I just finished my first personal sprint, spending the last 2 weeks working on learning Clojure. I've loved the idea of Clojure since it came out in 2008 but never spent the time to work on it. While I didn't finish all the things I wanted to, I did … [Read more]
Why Aren’t More Programs Written in Powerful Languages?
http://coffeeghost.net/2008/03/19/your-ignorance-does-not-make-a-programming-language-suck/ Fans of obscure but powerful languages like Lisp, Haskell, Scala, and OCaml can sometimes get overzealous about how much great their language is, … [Read more]
Personal Sprints
I have a problem - I have too many balls in the air, and I can't even juggle. There are too many things to learn, too many toys to play with, too many things to make, too many books to read. I'm too good at keeping track of things so nothing ever … [Read more]
Password Hygiene
Github recently discovered a distributed brute force password cracking effort. Short version, scammers used a network of 40,000 IP addresses and slow, methodical retries to get around lockout restrictions. Good news: Github emailed users who were … [Read more]
Javascript Underwater – My JS.Everywhere Talk about OpenROV
I was invited to speak at the JS.everywhere(2013) conference. This was different from my other talks where I talked about hardware projects. The conference is about inspirational stories of coding and learning, each speaker about a unique topic. My … [Read more]
UI Beyond the Browser
I recently presented a talk at HTML5DevConf called "Robots, Circuits, and Drones, Oh My! Javascript for Makers". It took a slight change from the proposed title, to "UI Beyond the Browser - Software for Hardware Projects". It's an evolution of the … [Read more]
Engineering The Alpha – Review of Month 1
While looking for an e-book to read on the train commute home, I found the book Engineering the Alpha. I bought it a few months ago after I heard Andrew Warner of Mixergy interview with author John Romaniello. I've had weight issues for my whole … [Read more]
Find the Largest Files In A Directory
tl;dr: $ find . -type f -ls | sort -r -k 7 | head -20 I'm a programmer who grew up on Windows, so while I'm competent at Unix commands, there's a lot I don't know. That "young and clueless with lots of time" period is a great time to pick up … [Read more]
Zero To Maker – A Bible and a Road Map for Makers
Full disclosure: David Lang (and OpenROV) was one of the first friends I made after moving to the Bay Area last year. This review is completely, hopelessly biased. I supported David's Kickstarter to write this book, I've read it on the web in … [Read more]
We Are All Joe/Jane Developer
[EDIT: Full attribution for the JD Intellectual Property rights] My coworker Andres, whenever he spots “clever” code during code reviews, asks “What will Joe Developer think of this?” (Feel free to use Jane Developer if it's more … [Read more]