Search Results: AI

the blind side of seniority

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I was raised by a father who loved underdogs. Kelly's Heroes and the stories of the Black Sheep squadron , were some of his favorites to watch and tell. These were stories of outcasts, thrown… [more]

What Makes a Senior Engineer Senior, and How Do You Build a Great Team?

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…before writing a line of code, but there code will unfailingly be correct. This one is who you want in the room when production is on fire, but is absolutely not who you want owning a greenfield… [more]

What Do Future Engineers Look Like?

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…effects as well as observability, testability, and failure modes. As we move farther up the ladder of abstraction as engineers, being able to think about systems as a whole becomes more important. It… [more]

The dark bricks walls marked the entrance to…

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…alley like sentinels guarding an underworld. I brushed against a dark figure whose hoody covered his eyes. Anonymity was always the rule. The handles of the bag dropped heavily into my hand and the… [more]

That’s what heroes do

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…looked like a rag doll, twisting and spinning through the air, bending in ways no human being should or could. They say the sight of my body in front of the blossom of fire was mortifying and yet they… [more]

My Name is Ed

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If at first you don’t succeed try, try again. Right. That’s what my father told me over and over again. That’s what my coach told me over and over again. They never had to build a fence though. Or… [more]

Safe Homes

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…kings and popes, laughed, and people Joined songs of praise celebrating Their deaths Until welcoming shores Took them in Rebuilding lives again Already built too many times And families, too often… [more]

Like Cain

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…they, Where their brothers keepers Recommitting to Cain's Great sin in holocaust [more]

Siblings

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…my ancestors, And the ancestors who owned people, And the rainbow clad reveler, And the saluting nazi, Are all children of the same Divine Parents Challenging because, what am I to do with it? How do… [more]

Pains & Aches

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My pains, and suffering My aches, and issues Have been small by most measures But they are my own I have lost but little And gained far more I have felt the touch of grief While others have felt its… [more]

Copper Moon

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…color That would not last It slipped quietly behind Mountains Faster than I expected Until I was left With only night [more]

Moment Mori

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…noise of the world The noise of my kids Not worldly acclaim or fame To be loved by them Sometimes I forget As urgency screams loud And wants and dreams Crowd out real needs To be loved, to be theirs,… [more]

lab

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…qr codes a simple tool for recording the contents of a container in a qr code you can print and place on them. No DB. No storage, it's all in the QR code. Allowance Calculator Ths is a quick… [more]

Kid's Birthdays

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…In a dozen hearts Pressing in To see the excitement Of awaited discovery To exclaim recognition And amazement Pressing in Until There is no room left To open Presents [more]

Spotify Archivist

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…with a few minute and a desire to experiment with Claude.ai and it's code authoring I described what I wanted the code to do: create a playlist per year that included the songs that I liked on… [more]

the megaphone

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…you know where this is going. You lose clarity and detail. It's louder, it sounds important, but it loses clarity, detail, and, by extension, nuance. One of the challenges of leadership is that we… [more]

Team! A Module For Teams!

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…built that needed engineer meta information (github ID, email, JIRA ID, OpsGenie ID, etc.) the better it would be to have a central place to keep all of that information up to date. In the past… [more]

The Hunt Begins

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…connect with me on twitter or linkedin . You can also email me at daniel[at]designfrontier.net Let's talk! Other things If you are curious about how I think about engineering, organizations, and… [more]

help the person next to you

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…won’t make it. There are a dozen types that fail: the weight-lifting meatheads who think that the size of their biceps is an indication of their strength, the kids covered in tattoos announcing to the… [more]

Some Thoughts on Engineering Leaderhip

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…am going to quote all the tweets here and then try to explain more about the topics they are touching on. Try to take it a little bit out of stream of conscious and into something more fleshed out.… [more]

Last Lectures

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…Lecture". At the beginning of the lecture he explains: this lecture series used to be called "The Last Lecture: if you had one last lecture to give before you died what would it be?"… [more]

Book Review-How to Survive in a Science Fictional Universe

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…safely in a science fictional universe By Charles Yu If I said the words: “Primer with daddy issues” how would that make you feel? If it makes you feel intrigued then you might enjoy this book. If… [more]

What Makes a Team Lead Great?

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…me as if I had three heads, but I knew he wasn’t going to fail me. - L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) is one of my favorite discussions of leadership styles.… [more]

About A Bike Race

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…as it rushes past Drives adrenaline through veins and brain As tires grip a corner like teens holding phones You push the panic back 21 corners left in the mad crush of riders You breathe. Teams start… [more]

Lessons Learned From a Film Producer About Making Software

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…great when people are willing to go along with your hair-brained schemes. We talked about the things my team would be working on after, and some of the things that I hoped they would get out of it,… [more]

The infinite power of people

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…has downloaded for you. If so, take a break from this email and read it. Welcome back! This pull quote from the top right of the PDF really hits the nail on the head for me: “What makes power… [more]

Today is going to be a great day, and other mindset shifts

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…and highlights ). The primary takeaway is that you use a daily affirmation of the goodness of the day to get you off to a positive start. “This tiny yet powerful habit is successful because it is… [more]

Cultural Homogeneity

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…because they are "uncivilized" or "badly raised." And then what? Those ideas are going to show particular bias against immigrants who are familiar with their own culture, but not… [more]

Disjunctive Normal Form and other fine reads

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It’s another week of DHH causing waves, which probably shouldn’t be surprising (not linking because I don’t really want to provide him a larger platform). But it does highlight one of the things I… [more]

Book Review-Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

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…Of course the magic system is strong, and the villains are monsters. But, overall it just doesn't back the emotional punch of some of the other books in the Cosmere. I literally cried at the end… [more]

Book Review-The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson

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…beautiful and revealing. We are complex. That small word said to us by the person we liked as a pubescent teenager sometimes sticks with us long into adulthood. How many of us pursue life and career… [more]

Book Review-A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller

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…The power of story is one of those things that was ingrained to me at a young age by being surrounded by story tellers. It takes center stage for much of this book as Donald Miller discusses the power… [more]

10 Valentines

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…And homes sheltered Then children came through joy and pain New worries stole our sleep Occupied our thoughts New joys too Filled our hearts Occupied our thoughts At times our world shook We clung… [more]

Book Review-Aloha Rodeo-Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West

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Review: Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West by David Wolman and Julian Smith Strap yourself in for a story where cowboys… [more]

Book Review-The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaimon I have a mixed experience with Neil Gaiman's work. Not because he isn’t a brilliant story teller, because he is. It’s more a content thing… [more]

Book Review-Road to Valor

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Review of "The Road to Valor" by Aili McConnon & Andres McConnon I have love cycling, a fact you should be aware of if you intend to stick around here. Coupled with my love for history,… [more]

Organizational Design Democracy And Ownership

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…and things that have been bouncing on the tip of your brain just drop into place. This week I had one of those. And it was about why people leave companies, and how to help them stick around longer.… [more]

Human Communications Are Hard

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Delays and technical issues bias us against others experiencing them. This comes from "Why are you so slow? - Misattribution of transmission delay to attributes of the conversation partner at the… [more]

Why weird team names make sense

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…be to name teams after the thing that they work on or maintain. Not a bad inclination, but one that quickly falls apart in the face of the realities of fast moving organizations and rapidly shifting… [more]

Software Engineer vs. Software Developer

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What is the difference between a Software Engineer and a Software Developer? Or is there a difference? So I've been building websites and web apps since we used to be called Web Masters. Which is… [more]

Some thoughts inspired by "Toward peer review as a group engagement"

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…biases play out in code review, which we can be certain that biases do exist. There are several recent studies on this in regards to gender that point out disparities. But I haven't seen any… [more]

Lumio UtahJS Conf 2022

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Welcome! I've been at Lumio for a few months now (ok fine 8 months) and I am looking for more people to join our rapidly expanding team. Check out the jobs, and more information about our team… [more]

2021: Year in Review

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…wonderful family moments on our numerous hikes in the mountains around our home, and in the redwood forests of California. And with that, I am looking forward to the next year. Happy New Year… [more]

Encourage teams to take risks

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…cutting a hole in the roof to install a vent fan to keep air moving and keep it cool in the summer. As you can imagine It’s a bit intimidating to take a drill and a saw, climb on the roof of… [more]

Antisemitism ends with us

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…started with, they quickly found themselves off the rails. In their march down the Rhine, still firmly in Christendom, their violent anti-Semitic attacks began. They were fired up. They longed for the… [more]

2020: A year

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…as half the engineers that reported up through me were laid off. I had sat through their meetings with HR, because they deserved to have someone they knew in those meetings. They deserved to know that… [more]

Tech Things I read in 2018

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This is going to be a pretty straightforward list of what tech related reading I did this year. It doesn’t include hundreds of blog posts and forum discussion. I’ll break it into two… [more]

Neptune (Gremlin) Local Dev Setup

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…Neptune. Oh, and because I know less about scaling and maintaining graph DB infrastructure than I would like. Using Neptune, a hosted graph DB, freed me from lots of the infrastructure knowledge for… [more]

"Hmm..." Patricia thought. Hopping from the swing she…

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…Patricia thought. Hopping from the swing she shook the chain as violently as she could. Her growing sense of dread leapt at the unexpected silence of the chain. She ran to the slide, hammering it with… [more]

As night settled on the playground, like a…

Nanofiction Published:

…sounds of the day. "That's odd" Patricia said wondering aloud at the coming silence. Was night outside one's room always so quiet? [more]

There are two kinds of settlers on the…

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There are two kinds of settlers on the plains: those who build their homes on hill tops, and those who build their homes by creeks. The Waltons refer to creekside settlers as "too lazy to care… [more]

Direct Feedback

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…don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep… [more]

On Bikesheds

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…one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people… [more]

Making the world more beautiful

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…a table with dings in it represent the highest form of praise for design? Of course this all falls apart if experiencing Japanese wabi-sabi, the aesthetic of use and decay, in our surroundings does… [more]

Vetting Information you read on the internet

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Hi friends! I realized that because of the certain set of skills I have been honing at work for the last decade I have some quick ways of vetting websites for content accuracy that the average… [more]

design and the internet as ephemera

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…) With the rise of the internet, cheap domains, and cheap hosting, the internet has become the source of most of our ephemera. Most events, even one time events, have websites now. We crank out… [more]

Jumping on the AMA bandwagon

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…find a link there permanently in the navigation above. "Wait?!" you say, "What navigation?" Click on the designfrontier up there. It expands into navigation. Yes I know that isn’t very… [more]

The rain fell on our faces as we…

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The rain fell on our faces as we danced in surprise, then joy... then stood transfixed by fear. Did we fit in this new world of rain? [more]

First Impressions: Redux/Flow

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…not a fan of types in my untyped languages. Those things said I think the developer ergonomics of Flow and Redux are pretty awful at first glance. I think this means a couple of things. The first… [more]

So I got Scammed on Amazon

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…one for $145 on Amazon marked as used it didn’t raise too many alarms for price. I’ve seen them sell for that locally a bunch of times. So, I hit order quickly so that the "used" item… [more]

monument

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…Developer Experience One of the things that Ruby on Rails gets very right and most node frameworks get wrong is the developer experience. So as I’ve been writing monument it has focused on making… [more]

Critiques and Code Reviews

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…Design before changing my major. These are insights I gained during those years and during my career since then. Also every time I mention Critiques, if you are a developer insert the words… [more]

So you Studied History and You're a Conservative... I am Sorry.

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…used in immigration debates today are the same ones used against the Irish over a century ago (jobs, religion, ’murica). Pointing that out won’t make you many friends. Neither will… [more]

Let's talk about Boot camps

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…didn’t exist. Now we build complex web applications on a daily basis. Machine learning, and distributed computing, are table stakes today. All the things that people went to college in CS for are… [more]

Language Drift and finding code beautiful

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…that matters is whether the code works, ships, and can be maintained. Languages shift, code styles and programming languages do too and we should be open to those shifts. Maybe they will stick, but… [more]

Being Senior Part 1- the books and data

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…Shop Class as Soulcraft, is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig. These are not programming books... but they will help you be a better programmer. If… [more]

begin it

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…forelock of the Possible, and then, reluctant to let go again, she’s forced to carry on and be productive." Either way. Go. Do it. Whatever it is. [more]

We understood what rain was. Condensation dropping back…

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We understood what rain was. Condensation dropping back to earth. But why it stopped, and why it started again, that's the mystery. [more]

Seeing and Speaking

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…colors . We as humans could not really see it until fairly recently when our language evolved to the point where a name for it existed. This points to a powerful link between the things we say, see,… [more]

Getting Lost and Happiness

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…find meaningful, that you can kind of get lost in on a daily basis. When you observe children, they are very good at this. They don’t get distracted by all those extrinsic yardsticks. They go for… [more]

Io: the language, not the moon

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…jump into the bad stuff. The things that were a pain and the things that made life hard. Problems You need Docker A whole lot of the internals don’t work on OS X currently. It seems mostly tied… [more]

Quote: How Fiction Ruined Love

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…which we should direct our intelligence and scrutiny." — Alain de Botton [more]

mourning

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…checks. I am not opposed to the idea of reasonable waiting periods for purchasing firearms. Honestly those feelings are more focused on the people who daily end their own lives then on those who… [more]

safe-shrinkwrap: for all your shrinkwrapping needs

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…to work with dev dependencies. It works... mostly. But maintaining shrinkwrapped devDependencies is no walk in the park. We had to though because of the particular packages that were breaking our… [more]

estimations and theory building

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…code bases go through as the team comes and goes. Naur explains that because programming is creating a theory of how the world functions it is impossible to completely transfer the theory from one… [more]

reducing noise

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…out of date on the news. Seriously though, we used to wait until the next day for the news to hit stands anyway. Not a big deal. Well worth the trade off. Notifications on OS X Being able to globally… [more]

:hover should be dead

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…time left in this world. I am serious. Here are the main reasons why: It doesn’t exist on touch devices It isn’t really accessible It often creates frustrating interactions Touch Devices I… [more]

2015: in review

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It is said that change is the only constant and that certainly proved true this year around here in 2015. I started the year working as a Front End Stack team (core team) member for the LDS Church and… [more]

Learning the Trade

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…Modules the ES6 Way by Jack Franklin The Web’s Grain by Frank Chimero. Anything by Frank is really excellent. What Screens Want by Frank Chimero 24 Ways an advent calendar of articles on… [more]

Details. Details. Details.

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…the black bean ravioli. But they got an important detail completely wrong. The detail? Their forks. The weight was all wrong. Despite the fact that it was metal, the balance of the fork made it feel… [more]

The burning trees reflected off the fear in…

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The burning trees reflected off the fear in her eyes. We needed to move but my feet wouldn't. Things had gotten out of hand. Again. [more]

Biology and CSS

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…height of my grandfather’s generation. I have brown hair, that is rapidly going gray even at the ripe old age of 31. I have blue eyes and olive skin. Now that you know more about my physical… [more]

The woods ended abruptly, as if at war…

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The woods ended abruptly, as if at war with the houses I stood beside. Neither would give an inch. The woods were calling me again. [more]

Thoughts on Components and stuff

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…of components. Warning: this is rambly and mostly a brain dump. Read on... Components. They are so hot right now. So hot. Like all the #hotness. They are flooding twitter, bouncing off the walls of… [more]

We paused as a clear drop fell towards…

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We paused as a clear drop fell towards the earth. Years ago the last rain fell from ash grey skies and man fled. This was new. [more]

Design Tools are Broken

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…This is an article about how badly our design tools are failing us in user experience [UX]. Because they are, and it is hurting the quality of our user experiences. 1. Animation Animations and… [more]

On To New Horizons

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…about tackling some new challenges, building a product again, after almost two years of writing library code and tooling for developers, and working with a bunch of people way smarter then me.… [more]

The Problem of Over Communication

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…rant, think about it. How often do you read internal emails? How about newsletters? How often do you just click delete them? Are there certain people who you filter out in meetings or whose emails get… [more]

REST vs. RPC and a mention of HATEOS

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This is a modified and expanded version of an email I sent a few days ago, here for public consumption. So RPC is great, right? I need to do X to my data so I’ll just make an endpoint called… [more]

The breeze caught her hair drawing my eyes…

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The breeze caught her hair drawing my eyes away from the still, printed pages. I stood slowly, and my feet raced towards her. Home. [more]

Sunset painted the hills gold. Muting the greens…

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Sunset painted the hills gold. Muting the greens and welcoming in fall. There was food to be gathered, and holes to be dug. [more]

The sky seemed to shatter in a single…

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The sky seemed to shatter in a single instant as the ball of fire dropped from the stars. "Let's go," she said rolling out of bed. [more]

Bracing myself against the wind I rose from…

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Bracing myself against the wind I rose from the ground as my jacket fought me like a sail. Its ferocity shocked me, as I pushed on. [more]

Thin air rushed past the train, whispering like…

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Thin air rushed past the train, whispering like a thousand lovers. I turned over in my bunk and tried to forget where I was going. [more]

Rex sat there a long time, waiting for…

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Rex sat there a long time, waiting for something. Someone? I can't remember. But then he stood and walked off. No why, just action. [more]

Shadows raced toward us, spurred on by the…

Nanofiction Published:

Shadows raced toward us, spurred on by the Sun's dive behind the mountain. Night was coming, engulfing the world. It was time. [more]

The crack of the twig echoed off of…

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The crack of the twig echoed off of the mountains like a gunshot. The snort of anger froze me in my tracks. It had found me, again. [more]

The wall was high enough for me to…

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The wall was high enough for me to ponder the coming pain while I fell. But, low enough that shade and soft grass were worth it. [more]

Audio and Old Androids

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…sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The project included all sorts of new ideas and thoughts, and is using a pretty custimized version of Backbone as the core of its client… [more]

Approaching CSS the OO Way

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…a second. Cascade. We’re not talking about the mountain-stream-in-spring-filled-with-snow-melt variety of cascade. What we are actually talking about is the Inheritance model of CSS. Hopefully,… [more]

Toward a More Responsive Future

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…just a more elegant hack. But before we dive into the details let’s discuss device detection, and why it is a short sighted solution, since it seems to be winning over hearts and allies.… [more]

Moving the World

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…view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest… [more]

There is a Right Way

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…through the clear acrylic jig. That simple experience contained some lessons that have shaped my life, and, less often than they should, my development, and design. The first lesson, is that taking… [more]

Short Circuit and the Javascript IF Statement

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…pull request on git hub. When I find the project again I’ll post a link to it... Now it’s time for some hot chocolate and breakfast. [more]

Don't Call Me. I'll Call You. Single Request Responsive Images

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…It’s kind of a big deal these days. The holy grail seems to be responsive images, or a system that allows you to determine the correct size image for the users browser. This reduces the amount… [more]

11

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…plane had been piloted into the towers. We recognized the tail paint. For me the scope of the disaster was so broad that it didn’t seem quite real. I couldn’t quantify that kind of loss. I… [more]

Hide the Admins

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…the only major security issue that turned up was that the railo admin was accessible from a public IP address. “Hmm...” I thought, “I wonder how you lock that down properly, using… [more]

Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS

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…a breeze. Behind that the app server layer is Railo running on Apache Tomcat. Railo is fast, free, and fast. The DB layer is CouchDB, with a second Cherokee server handling load balancing between the… [more]

Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS

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…a breeze. Behind that the app server layer is Railo running on Apache Tomcat. Railo is fast, free, and fast. The DB layer is CouchDB, with a second Cherokee server handling load balancing between the… [more]

Current Projects Update

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…A simple goal tracking application designed to give you a daily reminder of what your goals are. Mostly defunct at this point. If you are interested in purchasing the domain let me know... I may… [more]

Now Serving: Obsolescence

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…it’s almost some sort of paranoia where we are afraid to really say: we live in the third technological revolution. I have an iPod in my pocket, I have a mobile phone, I have a laptop, but then… [more]

Trust and the Box

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…sitting at their consoles stared down at screens uncertain what to do and unsure what had happened. capcom could still talk to the capsule so they knew it was still on it’s journey and the… [more]

A Tale of Two Cookies: Securing ColdFusion Session Cookies

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…that they never appear in the browser's cookie store, remaining in memory for that page only. This leaves only the encrypted session cookie visible. While this is a good start, and hides the CFID and… [more]