Imagine that you work at the kind of place where there is a new fire to be put out almost every day. It hasn't always been that way, but things have been in a near constant state of crisis for the last few months. On calm days, you try to get some useful feature work done. But before you can really…
Tyson Mote
Idle Words > Talks > Website Obesity This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney. [ 53 minute video ]. Let me start by saying that beautiful websites come in all sizes and page weights. I love big websites packed with images. I love…
Since the 1980s, bestselling author, game developer, and technology instructor Kathy Sierra has devoted her career to creating more humane software and sustainable online communities, earning her a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation earlier this year. Recorded in September 2015 at…
T he word for debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I’m newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house. So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that’s one quality of debt that I’ve been pondering lately…
Below you will find 2 versions of my own beginner workout routine that I most often recommend to beginners with any weight training goal (building muscle, losing fat, increasing strength, etc.). If you haven’t already done so, be sure to read my intro into beginner workouts and routines to confirm…
It’s the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling movement of Cypherpunks , civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers. At stake: Whether privacy will exist in the 21st century. The office atmosphere of Cygnus Support , a fast-growing Silicon Valley company that earns its dollars by…
“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.”
In early November, 1988, one of the first major computer viruses, “the Morris Worm“, hit the Internet. While the damage caused by the worm was probably unintentional, it’s estimated to have been somewhere around a…
Feeling stressed? Of course you are. You have too much on your plate, deadlines are looming, people are counting on you, and to top it all off, you still have holiday shopping to do. You are under a lot of pressure — so much that at times, you suspect the quality of your work suffers for it. This is…
HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT IN 4 EASY STEPS I’ve spent the past year losing 80 lbs and getting in shape. A lot of people have been asking me how I did it; specifics like what diet I was on, how many times a week I worked out, etc etc. So I thought I’d just answer everyone’s questions by giving you guys step…
For a long time now stateless services have been the royal road to scalability. Nearly every treatise on scalability declares statelessness as the best practices approved method for building scalable systems. A stateless architecture is easy to scale horizontally and only requires simple round-robin…
There was nobody in Jimmy Lee Dykes’s life to take the edge off his anger. He had long ago lost touch with an ex-wife and two daughters. His older girl recalled his fondness of firearms and a hatred of authorities; how he smelled of spearmint, coffee and cigarettes; how he beat her mother. Mr.…
Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern "literary" best seller. Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read— Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie . Give me anything, in fact, as long as it doesn't have a recent…
Idle Words > Talks > Haunted By Data This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in New York City. The video version is here (20 mins). In preparing this talk I decided to check out the data landscape, since I hadn't seen it for a while. The…
What's the best way to organize human knowledge? (Installation by Marcos Saboya and Gualter Pupo. Photo by Reuters/Olivia Harris) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be the most interesting website on the internet. Not because of the content—which includes fascinating entries on everything…
Idle Words > Talks > What Happens Next Will Amaze You This is the text version of a talk I gave on September 14, 2015, at the FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Good morning! Today's talk is being filmed, recorded and transcribed, and everything I say today will leave an…
A dark turn So how exactly did we go from chat lovers to convincing our moms six months into our courtship to drive us across the country to meet ? Not just to meet, but we messily kissed in a La Quinta Inn parking lot on a sunny February morning, and then made out at a Bennigan’s, and then made out…
Lessons learned from reading postmortems I love reading postmortems. They’re educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I’ve spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven’t done any kind of formal analysis on the most…
Wade Foster on Zapier’s unusual beta program, getting new users and building a successful remote team. Software integrations have been around for a very long time. But for most of that time, the ability to link two products together was exclusive to those with development skills; people who knew how…
I recently finished a story I’d spent several months obsessing over. When I pitched the piece to my editor, I knew that I’d found a worthy subject, but I couldn’t quite articulate what the story was about. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the words — it’s that I didn’t have an answer yet. All I knew was…
2015 01 15 Awk in 20 Minutes What's Awk Awk is a tiny programming language and a command line tool. It'sparticularly appropriate for log parsing on servers, mostly because Awk willoperate on files, usually structured in lines of human-readable text. I say it's useful on servers because log files,…
This article a is translation by popular request of Optimisations Nginx, bien comprendre sendfile, tcp nodelay et tcp nopush I wrote in French in January. Most articles dealing with optimizing Nginx performances recommend to use sendfile , tcp_nodelay and tcp_nopush options in the nginx.conf…
There are lots of security-related things to keep in mind when writinga web application, as the Web is a place full of danger:cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), clickjacking,brute forcing, spam and so on. Go gets many things right by default: for example, templates from…
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more. The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post…
No-nonsense, drab and blessedly comfortable, the 990 running shoe by New Balance has changed little since its introduction in 1982. Photograph by Hannah Whitaker. Prop stylist: Emily Mullin. The first time I even considered buying a pair of New Balances, I was 27, bronzed and lean, standing in a…
I recently took some time to work through the Matasano crypto challenges , a set of 48 practical programming exercises that Thomas Ptacek and his team at Matasano Security have developed as a kind of teaching tool (and baited hook). Much of what I know (or think I know) about security has come from…
Idle Words > Talks > Web Design: The First 100 Years This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace! I would like to start with a parable about…
07.06. 2015 Connoisseurs of disaster know that the official map of seismic hazards in the United States paints a fat red bull’s-eye in the middle of the country, right where Missouri dovetails into Arkansas: FEMA expects a major earthquake in the central United States to be the costliest natural…
In recent months, the media has become increasingly impatient with high-profile health advocates who dispense unsubstantiated medical advice. Among the highlights have been John Oliver ’s continued humiliation of Dr. Oz, who repeatedly touted the power of energy healing and “miracle” weight-loss…
Why “Don’t Worry About Money, Just Travel” Is The Worst Advice Of All Time Chelsea Fagan D. Zampiron I have an internet acquaintance that I’ve been following on social media for a little over two years now, an all-around nice, smart girl who blogs and does odd jobs and has recently decided to go…
21 management things I learned at Imgur It’s terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don’t. Different people need different kinds of management. Be adaptable to figure out what drives each person’s best performance. Give feedback frequently and directly. As a…
March 4, 2013 APPLE: My Key to Success No, not the company or the fruit. APPLE is an acronym ingrained into every Apple store employee before they ever even step on the retail floor. And it has continued to guide me ever since. APPLE: A pproach customers with a personalized warm welcome P robe…
This is a quick Friday blog post to talk about a recent experience I had working on a piece Juju code that needed to capture the data being sent over a net.Conn . Most Gophers know that the net package provides a net.Pipe function which returns a pair of net.Conn s representing an in memory network…
Please stop calling databases CP or AP In his excellent blog post Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods , Jeff Hodgesrecommends that you use the CAP theorem to critique systems. A lot of people have takenthat advice to heart, describing their systems as “CP” (consistent but not available…
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here The memo below was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack , on July 31st, 2013 . It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’. It is presented verbatim, as written (including…
00:00:00 00:00:00 Introduction Thanks for the introduction. Here's my background. I'm currently a production engineering manager at Facebook, working on Parse. I was the first Parse ops person hired almost three years ago. We are currently hosting over half a million mobile apps. I t's basically…
If you're interested in what we work on, please apply - we're hiring: http://mixpanel.com/jobs/ Mixpanel’s web UI is built out of small pieces. Our Unix-inspired development philosophy favors the integration of lightweight, independent apps and components instead of the monolithic mega-app approach…
1 The software developer job interview doesn’t work. Companies should stop relying on them. The savviest teams will outcompete their peers by devising alternative hiring schemes. Years from now, we’ll look back at the 2015 developer interview as an anachronism, akin to hiring an orchestra cellist…
Unicorns vs. Horses Why I want to be In-N-Out Burger, not McDonalds “That’s stupid —you’re building a lifestyle business” spat the investor across the table, flashing me a death glare. It was 2011 and I was at a roundtable event at Grow Conference, an annual gathering of investors, entrepreneurs,…
This is a very shortsummary with lots left out—here is the long version: http://startupclass.samaltman.com You should start with an idea, not a company. When it’s just an idea or project, the stakesare lower and you’re more willing to entertain outlandish-sounding butpotentially huge ideas. The best…
“HELL YEAH WE'RE USING @SlackHQ AT WORK I. LOVE. SLACK.” “Dear @SlackHQ, I love you. Yours, Dan” “@SlackHQ YOU COMPLETE ME” You’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. And you may have read how the internal-communication platform — now just two years old — is already used by more than…
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