May 2012
2 posts
“When those who question the validity of a relatively new scientific theory are...”
– Christopher Clausen, “Left, Right, and Science”, Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2012
“Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes...”
– The Valve Employee Handbook
April 2012
4 posts
1 tag
PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design →
“Fuck it. I understood it, you understood it, and the worst that happened was...”
– A delightful tidbit from my friend Andrew Dupont
“Everything in its right place, one keystroke, one pen scribble, one wineglass,...”
– I like this turn of phrase from my friend Lora Abe
1 tag
Facebook's New Model for Business, The Hacker Way
There has been a lot of recent talk, understandably, about Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the 2-year-old Instagram. I’ve read a few pundit pieces about the deal, including Robert Scoble’s take:1
Let’s say that Facebook can turn on monetization on mobile clients. That could mean $500 million in revenue on first quarter, $700 on second, $900–$1 billion on third....
March 2012
8 posts
“For the religious idea that a certain book or tradition might connect you up...”
– Richard Rorty, The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture
2 tags
Hacking is Important →
One of Rands’s finest.
1 tag
The New, The Better, The Unknown
Mark Zuckerberg included a letter amidst the Facebook IPO filing which contains, among other things, a description of an ethos I had recently tried to convey to someone about wanting things to always be better, and not being content with the status quo.
It’s not arrogance (as I understand it)—it’s a daring, uncomfortable and often unreasonable push, ever forward. For the same reasons...
1 tag
1 tag
Preparing Data for Use in URLs
I like to ensure that any data I have that goes into a URL, like a “slug” for the title of a post, or a real-world option like a brand of car, are considered and prepared for inclusion in a URL before I smash them in there.
For instance, if I had a site that had a database of different vehicles, separated by brand, one might expect a URL like:
example.com/cars/{brand}
In this...
1 tag
httpie →
Human-friendly curl replacement. Lovely.
1 tag
Raise the Crime Rate →
There is a huge problem with prisons and the way ex-convicts are treated in this country—that would be dishonest to dispute, or at least brazenly classist. That’s pretty much the extent of what I was convinced of by this article, though.
How about looking at how other countries handle similar problems, especially ones that face less individual risk and have drastically different crime...
February 2012
10 posts
1 tag
Using Bundler binstubs with RVM
There’s a feature of Bundler called binstubs which will installed bundler-wrapper executables for your gem executables in a directory of your choosing (./bin by default). This makes it so you don’t have to type bundle exec before every bundler-installed gem executable.
The trick, though is getting ./bin added to your PATH only when it’s appropriate, i.e. when you cd into a...
1 tag
The Worst Part of Tech Meetups
Of the many tech meetups I’ve been to over the last 10 years in San Diego, San Francisco and Austin, there is one persistent commonality that always tries to ruin my experience. I’m talking about the shameless conversation derailer.
These people are usually few in number, but they make up for that by monopolizing Q&A time or simply interrupting others at the meetup with their...
1 tag
Technological Progress in Society
There’s an aspect of tech enthusiasm that leads to popular lament of wasted or misdirected skills. But I think the only real way to have an impact on overall industry trends, and thus the focus of collective productive energy, is to start businesses or movements and create cultures within the industry that provide new rallying points, examples and inspiration for other thinkers to riff off. It’s...
1 tag
On Modern Relationships
During an email conversation with a friend, he remarks and I respond:
I’ve found it notable that friends who might entertain the idea of cheating find the notion of an explicitly open relationship difficult to weather.
I definitely find the same to be true. I think it can be explained with a basic theory of maturity or development in relationships: the naïve or undeveloped are...
1 tag
An API Ontology →
1 tag
“That’s what it means to become a leader. It’s not supreme confidence, it’s not...”
– Bryce Roberts, On Becoming a Leader
2 tags
Faster Specs without Loading Rails
If you’re writing unit specs in a Rails project and you don’t need Rails and all of its machinery to load in your spec while you’re iterating (for instance, because Rails takes 15+ seconds to load), you can just require the class you’re concerned with.
#require 'spec_helper'
require 'rubygems'
require 'active_support/all'
require File.join(*[File.dirname(__FILE__)] +...
1 tag
Tip-toeing in Code
def maybe_activate_frob
frob.activate! if x && y && z || a && b || c
end
vs.
def activate_frob_if_possible
frob.activate! if frob.can_activate?
end
vs.
frob.activate! if frob.can_activate?
I think I prefer the last version.
“Conventional wisdom is, ultimately, found wanting on wise.”
– Jim Maiella, Impossible Happens
I really love that turn of phrase.
January 2012
1 post
“Indoctrination of children into religious belief systems is one of the great...”
– Morality and Persecution, Matt Gemmell
December 2011
5 posts
“NDAA and SOPA are both horrible laws…but they’re also perfectly predictable...”
– What Part of Your Oath Do You Not Understand?, Joel Grus
“I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you...”
– Horribly creepy, idiotic hatred from Newt Gingrich in 1995
1 tag
What Does ‘Quality’ Mean?
First, Kyle Neath talked about Relentless Quality, which I loved, but wasn’t everything I would say about quality.
Then, Adam Keys talked about Relentless Shipping, which I appreciated, but again was telling a different story.
Then @soopa accused me of not adhering to the mantra of “Relentless Quality” at some point, which was fair, but somehow missed the point based on my personal...
“Quality is a state of mind and a state of work during every step of creation.”
– Quality in Craftsmanship
What’s Next for Brad?
As you may have heard, Gowalla is going to Facebook.
Several of the Gowalla team members will be moving to California to join the Facebook team; I chose to stay in Austin. I moved to Austin in 2010 not only for Gowalla, but for a change in lifestyle. The pace of life, wonderful people, myriad events and warm weather here have conspired to steal my heart. Austin is my home and will stay that way...
November 2011
1 post
Protect The Internet: Defeat SOPA →
October 2011
5 posts
“Remember how you had always thought that slavery was right and proper, and then...”
– Eliezer Yudkowsky, Making History Available – a compelling thought experiment.
“If what you believe doesn’t depend on what you see, you’ve been...”
– Eliezer Yudkowsky, What is Evidence?
“The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants,...”
– Glenn Greenwald on the Obama administration’s killing of the Awlakis.
State Abbreviations
I really dislike the US state abbreviations recommended by the AP Stylebook: “Wis.”, “Mich.”, “Del.”, “Calif.”.
My humble recommendation: use either the standard 2-letter postal abbreviations—WI, MI, DE, CA—or write out the whole state name. This intermediate abbreviation nonsense is messy, anti-formulaic and conveys no additional useful...
September 2011
2 posts
“An actual watchdog press is, first and foremost, eager to expose the corruption...”
– Glenn Greenwald, on media attention given to Iran’s release of American hikers
“The company prefers to announce new products simply when they’re ready, not when...”
– John Gruber, on Apple
August 2011
5 posts
“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
– Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Why I Switched Back to Chrome from Safari 5
I just spent a month using Safari 5.1 on OS X Lion as my default browser. This morning I decided to switch back to Chrome 14 beta. Here are the things in Safari that pushed me away:
The URL completion in the address bar is too aggressive, to the point that it completes URLs that I often don’t want, instead of just completing the next rational segment.
I have to run FastScripts to get...
“I think Mr Paul’s influence on the ideological cast of American...”
– Manufacturing irrelevance by Will Wilkinson
“…delusions are closed logical schemes, where reality is mangled into the service...”
– Venkatesh Rao, The Gervais Principle III
July 2011
6 posts
“For us, democracy is synonymous with elections, but in ancient times elections...”
– Roderick Long, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class”
“A constitution is not some impersonal, miraculously self-enforcing robot....”
– Roderick Long, Anarchism as Constitutionalism
“Life, like the universe, rounds off to darkness where it runs out of time, and...”
– Timothy Ferris, Seeing in the Dark
“The mistake that [was] made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men...”
– Dan Savage, quoted in Married, With Infidelities by Mark Oppenheimer
June 2011
2 posts
“There is no society which is so well-designed that it doesn’t require...”
– Bram Cohen on something involving BitCoins, which is less relevant than the quote alone.