December 2011
3 posts
Bootstrap an Audience
Louis CK has been all over the internet this past week. First he wrote a very personal missive urging people not to pirate his new show, he was on Reddit, and now he’s shown that this experiment payed off.
When Kevin Smith decided to independently distribute and market his movie Red State, many people said he would fail miserably. But he did the math and he knew he’d be able to make...
Instance Variable Shelf
Too often I see code that does the following:
declare('Foo', {
constructor: function(input) {
this._input = input;
return new Bar(this._input)
}
});
Chances are that Bar also copies input into an instance variable. Soon there’s a chain of three or four classes all maintaining input’s state. If Bar later updates input with a new struct, all of the other copies are...
Simple Ain't Easy
We watched another video during our Lunch and Learn Fridays. In this one, Rich Hickey masterfully draws the line between simple and easy. It’s been over a month since I first saw it but his words are still burning in my mind.
Hickey’s talk focuses on two common words; simple and easy. Think about easy as near at hand or familiar and simple as uncomplicated. And while we rarely think...
October 2011
4 posts
Product Kata
A friend told me that he would never build a new product from scratch again. It’s painful, annoying, and you never know what you missed until it hits you at 4am. Day. After. Day. Week. After. Week.
The whole process of releasing something is so full of complicated, little, nit picky details that I can’t help but feel like I’m spinning my wheels. This is really difficult because...
Why we are Still Deploying Overnight
(and what we’re doing about it)
So a co-worker sent me this blog post by Brian Crescimanno today that asks: why am I still deploying overnight?
Well, it’s a question that’s been bothering me for months. Sometimes when I bring up this question I find good reasons, other times I find excuses, and other times I find something no one has really thought of. Looking at the comments...
Java's JPA for Rails Fans
I’ve been thinking about ORMs lately.
I like Rails, it’s super quick to get up and running, the convention over configuration idea was brilliantly executed and has been endlessly copied. I believe that Rails forever changed the way that we write software.
I also like Java’s JPA (Java Persistence API)[1]. I hope to show those of you familiar with Rails and ActiveRecord why the JPA way of doing...
Lunch and Learn: Articulate Coding
We get lunch brought in to work on Fridays. I took the opportunity to show great videos to the team while we all ate. It’s a lunch and learn with zero effort.
Today we watched Kent Beck’s QCon talk on Responsive Design. It’s certainly worth checking out if you’re bored, although it is a bit slow in parts and the non-mic’d audience questions do get annoying.
There...