January 2012
3 posts
2011 Wistia Recap
brendanschwartz:
Here’s a video recap of 2011 in Wistia Land. This was a surprise end-of-the-year present from super friends Chris Lavigne and Dan Mills.
Wistia kills it. Great/fun 2011 recap video from them. Hope you guys have a great 2012!
Billion Dollar Startup Idea
Probably not the first to have this idea, but, “what if….”
What if there was an Apache mod that let all web-devs target WebKit with HTML/CSS and on the fly translated the CSS to support whatever quirks the requesting browser/User-Agent might have.
I’d pay handsomely to target 1 desktop browser, 1 mobile browser, etc. Let some crazy auto-updating plugin handle the rest,...
December 2011
6 posts
GIT HUB Y U NO HAVE FULL HISTORY/REVISION TEXT... →
Seriously though. I love love love github, and would kill kill kill for this. Anyone done this?
A Singulatarian Holiday
My brother & I decided to give exclusively “singulatarian” gifts this holiday. What’s that mean? Digital goods & services. What else could future meta-humans want/use?
A sampling:
Soundcloud Subscription
Minecraft key-code
Kindle eBook gifts
iTunes gift card
Not digital, but closer to meta-human:
TurningArt subscription
Foodzie subscription
etc
It’s all...
Computers Will Entertain Us to Death
Skyrim was released this winter, and players have already invested millions of hours in its single-player Nordic countryside. World of Warcraft boasts millions of years logged on its massively-multiplayer world of Azeroth. The human experience would claim billions of lifetimes spent in its omni-player reality, if it were to make a comparative claim on its marketing material.
How soon until we...
Want a Coffee? A Brief Guide for Neophytes
Some quick thoughts on what I’ve learned, and how I prefer to conduct coffee meetings. Here follow my guidelines for whoever wants to set up a java-jam:
Why Meet At All?
When reaching out to ask for a coffee meeting, be immensely specific with you want to meet, and what you hope to get out if it. If the reason is only as good as “let’s connect!” don’t be sour if...
November 2011
6 posts
Developers: You are not a Language
Despite what recruiters think, despite what you might think, you are not a language.
Years of hacking have sharpened your mind, your instinct, your reasoning, until you no longer even see the code: you see the answer. You are a problem-crushing warrior, an architect of logic.
So why filter your job opportunities by ‘language’?
I’ve seen this over and over: otherwise smart...
brinking.: 24 hours with the Fire →
nabeel:
24 hours in with the Kindle Fire and I feel like I’m coming to the same emotional place as I did with the Droid. The first 10 minutes were “wow, I think this might actually make it!” — but it buckled under extended use from lack of polish.
The good.
Hardware: A better form factor for media…
Solid review; definitely share Nabeel’s sentiments.
Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You... →
bijan:
Levy: Two years ago, you bought Zappos. Was that an attempt to absorb their so-called culture of happiness and customer service?
Bezos: No, no, no. We like their unique culture, but we don’t want that culture at Amazon. We like our culture, too. Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see...
October 2011
6 posts
“The human/machine relationship is abusive. The computer tempts you with its...”
– John Graham-Cumming
1 tag
Optimizing MongoDB: Lessons Learned at Localytics →
bdarfler:
Check me out
Super useful MongoDB info from Señor Darfler of Localytics
What Are You Afraid Of, It's Just Software
There has been a ton of interesting web-discussion recently. Has software failed us? Are we building skyscrapers or ever-higher piles of mud?
I’m in the ‘mud’ camp, but I’ll share a secret with you: it doesn’t matter. It’s a question of intelligent design vs evolution. Unsurprisingly, software is on the evolutionary path, like a thousand other systems &...
September 2011
1 post
1 tag
“A new generation, one that grew up with a data surplus, is coming along. To this...”
– Seth Godin - The Shower of Data
August 2011
8 posts
Making Sausage vs. Making Sayings
Recently, I tweeted how including video in a landing page increased conversions by 50%. A successful friend, whose advice I greatly respect, cautioned me that “only creating value matters”. Despite my respect, and surface-agreement, it’s necessary to point out that making sausage is what creates value, not quote-sharing.
Creating value is #1 on a startups todo list, but for that...
Symptoms of Startup Crunch Mode
Having trouble deciding if you’re in a Startup Crunch Mode? Victims usually suffer from any number of easily identifiable symptoms:
Buying H&M underwear-packs weekly to stay ‘afloat’
Witnessing consecutive day-night transitions from your desk in a single standing
All food in your fridge is past its expiration
Violently compressed postal mail in your overflowing mailbox
...
“at Boundless Learning, engineering sets the pace. We get shit done, we get it...”
– Ben M Greene: Why Continuous Deployment Matters
True that; it’s great defining your startup engineering culture deliberately. Our team decided to have a scalable, auto-deployed infrastructure from day #1, and it’s paid dividends in a big way since then.
6 tags
Insidious state of State / Python ruins weekends.
TL;DR: the worst bugs involve state. Prefer functional languages, and you’re far ahead of the curve.
This weekend, I went to visit a good friend in NYC. Unfortunately, there was a lingering bug in a part of Boundless Learning’s code that was gnawing the back of my mind. Some of our data collection was corrupt, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.
Like all epic...
5 tags
July 2011
2 posts
Scala, want to win? Here's what's missing:
Killer compiler errors.
In my 10+ years experience w/ statically-typed functional programming, I can say without a doubt, the biggest impediment to both productivity and newbie-adoption is the utter OPAQUENESS of the compiler errors.
When one decides to use a compiled language, you agree to argue with the computer in exchange for correctness of code. You tell it what (you think) you want it to...
MVC w/ Sencha Touch & ExtJS →
Just posted slides & source-code from my recent Javascript Meetup presentation that walked through the basics of setting up a Sencha Touch & ExtJS app, along with the MVC code & patterns.
You can find the associated example apps here:
https://github.com/aaronwhite/Sencha-Touch-MVC—-Example-App
https://github.com/aaronwhite/ExtJS-MVC-Example-App
(be sure to follow along the...
June 2011
3 posts
Unboxed union types in Scala via the Curry-Howard... →
bdarfler:
Holy crap Scala types are powerful.
Ya, that’s a really sweet article too.
May 2011
2 posts
Rapid prototyping w/ front-end JS & Mongo
My stealth-ish startup, Boundless Learning, is building some very cool products, on top of some very cool technologies, and while the majority of our value will be user-facing, there is a fair chunk of interesting back-office systems that we’ve developed to support our bigger mission.
It’s important that we are able to rapidly produce & adjust those back-office systems, so that...
Proxlet, Twitter's barometer
Proxlet has been one of my more interesting projects. (It solves an acute Twitter pain, it allows you to mute noisy users/apps)
One thing I’ve learned is that on any given day, the usage/user-ratings for Proxlet very directly reflect the at-the-time quality of the Twitter API service. Twitter chokes up, folks perceive the middle-man-Proxlet as the issue, numbers go down. Twitter operates...
April 2011
3 posts
Boundless Learning, Hiring Revolutionaries
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results”
-Albert Einstein
You: “Einstein? I thought this was a job posting.”
Indeed it is, but Einstein sums up why Boundless Learning exists: we are building a different type of company to take on a insane, and massive, incumbent industry in a way that has never been done before. If you want to be part of the...
10 Reasons You Should Work at a Startup Before... →
I was knee deep in writing a similar post, but Jason beat me to it.
I think for a first-time entrepreneur who have NEVER lived the startup life, the most important risk to de-risk is themselves.
“When people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the...”
– Austin Kleon (via marco)
February 2011
1 post
MongoDB + Node talk: NYC, late March
For those of you that interested in MongoDB & Node, I’ll be presenting at the PostgreSQL Conference this March. Details for the talk here: http://bit.ly/gvgT4a
January 2011
7 posts
My Node.js Talk on Proxlet
Proxlet has been all over the news today: Gizmodo / Lifehacker, BusinessInsider, Swiss-miss… and even 100shiki have covered it.
Throughout all this massive press, our $10/month server hasn’t skipped a single beat. How? Node.js.
If you’re interested in learning how Node.js lets Proxlet handle millions upon millions of queries on the cheapest of cloud servers, please join me the...
WebM: Google's weapon against iPhone battery life
A conspiracy theory for you to mull over:
Apple takes great care to ensure a long battery life for their iOS devices, by carefully controlling the hardware & software metaphors that impact it. The result is that iOS devices vastly outlast Android comparables.
By pushing the web towards the WebM codec, Google can very quickly knock a key benefit of the iPhone, namely H.264 hardware decoding,...
“Dealing with the future, it is more important to be imaginative and insightful...”
– Alvin Toffler (via putitperfectly)
Competition & Class
Having competition is great, personally, I get fired up and motivated into new levels of energy. Friends have seen me “on the warpath”. My productivity & focus seem to double instantaneously. (If I only I could bottle this, and sell it to you, friends)
I recently discovered Proxlet has a new competitor. The value Proxlet provides (muting annoying tweets) is a problem many people...
“Imagine it’s 1995: almost no one but Gordon Gekko and Zack Morris have...”
– The First Decade of the Future is Behind Us | Science Not Fiction | Discover Magazine (via arielwaldman)
WE LIVE IN THE MOTHER FLIPPIN FUTURE!!!
(via msg)
RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried. →
nerdcast:
parislemon:
And I do agree that the RSS problem is largely an aesthetic one. And while that may sound simple enough to fix, obviously, it hasn’t been.
Now Facebook and Twitter are fixing it for everyone by stabbing it repeatedly in the stomach.
Not gonna lie, I can’t stand “RSS is Dying” posts. But, I have been using it less and less as my usage of Twitter has gone up. I have...
“Yes, I realize that’s a contradiction, but it seems to capture the essence of...”
– Continuations: The Private IPO
December 2010
3 posts
bijan:
“There’s too much stuff. It seems to me that almost all tools we rely on to manage information weren’t designed for a world of infinite info. They were designed as if you could consume whatever was out there that you were interested in.”
—
Evan Williams: The Challenges of a Web of Infinite Info: Tech News and Analysis «
Completely agree. This is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to...
7 tags
