Economics: incentives incentives incentives. I don’t know if I quite buy it, but it’s still a good lens for understanding why the market contains what it does.
I was reminded of those incentives when reading The Jenna Marbles Paradox: Why Are YouTube Videos So Terrible? The basic premise …
One of the papers that I continue to refer to in my own thinking about technology is Notes on Postmodern Programming. Martin Fowler has a short summary:
The essence of it (at least for me) is that software development has long had a modernist viewpoint that admirable software systems are …
If you think someone is asking a rhetorical question, it is usually most interesting to treat it as though it is a legitimate question. Especially if we’re talking about something hard — driving down to underlying assumptions through this questioning process is interesting.
Applying this to Bret Victor’s talk …
A programming quandry (related to some thoughts I’ve had on locality):
The prevailing wisdom says that you should keep your functions small and concise, refactoring and extracting functions as necessary. But this hurts the locality of expectations that I have been thinking about. Consider:
function updateUserStatus(user) {
if (user …Javascript objects and classes aren’t hard. This whole “prototype” thing is blamed for too much: prototype-based programming isn’t hard. this is really weird, but prototypes aren’t.
What’s prototype-based programming? It just means every object has a “prototype” and when you look up a property on the …
Since I want to start blogging again, of course I have to also change my software. That’s just out these things work.
And to start a new blog I need at least one post, otherwise things are breaky. So of course the first post must be the announcement I …
Many years ago I wrote a fairly straight-forward port of Python’s doctest to Javascript. I thought it was cool, but I didn’t really talk about it that much. Especially because I knew it had one fatal flaw: it was very unfriendly towards programming with callbacks, and Javascript uses …
When it comes to software licensing, I get annoyed at GPL critics. Mostly they argue that a permissive license is more hassle-free. But all licensing hassles come from proprietary licenses. All of them. Open source licenses are simple, well-understood, and if you are doing open source stuff you don’t …
I hang around people who talk about security and privacy and activists quite a bit. When talking security beyond the typical attackers — people committing identity theft, simple vandals, spammers, etc. — there’s the topic of government surveillance and legal attacks, and privacy as a way to defend political activists against …
I find myself working in a Windows environment due to some temporary problems with my Linux installation. In terms of user experience Windows is not terrible. But more notable, things mostly just feel the same. My computing experience is not very dependent on the operating system… almost. Most of what …