• △
  • Articles
  • Atoms
  • Fragments
  • Newsletter
  • Now
  • About
  • 2023
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2022
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2021
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2020
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2019
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2018
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2017
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2016
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2015
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2014
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2013
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2012
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2011
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2010
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June
    • May
    • April
    • March
    • February
    • January
  • 2009
    • December
    • November
    • October
    • September
    • August
    • July
    • June

Twitter

2,850 tweets, and 5,568 including replies.

2023

June

  • Huge. If the lender stops operating, there will be ~no retail left along this corridor. If IKEA opens, it's the lone ant being cooked by magnifying glass and sun. It won't last a year.
    SF voters won their war on business & tech. Now, we see what's next.
    twitter.com/sfstandard/sta…( ♥ 9 ) 3 months
  • San Francisco, BART, and Muni are running titanic deficits of their own making, and every one has _increased_ expenditures on their latest budgets.
    Continued, indefinite bailouts are just assumed. (On top of those already received — $1.6B for BART.)
    twitter.com/debora_allen1/…3 months

May

  • Staying in a £30/night 6-bed/room hostel because my conscience prevents me from paying $250/night for garbage 6/10 London hotels on general principle.( ♥ 14 ) 4 months
  • Did what I thought I'd never do again, and started draining structured logs to Postgres.
    Precautions: (1) canonical lines only, (2) ephemeral database, (3) partitioned tables, and (4) efficient, batch upserts. With those in place, reasonable operational insight without Splunk. twitter.com/craigkerstiens…( ♥ 45 ) 4 months
  • The next time a British person gives you a hard time about queueing in your country, ask them what side of the sidewalk one should walk on.
    Never before seen such grossly unnecessary confusion and chaos as on UK footpaths, and in the ostensible cradle of civilization no less.( ♥ 6 ) 5 months

April

  • A whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium. In landlocked Atlanta, but the world's largest aquarium until 2012. Cool place.
    brandur.org/sequences/046( ♥ 8 ) 5 months
  • RT @craigkerstiens: .@brandur has done a bit of talking about our team, stack, practices. This summarizes well...
    When asked how we can compete with a big cloud or others, really comes down to execution and this is part.( ♥ 20 ) 5 months
  • California sure as hell won't offer its residents health care, but it'll definitely offer them a 2.5% gross income tax penalty in case they don't pay for their own. Like banning algebra, "progressive" policy at work.
    The most regressive state in the union. It's not close.( ♥ 6 ) 5 months
  • The Apple Card is a bit of a gimmick, but the new 4.15% account is a good reminder to check rates.
    I keep some cash for liquidity, and was amazed to find my credit union's "high-yield savings account" is paying a magnanimous 0.02% APY as of April 2023.
    apple.com/newsroom/2023/…( ♥ 14 ) 5 months
  • When I look at the price of a modest hotel room in a European capital like London and compare it to the average European salary, I'm left with serious questions on how society is still even functioning.
    Ten years ago I was getting like 50€ rooms in nice cities. A different era.( ♥ 14 ) 5 months
  • My reaction to someone saying they'll use GPT to write a book: so, I'll use GPT to summarize your book?
    Generative AI has changed the world to make the supply of derivative content infinite. The inevitable result will be be more of it than anyone can, or would care to, consume.( ♥ 12 ) 5 months
  • California to introduce fixed income-tiered energy bills. Tech workers in studio apartments paying 50% income tax will subsidize the landed gentry in big houses bought in the 70s who pay ~$0.
    CA is the most regressive state in the union. It's not close.
    12ft.io/proxy?q=https%…( ♥ 14 ) 5 months
  • Finally a good running week after many, many bad ones.
    I keep having to relearn the hard way (usually after gradually gaining 30 lbs. lol) that unless exercise is baked right into the schedule, it's not going to reliably happen.( ♥ 22 ) 6 months

March

  • And amusingly, an incident caused by the unassailable gravity of Hyrum's Law. Deployed a fix for a bug, but since its inception our Frontend had started using a related API parameter in a way that was allowed, but not intended, breaking integration.
    twitter.com/craigkerstiens…( ♥ 4 ) 6 months
  • Install a solid framework for producing distributed traces, and you never get tired of looking at these things.
    Auth/ACL -> procure temp SSH key -> SSH -> connect Postgres via SSH channel -> execute remote query on Postgres. Operations that can be parallelized are parallelized.( ♥ 39 ) 6 months
  • RT @pganalyze: E59 of ”5mins of Postgres” is about UUIDs vs Serial for Primary Keys. We explore reasons for using random keys and reasons for using sequential keys. We also show hybrid approaches and discuss the UUIDv7 standard. We feature @Xof and @brandur: hubs.li/Q01G5R_n0( ♥ 6 ) 6 months
  • This is cool: `CL.THROTTLE` (easy rate limiting) given a permanent home in DragonflyDB.
    And I can't believe I'm saying this, but C++ actually doesn't look all that terrible to write anymore!
    github.com/dragonflydb/dr…6 months
  • Amazing. "Journalists" lie gleefully, not having a shred of internal morality, and knowing their audience doesn't care about truth even by one iota.
    @elonmusk Removing those legacy bluechecks that imply non-existent legitimacy cannot happen soon enough.
    twitter.com/TitterDaily/st…6 months

February

  • Hip Seattle-themed store at the airport sells cassette tapes, apparently unironically.
    I sort of love it, but important question, does the technology to play these even exist anymore?7 months
  • SF report: 60% of DT jobs and $1.2B/y gone.
    Confirms forecasts showing "only" a $728M deficit over 2y were fantasy. Property taxes $82M/y and business tax $139M/y lower than projected.
    $1B deficit wasn't expected until 2026. It'll be here by 2024 or 25.
    sfbos.org/sites/default/…( ♥ 7 ) 7 months
  • It is quite ironic that elite coastal journalists, who've spent the last 10 years sneering at a suffering middle America, discontent due to hollowing out and job loss from globalism, will see their own jobs amongst the first and hardest hit by the coming wave of generative AI.( ♥ 4 ) 7 months
  • Follow up: it pays to install Signal via Homebrew (`brew install --cask signal`).
    Signal's download page will direct you to the universal Mac binary, but brew will know how to find an Apple Silicon-only version, light-as-a-feather at a mere 379 MB.
    twitter.com/brandur/status…( ♥ 21 ) 7 months
  • Every time I try to scp a file with a space in the name, I fall a little more out of love with command line interfaces.( ♥ 13 ) 7 months
  • Notes on automated `govulncheck`.
    Benefits: vulnerabilities patched in < 24 hours.
    Costs: Occasional broken builds, some of which you can't do anything about until new patch versions are available on GitHub Actions. Occasional confused contributors. twitter.com/GoDiscussions/…7 months
  • Made a little bug in the new billing module. Results only off by two orders of magnitude.( ♥ 8 ) 7 months
  • And follow up from yesterday — Shopify was a near miss from being a Postgres stack too.
    twitter.com/tobi/status/16…( ♥ 17 ) 7 months
  • Nice historical tidbit on GitHub + Postgres.
    Imagine the counterfactual where reengineering of Postgres was necessary for GitHub's scale. We might have only gotten a K/V store on RDMS like at Uber, but we might've gotten a Vitess-like layer for Postgres
    twitter.com/defunkt/status…( ♥ 35 ) 7 months
  • Derangement from the usual crowd over retiring SMS 2FA—which for ten years has been a well-documented liability that no one should use—is a new level. Jack himself was simjacked as recently as 2019 because he used this garbage.
    Scary to think what they'll come up with next TBH.( ♥ 36 ) 7 months
  • Honestly, even as bad as all this JavaScript stuff has gotten, I can barely believe this. Bigger than my first computer's entire hard drive.( ♥ 176 ) 7 months
  • Password hashing follow up. @PredragGruevski brought to my attention that although you can't rehash original passwords for existing hashes, you _can_ wrap them in a stronger hash.
    AKA banish all weak password hashes forever using this one weird trick.
    brandur.org/fragments/pass…( ♥ 20 ) 7 months
  • A little dev log of reexamining our password hashing strategy. We inherited PBKDF2 @ 27,500 iterations from Keycloak, jumped it to 600,000 iterations, and then moved to Argon2id.
    After LastPass, it's a good time to double-check your hashes are strong.
    brandur.org/fragments/pass…( ♥ 37 ) 7 months
  • The "True Faith" (New Order) cover from the end of Last of Us e04 is the Lotte Kestner cover which also makes an appearance in the second game.
    Great cover of one of the greatest songs of all time.
    youtube.com/watch?v=27ZMHU…8 months
  • Wrote about a Go test assertion we've been playing around with called `PartialEqual` meant to solve long blocks of ugly one-off asserts. Not a strong recommendation, but rationale for the pattern here: brandur.org/fragments/part…
    Prototype implementation: gist.github.com/brandur/7b459a…( ♥ 8 ) 8 months
  • Never trust anything written about Leica that contains a referral link.
    They're good cameras, but there's a whole cottage industry of people who romanticize these things for a living.( ♥ 12 ) 8 months
  • Dear media/podcasters/newsletters:
    Yes, ChatGPT exists. You asked it to do things like every other person on the internet. I'm sure the results were delightful. Now, please stop acting like you discovered the f*ing atom by using a product made by somebody else.
    Kind regards,( ♥ 35 ) 8 months

January

  • Wrote a Friday whine-piece on data loading in Go.
    The ORM + object dynamism and its near-infinite flexibility has to be one of the most powerful developments in the last decades for building things fast. What are all you people doing in Go??
    brandur.org/atoms/gj7keok( ♥ 20 ) 8 months
  • Today, saw a person sit at a table in a cafe and read a book for three hours. Didn't pull out their phone or laptop or distract themselves in any other way.
    Practically a superhuman feat in the contemporary age. I bet < 1% of humanity still has the capacity to do this.( ♥ 232 ) 8 months
  • Recommend _Triangle of Sadness_ as an artsy, black comedy that's actually good.
    Better to not even read any synopses. some have too many spoilers. Better to not even know where it's going.
    brandur.org/atoms/gizqz5c( ♥ 4 ) 8 months
  • My old man programmer take of the day: any metaprogramming DSL can be replaced with an API involving normal function calls and closures which might be maybe 10% less fluid to read, but is 10x more obvious and 10x as LSP friendly.( ♥ 83 ) 9 months
  • Love this.
    Apps that scale horizontally on commodity hardware are the obvious present and future of instrastructure. But even so, who among us _doesn't_ love the idea of a mainframe? So cool.
    And Fermi estimates galore. Great example of showing work.
    thume.ca/2023/01/02/one…( ♥ 14 ) 9 months
  • A ChatGPT-generated article hit the front page of HN this morning. Some notes.
    AI is scary as hell, just not in the way that we thought it would be. Very soon we're going to be drowning in the empty calories of AI-recycled content.
    brandur.org/fragments/chat…( ♥ 49 ) 9 months
  • In coding, resist the lowest common denominator.
    e.g. If you happen upon someone else's crappy codebase with no comments or testing, you don't have to copy the bad convention, it's still okay to add your own comments and testing, even if 95% of programmers won't.( ♥ 31 ) 9 months
  • Benioff's an opportunist who makes claims he knows play well with "progressive" outlets that'll write nice things about him. Later, when he does the opposite, it'll barely make the press cycle. Applies to layoffs, "committing to" San Francisco, Prop C, etc.
    Smart. Very cynical.( ♥ 12 ) 9 months
  • Once in a very long while, the stars align and there's a perfect confluence between technology, culture, and art. This meme is it.
    twitter.com/memenetes/stat…( ♥ 42 ) 9 months
  • It's fun looking at old snapshots of some great web design of the 2000s era.
    An irony is that people used to put text in images to look better than crappy browser-rendered text, but now that font rendering is so good, the text images now look much worse.
    brandur.org/atoms/gitc3ts( ♥ 15 ) 9 months
  • CSS TIL, a non-block element like a <span> will silently ignore a `line-height` like it never happened.
    20 years of CSS and I'm still running into these gotchas. I can all but guarantee the spec authors themselves spend significant chunks of time googling how to do things.( ♥ 12 ) 9 months

2022

December

  • Notably, my need for multiple accounts on Heroku ended before Heroku ever properly supported multiple accounts.( ♥ 9 ) 9 months
  • A few notes on publishing iPhone live photos through ffmpeg to WebM/VP9 and HEVC in `<video>`.
    (AKA how to do the work that Twitter and YouTube do automatically so no one ever has to learn anything or understand how any of this tech works.)
    brandur.org/fragments/ios-…( ♥ 11 ) 9 months
  • Much deferred visit to the Calgary Zoo, and a little experimentation on exporting iOS live photos as `.webm`/VP9 for use in a `<video>` tag, transcoded and cut for brevity with ffmpeg (details on that later). Komodo dragons. Amazing penguin exhibit.
    brandur.org/atoms/girm632( ♥ 5 ) 9 months
  • Nice trick with `math/big` for base62 encoding in Go without bringing in an external dependency.
    Base62 is nice compared to base64 because it omits hyphen (`-`) which isn't always copy/paste friendly. Great for generating secrets like API keys.
    ucarion.com/go-base62( ♥ 18 ) 9 months
  • Custom linters are such a good way to sustainably keep code quality high. Wrote this one to detect user-facing messages not following convention and autocorrect.
    Declarative S-expressions for matching keep lints maintainable. This would otherwise be like ten ugly conditionals.( ♥ 30 ) 9 months
  • The problem isn't that they took anything, it's that they left San Francisco _with_ its culture — one of profound obstructionism and regressivism, cynically masqueraded as "progressive".
    And now without the added tax to support it.
    twitter.com/HankPlante/sta…( ♥ 17 ) 9 months
  • Bankman-Fried's written testimony is a fascinating read. This is a serial liar of the highest order so don't believe a word of it, but still interesting.
    One avenue he tried was to try and cancel the chapter 11 team. Good luck with that.
    assets.bwbx.io/documents/user…( ♥ 9 ) 9 months
  • End of an era: $1.99 Shonen Jump.
    Seriously though, I wish more subscriptions would make carrying costs small enough that you don't have to think about carrying cost. I only read One Piece and OPM, so if this was a more typical $9.99 / $14.99, I would've dropped it years ago.9 months
  • Does your Go codebase use the "leading name" comment convention?
    // DoStuff does some stuff.
    func DoStuff() {
    }
    I've written thousands of these over the years, but even with automated tooling, they still feel like a net negative. Thinking about not doing it anymore.10 months
  • Comcast + San Francisco are the infernal match made in literal fucking hell.
    Comcast, a monopoly, jacks prices every year while continuing to be the worst telco in the world. "Progressive" SF runs interference by keeping microtrenching illegal to ensure no competition.( ♥ 9 ) 10 months
  • Don't use C# much anymore, but I love that it keeps plugging away with meaningful features. .NET 7 has improved perf, `required` keyword, raw string literals, and containers.
    The more modern and maintained stacks that we have to choose from, the better.
    nicolaiarocci.com/my-top-7-new-f…10 months

November

  • Usenet was the old frontier of the internet, and is still the new one too.
    As of this weekend, up four providers on different backbones (previously: one). Partly because the Black Friday deals were good beyond refusal, partly to help keep this crazy machine going.10 months
  • T minus 10 hours to Heroku d-day.
    • Deleted 42 apps that were broken or doing nothing.
    • Captured three Ruby apps as static HTML and moved to GitHub Pages.
    • Two dynamic apps went to Google Cloud Run and one hobby Bridge instance with multiple DBs.
    Later Heroku — it was fun.( ♥ 30 ) 10 months
  • Unit tests aren't a bad thing — Postgres and the kernel get away without them (and arguably shouldn't) by deep code review and extensive community testing.
    Your project doesn't have that. Write low-mock, right-size-of-unit tests — for you, and the person who comes after.( ♥ 43 ) 10 months
  • Go package of the day, which verifies no goroutines are still running after a test case:
    github.com/uber-go/goleak
    Put it in sooner rather than later because it just gets harder. It's _really_ easy for tests to accidentally leave goroutines running that no one would ever notice.( ♥ 79 ) 10 months
  • Been keeping an eye out since reading this great article on the truffle industry (and how it's BS).
    So far, 1 for 1. Here's a premium truffle product at an expensive SF boutique. Inspect tin, and it's tuber indicum, a cheap, tasteless truffle from China.
    tasteatlas.com/truffle-indust…( ♥ 13 ) 10 months
  • Went to take a look at San Francisco's new Central Subway today. Never thought I'd actually see this thing.
    Nice to finally have it though. Futuristic design, nice decor. And only a half decade behind schedule (fully open 2023) and $375M over budget, so not so bad for SF really.( ♥ 19 ) 10 months
  • Making my way through God of War Ragnarok, and damn, I'd forgotten how good the 2018 game was (which carries over as the gameplay is very similar).
    This is a must play for anyone into Norse mythology. Everywhere you go is so beautiful, and every character is fleshed out so well.( ♥ 9 ) 10 months
  • AppImage claims on the tin vs. AppImage IRL.
    So happy we have this now instead of static binaries.10 months
  • Heuristic for a well run project: be able to come back to a computer you haven't used in months, pull origin, and run 1-2 commands to get the build, test suite, and everything to just work™.
    Our is `make db/test && go test ./...`. No Docker containers harmed in the process.( ♥ 24 ) 10 months
  • Anecdote from Amazon.
    My last BigCo, ~40% of time wrestling with internal tooling is about right. (Add 10% arguing with true believers making contra-reality claims that this stack from hell was good, actually.)
    Dev at scale seems to get rough reliably.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=336275…( ♥ 48 ) 10 months
  • Yesterday: A little mushroom hunting (ever wondered where the Super Mario mushrooms come from?), and now posting content to a toy Spring '83 board.
    brandur.org/sequences/03010 months
  • Remeasured today — Go code is ~2150 test cases and runs in < 10s uncached on my Air. Most are DB-backed, so no cheating.
    At $lastJob, that was the time to run a single test case, AFTER 1000s of hours sunk into optimizations.
    Start lean. Keep it lean.
    twitter.com/craigkerstiens…( ♥ 49 ) 11 months
  • Omg, whoever worked on this, thank you.
    Not only is the capability to manually remove caches useful, but also being able to see a list of them and verify non-zero size (easy mistake is to cache the wrong paths and end up not actually caching anything).
    github.blog/changelog/2022…( ♥ 22 ) 11 months
  • Can't tell you how many ex-colleagues who've written some great stuff before who I'll look up like, "I wonder if X has written anything since 2010 …".
    Unfortunately, the answer is always "no", but it shouldn't be.
    You should start (or continue) a blog.
    twitter.com/simonw/status/…( ♥ 20 ) 11 months
  • Nice — Mastodon specifically uses the header `Idempotency-Key` to prevent duplicates while posting status updates.
    github.com/mastodon/masto…( ♥ 22 ) 11 months
  • Stripe's prime competency isn't payments, engineering, or product — it's PR, and always was. I look on in reluctant admiration at how even layoffs are executed about as masterfully as is possible.
    Sorry to anyone who got hit. This sucks.( ♥ 764 ) 11 months
  • RT @simonw: This makes a ton of sense to me: keep less critical, high throughput data such as analytics in a separate database from your core application data such that any problems with the high throughput stuff are isolated from affecting your key tables twitter.com/brandur/status…( ♥ 35 ) 11 months
  • The combination of Sorbet + Tapioca + generated stubs for the DB is the most concrete Ruby stack possible right now.
    Good day-to-day DX, and combined with thorough test coverage, unlocks broad, error-free refactors that would normally be impossible.
    twitter.com/craigkerstiens…( ♥ 18 ) 11 months
  • We're experimenting with a technique in which we keep high-throughput data out of our main DB to stave off operational issues, minimize backup size/WAL, and speed up recovery in case of failure.
    We call it "ephemeral DB". Working reasonably well so far.
    brandur.org/fragments/ephe…( ♥ 48 ) 11 months

October

  • Renaming a table in a hot database without breaking anyone and with no downtime is harder than it sounds, but possible using a combination of Postgres' updatable views and transaction DDL. Good for schema hygiene fanatics like me.
    Full instructions:
    brandur.org/fragments/post…( ♥ 50 ) 11 months
  • The post-credits scene of the latest Rick and Morty — absolute mastery of the comedy medium. Like, the pinnacle. We can all just give it up and go home now.11 months
  • Shopify's new HTTP server is Unicorn-esque, but reforks aged Ruby worker processes generationally to yield better copy-on-write memory sharing.
    Very smart, and kind of obvious in retrospect. Wish I'd thought of it.
    github.com/Shopify/pitchf…( ♥ 152 ) 12 months
  • We put our first partitioned table into prod, so did a small write up on what it's like to use partitioning in Postgres nowadays.
    Progress on this feature over 5 years is downright incredible. Managing a partitioned table is 90% as easy as a normal one.
    brandur.org/fragments/post…( ♥ 66 ) 12 months

September

  • iOS 16's wallpapers are comically awful.
    Apple's back catalog has some of the most gorgeous photography and abstract art ever created, none of which is made available, and replaced instead by emoji wallpapers and ribbons (?).
    What's going on over there.( ♥ 20 ) about 1 year
  • We've been running govulncheck in CI about a week now. So far the only downside we've noticed is that it breaks every time a new version of Go comes out (including patch versions). Fix is to make sure to use `check-latest` on `actions/setup-go` steps.
    pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/v…( ♥ 7 ) about 1 year
  • Worth looking at concept art for "The Line", a pedestrian city 170 km long, and which will probably cost $1T.
    It'd be better if it didn't take the Saudis to try this, but someone needs to be innovating in urban environments, and the west sure isn't.
    neom.com/en-us/regions/…about 1 year
  • The Ultra's the first Apple Watch that's ever tempted me — was expecting dive features eventually, but not so soon.
    Max depth of 131 ft is unfortunate as it's right at the threshold of pleasure diving. My max at the Blue Hole last month was 138. They just needed another ~20 ft.about 1 year

August

  • Very appropriate Team Zissou flair on our dive boat.( ♥ 4 ) about 1 year
  • Cutest house gecko.
    Next to AirPods Pro case for size comparison.( ♥ 5 ) about 1 year
  • Reading for vacation, because I hate myself.
    (Landed: Belize.)( ♥ 6 ) about 1 year
  • Every language has parallelism, but often it's risky/hard enough that you only pull it out for the important stuff. It's good, but with sharp edges — one of error handling, mutex misuse, or race will get you.
    Errgroup's a safe enough abstraction that it's now a weekly go to. twitter.com/brandur/status…( ♥ 9 ) about 1 year
  • Never underestimate the value of native packages.
    Wrote a feature that forwards over SSH. In most languages, tests would stub the sh*t out of everything, making them useless wall ornaments. With Go's x/crypto/ssh, they connect to real Postgres over real SSH. Super high fidelity.( ♥ 23 ) about 1 year
  • Add Postgres + WASM to those timeless pairings of two beautiful things like HTTP + REST, Ruby + Rails, chocolate + peanut butter??
    Have always advocated app devs better understanding how db/tx's work to build more robust software. Maybe the best educational tool in a decade. twitter.com/simonw/status/…( ♥ 36 ) about 1 year
  • Political Go.( ♥ 9 ) about 1 year
  • Look, I'm not saying that I like it, but Salesforce Park is legitimately the nicest park in San Francisco.( ♥ 21 ) about 1 year
  • Thought-provoking.
    I'd venture to add increasing isolation, which along with a deep set feeling of pessimism, makes people angrier, causing them to lash out in ways they know on an intuitive level is destructive to others, themselves, and wider society.
    ava.substack.com/p/modern-malai…( ♥ 9 ) about 1 year
  • Reading Peter Zeihan's (ultra China bear) and Ray Dalio's (ultra China bull) books back to back is a trip.
    Both make convincing arguments and come to opposing predictions. Lack of consideration for population age demographics is a definite blind spot in Dalio compared to Zeihan.( ♥ 17 ) about 1 year
  • Tailwind: first day on it is horrible as you're inextricably married to the ref docs page to look up Every. Single. Thing.
    But having written 10s of thousands of lines of CSS over the years, I think I'm a believer already. CSS is unmaintainable on a fundamental level.( ♥ 46 ) about 1 year
  • Go wishlist 2022:
    • Stack traces.
    • Test assertions (just a few — like Rust's `assert!`, `assert_eq!`, `assert_ne!`).
    • Better formatted CLI output.
    • Streaming API like Java/C#'s LINQ.
    • Error handling boilerplate reduction.
    • STACK TRACES.
    brandur.org/fragments/go-w…( ♥ 21 ) about 1 year
  • Pretty fun: built an internal rendering helper preview how generated emails will look in HTML vs. plaintext.
    Build the tooling with the feature because no one's actually going to do it later.( ♥ 33 ) about 1 year
  • Major tool sharpening projects that I've been procrastinating on for at least two years:
    • Convert to Neovim. (And reboot RC file.)
    • Convert to Fish shell. (And reboot RC file.)
    • Convert to Tailwind CSS.
    Finally getting to at least one of these today (Tailwind).( ♥ 18 ) about 1 year
  • The new "Thirteen Lives" dramatization of the Thai cave rescue is really good. 2021's "The Rescue" documentary is still better, but both worth seeing.
    Slightly disturbed that I barely recognized Colin Farrell. He looks like a normal person nowadays.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_…about 1 year
  • A good README is like a well-written novel: hook, detail, conclusion.
    Loved reading the one for Pressly's Goose recently. Intro, basic usage, examples, more advanced usage/examples, best practices, license. 80% of what I need in two min of reading.
    github.com/pressly/goose( ♥ 32 ) about 1 year
  • Updating a Rust project after a 1.5+ years, was relieved to find relatively few new errors/warnings, suggesting the language is stabilizing.
    And while many linters are good, Clippy still has to be the best. Really appreciate how errors give you an exact fix with laser precision.( ♥ 28 ) about 1 year
  • Hah — amazing. Jacques Cousteau's Calypso really did have a below-waterline observation chamber like the Belafonte's in Wes Anderson's _The Life Aquatic_.
    At 56% Rotten Tomatoes, this is seriously one of the most underrated movies of all time.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Calypso( ♥ 10 ) about 1 year
  • OMG, links, lists, and headings are supported in Godoc as of 1.19, all using Markdown-inspired syntax. Love it.
    go.dev/doc/go1.19#go-…( ♥ 11 ) about 1 year
  • Tried it. Running the CLI gauntlet took 15 min to get right. Procured a workload ID provider, but it failed with vague errors.
    Gave up, went to service account JSON. Succeeded, but it took a half hour to brew the right blend of obscure roles.
    Someone get Google IAM a PM, stat! twitter.com/brandur/status…( ♥ 4 ) about 1 year

July

  • Cool vintage: Cyma WWW, one of the dozen brands that met British Ministry of Defence (note: spelled with a "c") specs to be distributed to soldiers during WWII. Great 38 mm steel case. Temporarily babysitting this one for a friend.( ♥ 12 ) about 1 year
  • Google has jumped the shark on auth. Their service account JSON blobs were bad, but now it's worse.
    There's risk to API keys in that they could leak, but alternatives should be weighed against ergonomics. You practically need a PhD to get up and running.
    cloud.google.com/blog/products/…( ♥ 19 ) about 1 year
  • Having achieved its final form of TikTok-ification, my long-term gambit to never use Instagram has finally paid off.
    Even before that happened, Twitter's 280 characters were high art by comparison.( ♥ 10 ) about 1 year
  • Someday, I would love to see the source code for S3.
    That project must be the greatest pile of nightmare code ever written, and simultaneously one of the most impressive engineering feats in history.( ♥ 95 ) about 1 year
  • Advantages to micromanaging DB queries in Go (as is standard in Go) are no accidental N+1s from lazy loads, and we're far more likely to batch select/upsert rather than one-off loads/saves/updates.
    Downsides in the form of dev time are very considerable, but it's not purely bad.( ♥ 25 ) about 1 year
  • What do Go people do to operate prod without a REPL?
    We've been playing with a BG worker that looks for DB flags from operators. Surprised you don't have more people sharing techniques like this because REPL-less life makes even trivial ops a headache.
    brandur.org/fragments/oper…( ♥ 21 ) about 1 year
  • The effort that's gone into applying leap seconds safely is impressive/terrifying.
    Google/AWS smears are 24h centering on the leap. FB, 17h starting on it.
    In Google's docs note the TAI ref, basis for UTC, and 37s ahead because it doesn't observe leaps.
    developers.google.com/time/smear( ♥ 10 ) about 1 year
  • Out of all the amazingly great consumer tech we've gotten in the last decade (e.g. OLED, retina res, USB-C, ƒ/1.6 lenses in phones), my favorite has to be the M1.
    Not having to think about battery life — even when working all day away from an outlet — is a total game changer.( ♥ 14 ) about 1 year
  • Finished "The End of the World Is Just the Beginning" by Peter Zeihan.
    He's super bearish on China, which 6 mo ago I wouldn't have bought, but between trouble in economy/finance/housing and Covid Zero suggesting Xi's fired every dissenting voice, I need less convincing nowadays.( ♥ 20 ) about 1 year
  • Exposé is my absolute favorite useless feature of macOS and I hope it never goes away.( ♥ 19 ) about 1 year
  • Thanks to everyone who emailed about Nanoglyph's signup being broken. It's fixed.
    This is what happens when you connect a Heroku DB to a non-Heroku platform (Google Cloud Run) and they (justifiably) roll creds.
    Friendly reminder: never write software.
    nanoglyph-signup.brandur.org( ♥ 9 ) about 1 year
  • A minor nicety of using UUIDs as primary keys (as opposed to bigint) I'd defend is that you can give related objects all the same ID when you know there's always going to be a 1:1 relationship. Makes it easy to find things quickly.
    (And not to worry, we still use FKs too.)( ♥ 29 ) about 1 year
  • RT @craigkerstiens: Reason 167 to work @crunchydata, you can debate with me and @brandur on database design patterns on a daily basis...( ♥ 12 ) about 1 year
  • Continuing my streak of totally-popular-with-everyone database opinions, here's one on why soft deletion (`deleted_at` columns) is a net negative, and what to do instead.
    brandur.org/soft-deletion( ♥ 209 ) about 1 year
  • RIP one of the best free credit cards ever — 5% on Uber; 3% dining, hotels, airfare; $50/yr Spotify; $600 mobile phone damage protection (which I totally used once after falling on iPhone trail running); no fee.
    But, alas, seemed too good to be true. Was.( ♥ 10 ) about 1 year
  • One of my techno utopia fantasies is that 90s Japan had been better at software/chips, and by now we'd have a plethora of ARM-based netbooks in the spirit of the Vaio P running a non-Mac non-Win non-Android OS.
    As cool as Apple is, we're far too reliant on their continued mercy.( ♥ 19 ) about 1 year
  • Put down some thoughts trying to articulate where I've found it appropriate to push logic down to the database in the form of stored procs and triggers. The opacity of the side effects of such isn't great, but it's a useful technique given some restraint.
    brandur.org/fragments/code…( ♥ 27 ) about 1 year

June

  • `xerrors.Errorf` undeprecated last week:
    go-review.googlesource.com/c/xerrors/+/41…
    This is the kind of good samaritanism the Go community needs.
    Gentle reminder that `fmt.Errorf` is incapable of capturing a backtrace, which makes it totally unsuitable for production use of any kind.( ♥ 11 ) over 1 year
  • The alternate history reel at the beginning of seasons of "For All Mankind" is some of the best three minutes of TV all year.( ♥ 14 ) over 1 year
  • Great concept for a new publishing protocol.
    Users publish to a single slot that's overwritten with new content. Instead of a timeline dominated by the noisiest who tweet every five min, a broad view of everyone in the space.
    No likes, replies, or favs.
    robinsloan.com/lab/specifying…( ♥ 13 ) over 1 year
  • 1.18 again: finding that x/maps and x/slices don't do enough (no `Map`???), but projects like github.com/samber/lo do maybe too much.
    So far, adding functions that reuse lo's naming conventions given it's the best standard we have, but curious how others are running things.( ♥ 8 ) over 1 year
  • My first use of `x/sync/errgroup` today as an informal goroutine pool in (or close to) stdlib.
    Very nice — will even cancel context in case a Goroutine fails. errgroup isn't new in 1.18, but `SetLimit` for parallel control is. Been wanting this in Go for many years.( ♥ 16 ) over 1 year
  • Notable with Boudin's ousting (and just like the school board's) is that if you judged by local voters' guides or mailers you get around here, every man, woman, and dog in the city was against the recall.
    Meanwhile, he's utterly dismantled when the people get to speak.over 1 year
  • The combination of Sorbet abstract implementations + Ruby single-line method definitions (added 3.0) are great looking code.
    One thing Ruby still has going for it is aesthetics.( ♥ 24 ) over 1 year
  • Every time I think that Apple has finally righted the ship, they do something like put an M2 exclusively into the Touch Bar MBP.( ♥ 13 ) over 1 year

May

  • Shower loop:
    • Not writing enough.
    • Maybe need better tools? (iA Writer + Vim bindings??)
    • No, it's a poor carpenter who blames his shoddy tools. Remember GRRM on DOS WordStar 4.0.
    • Wait, it's been 11 years and no Winds of Winter.
    • So, need better tools?? No, come on.( ♥ 24 ) over 1 year
  • FF7 INTERmission review: Wow, Yuffie's combat is fun. Huh, this is a lot of consecutive bosses for so early in the game. Oh, it's over isn't it.over 1 year
  • Revised asdf upgrade guide:
    1. `rm -rf ~/.asdf/`
    2. Close all shells.
    3. `tmux kill-server`
    4. In new shell, verify `$ASDF_DIR` unset.
    If it continues to fail:
    5. Dig hole. Place computer inside.
    6. Douse with gasoline.
    7. Light on fire. Run away.
    twitter.com/brandur/status…( ♥ 10 ) over 1 year
  • "What problem are you really trying to solve?"
    — Sacred mantra of the Gopher pseudo-intellectual( ♥ 11 ) over 1 year
  • Out of curiosity, have been reading Bill Gates' 1995 "The Road Ahead" and its predictions hold up well so far. Here's the pages describing the "wallet PC" (AKA smartphone) and use of biometrics to protect wallets.
    iPhone releases 12 years later in 2007, TouchID 18 years in 2013.( ♥ 13 ) over 1 year
  • G Suite legacy edition SAVED.
    The first time procrastination / brinksmanship has worked out for me, ever.
    support.google.com/a/answer/60217( ♥ 17 ) over 1 year
  • It felt like wasting time when I did it, exporting my collection from Flickr was one of my best ideas in years.
    Kind of an indictment that a platform for sharing high-res original photos is ~worthless, but add an algorithm, filters, and hellish cropping and you've got $100B.over 1 year
  • Great piece.
    The Fed takes credit for all economic gains, while ignoring their role as a primary instigator of wealth inequality through asset inflation.
    Continually amazed how rare it is to hear of the downsides of zeroed rates/QE from the mainstream.
    thelastbearstanding.substack.com/p/the-case-for…( ♥ 7 ) over 1 year
  • How insulting. I'm actually a Node developer. twitter.com/craigkerstiens…( ♥ 6 ) over 1 year
  • This is the kind of thing that makes me lose the thread on SQL DSLs. Took 10 min of trial and error to write that.
    But ironically, still safer than many alternatives, where SQL is in code only as a simple string.
    IMO, best option is real SQL, parsed before runtime. e.g. sqlc.( ♥ 17 ) over 1 year
  • Judge my Go sin: vendored like half of `encoding/json` to get more flexibility around encoding.
    The only customization knob `encoding/json` gives you is `json.Marshaler`, which takes no parameters, and doesn't go very far. IMO strong argument this package should expose more API.over 1 year
  • Babel, dart guns, and institutional stupidity — Jonathan Haidt argues convincingly that the virality effects of social media are incompatible with a functional democracy:
    theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
    In podcast form:
    overcast.fm/+vpWYPmZ8gover 1 year
  • Very fair and comprehensive treatise on Go.
    Generally nice language with a hundred oddities to know about. Usually better not to dig into the "why" of them because more often than not, reading the facile rationalization is bad for blood pressure.
    typesanitizer.com/blog/go-experi…( ♥ 41 ) over 1 year

April

  • Watched "Last Night in Soho" — solid horror that doesn't rely on jump scares (a superior genre of horror).
    And now I want to go to pubs and see if I can get any of them to give me a Kronenberg 1664 when I order "a pint of the numbers". What are the chances that works? 10%?( ♥ 5 ) over 1 year
  • We put a change into our Ruby code to treat UUIDs as 16-byte bytestrings instead of their normal string format.
    A small tweak, but kind of fun — UUIDs can plausibly live their whole lifecycle as binary without being rendered to a string. Also, type-safe.
    brandur.org/fragments/ruby…( ♥ 13 ) over 1 year
  • PayPal evacuating SF June 3rd. That's everyone in payments gone — Block (Square), Stripe, Brex, Credit Karma, etc. I'm sure just a coincidence — no relation to Prop C.
    Once again, San Franciscans get what they ostensibly want. We'll see how long this train can stay on the rail.( ♥ 4136 ) over 1 year
  • Imagine if you had to type your password back into every app on your phone every week like is somehow still a normal thing on your desktop.( ♥ 12 ) over 1 year
  • Everyone who's ever put Ruby in prod knows that safe refactoring isn't possible except in very small incremental steps.
    We find that a combination of Sorbet plus high branch coverage makes large changes possible. Turns out, type annotations are good.
    brandur.org/fragments/larg…( ♥ 29 ) over 1 year
  • A year into professional Go dev, my main day-to-day complaint: too. much. code.
    Too many `if err != nil`, too many stanzas that should've been one-liner map/reduce, too much boilerplate. It's a problem for dev speed, but mainly refactoring because there's just so much to change.( ♥ 86 ) over 1 year
  • Brilliant.
    twitter.com/micsolana/stat…( ♥ 10 ) over 1 year
  • Manhattan.( ♥ 9 ) over 1 year
  • Just in case there's anyone else out there who hasn't seen this work of genius. Keep an eye on that counter in the bottom right as you scroll down.
    web3isgoinggreat.com( ♥ 18 ) over 1 year

March

  • The Expanse might be one of those vanishingly rare pieces of media where the TV series is better than the books. TV makes the universe come alive, and hits a perfect sober/serious quality that books suggest, but don't quite convey.
    (Only on book three so far, so grain of salt.)( ♥ 21 ) over 1 year

February

  • (Mildly interesting —) Did a benchmark of ECDSA (EC
    = elliptic curve) as we were migrating today from RSA.
    (On my MBP at least) RSA is slower, but mostly on signing. Verification is about the same speed. Signing is slower by ~100x though, so it was worth the effort to move.( ♥ 8 ) over 1 year
  • ffmpeg is an API that's coincidentally on the command line. Thus, Handbrake.
    There's never been another program I've used so much and still know so little about. My last args:
    `-map 0:0 -c:v libx265 -preset fast -crf 28 -map 0:a:0 -c:a aac -map 0:s:m:language:eng -c:s copy`( ♥ 14 ) over 1 year
  • Tiny development log from today: using a Sentry span sampling function to drop spans that no one will ever look at so that we can keep the rest.
    brandur.org/fragments/sent…( ♥ 12 ) over 1 year
  • I assumed these Sentry spans were self-satisfied technical wankery on my part, but they really helped fix a perf bug that would've been hard to find.
    See the ~80 ms gap in this pic — I wasn't sure what it was, but knew it was happening between auth check and remote service call.( ♥ 43 ) over 1 year
  • Disk space critical, so reencoding videos to x265. Perplexed why one series wouldn't go < 1.5 GB/file. Turns out, assuming audio streams would be small, told ffmpeg to map them to out. Final artifact: 300 MB video + 1.2 GB audio.
    Lesson: ffmpeg is hard. 1,000th time learning it.( ♥ 16 ) over 1 year
  • One day we realized that both our major production systems only had one stateful dependency, and decided to see how long we could keep it that way.
    Not strongly prescribed, but food for thought anyway — on single dependency (Postgres only) stacks:
    brandur.org/fragments/sing…( ♥ 93 ) over 1 year
  • Email deliverability is hard, so double-posting here as well: published 031 about API reference docs.
    A few stories about doing building them with JSON hyper-schema at Heroku, custom DSLs at Stripe, and now via Go's reflect/docs packages at Bridge.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/031…( ♥ 30 ) over 1 year
  • My favorite character in Raised by Wolves is Ragnar Lothbrok.over 1 year
  • With every new G of cellular: more theoretical bandwidth, more alphabet soup, and higher prices. Meanwhile, reception and real world performance frozen in amber for ten years now.
    Screencap taken the precise geographic center of San Francisco, which is on top of a big hill.over 1 year
  • One of the less predictable casualties of San Francisco's lockdown-infinite policies is ... bicycling?
    Contrary to the popular anti-tech narrative, it turns out that young tech workers were the only class of SF society who were willing to try alternative eco-friendly transport.over 1 year
  • I am totally YOLOing all JS I write now: for ... of / const / IntersectionObserver / => / async / clipboard API / Map — all 95%+ support.
    No build pipeline. Direct debugging. Only way to live. What's a polyfill again?( ♥ 15 ) over 1 year
  • AirPods Max bought 2021/02/24. Sending them for one more warranty claim before the year horizon — claim no. 4.
    Great looking headphones. Easily the shoddiest tech product I've ever owned. Like, black comedy level lol.
    Pic of warranty replacements no. 3 for two separate pairs.over 1 year
  • We encode IDs as an in-house format called EID, which is 128 bits like UUID, but easy to select. We use ULID's time-based algo so they're ordered.
    Few downsides except that the SQL enc/dec funcs are the most brutal computer code I've ever written lol.
    docs.crunchybridge.com/api-concepts/e…( ♥ 66 ) over 1 year

January

  • One of my proudest automations — docs/API structure read from Go code → OpenAPI → Hugo-friendly Markdown → HTML, all pushed automatically via GitHub Actions.
    API ref is complete, but docs are human-written so they don't read like cold machine output.
    twitter.com/craigkerstiens…( ♥ 55 ) over 1 year
  • lol, don't walk to talk about how long it took me to diagnose a bug around overflowing <pre> elements because Flexbox containers come with a surprise `min-width` value.
    No matter how long you work with it, CSS is the gift that keeps on giving.
    weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2016/feb…over 1 year
  • Apple spaceship just barely visible in the distance.( ♥ 6 ) over 1 year
  • It's a total indictment of modern society that _The Last Duel_ is a box office bomb while the latest Marvel / Star Wars rehash will consistently make a bajillion dollars.
    Great movie though — a little long, but acting, costumes, sets all A+++.over 1 year
  • My parents are birders so for fun my brother bought a board game which our family refers to colloquially as "the bird game" (actually: "Wingspan").
    Thought it'd be some Mickey Mouse trivial pursuit type thing. Reality: mix of Game of Thrones and Civilization 4, with birds.( ♥ 15 ) over 1 year
  • And this keeps getting better as we iterate.
    Ruby (Owl) — semaphores, 100% branch coverage, Sorbet/Tapioca, Roda.
    Platform (Go) — 3s test suite, self-descriptive API abstractions, FAST.
    Both transactionally-driven, single dependency (Postgres), and current language versions. twitter.com/craigkerstiens…( ♥ 16 ) over 1 year

2021

December

  • I'm still walking the line as to whether Slack is overall net good or bad, but one thing I'm sure of is that using it in moderation is better.
    One technique we're trying: experimenting with disciplined threading to overcome total Slack-mania —
    brandur.org/fragments/slac…( ♥ 22 ) almost 2 years
  • Occasionally evaluate moving my Large Old Media up to cloud storage. With the introduction of services like B2 and tech like x265/HEVC it seems like it should be, but still nope.
    This post is from 2017, but prices are holding steady around $0.02/GB.
    backblaze.com/blog/hard-driv…almost 2 years
  • 30 / 60. Finally — half. way.
    200 to 300 reviews a day for 400+ consecutive days now. 983 kanji down. ~1 year left. It's a miracle anyone ever has learned this writing system, but inching closer.( ♥ 12 ) almost 2 years
  • asdf is a good version manager, but to save yourself a world of expansive pain, would strongly recommend this simplified upgrade procedure:
    1. rm -rf ~/.asdf
    2. Start over.( ♥ 21 ) almost 2 years
  • The number of local articles written about 1.5 days of moderate rain in the Bay Area ("atmospheric river") is literally unbelievable.
    Can't tell if this is commentary on the soft coastal elite, or news addiction, or rarity of California precipitation. Probably all of the above.almost 2 years
  • Small business is nice and all, but do you know how inconvenient it's been to find free parking lately?!
    Err, *ahem*, I mean we have to be thoughtful about safety and accessibility. That parklet over there casts a shadow visible from a park down the block! This shalt not stand. twitter.com/hknightsf/stat…almost 2 years
  • Wow. In the world of software engineering, it rarely gets more definitive than that. (On MySQL.)
    Mongo devs: One from you next please.
    blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2021…( ♥ 32 ) almost 2 years
  • Best thing about the new MBPs: the screen. More than twice as bright as the last gen, after decades waiting, the dream of working outside (without being hunched over squinting, eyes in pain) is finally real.
    A few quick notes: brandur.org/fragments/macb…( ♥ 15 ) almost 2 years
  • lol I know just how much everyone loves hearing about other peoples' vacations, but ... mandatory dolphin videos. Shot just off the coast in Huatulco National Park while returning from diving for the day.( ♥ 14 ) almost 2 years
  • Great to see JetBrains doing a new IDE. Their current IDEs were great for their time, but now comically wasteful.
    But they're the only IDE maker that understands the importance of refactoring tools, and those need a comeback. VSCode needs competition.
    jetbrains.com/fleet/( ♥ 43 ) almost 2 years
  • Coffee, from berry on branch to roasted bean. The mountains of Oaxaca, MX, 3k feet above sea level.( ♥ 6 ) almost 2 years

November

  • SF looking increasingly more like the dystopia it endeavors to be.
    5-year civic plan: (1) force the rest of downtown business shut through continued lockdown and crime enablement, (2) push even more purchasing to Amazon, (3) complain about evil monopolies on Twitter.( ♥ 13 ) almost 2 years
  • Unloaded my iMac Pro yesterday. Sad — such a great machine, and one of the early indicators that Apple was starting to make a comeback towards practicality again, but just wasn't using it anymore with M1 computers around.( ♥ 4 ) almost 2 years
  • Floored that spelling autocorrect on Macs (with keyboards!) is on by default. When I go back and proofread, 80% of the typos are not ones that I made, but rather authored by Apple as it helpfully makes correct spelling/grammar incorrect.
    _Very_ ducking annoying ill tell you.( ♥ 13 ) almost 2 years
  • Follow up from last week: how to implement a "random by token" flag using a hash and a big int.
    brandur.org/fragments/flag…
    Nothing too novel, but useful for producing the same on/off result for the same ID on every call. Users don't see non-deterministic behavior on roll outs.( ♥ 12 ) almost 2 years
  • Alright, there's maybe a 20% this Wheel of Time interpretation is good, but if it is, that's many hundreds of hours of childhood investment/daydreaming fulfilled. Hail Mary.
    Cowboy Bebop also drops at midnight Pacific. Tonight's going to be either boom or bust.( ♥ 7 ) almost 2 years
  • Some quick thoughts on feature flags as I was building some here —
    brandur.org/fragments/flag…
    Not wanting to maintain a bunch of code abstractions, the goal is to have one system that does many things well: feature rollout, operational knobs, deprecations, internal settings, etc.( ♥ 24 ) almost 2 years
  • The only author on Earth who can make laugh out loud when reading an article about inflation and the bleak future of our money supply. twitter.com/micsolana/stat…almost 2 years
  • Anyone successfully migrated off Dropbox to a new service they love?
    Haven't been enthused about the pricing and product bloat (would love to downgrade to Dropbox 2012 edition), but two years to ship an M1 binary (they're aiming for H1 2022) is probably the final straw.( ♥ 16 ) almost 2 years
  • Winner of most awkward project naming of all time: golangci-lint. Until about a week ago, I needed to try about three different permutations of "lang" / "ci" / "lint" / hyphen before finding the right one.
    Still, great program — fast and highly configurable.( ♥ 9 ) almost 2 years

October

  • Carmack's talks are amazingly dense — 60 minutes of uninterrupted dialogue on the state of VR. No slides, no visuals, no filler.
    The only reason to be optimistic about Meta (involving a technology that underdelivers again and again) is his involvement.
    youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0…( ♥ 19 ) almost 2 years
  • My most anticipated movies of the last few years, with polar different outcomes.
    • Die Another Day: May be the worst Bond ever. Everything good sucked out. Left: melodramatic husk.
    • Dune: The best interpretation ever made, easily. Tarnished only by being a part 1 situation.( ♥ 12 ) almost 2 years
  • RT @sebrindom: Have written a blog post about how we implemented idempotency keys in @medusajs. I first read about the concept on @brandur's blog and have obsessed over it ever since 😁
    #opensource #javascript #programming
    dev.to/medusajs/an-op…( ♥ 14 ) almost 2 years
  • RT @micsolana: this is impossible because inflation doesn't exist but if it did exist it wouldn't be happening and if it *was* happening it would be a good thing, actually, everyone knows this. please learn econ twitter.com/APompliano/sta…( ♥ 647 ) almost 2 years
  • For <script>:
    * `async` causes it to be fetched in parallel, but run ASAP.
    * `defer` waits for DOM readiness before running.
    I would think that combining both would make sense, but most of what I read suggests browsers will just prefer async.
    OOC, does anyone know why?almost 2 years
  • As much as I love all the pretty colors I have in my logs now, really missing Splunk's unique capacity to crush billions of lines of logs like nothing else.
    OTOH, not missing that pricing ... at all. If a new entrant doesn't disrupt this space within 5 years I'll eat my hat.( ♥ 6 ) almost 2 years

September

  • Always aim for day one. twitter.com/craigkerstiens…( ♥ 11 ) almost 2 years
  • Program start check: A dead simple pattern for CI that makes sure your program can successfully start and stop. Implementation takes about 10 minutes and it'll save you some day.
    brandur.org/fragments/prog…( ♥ 25 ) almost 2 years
  • Between hardware rebate and carrier incentive, my iPhone upgrade this year will be ... free? Had to upgrade plan, but contrary to everything I've learnt about carriers over the last 20 years, Magenta MAX actually seems ... better than what I had?
    Still waiting for the catch.almost 2 years
  • Next level from @LukasFittl and co. — first they boxed up the Postgres SQL query parser into a modular API that enabled great derivative tools like sqlc.
    Now — the Postgres planner isolated and compiled to WebAssembly to help suggest optimal indexes. Nice. twitter.com/pganalyze/stat…( ♥ 33 ) almost 2 years
  • Amen. Zoomed to only this section of JFK, we somehow forget that more than 3/4 of GG Park is still full of busy roads, many of which make the mere act of traversing the park on foot hazardous as yielding to pedestrians is optional in SF.
    From @hknightsf:
    sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/hea…( ♥ 13 ) almost 2 years
  • Thanks Curt!
    028's about teaching people SQL and internal tool inspiration.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/028… twitter.com/asenchi/status…2 years
  • Has anyone ever wanted to copy and paste text _with_ formatting on purpose?
    The Mac OS built-in shortcut of ⌥+⇧+⌘+V for paste without formatting is so awkward. The only workaround I know is to spot fix specific apps with overrides, but what an awful default.( ♥ 21 ) 2 years
  • Strong fog game this morning.( ♥ 4 ) 2 years
  • Finally got around to seeing the Demon Slayer movie. Beautiful art (anime, but one with a unique style), incredible soundtrack.
    Love that it's the highest grossing movie _ever_ in Japan, even if it's not the masterpieces that were Spirited Away (no. 2) or Your Name (no. 5).( ♥ 9 ) 2 years
  • Postgres' `text` type, which lets you interleave unbounded data in with any database row, is a marvelous feat of technical accomplishment.
    Published a piece on why you might want to consider using `varchar` anyway, inspired by lessons learned at Stripe.
    brandur.org/text( ♥ 80 ) 2 years
  • I guess the enthusiastic uptake of these new cookie options is good (Stack Overflow is so enthusiastic that I've filled theirs out 27 times already), but when I get a modal with "do not sell my personal information", it's just like ... can't you just not ask and then not do it.2 years
  • After trying a lot of database options in the Go world, we ended up moving everything over to sqlc — lets us use the excellent pgx driver everywhere, while also getting us high-level constructs with minimal boilerplate.
    Longer writeup:
    brandur.org/sqlc( ♥ 59 ) 2 years
  • Gods, now that I'm off JIRA, GitHub Enterprise, managed endpoint with < 2 hours battery life, mandatory multi-layer code reviews, 15 minute CI turnarounds, and 30 second test start up, I'm running out of things to complain about.
    May need to look into picking up Java as a hobby.( ♥ 98 ) 2 years
  • A partial list of K-sorted ID algorithms and prior art. We ended up going with ULIDs on new sequences for the time being. So far: upside (ergonomics + insert perf) with very little cost compared to V4 UUIDs.
    brandur.org/fragments/k-so…( ♥ 23 ) 2 years
  • Shipping Nanoglyph 027 today (FINALLY). On Colorado, elaboration on 15 minute/15 week upgrades, and more on K-sorted IDs.
    nanoglyph-signup.brandur.org( ♥ 7 ) 2 years
  • Chat 2002: Trillian.
    Chat 2022: Slack + iMessage + Chrome (for Google Chat) + Signal + WhatsApp + Discord + Twitter DM.
    And Google's new Chat product is exactly the same as the old except now it doesn't even let you disable auto-emoticon conversion. What's happening to us.( ♥ 26 ) 2 years

August

  • Time to upgrade production to Go 1.17 — 15 minutes.
    For comparison, time to upgrade Ruby at old major payments processing job — closer to 15 weeks.
    There is something to this static binary / shallow stack thing.( ♥ 87 ) 2 years
  • RT @craigkerstiens: In a similar vein to the last thread... we've got some really solid engineers working on really solid code bases, @brandur breaks down some of it with a bit of behind the scenes detail here - brandur.org/nanoglyphs/025…( ♥ 19 ) 2 years
  • Go in production: we switched to use the xerrors package to get stack traces, because stack traces are kind of important for debugging problems. If you've got a better way, would love to know about it.
    brandur.org/fragments/go-x…( ♥ 24 ) 2 years
  • WaniKani accountability update ~1 year in: level 23 / 60, 737 kanji learned (+ ~2.5k words vocabulary). Still making progress, but more slowly.( ♥ 5 ) 2 years
  • Been listening to songs from Initial D soundtracks literally all day and work is so much faster at 154 BPM. RECOMMENDED.
    youtube.com/watch?v=JPN0JV…( ♥ 7 ) 2 years

July

  • AWS pay in advance —
    I like the applicability for long-running autonomous projects. Pay a runway into an account and it'll run without having to swap out a credit card every few years. Keep to core services where APIs are stable and deprecation is rare.
    aws.amazon.com/about-aws/what…2 years
  • Absolutely gorgeous illustrations of metropolis Tokyo. There's nothing better than the combination of rain + neon colors.
    behance.net/gallery/124056…( ♥ 12 ) 2 years
  • "Pig" (2021) with Nic Cage is so weird/incredible. First movie I've seen in ten years where I had no idea what was going to happen at any point.
    Hard not see the John Wick inspiration, but still very much its own movie.( ♥ 7 ) 2 years

June

  • Whoah, don't know when this was added, but GitHub pull requests automatically retarget their base branch when that base branch is merged. GREAT feature — makes chaining PRs that much easier.( ♥ 18 ) 2 years
  • Programming is terrible, and we should be appropriately forgiving to our forbearers, but once in a while I come across a design choice that is absolutely baffling in that at some point, someone really thought that this was a good idea.
    How to pass arguments to Rake tasks:( ♥ 27 ) 2 years
  • RT @craigkerstiens: Not my words, but a good reinforcement we are building towards some pretty exciting things @crunchydata. And we're hiring (https://t.co/YusRZ2DFMa) /cc @brandur( ♥ 16 ) 2 years

April

  • Was grepping our code today and became unreasonably happy at seeing this level of `FOREIGN KEY` hygiene. For reference, the project is less than a year old.
    There are many ways to make software that works, at least for a time. This is a way to make software that _stays_ working.( ♥ 34 ) 2 years
  • Wrote this one a few months back, but forgot to post it here.
    Stay optimistic about companies and technologies, but apply healthy skepticism as well — in almost every case, people (very unsurprisingly) leave out the bad stuff.
    twitter.com/komlasapaty/st…( ♥ 7 ) 2 years
  • Inspired move by Patagonia — no more customized products with corporate logos because products with logos are more likely to end up in landfills.
    Companies should embrace this and keep going Patagonia for swag. Brand T-shirts if you have to.
    patagonia.com/transitioning-…( ♥ 63 ) 2 years
  • Just wanted to drop a blanket "thank you" for all the nice comments/messages/likes about my note yesterday. I expected a trickle of encouraging responses, and got a tsunami instead. You people are incredible.( ♥ 36 ) 2 years
  • Recently I had the hard realization that I've spent more years as a Mongo user than as a Postgres one, so I'm changing that this month. Excited to be joining the engineering team at @crunchydata.
    A few more words on that: brandur.org/fragments/crun…( ♥ 183 ) 2 years
  • Sent 023 this morning on downward assignment, the evolution of properties in C#, and Japanese city pop.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/023…2 years
  • TIL: The “Re” we use in subject lines for email replies is a latin phrase abbreviated from “in re” (“in the matter of”). Hah, I always thought it was short for “reply”.
    There’s an RFC of course:
    tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#s…( ♥ 48 ) 2 years
  • Every time I wake up early enough to go see the sun rise, then walk around to listen to the early morning sounds of nature, I realize that it's completely unreasonable that I don't do this every single morning.( ♥ 34 ) 2 years
  • Reminder that it's worth glancing at the AWS bill every once in a while, even if it's not enormous.
    The s-m-r-t idea of always invalidating all index pages in CloudFront on every build cost $8 of a total ~$13 bill last month.
    github.com/brandur/sorg/c…( ♥ 13 ) 2 years
  • Luckily a joke, but it got me. Right in line with Ruby's design principles (succinctly: "include _everything_").
    bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/17768( ♥ 9 ) 2 years

March

  • Complained to @keiko713 about the kanji for the word "carrot" — 人参, which makes it "person" + "participate" (?!?!). Was sent this image as a memory aid.
    (Source: twitter.com/buromasa0423/s…)( ♥ 6 ) 3 years
  • I like the abstract romantic idea of a monorepo as much as the next person, but once one is so big that Git (one of the fastest and best-optimized programs every written) doesn’t really work anymore, the monorepo is too mono.( ♥ 21 ) 3 years
  • Stats from Canadian real estate.
    Turns out, super inflationary policy has ramifications. $X,000 in free money today, but $X00,000 more needed to own a home tomorrow. Most Canadians are homeowners and profiting, but think of the children, seriously.
    creastats.crea.ca/en-CA/( ♥ 7 ) 3 years
  • Last Nanoglyph — wrote about how, unsurprisingly, IDEs are a good idea, and how they make writing **even Java** (!!) pretty fun.
    Title for next week: "Time and Entropy".
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/021…( ♥ 11 ) 3 years
  • Impressive video on electric buses in Shenzhen. Imagine buses going from the loudest vehicles on the street to the quietest.
    We’ve all internalized that big infrastructure upgrades are impossible, but remember some places in the world still make them.
    youtube.com/watch?v=0P7fTP…3 years

February

  • Can’t believe I agree with Facebook on anything, but this is the right move. Big tech isn't good, but legislative overreach and insider graft is worse.
    Good for society too. Given the quality of today’s news, we’d all do well to consume less of it.
    about.fb.com/news/2021/02/c…( ♥ 4 ) 3 years
  • Excellent: Go 1.16 finally supports slurping up static files into binaries. 3rd party packages and extra build steps no longer required.
    (Like Go, and this is good, but can’t give them _too_ much credit because it should’ve happened >5 years ago.)
    golang.org/pkg/embed/( ♥ 10 ) 3 years
  • Wrote a piece on ditching Google Analytics to run analytics over logs, like it’s 1999 (except now with hosted Presto, etc. bootable in seconds from the cloud ;).
    I also estimate how inaccurate hosted analytics are due to adblocked scripts. Answer: very.
    brandur.org/minimal-analyt…( ♥ 73 ) 3 years
  • And worth noting it'll deduplicate too!
    twitter.com/starsandrobots…3 years
  • Periodic reminder that Vim has a built-in `:sort` command that works for an entire file and all the usual selections. Not something you need every day, but the days when you do, it's a _huge_ time saver.
    thoughtbot.com/blog/sort-line…( ♥ 26 ) 3 years
  • RT @jkspn: As @NotionHQ had a meltdown earlier today, I am reminded of this wonderful read by @brandur on local-first software
    The convenience of online apps like Notion, @Figma, @Webflow, etc. can’t be overstated. But ultimately they depen on your connection.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/014…( ♥ 8 ) 3 years
  • Some nice people have bumped me on Twitter recently, so I'll take the opportunity for some self promotion —
    You might enjoy my newsletter, _Nanoglyph_. It's like a Substack, but from the old school. I'll be shipping a new edition in the next day or two.
    nanoglyph-signup.brandur.org( ♥ 9 ) 3 years
  • RT @thesephist: Since I found it 3 years, ago, @brandur's blog has stayed the best designed blog I've ever seen (obviously, a subjective take). So clean, minimal, without being generic. And lots of attention to detail everywhere.
    It was a big inspiration for t.co/K3osrFdbV4's design.( ♥ 29 ) 3 years
  • As much as I dislike trading firms and financial institutions, for the sake of my own sanity, I for one am glad that GME didn’t become another Bitcoin — expensive because people say it’s expensive, not because it can it can be used for anything or has any inherent worth.( ♥ 10 ) 3 years

January

  • A little architectural inspiration: amazing house built underground, into the side of of a hill. Concrete and steel everything.
    Come on billionaires, more Bond villain lairs like this please. Someone needs to do the volcano thing ("You Only Live twice").
    design-milk.com/a-cave-like-ho…( ♥ 16 ) 3 years
  • RT @adamludwin: An average GameStop by this summer( ♥ 39 ) 3 years
  • Excellent take on social media.
    Twitter leaders—with politicians and reporters being the worst offenders—tweet what plays best, and what plays best are divisive semi-truths and reductive caricatures of opponents. We just can’t help ourselves.
    twitter.com/micsolana/stat…( ♥ 4 ) 3 years
  • Programming in Java for a few hours sure makes you appreciate C#.
    Java's like an alternate reality where all the nice quality of life features (properties, property init from constructor, option parameters, tuples, etc.) just never happened.
    At least it finally got closures.( ♥ 14 ) 3 years
  • This is pretty niche, but I wrote Go API bindings for WaniKani.
    github.com/brandur/wanika…
    Integrated the good parts of stripe-go, and left out the bad (global state, Java-esque iterators).
    WaniKani is a microcosm of good API design. More details: brandur.org/fragments/wani…( ♥ 7 ) 3 years
  • For fun and (not so much) profit, cross-posting to Mastodon. Get in touch if you use it: mastodon.social/@brandur
    Not super optimistic that federation will be the answer, but will try anything that might put a dent in Twitter.
    Implementation detail: brandur.org/fragments/mast…( ♥ 8 ) 3 years
  • Sent Nanoglyph 018 about Ractors in Ruby 3.
    A more faithful implementation of the actor model than something Goroutines/channels. Two styles of message passing to get whatever blocking/non-blocking semantics you want to have.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/018…( ♥ 24 ) 3 years
  • Yet another Gmail HTML/web oddity: it won’t display an SVG.
    To this day the only reliable way of discovering what quirky subset of HTML Gmail supports is trial and error. I’m afraid to even look how my emails render on other even-quirkier web clients like Outlook or AOL.3 years
  • Played around with Ractors last weekend. Very happy there’s finally parallelism in Ruby.
    Worth noting that they’re currently not much use because so much Ruby relies on ambient global state. e.g. Can’t parse TOML in a Ractor, can’t render Markdown. Mostly stdlib-only right now.( ♥ 5 ) 3 years
  • RT @gertjanwilde: What's good about offset pagination; designing parallel cursor-based web APIs — by @brandur buff.ly/3ovE4Nl #API3 years
  • A few romantic shots of Banff to help get your week started. Can't believe I'm still hiking in January.( ♥ 32 ) 3 years
  • Update on Homebrew on M1: Works great now, and I was able to get rid of the second x86 Homebrew install that ran some programs under Rosetta. For my money, there are no blockers left in these being great machines for development.
    More detail: brandur.org/fragments/home…( ♥ 38 ) 3 years
  • Nice thinking around easing Ractors into the Ruby ecosystem from @kirshatrov.
    Ruby relies heavily on global state so bringing them in at the "top" will be difficult initially, but they're more amenable at the "bottom" where less state needs to be shared.
    kirshatrov.com/2021/01/06/rub…( ♥ 15 ) 3 years
  • RE WhatsApp Facebook-itzation: Baffled by the number of claims of “I left WhatsApp by “just” switching me and every person I know over to Signal!”
    Very hard to believe, but they seem to believe what they’re saying. Not sure where the disconnect is, but installed Signal anyway.( ♥ 7 ) 3 years
  • RT @petervgeoghegan: Over 5 years ago my then-colleague @brandur wrote about problems with Postgres queues and the accumulation of garbage MVCC versions (see brandur.org/postgres-queues). Expect significant improvements in this area for Postgres 14: postgr.es/m/CAGnEbogATZS…( ♥ 61 ) 3 years
  • After a lengthy battle, my SEO’s been usurped by an IKEA hangar rail for the garage. (Looks pretty nice actually, might get one.)
    Do I have any chance of taking it back, or is this the end.( ♥ 63 ) 3 years
  • Finally finishing S4 Mr. Robot. Felt less anxiety from the culminating plot than from the idea of hacking via smartphone.
    Between autocorrect, no tab button, and half your shell symbols buried in keyboard menus two layers deep, this is the show’s most dystopian concept, by far.( ♥ 8 ) 3 years
  • Happy 2021!
    A few pretty photos of the Rockies from the other day. Just gorgeous — lots of green, but now with a light layer of snow.( ♥ 24 ) 3 years

2020

December

  • Big Sur a few weeks in: Some things are worse (contrast, Finder), many things are different (fonts, menus), but nothing is _better_.
    Imagine if a big new macOS version introduced new keyboard shortcuts, better multi-tasking, or the like. Innovation in desktop OSes isn’t done.( ♥ 10 ) 3 years
  • Go 1.16 beta1 for ARM-based Macs is a life saver so far. Ran into all kinds of problems with failures and zombie processes with 1.15 under Rosetta.
    golang.org/dl/( ♥ 6 ) 3 years
  • My closet is indexed on `(season, apparel_type, style, color) WHERE defunct IS FALSE`.
    (And given half of those are `(summer, t-shirt, v-neck, black)`, de-duped on the backend ... ;) twitter.com/craigkerstiens…( ♥ 7 ) 3 years
  • Going through old tweets, found this 10yo ad for The Camera Store in Calgary. One minute long, no spoken words, pure inspiration. Best enjoyed by photography nerds.
    (The ease/art of videography has advanced since then, but this is da Vinci for its time.)
    youtube.com/watch?v=awq90A…3 years
  • Life on WaniKani: wake up, underwater, to inbox(hundreds) every morning.
    270 kanji in. Last week, from first principles, found that "ichiban" (一番) literally means "number one". Learned that word when I was five, and for the last 30 years thought it meant “noodles”.( ♥ 8 ) 3 years
  • After local businesses spent $10,000s they didn't have on outdoor infrastructure, city and state will now force a new, indefinite closure.
    It’s been a long time coming, but that’s it — the death knell. Ten years from now, I’ll be able to describe the final days of San Francisco.( ♥ 21 ) 3 years
  • On the reasons why RDMSes trend toward glorified key/value stores at scale, and ideas to stop it — twitter.com/planetpostgres…( ♥ 27 ) 3 years
  • A living GitHub issue, and the best project management I've ever seen, in or out of industry.
    (Note the 500+ hidden comments too so that it's easier to focus on recent events.)
    github.com/Homebrew/brew/…( ♥ 12 ) 3 years

November

  • Finally, a blank slate.
    (Allowing me to start on one part of the surface and work inwards without breaking everything. Wayyyyy too many hours spent refactoring to get here.)( ♥ 5 ) 3 years
  • Trying a site redesign and man, a combination of poor CSS hygiene and CSS defaulting to a mess have caught up to me.
    Now building "firebreaks" so changes in one place don't cascade into everything.
    Lesson: Keep stylesheets highly encapsulated, even where sharing is convenient.( ♥ 10 ) 3 years
  • Apple's pulled an Rdio with Big Sur. As much as blown out, low-contrast interfaces with big white space gutters look great in portfolios, they are strictly worse for usability. Modern designers need the equivalent of editorial boards, or something.
    andrewdenty.com/blog/2020/07/0…( ♥ 9 ) 3 years

October

  • Important development in web technology that'd be easy to miss: Very soon there will be no performance advantage to cross-site resource sharing via CDN.
    Privacy aside, I like the idea of sites hosting their own assets — just seems simpler.
    stefanjudis.com/notes/say-good…( ♥ 24 ) 3 years
  • I'm extremely jealous of people who can write succinctly, and still get plenty of ideas through.
    I start intending to write 20 words. Before I know it, the project's ballooned into a high caloric word salad of 2,000+ words, most uninteresting, but none of which I want to cut.( ♥ 40 ) 3 years
  • Like most of everyone, I assumed that container images were our one and only future, but as of ~1 month ago, Heroku-style buildpacks are now quite ubiquitous.
    On Digital Ocean App Platform:
    digitalocean.com/docs/app-platf…
    On Google Cloud:
    cloud.google.com/blog/products/…( ♥ 26 ) 3 years
  • Planet Earth is one of the best TV series ever created, but a fair critique is how it goes to extreme lengths to gloss over human impact on these ecosystems.
    Recommend Attenborough’s “A Life on Our Planet” (Netflix). Same sublime cinematography, but with sobering facts attached.( ♥ 24 ) 3 years
  • Maybe best small-ish Postgres improvement in years, 13 has a “force” option for dropping a database even where clients are connected:
    $ dropdb --force
    # DROP DATABASE my_db WITH ( FORCE );
    That was probably PG's #1 development annoyance. I can feel all that saved time already.( ♥ 63 ) 3 years
  • Nanoglyph 015 is about type signatures in Ruby and my impression of how Sorbet’s helped stabilize Stripe. Not a big fan of Ruby 3’s `*.rbs`.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/015…( ♥ 15 ) 3 years
  • Today in writing on iPad: had to google the gesture for redo after accidentally undoing a whole paragraph by — I kid you not — "shaking" the iPad by placing it on a table. This certified-100%-undiscoverable touch/gyro input mystery meat buffet has to stop. More keyboards please.( ♥ 42 ) 3 years
  • It’s THE BEST feeling when after painstakingly learning readings of specific kanji like "previous" 先 (“sen”) and "life" 生 (“sei”), get to a word that combines them (先生), then suddenly realize you’ve known this word for decades (“sensei”), and now know it by first principles.( ♥ 17 ) 3 years
  • Opened Duolingo for the first time in years. Within 20 minutes I’d dismissed 50 modals on “hearts”, “gems”, notifications, etc. You can even buy indulgences — e.g. pay money to continue your streak if you skipped the day.
    Sad/awful. We need better monetization models.( ♥ 15 ) 3 years
  • RT @_sebgl: I love @brandur's nanoglyphs format and content. Great read for your morning coffee. Please keep them coming!
    twitter.com/brandur/status…3 years
  • Nanoglyph 014 is about local first, diving in Indonesia, and being reminded how great software is when it runs without an internet connection. Also, for good measure, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/014…( ♥ 16 ) 3 years
  • Twin Peaks now re-opened daily for car traffic, proving two core San Francisco principles:
    (1) even a single street closed to vehicular traffic is one too many, and (2) in the vanishingly rare case that city leadership accidentally makes a good decision, it’s reverted posthaste.( ♥ 10 ) 3 years
  • Back at Heroku, wanted to do the $5 dyno _forever_. It looks like it's finally here, albeit from a different company.
    I haven't tried it yet, but this could be the biggest win in internet infrastructure that hobbyists have had in years.
    digitalocean.com/pricing/#app-p…( ♥ 33 ) 3 years

September

  • More misadventures in trying to learn (to read) Japanese: On the cruelty of kanji.
    (Knew it was hard. Didn't know it was this hard.)
    brandur.org/fragments/kanji3 years
  • Surprising how split popular sentiment is between siding with Apple vs Epic.
    Imagine if the original PCs disallowed user-installable software, and IBM/Apple demanded 30%. Modern computing wouldn’t exist.
    Mobile platforms are the future. Android/iOS are a duopoly. 30% is nuts.( ♥ 51 ) 3 years

August

  • Maybe the first and last time you'll hear me say good things about Mongo, but its TTL indexes are one of the most useful new database features in years.
    They're an automated way to prune old data, which as it turns out, is something a lot of people need.
    brandur.org/fragments/ttl-…( ♥ 35 ) 3 years
  • Quite a long hiatus for Nanoglyph. This week (or last week plus some time to jam DMARC into place) wrote about the origins of Postgres.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/013…( ♥ 7 ) 3 years
  • Great history on Firefox's journey from XPCOM to XUL to WebExtensions. Good information on this subject is hard to come by.
    Convincing, but still a bit sad. With the diminished API of WebExtensions, Firefox lost its only major edge over Chrome.
    yoric.github.io/post/why-did-m…( ♥ 5 ) 3 years
  • Development log where I describe DMARC, an email protocol which dictates accept/reject/quarantine decisions for received mail that can't be authenticated. Also learned about SPF and DKIM, which before now, have always been Greek to me.
    brandur.org/fragments/dmarc( ♥ 9 ) 3 years
  • Grilled a friend for an hour about Twitch "subs" and the culture around them; easy to understand when you're in it, not obvious when you're not.
    This seems to be one of the most successful non-ad monetization models for independent publishers in the history of the internet.( ♥ 13 ) 3 years
  • Very cool — RDS (and Postgres) now run on ARM. It's just a matter of time until ARM ignites in the data center.
    I was hoping/expecting the $ discount to be greater, but AWS claims an r6g is ~40% more performant than its m5 counterpart, at ~20% cheaper.
    aws.amazon.com/about-aws/what…( ♥ 41 ) 3 years

July

  • As if I could like Rick & Morty any more ... now there's an anime short, and it's as good as any existing episode, if not better.
    For my money, there's never been another show in the history of TV that's been as consistent in quality.
    youtube.com/watch?v=-kdltv…( ♥ 4 ) 3 years
  • Very cool about the coming resurrection of t.co/67aRwjbFGJ, a cornerstone of the good, old internet.
    Didn't recognize the name of the new owner, but immediately knew him as the "guy with the fish drawing on his blog who writes about Antarctica".
    idlewords.com/2016/10/cape_a…( ♥ 12 ) 3 years
  • GitHub has done it again — didn't like the new design at first, but it's growing on me.
    I'm _inexpressibly_ happy that it still has a reasonable `max-width` to limit line lengths rather than going full GitLab.( ♥ 17 ) 3 years

June

  • A few shots from Fort Funston the other day. Excellent place for a walk.
    brandur.org/sequences/2020…( ♥ 6 ) 3 years
  • Despite the demise of Olympus and the incredible progress in smartphone cameras, I'm optimistic about the camera industry.
    All of Canon, Fuji, Leica, Nikon, and Sony are doing their best work ever in cameras/optics, and there's still plenty of interest.
    bbc.com/news/technolog…( ♥ 6 ) 3 years
  • Final day of Walzwerk.
    brandur.org/sequences/2020…( ♥ 4 ) 3 years

May

  • Just read "GitHub Sponsors" as "GitHub Sopranos" (relatedly: a quarantine TV project since I missed the original run). Time for bed.( ♥ 7 ) 3 years
  • It's sometimes hard to convince Americans that we have technology in Canada. How about this:
    My grandfather using Dictaphone "Time-Master" circa '50s. It used new "Dictabelt" tech to store audio to plastic belts instead of wax cylinders. Magnetic tape would come ~10 years later.( ♥ 8 ) 3 years
  • A (surprising?) leader in friendly packaging is ImageMagick.
    Downloads page: Here are RPMs, Homebrew invocation, some other stuff. Not using those? Here's a pre-built binary that you can dump onto any Linux system and be up and running in 3 seconds.
    imagemagick.org/script/downloa…( ♥ 10 ) 3 years
  • The evolution of code in a small, constrained project is beautifully elegant:
    Throw quickly against the wall until MVP. Refactor. Harden. Refactor. Harden.( ♥ 13 ) 3 years
  • The only good thing about every desktop app in the world being a web-app-and-browser-in-a-box these days is that you can ⌘+- and ⌘++ to change the text size in practically everything.( ♥ 37 ) 3 years

April

  • Lockdown movie recommendation: Midsommar.
    (If you like horror) but it's practically in a genre of its own: Almost entirely in daylight, ~zero jump scares, no monster. Clever, subtle dialog, amazing scene and costume design. Stress just keeps escalating.
    imdb.com/title/tt877226…( ♥ 20 ) 3 years
  • It's not trendy to post about Ruby, but this is the best writeup on IO in the language that there is (gleaning this from Ruby's official docs is ~impossible).
    Gets me every time:
    • StringIO is not IO.
    • Tempfile is not IO, and not even a File.
    thoughtbot.com/blog/io-in-ruby( ♥ 18 ) 3 years
  • (On regression in GUI design.)
    datagubbe.se/decusab/
    We've trended for two decades towards UIs that are prettier, but less powerful/discoverable. Even seemingly benign patterns like lavish whitespace, now present in ~every app, aren't good — information density matters.( ♥ 10 ) 3 years
  • The best piece on the background and current state of io_uring I've read so far — seriously exciting stuff.
    (I wrote my own version for Nanoglyph a few weeks back, but this is better.)
    thenewstack.io/how-io_uring-a…( ♥ 19 ) 3 years
  • stripe-go V71 released:
    It goes all in on Go Modules (we held off a long time in the hopes Dep would build in basic Modules awareness).
    Other changes: API responses now available on object structs, retries for intermittent failures now on by default.
    github.com/stripe/stripe-…( ♥ 11 ) 3 years
  • A conversation with Alan Kay:
    queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=…
    (Amused how ACM Queue's web edition is a nothing-but-the-text ultra-utilitarian scroll, but click the tiny PDF link and you're treated to beautifully typeset pages with full photographs. Can't tell which I like more.)( ♥ 12 ) 3 years
  • CloudFlare's COBOL support via WASM is such a perfect technical PR stunt.
    blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-wor…
    Scala's now demoted to second place in ugliest languages serving HTTP requests on the internet. A month ago, who could ever have thought it possible?( ♥ 7 ) 3 years
  • Ran an informal shootout to verify that MozJPEG is a good answer for web-optimizing JPEGs. (It is.)
    And in general: Very worthwhile putting something like this into your site's toolchain. MozJPEG shrunk my images to an average of 40% their original size!
    brandur.org/fragments/libj…( ♥ 6 ) 3 years
  • The GitHub Actions build images are provisioned with a surprisingly extensive catalogue of miscellaneous odds and ends.
    I cut ~half a minute off build times by realizing there was a pre-installed `awscli` and using that instead of fetching it via `apt`.
    github.com/actions/virtua…( ♥ 11 ) 3 years
  • I'm stealing the idea (found on the internet) of always leaving a Goodreads review for books, but boxing it down to 1 paragraph / ~3 sentences.
    Leaves a useful trail for colleagues and/or your own reference, but prevents review-writing from turning into a major project.( ♥ 8 ) 3 years
  • Process for syncing doc via iCloud:
    • Open app (e.g. Notes, iA Writer) on target device.
    • Cross fingers.
    • Wait 0-30 min.
    Content syncs eventually, but it's incredibly non-deterministic/unreliable. Am I missing something, or is this just how our brave post-file world works?3 years
  • HIGHLY productive weekend.
    Only 100+ chapters to go.( ♥ 8 ) 3 years
  • Two programming concepts that seem like good ideas until you have an inescapable tower of them, at which point you realize they're bad ideas: (1) Ruby blocks, (2) middleware.
    I've recently taken to copying backtraces into Vim buffers to make them searchable.( ♥ 22 ) 3 years
  • Love this concept: A popup newsletter ("Year of the Meteor") — well written on a variety of topics, and will eventually disappear by design.
    This sort of standalone push of independent content embodies the most aspirational aspects of the early web.
    desert.glass3 years

March

  • Catalina developed such a notorious reputation that I put off the upgrade for ~5 months. Finally took the plunge.
    Pleasantly surprised so far: EXIF information in Finder _alone_ is such a killer feature to easily have made it worthwhile.( ♥ 11 ) 3 years
  • GitHub Actions now makes caching possible (a small feature, but an important one). I'm not sure when this was released, but I swear it didn't exist a few months ago.
    github.com/actions/cache( ♥ 9 ) 4 years
  • Great personal piece on Kojima —
    nytimes.com/2020/03/03/mag…
    Reading peoples' takes on Death Stranding over the last few months has been fascinating — it doesn't seem to have many qualities people actually like, but they review it well anyway, seemingly as a nod to its creator.( ♥ 6 ) 4 years

February

  • Picked up the advanced cert card this morning, and wrote a little about getting it in Monterey in the last week’s newsletter (along with a few choice software links).
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/010…( ♥ 9 ) 4 years

January

  • An excellent mini-productivity trick.
    twitter.com/oldmanuk/statu…( ♥ 13 ) 4 years
  • Dove Monterey this weekend. Great experience, but even with 7mm wetsuit and two layers of it on the torso, yeesh that water is chilly.( ♥ 10 ) 4 years
  • Deployed a couple small things to Google Cloud Run finally.
    First impressions: Cloud Build is awesome (totally avoided installing local Docker), excellent custom domain setup/TLS, way too expensive but may work for tiny projects, GCP TUI/GUI both underwhelming but functional.( ♥ 13 ) 4 years

2019

December

  • Favorite new Mac OS mini-productivity tip:
    Copy the current path in a focused Finder window with ⌥ Option + ⌘ Command + C.
    So good when a common action turns out to have an easy default shortcut.
    (You may have to disable an Alfred shortcut in Features -> Clipboard History.)( ♥ 27 ) 4 years
  • Today: Writing, light coding, photo editing, whole pot of coffee. Interludes for calisthenics and running in the greenbelt. All in the quiet of the 'burbs (away from SF's natural soundtrack of heavy machinery/road noise).
    Yep I'm boring, but practically a perfect day off.( ♥ 32 ) 4 years
  • Last week wrote about rain in SF, 70s space optimism (and the MOMA), mainframes, vectorized SQL execution, and the artistic philosophy behind "Under the Wave Off Kanagawa".
    This week going out in ~1 hour.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/006…4 years
  • A couple snowy/icy Alberta shots, mandatory for the season.( ♥ 16 ) 4 years
  • They're making "Wonder Woman 1984" and joining the 80s nostalgia train started by Stranger Things, It, Deutschland 83, etc.
    Me: The present is so stylistically unremarkable that we're like an elderly generation reminiscing on a more vibrant past. Also me: sign me up.( ♥ 13 ) 4 years
  • Really neat to see that the runner that powers GitHub Actions has been open-sourced, but it seems like a missed opportunity in that the release was so light on context. Can any GitHubbers comment on the choice of C#?
    github.com/actions/runner( ♥ 7 ) 4 years
  • I've been having trouble finding inspiring writing topics recently, so experimenting with a (not quite) weekly newsletter to help get some words flowing.
    Last week's: an old Heroku eggnog recipe, and a dive into GitHub Actions.
    brandur.org/nanoglyphs/005…( ♥ 23 ) 4 years
  • And I shouldn't be too hard on the NeXT logo — it does have a great 80s vibe. Certainly more interesting than today's "just use sans-serif" school of design.
    bloomberg.com/news/articles/…( ♥ 7 ) 4 years
  • Re-read the Jobs biography and was reminded of Steve paying Paul Rand $100k, sight unseen, for the NeXT logo. There's some nice photos of Rand's booklet online, and even a reaction video — from 1986!
    The logo is a little homely, but it's a *great* story.
    logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul…( ♥ 7 ) 4 years

November

  • RE 16-inch MacBook Pro:
    Thankful that Apple didn't lay it on _too thick_ with superlative rhetorical bullsh*t about "reinventing the keyboard" or anything like that after the new variant is clearly a revert of a Really, Truly, Worst-of-Apple-hubristic-design Bad Idea.4 years
  • Gmail's new-ish setting to not show external images by default is its best new feature in years.
    I get an inordinate amount of pleasure examining tracking pixels from recruiters (in source) and knowing that they can no longer trust their surreptitious telemetry.( ♥ 22 ) 4 years
  • Ended up migrating my blog's build from Travis to GitHub Actions.
    All in all, not too different, but really like the formalized build steps — output is a lot easier to read. Also, access to more modern packages via Docker.
    github.com/brandur/sorg/c…( ♥ 21 ) 4 years
  • I really like this piece suggesting thoughtfulness on runaway use of dependencies. (Quite a radical position by today's standards.)
    e.g. If Apache Struts as disclosed three major remote execution vulnerabilities in four years, consider avoiding it.
    queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=…( ♥ 8 ) 4 years

October

  • A pod of dolphins swimming alongside our dive boat. Impossible not to love these animals.
    Near Bunaken, Indonesia.( ♥ 13 ) 4 years
  • Coral Eye marine outpost on Bangka, Indonesia.( ♥ 7 ) 4 years
  • Git tip I wish I'd discovered ten years ago: if you `git config --global diff.noprefix true` it removes the silly `a/` and `b/` prefixes so that when you double-click select one to copy, you get a usable filename instead of a mangled path.( ♥ 2052 ) 4 years

September

  • Finished up the last of 14 dives in Roatan. A couple photos of the dive outfit — love the hand-painted signs (very “Life Aquatic”).
    Highlights: eagle rays, sea turtles, mantis shrimp (!!), clouds of silversides, seahorse, lionfish (invasive species) hunting, diving 300 ft wreck.( ♥ 9 ) 4 years
  • Portrait of “Dr. Claw”, an after hours pool user at our local resort. Comparison of 11’s Night Mode (left) versus a 1.7 Leica (right).
    3 years ago, not worth spending one second thinking about taking an iPhone photo in the dark. A year ago: possible, with bad results. Now: good.( ♥ 12 ) 4 years
  • Assumed the 11’s 0.5x lens to be a gimmick, but 24 hours in, finding it’s the wide angle I always wanted, but didn’t know I did.
    Apple knocked it out of the park. In including it, but also the new Camera app design, which subtly shows what 0.5x might look like from the 1x view.( ♥ 49 ) 4 years
  • My sympathies for the immortal souls of those who eschew the ORM (or more importantly, anyone who has to maintain their stuff).
    One of the most airtight models in software design: ORMs for basic fetches and persistence. SQL for the complicated stuff.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210311…( ♥ 43 ) 4 years
  • New docs on Stripe's rate limits:
    We could stand to have more information on how to build code and patterns to work with limiting, so if anyone has specific requests, I'll try to integrate them over the next week or so.
    stripe.com/docs/rate-limi…( ♥ 39 ) 4 years
  • Not wanting to be the last person using it, spent the morning trying to get "good" at VS Code.
    Took 3 hours to get a setup better than a vimrc/plugin config curated over 10+ years, with the 80% of Vim people actually use, functional completion, jump to def, and "hover" docs.( ♥ 34 ) 4 years
  • Discovered that it's possible to hike from the hills of Richmond to the redwoods of Oakland, and thanks to a buried highway, only cross ~3 minor roads.
    This is now the best long walk that I know of in the Bay Area.( ♥ 65 ) 4 years
  • RT @FranckPachot: an awesome explanation of PostgreSQL transaction and read consistency code: brandur.org/postgres-atomi… by @brandur( ♥ 30 ) 4 years
  • I've emailed in 79-char plain text for years as a courtesy to counter Gmail's propensity to never line wrap, but am increasingly cognizant that it's ~illegible on mobile, which is where a lot of mail gets read.
    Should I stop? Are there any other great format tricks I'm missing?4 years

August

  • Hugely important. Infrastructure matters, but safety also requires laws to be followed.
    Stopping at crosswalks, red lights, and stop signs is informally not required in San Francisco — dangerous norms blessed by the SFPD by comprehensive non-enforcement. twitter.com/hknightsf/stat…( ♥ 10 ) 4 years
  • Some texture shots of 3sixteen 16.5 oz unsanforized Japanese denim, indigo died, and slubby for fade contrast.
    (Especially in California) Owning only one pair of raw denim is more than enough, but the feel/weight/heft on these is pretty satisfying.4 years
  • Learned today that Perl 6 won't be compatible with 5.
    Luckily I have no skin in the game, but it's amazing that language designers made this mistake after the hard lesson of Python 2 to 3 — a division that will have taken 12 years to resolve (if the 2020 sunset works this time).( ♥ 18 ) 4 years
  • Tried Postgres' automatic partitioning feature — very cool stuff.
    However, one limitation only raised given a thorough read of the docs is that because indexes are partition-local, there's no easy way to enforce a unique constraint across all of them, which hurts many use cases.( ♥ 13 ) 4 years
  • Coincidental with today's rest-client compromise, we released stripe-ruby v5, which among other things, moves to stdlib's Net::HTTP and brings total runtime dependencies to zero. (A micro-feature maybe, but a good one.)
    We'd love it if you gave it a try!
    github.com/stripe/stripe-…( ♥ 23 ) 4 years
  • Real-world code being converted from futures to async/await in Rust. Beautiful.
    And in case you missed it: await was implemented postfix (`x.await` instead of `await(x)`) for chainability. Contentious at the time, but so obviously the right decision now.
    docs.rs/dtolnay/0.0.3/…( ♥ 16 ) 4 years
  • This was a delightful Postgres mini-project.
    Working in high-level languages almost all the time, it's been a _really_ long time since I had to think about pointer widths and re-arranging bits with shifts and masks.
    twitter.com/planetpostgres…( ♥ 40 ) 4 years

July

  • A favorite operational trick from Stripe —
    Metrics and dashboards are great, but despite its inefficiencies, logging will always have a place in operations — it gets you insight in tight spots that you'd never have otherwise.
    twitter.com/stripe/status/…( ♥ 103 ) 4 years
  • LHI004: “Drive me back to the academy,” Buckman said.“I don't think I can drive; I'm shaking too bad.” He felt something on his face; putting up his hand, he found that his chin was wet, “What's this on me?” he said, amazed.
    “You're crying,” Herb said.4 years
  • Knocked the Hornet off my Bay Area bucket list. Was pleasantly surprised by how much of the ship is open. e.g. You can walk the entire length of the flight deck, and especially later in the day, feels like your own private aircraft carrier.
    Alameda’s view of SF is wonderful too.( ♥ 13 ) 4 years
  • CloudFlare's outage being caused by RE backtracking is fascinating (see appendix) — there must be so many similar bugs out there, and benign by luck because they haven't seen the right load/input.
    (But ~none in Go or Rust, which don't backtrack.)
    blog.cloudflare.com/details-of-the…( ♥ 18 ) 4 years
  • Birthday present to self: Osprey Duro 15 running pack. (Also, my last bag fell apart.)
    Stabilizing straps are so good and the pack so light/breathable that commuting down/up the mountain to/from work with a 13” MBP feels like no trouble at all. Should’ve gotten one years ago.( ♥ 12 ) 4 years
  • Hate to see the 12” MacBook’s demise.
    It was underpowered, but it turns out that was fine for 95% of what I actually want to do on a computer. And a form factor so tiny that you could throw it in your bag and forget it was even there.( ♥ 10 ) 4 years
  • In SF, people walking around with face glued to smartphone is an epidemic.
    It’s apparently even worse in South Korea — they’re now experimenting with ground traffic signals to save smombies (“SMartphone zOMBIES”) from walking into traffic.
    Truly awful.
    economist.com/asia/2019/07/0…( ♥ 7 ) 4 years

June

  • Great content on building a fast rule engine for ad blocking. Even better: it's in Rust.
    Original implementation assumed that most requests aren't blocked, but found that on 250k reqs across top 500 domains, _39%_ were. Almost half going to ads/tracking!
    brave.com/improved-ad-bl…( ♥ 7 ) 4 years
  • Comments on new rent controls in Berlin are great. Thoughts:
    * A gov’t that rivals SF in dysfunction. Defies physics.
    * Policy should (but never does) respect market forces.
    * Can’t stop there. Rent seeking too easy. Housing as investment needs curbing.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202149…4 years
  • My accidental discovery of the day: Park auf dem Nordbahnhof — originally a rail line that fell into disuse after the wall was built alongside it, and now a wilder version of New York's High Line.
    brandur.org/sequences/berl…( ♥ 14 ) 4 years
  • Amazing parks and trails in Leipzig. Head far enough south and you find yourself on old roads through old forest, shockingly devoid of people. It all smells heavily of wild garlic.
    brandur.org/sequences/berl…( ♥ 14 ) 4 years
  • 003: A short stint down in Leipzig, a city which is home to some extraordinary old music venues. Today: doom metal performed under a dome inspired by Rome's Pantheon.
    brandur.org/sequences/berl…( ♥ 4 ) 4 years
  • 002: It's a _really_ hot month in Germany. I may have found the single positive use of jet lag: letting me get up early to go running before it becomes unbearable. This is a favorite Berlin route down the Spree.
    brandur.org/sequences/berl…( ♥ 13 ) 4 years
  • Grenzmauer 75.
    (Not very original, but a good place to start.)
    brandur.org/sequences/berl…( ♥ 5 ) 4 years
  • Great comment on actix-web 1.0 (a fast HTTP server for Rust), which notably is no longer powered by the actix actor framework.
    One of Rust's best-maintained projects, and just as importantly, targets stable instead of nightly (unlike most alternatives).
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201046…( ♥ 10 ) 4 years
  • In Berlin for a few weeks, and publishing a small photography/writing project while I'm here.
    (And if you have ideas for amazing things to see while I'm here — send them my way!)
    brandur.org/sequences-proj…( ♥ 8 ) 4 years

May

  • Fell in love with Huge's live reload feature, so I put together a bit of a writeup on how to build your own on various Go primitives, and with changes streamed to clients via WebSocket.
    Also: Vim file saving trivia including unusual case of file “4913”.
    brandur.org/live-reload( ♥ 28 ) 4 years
  • Jonathan Blow makes the case that software is in decline, and been free riding on hardware improvements for a long time. “We don't expect it to work anymore.”
    So many great points — I'm 100% convinced. Most important talk of the year. Maybe the decade.
    youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOd…( ♥ 55 ) 4 years
  • Walked out to the Hunter Point's Shipyard for the first time and was surprised by the area's serene beauty.
    I now have a recurring urban fantasy that the navy finishes radiological cleanup and turns it over as a national park with ~no redevelopment — San Francisco's Tempelhof.( ♥ 15 ) 4 years
  • I link only the very occasional music discovery on YouTube lest I be tweeting the all day, but it's rare to find a new favorite — this song and video are perfect in pretty much every respect.
    It's in Swedish, but luckily, there are no lyrics.
    youtube.com/watch?v=bubOcI…( ♥ 4 ) 4 years
  • My money's on Go for the most productive language — a winning combo of speed, brevity, correctness, and strict-but-not-too-strict types.
    This morning I wondered how difficult it would be to implement graceful restart with exec on usr2. Went from idea to refined impl in < 30 min.( ♥ 123 ) 4 years
  • Wish I'd figured this out years ago:
    By setting Gmail on Vimium's exclude list, but then excluding almost every key, you can have get both Gmail shortcuts *and* Vimium's "F" function.
    ("F" = keyboard link following; possibly the greatest browser plugin feature ever created.)( ♥ 5 ) 4 years
  • A common mistake from industry laymen is that running software is "shelf stable". Like a bridge, once you build it, you can leave it in place for years.
    Especially for large/complex projects, the opposite is true. Without human care, most would last days, or with luck, weeks.( ♥ 50 ) 4 years

April

  • I'm periodically reminded of this great little page: areweasyncyet.rs
    The format may have started as a joke, but this site goes above and beyond by providing the ultimate executive summary, and linking relevant PRs, RFCs, and projects. Excellent way of staying apprised.( ♥ 7 ) 4 years
  • A very short fragment of thought about iPhones, HomePods, falling orchids, and button design.
    (Admittedly, mostly just self-satisfying complaining, but trivial flaws amplified by constant, around-the-clock use compound into slightly-less-trivial flaws.)
    brandur.org/fragments/fals…( ♥ 6 ) 4 years
  • Looking for some alternate UI inspiration — what are your favorite fictional computer/human interfaces?
    Here are a few of mine: Tron Legacy, Oblivion, Casino Royale, Mission: Impossible (the good one).( ♥ 20 ) 4 years
  • Only a few days in, I really look forward to these little bursts on walking and Japan (even thinking I was getting paged when the first arrived at 5 AM).
    More off-Twitter tiny indy web content please! Playing with some ideas of my own for future trips.
    twitter.com/craigmod/statu…( ♥ 8 ) 4 years
  • Having walked by it for years, I’ve always wondered about this tiny dive shop in the center of SOMA a stone’s throw from HQ of half the major tech startups of the last decade.
    Finally did a course there last night, and although compact and aged in very SF ways, it’s a delight.( ♥ 16 ) 4 years
  • As a user, I can't overstate how much of a game changer Sorbet by @darkdimius and co. is — you get totally, wonderfully, can't-ever-go-back captivated by it after just a few hours of use. The extra type annotations cost a little, and return *a lot*.
    sorbet.org( ♥ 59 ) 4 years
  • Some exciting progress for Stripe client libraries: stripe-java v9 now has typed parameter classes for API inputs, and they're code-generated for accuracy.
    This is something the team's been wanting to do this for *years*. More info and migration guide: github.com/stripe/stripe-…( ♥ 14 ) 4 years
  • This map of Berlin's transit is beautiful pragmatism: berlintransitmap.de
    Speaking as a somewhat colour-impaired person, the old/current map (2nd image) has always been borderline unintelligible because of heavy reliance on adjacent colours.( ♥ 15 ) 4 years
  • Some of the first crocuses starting to flower in the foothills of Alberta.
    So soon after the end of winter the province is a monochrome landscape of lifeless brown, and these little splashes of colour are a delight.( ♥ 17 ) 4 years

March

  • Maintaining good status pages is an important discipline.
    The update to isairpoweroutyet.com was expedient, accurate, and definitive.4 years
  • Fastly's recent open sourcing of Lucet prompted me to go back and read about Terrarium, WASM-based computing on the edge.
    So much positive signal even from just the initial list of supported languages: Rust, C, TypeScript. Someone there has good taste :)
    fastly.com/blog/edge-prog…( ♥ 10 ) 4 years
  • RT @pganalyze: "Atomicity states that for a series of operations performed against a database, either every one of them commits together, or they’re all rolled back; no in between states are allowed. "
    As so very often, a great article by @brandur: ed.gr/beehb
    #postgres( ♥ 11 ) 4 years
  • China is destroying the west in terms of made up tech/startup lingo. You need to get to book three of the trilogy to even understand this reference.
    logicmag.io/07-the-chinese…( ♥ 10 ) 4 years
  • The National Geographic article about Tokyo that's been heavily featured in the screenshots of the launch of Apple News+. Includes an amazing map that gives you a feel for the proportions and relative density of the city and its metropolitan area.
    nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/…( ♥ 6 ) 4 years
  • For more complex aggregate operators like `$lookup` (a lackluster left outer join), Mongo's official docs actually use SQL examples to illustrate what they do because it's so much more clear than their own pseudo-query language.
    Why are we supposed to be using this thing again?( ♥ 27 ) 4 years
  • Reading Wiki's “Difficulties of plot summary” on Finnegan's Wake is great:
    It's one of the best known classics and Joyce gave interviews after publication, but still, not even the most pre-eminent literary critics have a clue what happened in this book.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans…5 years
  • At Stripe we switched to a GUI-driven deploy process for services.
    I'm a die-hard terminal person for life, but it's so much better. Especially during the duress of an incident, there's nothing like being able to click boxes to resolution instead of looking up obscure CLI flags.( ♥ 847 ) 5 years
  • Sending away to China to get new hardware modded into an old ThinkPad is the most practical part of old hacker culture that we have left.
    (And looking forward to experiencing this myself when the 2022 MacBook refresh brings in an all-Touch Bar keyboard.)
    geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thi…5 years
  • Tried out the ACME/Let's Encrypt `autocert` package for Go, and it's astonishing.
    One line of code in your app and CA valid HTTPS just works. No magic load balancers, no Nginx. We should hope that the future of all server-side programming is this simple.
    godoc.org/golang.org/x/c…( ♥ 35 ) 5 years
  • Finished “Bad Blood” on Theranos/Holmes. Knew the story was extraordinary from the few WSJ articles I'd seen, but the details are even more crazy/grisly/disgusting.
    Excellent writing, and better than fiction. Worth hoisting to the top of your read list.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood…( ♥ 19 ) 5 years
  • Kakoune is probably the Dvorak of Vim-like text editors, but it's inspiring to see people trying to make human/computer interactions more efficient instead of less. (i.e. Through more slow JS, more apps based on web browsers, inefficient touch UIs, etc.)
    github.com/mawww/kakoune( ♥ 8 ) 5 years

February

  • Haven't been a huge fan of the term "fearless concurrency", but I'm warming up to it. It's been a while since I included "pthread.h", but it's worth remembering that the crudity of its primitives mean that programs fail by default, rather than vice versa.
    sites.google.com/a/athaydes.com…( ♥ 7 ) 5 years
  • Red Dead Redemption 2 is breathtaking. Acting, writing, and polish all A++.
    But is there a point where a game pulls in too much real life? This one was a few design calls from having me brush Arthur’s teeth before bed, trim toenails weekly, and do 45 min/day on the elliptical.( ♥ 12 ) 5 years
  • After a 30-minute run in torrential rain, I open my backpack and find its contents bone dry. The future hasn't yielded flying cars, a moon base, or the happy demise of JavaScript, but our technical fabrics are just incredible.
    (Context: it's really coming down in SF right now.)( ♥ 18 ) 5 years
  • Getting a patch reviewed on the Postgres hackers mailing list floors me every time — just at the next level in terms of attention to detail, effort invested, and thoughtfulness. I'm 10+ years into working in software professionally and I've never seen anything else like it.( ♥ 194 ) 5 years
  • RT @PostgreSQL: Sorting is an essential feature of databases, but can also be a bottleneck. How does @PostgreSQL help to make sorts fast? @brandur describes one method called "SortSupport" that helps speed up @PostgreSQL Sorts in a lot of cases: brandur.org/sortsupport( ♥ 56 ) 5 years
  • Finally published something in 2019 —
    SortSupport is a really neat optimization in Postgres that makes sorting fast even for data types that are large or arbitrarily-sized. Here we take a look at the details.
    brandur.org/sortsupport( ♥ 35 ) 5 years

January

  • And alternatively, from the journal of C horrors:
    Wasted literally 45 minutes debugging because unlike any sane language, the bitwise `&` operator has lower precedence than comparisons like `==` (so guess what happens when you evaluate `a & b == 1`). Fuuuu.( ♥ 29 ) 5 years
  • Working on my first Postgres patch since 2017.
    With more dangerous pointer casts than lines of code, C is terrifying, but there's also satisfaction working so close to the metal. Before this, I hadn't had to think about how values look in binary or endianness since university.( ♥ 35 ) 5 years
  • “World of Tomorrow” (short film) is the craziest, weirdest, most original thing I've seen in a long time.
    Also comes with uncomfortable levels of insight: “That is the thing about the present, Emily Prime. You only appreciate it when it is the past.”
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_…( ♥ 12 ) 5 years
  • Unfortunately, I ran into a problem yesterday that required reinstalling Rust —
    Fortunately, ripping out and reinstalling the entire toolchain including nightly, rustfmt, and clippy took < 5 min (there's even `rustup self uninstall`). If only all software were so well behaved!( ♥ 21 ) 5 years
  • “All Along the Watchtower” is one of the best songs ever written, and Bear McCreary's composition for Battlestar Galactica is the best variant of it.
    Pause for a moment. Turn up the volume (not generally, but for some temporary extra detail). Listen.
    youtube.com/watch?v=BigolJ…( ♥ 29 ) 5 years
  • I love the faded look and character of these old fitness installations around the track in Golden Gate Park (remember how cool wooden playgrounds were when they still existed?).
    Did the vault bar and push ups.( ♥ 9 ) 5 years
  • Even having read about them a hundred times before, I still need to refresh my memory on the different SQL JOINs once a year or so (doing application development, `INNER JOIN` isn’t just the common case — it rules supreme).
    Here’s a novel take on them:
    blog.jooq.org/2016/07/05/say…( ♥ 47 ) 5 years
  • How to add a home screen link in iOS with an arbitrary URL, involving activating airplane mode to trick iOS into giving you the link you want.
    (Normally, Safari chooses a URL for you even if you're at the exact location you want.)
    stackoverflow.com/a/341051125 years
  • Even after all these years, the Bow is still my favourite river. It looks its best in the winter.( ♥ 19 ) 5 years

2018

December

  • The only accomplishments I can claim for the last couple weeks are inhaling ~45,000 Calories worth of excessively rich food and reading 300+ chapters of Naruto.
    I can't think of a better time to set some more ambitious goals for 2019.( ♥ 18 ) 5 years
  • To this day, one of my favorite pieces of independent software is still Plex —
    Built by a small shop, but more refined, flexible, reliable, and beautiful than competing products from ~trillion dollar companies, despite having a much broader problem to solve.( ♥ 24 ) 5 years
  • Lovely writing on the beauty of rain (and why some of us like it so much).
    “Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a thousand times more sexy than a sunburnt palm, and more primal and contemplative, too.”
    twitter.com/starsandrobots…( ♥ 6 ) 5 years
  • Hah, genius :)
    We most often talk about what features a programming language has, but just as important are what features it *doesn't* have. It is possible to write good C++, but the odds are way against you.
    twitter.com/timur_audio/st…( ♥ 22 ) 5 years
  • Just checked, and I'm a few months away from having owned Air Pods for two years.
    Given the nature of the hardware (wireless, tiny batteries), I'm **astonished** at how reliable and durable they've been over that lifespan. Quite possibly the best product Apple's ever shipped.( ♥ 25 ) 5 years
  • A few shots from SF's botanical garden in Golden Gate Park.
    Contains, amongst other things, the most peaceful redwood grove within city limits. (And it's always free with proof of a local address).( ♥ 24 ) 5 years
  • This account from an ex-Oracle engineer on what it's like to work on Oracle is tooth-gnashingly painful.
    Fast unit tests and a suite that runs in minutes locally (or less!) is productivity manifest. Making CI the dev feedback loop embraces the opposite.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184429…( ♥ 71 ) 5 years
  • I retooled sorg to decouple from Flickr yesterday. I like the service, but not enough to justify a pro account.
    The new implementation is a YAML file + Dropbox. Good for fewer moving parts, but still a little sad — Flickr must have been my oldest still-in-use internet service.( ♥ 6 ) 5 years
  • RT @simonw: As @brandur points out in this excellent article, a big benefit of Redis Streams is it lets you use Kafka-style primitives without first spinning up a Kafka cluster brandur.org/redis-streams( ♥ 19 ) 5 years
  • A nice update in where Rust is at today with async/await in nightly, including how to get backwards compatibility with “old” futures.
    My favourite part is how new futures return just a single type so you can use `Result` and all its furnishings like `?`.
    jsdw.me/posts/rust-asy…( ♥ 6 ) 5 years

November

  • The coming decades will show that trusting the free market to do the right thing with respect to housing is one of our civilization's greatest errors.
    The wealthy maximize ROI (and housing is a great asset). Land owners maximize rent (and that's AirBnB).
    theguardian.com/cities/2018/no…( ♥ 6 ) 5 years
  • At a sale from Self Edge bought Pure Blue Japan, known for their raw denim's "slubby" texture (thick, uneven weave).
    Unsanforized (sanforized = treated to minimize shrinking) and not prewashed, they're expected to shrink on 1st soak. These shrunk ~2 sizes and from baggy to slim.( ♥ 5 ) 5 years
  • Rewatched Oblivion (2013): Amazing narrative structure that reveals little pieces throughout, and you don't have the whole picture until the final few minutes. Epic soundtrack too.
    Its only mistake in not being considered a sci-fi classic was that it wasn't made in the 80s.( ♥ 22 ) 5 years
  • Great notes on HTTP/3 aka QUIC: I'd feel tepid on the idea of throwing away such a well-proven protocol as TCP, but am comforted that QUIC is probably what TCP would've looked like if its inventors had the benefit of seeing 30+ years of practical use.
    blog.erratasec.com/2018/11/some-n…( ♥ 21 ) 5 years
  • Perspective out of loss: If one good thing comes out of weeks of living under a hellish cloud of smoke and ask — when (if?) it clears, it'll be a long time before any of us in California take clean air for granted again.
    Surreal how much of 2018 has been defined by forest fires.( ♥ 7 ) 5 years
  • Jaw dropped reading this piece on Ruby fibers — EventMachine and its "fork the ecosystem" model all over again, 10 years later.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184840…
    For a more pragmatic solution, consider using a language that cares enough about concurrency/performance to make it standard.( ♥ 9 ) 5 years
  • Trying to leave my realm of custom software by moving content to Hugo —
    It's been surprisingly painful. Hugo's core is Go, but all user-space coding is done via markup/tags, so that nice compile-time checking vanishes. When you do something wrong, it's rarely obvious what it is.( ♥ 8 ) 5 years
  • Regardless of the complexity/cost added by an abstraction to guarantee distributed consistency, it will still be strictly less than that of the messy (and wrong) alternative to compensate for its absence at the application layer.
    (Or, duct tape is more expensive than you think.)( ♥ 17 ) 5 years
  • Dropbox on scaling transactions between shards using a two-phase commit. Like Google, they've concluded correctly that the answer to scaling consistency isn't to throw it out, but rather to build a substrate to make it possible, even if it's difficult.
    blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/11/c…( ♥ 60 ) 5 years
  • Maybe I'm romanticizing the past, but I swear to remember a time when A/V was easy.
    These days (since 4k?) buying new technology is step 0. The next week is guessing at problems by reading underinformed arcana online, non-deterministically troubleshooting, and upgrading cables.( ♥ 4 ) 5 years
  • Of minor interest: implementing a stateless form of CSRF protection to allow a cross-site submission using the `Origin` header.
    (Maybe noteworthy if you've never heard of a forbidden header before.)
    brandur.org/fragments/orig…( ♥ 15 ) 5 years
  • Cautiously optimistic for this tiny book format.
    I like paper better, but read ~entirely digitally these days for usability: size, portability, one-handed use. For 10+ years now, US paperbacks have been optimizing shape for the most exotic/awkward.
    nytimes.com/2018/10/29/bus…( ♥ 8 ) 5 years

October

  • Porto, which as it turns out, as the city on the outlet of the Duro River, legitimately exports as much port as the name suggests.
    The number in the upper right on the sign on the huge barrel in the last photo is the holding capacity. 32,275 litres (with the largest being ~50k).( ♥ 10 ) 5 years
  • Some photos of a pair of bobcats shot by my dad in the neighborhood where I grew up. Just incredible.
    Naturally, in the first shot he slowly walked up to the bobcat until he was at ~3m distance. As you do, (in Canada).( ♥ 19 ) 5 years
  • Lisbon, (dark mode).( ♥ 43 ) 5 years
  • Great talk. TIL the Postgres B-tree will try to avoid a page split by opportunistically vacuuming an index page of dead tuples. Normally visibility lives only in the heap, but an exception is made for tuples unreachable from *any* possible transaction.
    twitter.com/petervgeoghega…( ♥ 14 ) 5 years
  • On the incompleteness of C:
    Postgres is a database, but also a runtime (fully custom memory management infrastructure), a standard library (custom string builder, linked list, hash map, sorting, ...), and even language (custom longjmp-based try/catch/raise mechanisms).( ♥ 74 ) 5 years
  • Happy to report that Lisbon looks and feels exactly like you’d expect Lisbon to look and feel. Fascinating architecture, lots of colour, and steep hills.( ♥ 26 ) 5 years
  • In 2018, Make's error if you accidentally prefixed a command with four spaces instead of a tab is `*** missing separator. Stop.`, presumably because user hostility is a core design tenet.
    Stop romanticizing Make/old Unix commands/shell scripts, and help make them die.( ♥ 61 ) 5 years
  • RT @PostgreSQL: Why is it important to manage client connections to your @PostgreSQL database? @brandur explains the effects of many connections on your database, as well as how to use connection poolers to help: brandur.org/postgres-conne…( ♥ 67 ) 5 years
  • Hitting connection limits in Postgres is a common problem to have (and a surprising one when you first run into it).
    This piece covers a few ways to make efficient use of available connections through techniques like pools and minimum viable checkouts.
    brandur.org/postgres-conne…( ♥ 43 ) 5 years
  • RT @sdw: One of the best photo collections I've seen in years of an overland trip traversing the old Silk Road. Suddenly very eager to visit Uzbekistan. imgur.com/gallery/5jOAsH0( ♥ 561 ) 5 years
  • In case you missed it: modern coupon sites are mostly fake deals. They do it because when you click a link, they redirect you to your target in a background tab and install a referral cookie.
    Never even consider using one outside of an incognito window.
    blog.usejournal.com/how-one-affili…( ♥ 12 ) 5 years
  • After the Banksy news last week I rewatched "Exit Through the Gift Shop".
    Today, it's still not clear if it was a documentary or mockumentary, or who Banksy is.
    In 2018, especially with the ubiquity of the WWW, this rare under-information is weirdly frustrating and tantalizing.( ♥ 10 ) 5 years
  • Upgraded to Mojave.
    Apple knocked it out of the park with dark mode — just beautiful, and being integrated into all the default apps makes it real this time (as opposed to the idea's long history of hacks). The double night and day default wallpapers are such a nice touch too.( ♥ 16 ) 5 years
  • Between SB 827, CA net neutrality, public transport and street safety funding, extended parental leave, and even 4AM last call, there's rarely been a politician in history with Scott Wiener's track record for good taste.
    (And he's right on this one too.)
    twitter.com/Scott_Wiener/s…( ♥ 7 ) 5 years
  • Great take on the excellence of Go's concurrency model (and my sentiments exactly).
    Green threads might not be as fast as a perfectly implemented async model, and they need a runtime, but they're still the right compromise between speed and usability.
    eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/go-hits-t…( ♥ 17 ) 5 years
  • I have never been so afraid for GitHub in my life.
    More integrations is generally good, but Jira is the exception. When software is this irredeemably bad, don't integrate with it, replace it. Remember GitHub Projects? Good idea. Now finish the other 50%.
    blog.github.com/2018-10-04-ann…( ♥ 47 ) 5 years
  • An interesting post on using LLVM-based JIT compilation coming in Postgres 11.
    Editorial: In practice Postgres w/ JIT + partitioning may outperform traditional data warehouses for those willing to keep data size in check. Hope to one day ditch Redshift.
    pganalyze.com/blog/postgres1…( ♥ 22 ) 5 years
  • A profile on the creator of Stardew Valley, who built the game solo — gameplay, art, story, music.
    Staggering dedication, and a reminder of what's possible without organizational overhead. This guy ships more than entire departments of some companies.
    gq.com/story/stardew-…( ♥ 24 ) 5 years

September

  • A little Canadian colour. (And snow in September?!)( ♥ 17 ) 5 years
  • `dbg!`, a tiny upcoming shortcut in Rust to print a value to stderr and through the power of macros, the line and expression that emitted it.
    I love this kind of language nicety. It'll save ten seconds at a time, and thousands of hours in aggregate.
    github.com/rust-lang/rfcs…( ♥ 11 ) 5 years
  • Every thread like this one it reminds me how much pent up demand for pedestrian-friendly urban environments there is out there. And yet, we've failed to produce even one in all of North America.
    Our urban planners should be replaced. We need new blood.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180142…( ♥ 5 ) 5 years
  • A correction from my piece on fast column defaults in Postgres is that `now()` is *not* volatile. When used with `DEFAULT` existing rows pick up that tx's `now()`, new rows get a current `now()` as they're added, and it's all fast. I'm even more amazed.
    brandur.org/postgres-defau…( ♥ 14 ) 5 years
  • Mongo satirizes Mongo better than its critics ever could!
    There are two paths in data architecture: use a relational database, or build a pale shadow of one in your app layer as you desperately try to shore up data integrity on your non-relational store.
    twitter.com/MongoDB/status…( ♥ 110 ) 5 years
  • My grandmother didn't want an internet connection because she was afraid that with textual communication possible, people wouldn't call anymore.
    It seems silly on the surface, but she was absolutely right. In the age of text we speak with more people, but at lower fidelity.( ♥ 41 ) 5 years
  • “What kept me from doing that was a calm voice in my head telling me that I’m here to write a book, not a preprocessor. ... Now I have written two books and zero tools, which I consider a success.”
    Amen. The Achilles heel of the developer/author.
    twitter.com/thorstenball/s…( ♥ 12 ) 5 years
  • I'm following Mojave and trying out a dark mode landing page.
    Light text on black rendered poorly on screens for decades, which was frustrating because it looks *incredible* in print. Retina has since improved things a lot, even if I still wouldn't push it for long text pieces.( ♥ 4 ) 5 years
  • Had an interesting couple of days with Git LFS (Large File Storage).
    GitHub's integration with it is impressive, but the subtleties around its magic ended up causing a lot of trouble by the end. I also burnt through GitHub's meager/not-well-advertised data quota in < 1h of use.5 years

August

  • I don't work on the frontend often, but when I do, I'm continually impressed by ~recent progress in browser APIs to make historically hard things easy.
    e.g. Intersection Observer for lazy loading images. After a copy/paste I had this working in 10s flat.
    developers.google.com/web/fundamenta…( ♥ 16 ) 5 years
  • Creating columns with DEFAULT values will now be fast in the upcoming Postgres 11 release. It seems like a small feature, but it's a *huge* improvement operationally.
    I put together some background on why it's important here —
    brandur.org/postgres-defau…( ♥ 99 ) 5 years
  • ACID transactions are the most important primitive for building large, robust systems there is. Bake them into your system from day one. Never, ever use MongoDB.
    I like when I'm not the only saying this stuff. Here's FoundationDB's transaction manifesto:
    apple.github.io/foundationdb/t…( ♥ 213 ) 5 years
  • A nice writeup on the development of Unix-like pseudo console infrastructure for Windows.
    Prior to this, services like SSH on Windows servers would spawn off-screen consoles which were fed keystrokes and scraped for output to send back to clients. Crazy!
    blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/20…( ♥ 6 ) 5 years
  • A great Nginx feature I learned about recently is the `X-Accel` family of headers. They allow you to say, generate a temporary S3 URL, hand it off to be efficiently served by Nginx, and all masked under your own hostname.
    nginx.com/resources/wiki…( ♥ 24 ) 5 years
  • A packaging system that doesn't allow classes and features to be definitively private so *no* outside access is allowed is one that's not complete.
    A key problem in software is that as it grows absent strong controls, interfaces widen until everything is exposed to everything.( ♥ 12 ) 5 years
  • LHI003: He knows she tried to be forgiving, but who can just shrug away a guilty lie, a stab in the back? Such a mistake will change a relationship irreversibly, even if we have learned and would never repeat it. The princess's eyes grew narrower. She became more distant.5 years
  • A little daily inspiration: Muse, a 90-second video through an imaginary world with cyperpunk/Bladerunner vibes.
    The quality of work produced by solo artists these days is a little terrifying because I don't completely understand how it's possible.
    vimeo.com/280451457( ♥ 16 ) 5 years
  • Monorepos are a really bad idea disguised as a good idea, and the mirage only evaporates once it's too late.
    Shared tooling is nice, but there is no stronger downward force on software quality than tragedy of the commons, and a pervasive nihilism that stems from it.( ♥ 26 ) 5 years
  • An entertaining bug that I worked on recently: how enabling HTTP/2 and a subtle change in net/http's contract broke some existing Go clients. Hyrum's Law reigns supreme.
    brandur.org/fragments/go-h…( ♥ 18 ) 5 years
  • Barcelona's superblocks are an ingenious way to retrofit healthy urban design.
    In San Francisco, we have exactly zero streets that are safe for walking/biking/play, and precious few places to escape traffic noise. We could stand to learn from Europe.
    citylab.com/transportation…( ♥ 21 ) 5 years
  • Over the years I've burned a lot of time arguing with people who can't accept that the word "literally" has a second definition — one that means figuratively.
    Next time you use it, know that you're in the good company of Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Dickens: merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/…( ♥ 15 ) 5 years
  • RT @handmade_net: “We’re conditioned ourselves to think that waiting 30+ seconds for an app to load, or interrupting our workflow to watch a half second animations a thousand times a day, are perfectly normal.” -@brandur
    brandur.org/interfaces
    #programming #ui( ♥ 41 ) 5 years
  • Happy to see the reactions to my article on minimalism. It's critical to stay inspired, and ideas like simplicity and ephemeralization inspire me.
    At one time I saw them as common values, but now know well they're not, so I'm glad to help nudge them along, even if just a little.( ♥ 35 ) 5 years
  • RT @tammybutow: "Nothing operates flawlessly once it hits production. Every component in the stack is a candidate for failure, and with sufficient scale, something will be failing all the time." #neverforget -- @brandur brandur.org/minimalism( ♥ 84 ) 5 years
  • Happy to report api.stripe.com now supports HTTP/2 after dropping support for old crypto unlocked an upgrade path for us.
    Go integrations on 1.6+ will start using HTTP/2 automatically. Upgrade stripe-php to get it. Support in other languages is more complex, but coming.( ♥ 77 ) 5 years

July

  • Reading the history of the Bay Area often brings about a nostalgia for a time and place long gone — one more interesting, and more optimistic.
    I’ve never felt that as strongly as reading this thread on the Metreon.
    Today, a cultural abyss. Yesterday, an ode to techno utopia. twitter.com/MaxKriegerVG/s…( ♥ 8 ) 5 years
  • The next time someone says that a test suite is slow because it's a big project, point out that you can build Postgres from scratch on a fast machine in ~30s and run its test suite in ~15s.
    Test suites are slow because their progenitors were sloppy, not because they have to be.( ♥ 384 ) 5 years
  • LHI002: “I'm talking about cooperating. Favors. You do a favor for me, I'll do one for you. Get it?”
    “Do one for me,” Yossarian requested.
    “Not a chance,” Doc Daneeka answered.( ♥ 5 ) 5 years
  • Issue a physical artifact by way of an API.
    (And very excited to say that we'll have full support for Issuing across Stripe client libraries in seven languages and in stripe-mock on day one.) twitter.com/patrickc/statu…( ♥ 22 ) 5 years
  • Bad: broke iPhone screen trail running.
    Good: used credit card fringe benefit for phone damage, and after some bureaucracic navigation, they paid. Apple botched repair, so I ended up with a new phone ~8 months after purchase.
    Credit cards are kind of evil, but kind of great.( ♥ 9 ) 5 years
  • LHI001: The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.( ♥ 4 ) 5 years
  • LHI000: I put together a few words on what we can learn in software about resilience and long term thinking from the design principles of a 10,000 year clock.
    brandur.org/10000-years( ♥ 15 ) 5 years
  • I don't always compliment Go, but we just looked into enabling HTTP/2 across our seven supported languages. In Go you get it automatically for both clients and servers using just `net/http`.
    Excellent end user experience — 10x better than anything else and 100x better than most.( ♥ 135 ) 5 years
  • The newest episode of Hardcore History is on Japanese history and culture, and starts with the story of Hiroo Onoda, who held out alone in the Philippines and continued to fight WWII until 1974.
    As per Dan Carlin's usual, it's excellent work.
    twitter.com/HardcoreHistor…( ♥ 8 ) 5 years
  • The sun setting over Yosemite Valley.
    (Seen through the smoke kicked up by yet another wildfire raging through California.)( ♥ 14 ) 5 years
  • There's nothing quite as nefarious as a technical decision made via Slack: stakeholders miss it if they're not around, points are poorly stated as they're strung across 50 half-baked thoughts, context exists across pages of jumbled noise, *and* it's time consuming.
    I miss email.( ♥ 976 ) 5 years
  • One of my favourite natural effects in San Francisco: morning sunlight filtering through the mist and eucalyptus of Mount Sutro.( ♥ 122 ) 5 years
  • I finally got around to reading “Vipassana for Hackers”.
    Other books on the subject tend to contain (1) too much mysticism, and (2) too many words (more is said than necessary to reach book length). This short book is neither; it's practical and concise.
    github.com/deobald/vipass…( ♥ 18 ) 5 years
  • Nearly abandoned a project this morning after rediscovering the nightmarish quality of Twitter's API.
    Four different mechanisms for authentication, none general. OAuth 2 supported, but only for appearance's sake — OAuth 1 still needed to say, post a tweet. Kafka would be proud.( ♥ 11 ) 5 years
  • A photography project for portraits of taxi drivers in Tokyo — there's already something magical about neon lights, and the bokeh and color in their reflection off glass makes them even more so.
    olegtolstoy.com/whos-driving-t…( ♥ 8 ) 5 years

June

  • iFixit's rigor in long term thinking is a refreshing counterpoint to modern Apple's "form over function" ethos.
    “This is design anorexia: making a product slimmer and slimmer at the cost of usefulness, functionality, serviceability, and the environment.”
    ifixit.org/blog/10229/mac…( ♥ 14 ) 5 years
  • The best Bash advice.
    (Bash (or sh, zsh, etc.) is objective garbage as a programming language, but it’s garbage that’s ubiquitous, and that’s valuable. Just don’t let a Bash program grow beyond trivial size or you’ll pay for that low bar to entry later — in blood and tears.) twitter.com/copyconstruct/…( ♥ 92 ) 5 years
  • Excellent piece on Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong (among others).
    Miyamoto attributes his creativity to being surrounded with nature when he was young. The story begins and ends with stumbling on a cave.
    newyorker.com/magazine/2010/…( ♥ 9 ) 5 years
  • Interesting thread on whether people are deploying anything important on serverless.
    Reading between the lines, I suspect that if there were a lot of large serverless deployments out there, we'd be seeing many more data points, and more notable ones too.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173787…( ♥ 25 ) 5 years
  • I finished my third Haruki Murakami book ("A Wild Sheep Chase") of the last couple years, and his brand of weird surrealism continues to delight.
    I'm still thinking about "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" months after finishing it — surely the sign of a great book.( ♥ 9 ) 5 years
  • Submissions for National Geographic's Travel Photographer of the Year contest is a never-ending carousel of the most incredible photography you'll ever see — on everything from the most pristine nature to the densest urban environments. Here's 2018.
    travel.nationalgeographic.com/photographer-o…( ♥ 28 ) 5 years
  • RT @rauchg: PR that adds async/await to Rust
    github.com/rust-lang/rust…( ♥ 130 ) 5 years
  • I tried to tell a story last night about camping out near a decommissioned nuclear reactor over the weekend, but no one at the table was event remotely impressed – apparently half of America grew up within spitting distance of one.
    Still, I thought it was cool.( ♥ 15 ) 5 years
  • Even while REST is perfectly adequate as a modest baseline, I put together a few words on why I think GraphQL has the promise to lead to a generation of APIs that are more powerful, more discoverable, and most importantly, more adaptable.
    brandur.org/graphql( ♥ 132 ) 5 years
  • Unpopular opinion: considerable restrictions on AirBnB are probably the right thing. The service is ultimately good for travelers (including me, many times), but *mostly* bad for locals, with the major exception being a wealthy rent-collecting class.
    cntraveler.com/story/nearly-8…( ♥ 10 ) 5 years
  • We just released stripe-go v32 — a major overhaul that refines the implementation, fixes a lot of naming, and produces an API that can distinguish between a value that wasn't set from one that's explicitly empty.
    Migration guide: github.com/stripe/stripe-…( ♥ 17 ) 5 years
  • I'll be championing Markdown in Git repositories until the day I die, but wow, Dropbox Paper is a near perfect WYSIWYG implementation —10x better than alternatives.
    Tools like this exist, and yet companies pay real money for Confluence. Enterprise software is total madness.( ♥ 35 ) 5 years
  • Backyards in San Francisco are on average, more vibrant than most places in the world. A lot of that is climate, but there’s also a dose of tight constraints breeding creativity.
    The boring facades you see along a street often don’t give you a feel for the quiet oases out back.( ♥ 10 ) 5 years

May

  • Some legitimate reasons to miss San Francisco: (1) running up mountains a few blocks from your front door, (2) car-free days in Golden Gate Park.( ♥ 19 ) 5 years
  • We're about to make a large-ish change to how API parameters are sent in stripe-go so that we handle places where zero values of types are meaningful. I've opened a small RFC, and would be interested in hearing from you if you have an opinion on it.
    github.com/stripe/stripe-…( ♥ 5 ) 5 years
  • The KVB at Volkspalast.
    Sometimes the venue really helps make a show, and Leipzig is full of big, old, interesting places. Seeing one here is like what it would have felt like to hold a rock concert in an ancient Roman temple (but with a sound system from 2018).( ♥ 4 ) 5 years
  • Juniper (Rust GraphQL) just merged a “lookahead” feature making efficient data fetches possible by composing queries based on request introspection.
    Calling DataLoader (the usual implementation) just “inelegant” is generous. This looks to be much better.
    github.com/graphql-rust/j…( ♥ 5 ) 5 years
  • A favourite part of Leipzig is the abundance of peaceful trails running through largely undeveloped greenery.
    This is really close to what an optimal city should look like: dense residential surrounded by lots of natural space. Minimal roads. No parking lots.( ♥ 23 ) 5 years
  • And serendipitous running exploration find of the day: wild boar (not literally wild).
    Not pictured: piglets scurrying around in the background. Boss boar so big that he might know a thing of two about the assassination of Robert Baratheon.( ♥ 8 ) 5 years
  • The Monument to the Battle of Nations, built on site 100 years after the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon’s decisive defeat that led to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It towers over you at 300 feet tall.
    (Morning runs here are a little more interesting than home.)( ♥ 9 ) 5 years
  • Somewhat ironically given its content, 1984 sure manages to inspire some tremendously well-designed book covers.
    (And imagine how many hundreds of editions of this book have been printed since it was published in ‘49.)5 years
  • `impl Trait` lands today in Rust 1.26. Its utility isn't obvious, but what you had to do before (trait objects) was a huge pain while learning.
    Between that, Result from main, 128 bit integers, and async/await in sight, Rust stays the most exciting happening in software, by far.( ♥ 6 ) 5 years
  • Only the most critical or widespread projects will make meaningful advances after their original authors leave, and only through incredible effort and tenacity by their inheritors after so much context is lost.
    Be a good citizen: don't throw half-baked software over the fence.( ♥ 4 ) 5 years
  • Some images are powerful enough to pull you away from where you are now and take your mind to a fantastic place far away.
    These “Forest of Liars” renderings are some of them. Absolutely gorgeous. twitter.com/sylvainsarrail…( ♥ 7 ) 5 years
  • An ingeniously-designed kit for pour-over coffee on the road.
    design-milk.com/enjoy-next-thi…5 years
  • (I try to find something inspiring to look at in the morning. Here that is in the form of) some gorgeous Swiss mountainscapes.
    behance.net/gallery/605185…( ♥ 5 ) 5 years

April

  • Compare an efficient keyboardist to a fast phone/tablet user and you’ll see a 10x+ productivity difference, yet the majority of R&D goes into touch UIs, or the exotic frontier.
    There’s still many advances to be made in interface design, and they’re closer to home than we expect.( ♥ 19 ) 5 years
  • Another month in, I'm finally starting to feel semi-literate in Rust. It's the hardest programming language I've ever learnt, but it pays off.
    brandur.org/fragments/rust…( ♥ 98 ) 5 years
  • A short story about moving a very hot rate limiting stack from a single standalone Redis to a 10-node Redis Cluster. Maybe the smoothest production rollout I've ever seen.
    brandur.org/redis-cluster( ♥ 44 ) 5 years
  • Great talk from @antirez yesterday on Redis streams.
    A lot of thought has gone into this feature — not just in algorithmic efficiency, but space efficiency (radix tree + only one bit is used if an item's fields match its predecessor's), usability (consumer groups), and testing.( ♥ 25 ) 5 years
  • I find some inspiration in the About page for Offscreen, a magazine with no digital version.
    All content online gets mixed together, and the asymptote of its perceived value is zero. 280 characters will be ever more normal as target content length.
    offscreenmag.com/about5 years
  • The fruit of the labor of the Bonsai associations from in and around San Francisco, gathered for the day in Japantown. Happy cherry blossom season!( ♥ 15 ) 5 years
  • Inspiring Rust moment of the day: my test suite takes ~8 s to run. `time` reports "user" as ~46 s.
    With `time`, if user > real, you're seeing time spent on multiple cores.
    If user >> real, you're seeing huge parallelization. My suite, using only Rust's normal tooling, shows 9x.( ♥ 13 ) 5 years
  • On Rust compile times: I was worried they’d trend out of control as code grows, but they’ve been fine.
    For a big project, incremental is on par with a fast Ruby test suite, a fraction of a normal one, or an infinitesimal slice of a degenerate megasuite (found at Big Ruby shops).( ♥ 5 ) 5 years
  • RT @dcurtis: In order of importance for San Francisco government—possibly the worst major city government in the country—to address:
    1. Drugs/homeless/safety
    ....
    99999. Scooters.( ♥ 298 ) 5 years
  • I read PEP 492 (async/await) and PEP 484 (type hints) for Python, and was impressed to see they've been implemented for years already.
    (Probably don't use interpreted languages beyond scripting, but) Python is really moving.
    python.org/dev/peps/pep-0…
    python.org/dev/peps/pep-0…( ♥ 8 ) 5 years
  • I have a hard time not thinking about the tens of thousands of human hours lost rescuing state in systems that aren't safe at rest.
    Here’s a tiny spark of a thought on baking resilience into online services. The 500 test: brandur.org/fragments/the-…( ♥ 23 ) 5 years
  • It looks like there's a good chance that a native form of async/await will be coming to Rust's core (as opposed to existing in packaged layers of macro spaghetti above it). This is really, *really* good news.
    github.com/withoutboats/r…( ♥ 53 ) 5 years
  • It was a tremendously beautiful rainy morning in San Francisco today. It's rare to ever see the city this lush.( ♥ 21 ) 5 years
  • The more I play with GraphQL, the more it seems like the obvious way forward for web APIs.
    Strong conventions, introspection (GraphiQL is amazing), and improved change resilience (explicit field requests). You can still design great APIs minus the mystique/dogmatism of REST.( ♥ 43 ) 5 years
  • For all the silly platitudes thrown around in our field, the exaltation of refactoring isn't one of them — aggressive and continuous refinement is the only path to beautiful, sustainable software.
    Any code that ossifies after being first written is almost certainly bad code.( ♥ 28 ) 5 years
  • Having lived in San Francisco’s SOMA district for five years before finally getting out, I’ll never again underestimate the value of silence.
    It’s the most minute luxury in life. When you have access to it, you think nothing of it. When you don’t, you miss it dearly.( ♥ 54 ) 5 years

March

  • I spent some time building a toy web service in Rust and wrote about some of the best parts. This piece explores a type-safe actor framework, Postgres-friendly concurrency model, and middleware with compiler-enforced modularity.
    brandur.org/rust-web( ♥ 116 ) 5 years
  • Patriot (on Prime Video), a dark comedy about a nihilistic spy whose work in Europe leaves behind an ever more fragile web of loose ends, is some of the best TV made in years. Beautiful writing and cinematography. Highly recommended.( ♥ 10 ) 6 years
  • For those who made it here by way of HN — I want to clarify that despite my occasional critique, Rust is my favorite programming language, by far.
    No project gets everything right, but Rust (and its great core + community) has consistently been more right than anything else.( ♥ 14 ) 6 years
  • RT @heinrichhartman: "Suddenly, the absurdity of the thought hit me like a ton of bricks: I was sitting in an Onsen looking forward to the next time I’d be able to sit in an Onsen. It was hard to imagine a more pathological example of cognitive degeneracy." -- @brandur / brandur.org/fragments/mind…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • Application-level validations are optimistic — they work as long as you're 100% bug-free, and at low concurrency.
    Database contraints are the only way to move from hoping data is valid to *knowing* it is. Use them. Don't use a database without them.
    citusdata.com/blog/2018/03/1…( ♥ 46 ) 6 years
  • It's always surprising to see how bad most people are with docs, even when they're often the ones suffering for it.
    You see countless of these in a day:
    factory.create_widget() # creates a widget
    But comments explaining what a widget is and why it's there? ~Non-existent.( ♥ 27 ) 6 years
  • Mocks and stubs are a powerful idea, but they're the unstable box of ancient dynamite of software engineering — more dangerous than they're worth.
    There's nothing quite like tests that are 90% mocks and succeed at nothing but testing a specific internal implementation.( ♥ 34 ) 6 years
  • Really impressed by Google Cloud Platform so far. It's like AWS minus the obfuscated Amazonspeak, and with a better console.
    The only service I miss is ACM — zero-hassle HTTPS is *such* a killer feature. A Kubernetes/Let's Encrypt Rube Goldberg machine just isn't the same.( ♥ 37 ) 6 years
  • Internal software frameworks are usually bad because they’re write-once refactor-never affairs.
    Tragedy of the commons plays a big part — it’s easier to slather on a new layer of mud than to go back and apply a fix to the core, and future maintenance is everybody’s problem.( ♥ 14 ) 6 years
  • The HomePod sure makes a gorgeous room accent. The first Apple product in ages that I've willingly ordered in white.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • These days when I move from a modern TV show to a modern game, like from “Altered Carbon” to “Horizon Zero Dawn”, paradoxically the latter feels more lifelike despite having no live actors. Far more immersive anyway.
    (And wow, what a beautiful game.)( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • To balance my Rust enthusiasm with the occasional dose of cold reality: I've not once been able to use a crate to a meaningful extent without looking at its source code.
    Docs are rich in type annotations, but useless. `examples` dirs are a great idea, but almost always trivial.( ♥ 7 ) 6 years

February

  • redis-cell 0.2.2 is released, with some great contributions from the @CartoDB team for correctness at very fast replenish rates. Its code has also been modernized, Clippy (lint) integrated, and the latest Rustfmt conventions adopted.
    github.com/brandur/redis-…( ♥ 23 ) 6 years
  • So good to see someone with a high profile talking about this. When a state loses its ability to build capital infrastructure, it loses agency over its own development. California's is long gone.
    twitter.com/elonmusk/statu…( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • Habits are frustrating. It’s so easy to break a good one and so hard to break a bad one.
    Bad habits are on autopilot, but good ones, even if you have them going for weeks, easily turn one missed day turns into two, then three, and before you know it, are gone.( ♥ 18 ) 6 years
  • Running `kubectl apply -f kubernetes/` on a directory of (versioned) configuration files and watching an entire service mesh converge to its new target state is downright magical.( ♥ 17 ) 6 years
  • A connection pool that releases connections on `Drop` (i.e., destructor) when they leave scope like r2d2 in Rust opens up a new paradigm for connection management that is *so much* more resource efficient.
    N workers can plausibly share << N connections. github.com/sfackler/r2d2( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • Here's Actix, a web framework for Rust, edging its way to the top of TechEmpower's lists to sit soundly alongside the highly optimized C/C++/Java code that's normally found there.
    (Don't put too much stock in benchmarks, but this is pretty cool.)
    github.com/actix/actix-web( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • v1.10: Builds are a little faster and more reliable, tests can cache results, runtime and the GC are faster, minor API tweaks, no significant language changes.
    This is what I like about Go — you don't need a flashy new language feature to cut a release.
    golang.org/doc/go1.10( ♥ 11 ) 6 years
  • The more I think about the idea of no GC in production, the more I like it — memory growth that's almost perfectly bounded.
    Here's my Rust service's memory use over ~5 hours running a periodic workload. The footprint is tiny, and baseline so flat that you could us it as a level.( ♥ 15 ) 6 years
  • "5 Centimeters per Second" has a slow, subtle beauty that I doubt anything in western film will ever approach. Makoto Shinkai (see also "Your Name" which is even better), is a genius.( ♥ 27 ) 6 years
  • My first Rust service with Diesel/Cloud SQL backend running on managed Kubernetes.
    Lots of cool technologies to get there including cross-compilation to a musl target, multi-stage Docker build with a final tiny ~12 MB Alpine-based image, and binary-embedded Diesel migrations.( ♥ 23 ) 6 years
  • Interesting musings on the price of art from a musician who earlier in his career was selling $20 albums and now makes a few bucks from internet streaming.
    The old model of buying a CD for a few songs was pretty broken, but the new one seems to be too.
    overcast.fm/+FCH_uYgZ46 years
  • The experience reminded me that language tooling is as important to developer experience as syntax.
    It's a new idea to offer integrated package and SDK version management as a core part of a language's distribution. When you've seen the light (e.g., Rust), it's hard to go back.6 years
  • After realizing that the SDK I'd downloaded from Microsoft was for .NET Core 2.0 and I needed 1.1, I looked up how to install a new target framework via the `dotnet` command before realizing that of course you can't do that.
    I am so spoiled by `rustup`.6 years
  • Clippy is hands down the best linter ever built. By far.
    With stylistic concerns automated away with Rustfmt, the linter's job becomes one to catch real problems. Clippy is so good at it that I was actually learning better Rust by fixing its warnings.
    github.com/rust-lang-nurs…( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • Explicitness (especially around type annotations) is a value widely and consistently held by people who've written a lot of code.
    Reading someone else's code, or your own a year from now, you *always* wish that they/you'd taken the time to type a few extra characters.( ♥ 19 ) 6 years
  • When you create your API's /v2/, you have a choice between keeping /v1/ online forever or deprecating it and off-boarding users.
    The former slows you down and latter exhausts you. This reason alone is why public APIs with non-negligible users should have only one version.( ♥ 13 ) 6 years
  • Impressed that Google Cloud will give you a 2-node HA Postgres cluster for ~$15/mo; the same as the cheapest single-node RDB.
    Sustained use pricing is also more user-friendly than reserved instances — true elastic computing minus capital costs and math.
    cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postg…( ♥ 18 ) 6 years
  • Watching rustfmt reflow code to satisfy maximum line width has got to be the most satisfying (small) thing in programming.
    This is exactly how styling tools should be built: strong default conventions, but changeable via a conf file that's checked in with the project.( ♥ 13 ) 6 years
  • Somewhat ironically, my building's main noise problem (aside from cars) isn't young people with stereos, but an old guy who watches network TV at full volume ... 24 hours a day. This medium seriously cannot die soon enough.( ♥ 12 ) 6 years
  • One of the ideas for the High Line in New York was to make it a 7,920-foot-long swimming pool.
    I’m happy with how it ended up, but what a great concept!
    thehighline.org/media/W1siZiIs…6 years
  • RT @interfluidity: American politics now boils down to a contest over who can describe sets of events in the most nefariously conspiratorial light. Good decisions are sure to result.( ♥ 92 ) 6 years
  • The best kind of new feature — a common (and critical) database operation gets much better, and users don't have to do a thing. The little Oracle <-> Postgres disparity that's left continues to shrink every year.
    Congrats @petervgeoghegan! twitter.com/petervgeoghega…( ♥ 23 ) 6 years
  • There's been a grace period of 10 years since the TLS 1.2 spec was published, and the time has come to make sure you're upgraded.
    (PCI providers need to start shedding requests come June to stay compliant, so it's for real this time.)
    stripe.com/blog/completin…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years

January

  • EDB’s building a new table storage backend in Postgres that uses a technique akin to Oracle’s undo log for MVCC (named “zheap”). No more table float or stalled VACUUMs. Fascinating.
    rhaas.blogspot.com/2018/01/do-or-…( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • A fun aspect of production scale is that you don’t just hit your edge cases, you hit them often enough that they’re reliably reproducible.( ♥ 21 ) 6 years
  • The Dark Forest is even more interesting than its prequel — I’m still thinking about its ideas whenever I look up at a night sky.
    (It’s also really nice to see hard science-fiction bubble to the top of the popular culture every once in a while.)( ♥ 12 ) 6 years
  • The story of why we don’t build powerful tooling for humans is told by common escalators.
    Used correctly, they convey superhuman ability to climb stairs at double speed. In reality, people stand on them. Getting between floors is half as fast, but we can be five times as lazy.( ♥ 19 ) 6 years
  • RT @antirez: Blog post: “An update on Redis Streams development”: antirez.com/news/116( ♥ 51 ) 6 years
  • The world is really going to suffer deprived of those crappy two minute smartphone videos taken from thirty rows back with no optical zoom that literally no one has rewatched ever.
    spin.com/2018/01/jack-w…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • Saw a service go down yesterday. Likely cause was an upgrade in minor version of one gem made it incompatible with another gem that was patching its internal API.
    There’s an argument for “responsible” Ruby, but a programming language that lets this happen is not a good one.( ♥ 46 ) 6 years
  • RT @PostgreSQL: Curious how atomicity happens in Postgres? @brandur explains it for you here - brandur.org/postgres-atomi…( ♥ 44 ) 6 years
  • Stunning photography of Chinese aquaculture. I'm sure those waterscapes have a healthy dose of inherent beauty, but the composition on these shots is pure genius; huge credit to the photographer (Tugo Cheng).
    theguardian.com/artanddesign/g…( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • Recently got access to Safari, and was baffled to find that O'Reilly has eliminated downloadable formats for its books — it's hard to imagine a more hostile (distracting, poor ergonomics, etc.) reading environment than a web browser on a laptop.( ♥ 17 ) 6 years
  • I got one comment on HN today (intended unironically, but ironic at the meta level) explaining that it's wrong to be complimentary of Go because Turbo Pascal on DOS did it sooner, better.
    My mistake. By way of apology, I've attached some beautiful Pascal syntax for admiration.( ♥ 21 ) 6 years
  • Go on Lambda is *really* compelling. It's fast, highly concurrent, is batteries included, but its most interesting features for serverless might be API stability and easy, robust deployments. A few more words on the subject:
    brandur.org/go-lambda( ♥ 97 ) 6 years
  • After yesterday's events, I'm trying my first Twitter poll (even if I don't think the end is quite nigh).
    What will the end of cryptomania look like?6 years
  • I'd missed that HHVM has permanently and irreparably fractured from PHP.
    Maybe it's just me, but supporting a custom PHP-like lang/VM forever, ~alone, is such a morose idea, even if you're Facebook. OSS is good. Shared community effort is even better.
    hhvm.com/blog/2017/09/1…( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • Random thoughts on Rust:
    So much is amazing, but my god, I spent two hours today trying to figure out how to make a trait imply cloneable (and failed — see E0038). This is pretty normal, with huge swaths of time getting sunk into problems that are appallingly uninteresting.( ♥ 13 ) 6 years
  • Great to see Google writing in support of strongly consistent databases. Building on transaction-less databases (Mongo, etc.) is a great way to spend eternity desperately shoring up brittle code against a trillion edge cases caused by concurrent access.
    cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/01/why-yo…( ♥ 88 ) 6 years
  • If you thought Go's `close(chan)` was cool:
    (Rust) A control thread injects work and workers receive it by channel. Control waits for them to join after it finishes sending work and the channel closes automatically (and safely) as it `Drop`s from scope.
    github.com/brandur/podcor…( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • I just added another two years to my Nautilus subscription. I don't know of another magazine published with such consistently good and innovative content, and the print and PDF editions beautifully built — a project well worth supporting.
    nautil.us( ♥ 14 ) 6 years
  • The design document for Redis' upcoming consumer groups is well worth the read. A complicated feature implemented in understandable terms.
    gist.github.com/antirez/68e67f…( ♥ 14 ) 6 years
  • Love the shift in San Francisco’s usual sterile California weather. Just a little eerie and the most perfect temperature possible for running/walking.
    (Pictured: Salesforce Tower and the Financial District from Tank Hill.)( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • RT @PostgreSQL: An example of building an idempotent API utilizing keys with @postgresql by @brandur
    brandur.org/idempotency-ke…( ♥ 22 ) 6 years
  • RT @Benoit_Tgt: (..) distinction between “simple” and “easy”: simplicity meaning the opposite of complex, and ease meaning “to be at hand” or “to be approachable” (...). Schemaless databases are not simple; they’re easy.https://t.co/64xwPA9vhM (by @brandur)( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • The best, totally unexpected improvement to smartphones over the last few years is their waterproofness. It’s nice being able to run in the rain minus the ziplock bag.( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • A week and a half into daily Rust programming:
    Every line is a new death struggle with the compiler, but once that's done, you're done — the runtime confidence is freeing, even compared to other compiled languages like C#/C++/Go (Haskell is comparable, but less sane).( ♥ 24 ) 6 years

2017

December

  • The iPhone X’s ultra-wide aspect ratio isn’t so good for 3:2 photos anymore, but with it + AirPods (+ a lot of help from Plex) Apple’s accidentally created the best mobile home theatre setup of all time. Very close to flawless.( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • The icy Bow.
    (Calgary, hovering between -25C and -33C, has reached a special kind of cold.)( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • (Also, I've sunk so many hours into Rust this holiday season that its error messages around moves/borrows/lifetimes are actually starting to make sense. God help me.)( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • Rust's `slog` is the most elegant logging I've ever seen: Its "compact" format will show structured log lines in a hierarchy so that you can actually read them. A few tiny helpers of your own keeps invocation succinct and clean. An async drain ensures perf.
    Totally beautiful.( ♥ 28 ) 6 years
  • Here's Rust/Diesel's type system preventing me from loading a `BIGINT` into an `i32` (it needs an i64) at compile time. A little annoyance today to prevent horrific bugs tomorrow.( ♥ 10 ) 6 years
  • Hit 100 days on Headspace and now changing to new(ish) Oak meditation app.
    Excellent so far — especially the configurable background noise. You’re not always in a quiet environment, and ambient noise can be a big help for focus.( ♥ 12 ) 6 years
  • Mongo zealot on HN: “It’s nice that Postgres supports JSON, but I’d like to see it come with a custom, non-standard form of JSON with timestamps like Mongo’s BSON.”
    I’ll explain the concept of data types and typed schemas right after I’m through explaining the concept of irony.( ♥ 19 ) 6 years
  • GitHub's approach of providing few, powerful features that are extensible is much better than carpet bombing 1,000 non-distinct ones, 98% of which are left unused (JIRA).
    Better for big projects, _way_ better for small and medium-sized projects.( ♥ 34 ) 6 years
  • Always impressed looking at the Kubernetes tag/CI/bot setup. github.com/kubernetes/kub…
    Especially the tags.6 years
  • "Atomic Blonde" won't be remembered for its depth, but anything that takes place in Berlin with an 80s soundtrack this extensive is at the very least fun to watch.( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • Excellent piece on Tokio, Mio, futures, and tasks in Rust. Great detail and great depth. I didn't understand it all the first time around so I'm reading it again.
    cafbit.com/post/tokio_int…( ♥ 11 ) 6 years
  • I was loving the iPhone's "raise to wake" feature until I tried running with it. Combined with the engorged power button, you're waking it up by accident once every ~5 seconds.
    120,000+ employees at Apple and no one jogs?( ♥ 13 ) 6 years
  • Two recent LED acquistions. 7W and 36W respectively; both roughly as bright as the sun.
    Flying cars, a moon base, and world peace have been frustratingly elusive, but the future has yielded amazing lighting technology beyond what anyone could have dreamt even as late as the 80s.( ♥ 10 ) 6 years
  • The Starry Expanse is rebuilding Riven from scratch and making it fully 3D this time around. The project’s been in progress since 2010 already. What a heroic effort.
    starryexpanse.com6 years
  • I ran my first deploy to Amazon's Fargate — it worked, but I'd been hoping for something ... simpler.
    Despite Docker, containers, and Kubernetes, the world is still looking for a deployment and operational experience on par with Heroku in mid-2011. There's lots of room to grow.( ♥ 102 ) 6 years
  • RT @bitfield: The new Redis 'stream' data type (XADD/XRANGE) will provide a neat way of implementing the unified log pattern for distributed systems (with a little help from our friend Postgres) twitter.com/brandur/status…( ♥ 31 ) 6 years
  • Nice analysis of the High Sierra root exploit: objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x24…
    Some blame the programmer and/or QA, but the problem was an unchecked pass-by-ref in a function that looks like it should return its result. Once again, the real culprit is a dangerous programming language.( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • It's fun looking at photos I took 10 years ago. I'm only a 10% better photographer since then, but technology is up 100x.
    My first camera phone, a Motorola Krzr, took 2 megapixel images and they were *terrible*. These days, my dedicated camera is harder to justify every year.( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • I'm so happy to see that Terraform supports Datadog. I've been trying to figure out how to get plaintext-configured and versioned dashboards and alarms since literally the first time I saw a dashboard and alarm.
    twitter.com/ctshryock/stat…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • Very platform specific, but `-webkit-font-smoothing` and its brethren do *wonders* for text rendering on Mac OS. (In the bucket of "things I just found out about".)
    If you have a lot of users on Macs, this ~2 line change might be easiest design win you ever make.( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • I hate the idea of reading books on phones, but we’re at the point where it’s the best option: always with you, line and page lengths let you read quickly, and pages turn instantly.
    The iPhone X’s OLED and bigger screen makes it even better. iBooks night theme looks amazing.( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • This is cool: 99%+ bottles of Yebisu look like the one on the right. One in a few hundred look like the one on the left.
    In these “Lucky Yebisus” the lucky god has an extra fish: look for the tail in the basket on the very left.
    A tiny, yet ubiquitous, easter egg. Love it.( ♥ 22 ) 6 years
  • Last night in Japan. We didn’t want to pay for a hotel, so we’re hanging out at the Disneyworld of Onsens — complete with sleeping room and open until 9a.
    Located on Tokyo’s artificial island Odaiba, also notable for having a 1:1 scale model of a Gundam.( ♥ 16 ) 6 years
  • Amazon knocked it out of the park this year at re:Invent: multi-master Aurora, Nitro (close-to-the-metal hypervisor) on new c5/m5 types, bare metal i3, EKS, Fargate.
    So much to look at. Downloading talks for the flight back to SF (and on that note, still love `youtube-dl`).( ♥ 25 ) 6 years

November

  • Rust being injected into mainstream software in a significant way (and the proportional reduction in C++) is one of the most positive developments in software of the last decade. I'm optimistic that we see Servo go live in the next few years.
    blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/1…( ♥ 18 ) 6 years
  • Excellent piece on first contact, a journey to China’s new observatory, (now the largest in the world by far), and speculation from Liu Cixin’s (author of The Three-Body Problem) on dark forest theory.
    theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • Back issues of Brand magazine are simply not available in most of the world, and injuriously expensive to order online.
    In Tokyo, you walk into a bookstore and pick any one of them up off a shelf. The sheer variety of products available in brick and mortar is hard to believe.6 years
  • This is probably overcompensation from living in dry climates all my life, but I love the moss out here. Such vibrant greens.( ♥ 22 ) 6 years
  • I _just_ realized that iOS 11’s Control Center is customizable and includes a low power mode toggle and quick launch for alarms.
    (Tweeting just in case I’m not the only one because I’ve been wanting this for years.)( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • Sad (even if my feet are happy) to have finished our last day’s walk on the Kumano Kodo. What a magical place.( ♥ 15 ) 6 years
  • Yesterday we hiked into Yunomine, an Onsen discovered 2,000 years ago, and considered to be Japan’s oldest.
    2nd image: Tsuboyu, an ancient (and quite modest) bath house carved into bedrock. 3rd: eggs for sale to cook in the 90C water bubbling out of the ground.( ♥ 15 ) 6 years
  • Workers along the Kumano Kodo taking a layer of bark from Japanese cypresses for use as traditional roofing on Shinto shrines — no power tools involved.
    Pretty amazing watching these guys in action. I’d be happy to be half this good at anything.( ♥ 11 ) 6 years
  • Hiking the Kumano Kodo with a 14 L Mission Workshop Hauser. Luckily it’s not the most rigorous of treks, but I’m probably still forgetting a thing or five.( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • Woke up on Mount Koya to find its temples covered in a soft sheet of snow. At sunrise, trail ran from the Daimo gate to the top of Bentendake. Absolutely gorgeous.( ♥ 18 ) 6 years
  • Enjoyed this sober take on Bitcoin from The Economist: economist.com/blogs/buttonwo…
    The tower’s going to fall, but with so many incentivized in keeping it standing, it’ll take a sizeable tremor to start the cascade. One day this is going to make history’s greatest case study.( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • Osaka. Sunday ~5 am. Thousands of people on the streets. I can’t tell whether most of them are waking up or going to sleep.( ♥ 22 ) 6 years
  • RT @olivierlacan: Scaling Postgres with Read Replicas & Using WAL to Counter Stale Reads brandur.org/postgres-reads
    I’ve seen academic papers with less detail, context, and quality than this amazing piece from @brandur.( ♥ 25 ) 6 years
  • The best Google Maps trick ever (thanks @leinweber): "areas of interest" are shown in a subtle orange color around certain blocks. When traveling to unfamiliar cities, you can use them to find great places to stay and visit.
    For example, here's Valencia/Mission in San Francisco.( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • RT @craigkerstiens: So I think I might quit writing blogs and just start pointing people to @brandur’s posts: brandur.org/postgres-reads( ♥ 31 ) 6 years
  • Japanese macaques (or snow monkeys; who live in the coldest environment of any nonhuman primate) warming up in one of Nagano’s hot springs.
    There are ~100 of these guys, and they run by just inches from you — by far the most personal wild experience I’ve had in recent memory.( ♥ 22 ) 6 years
  • A great Japanese version (or at least as far as a non-Japanese speaker like myself can tell) of my article on how Ruby's memory allocator works. Translated by @hachi8833.
    techracho.bpsinc.jp/hachi8833/2017…( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • Japan’s a “point a camera in any direction and the photo comes out beautiful” kind of place. Here’s the garden of a local shrine during a mild downpour.( ♥ 24 ) 6 years
  • There’s a room that you can walk into in the contemporary art museum in Kanazawa that’s open to the sky. Combined with the city’s natural propensity for rain, it’s quite a beautiful effect.
    (And the piece is by James Turrell who did the skyscape at the de Young in SF.)( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • My very own Pasmo. (Have made it safely across the Pacific.)
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasmo( ♥ 17 ) 6 years
  • This looks like an orb floating in midair. It’s actually the view down the barrel of a WWII gun 68 feet long (and which fired a projectile weighing 2,100 pounds).
    There’s some pretty interesting history lying around the parks of California.( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • Film photography, fine wine, and vinyl — all hobbies that are deeply irrational, and yet ... pretty cool.
    (Having enough expensive vices already I have no intention of picking up any of them, but it's fascinating talking to passionate people who have.)( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • I'm about to visit Asia for a few weeks, and expect to publish issue no. 2 of my newsletter when I get back. It's sent only a few times a year, and may be of interest if you're into travel or software.
    It's titled "Passages & Glass": passages-signup.herokuapp.com( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • RT @romainhuet: Did you know @stripe offers OpenAPI 2.0 & 3.0 specs? 📚📃✍️ github.com/stripe/openapi
    You can now benefit from the whole OpenAPI ecosystem, and use tools like Paw by @luckymarmot or @postmanclient to explore our API and make your first requests without writing code! 🚀( ♥ 95 ) 6 years
  • Yesterday's toy project for Redis streams needs a prerelease branch of Redis to run. I like CI, so I had Travis build it from source before running tests.
    The Redis download + unzip + make takes < 1 minute:
    travis-ci.org/brandur/rocket…
    C (minus the ++) is pretty awesome.( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • The unified log is an inspiring idea in distributed architecture. Redis streams are the perfect foundation for one in most cases — user-friendly, ubiquitous, and cheap.
    A little commentary and a unified log demo built on the prerelease branch: brandur.org/redis-streams( ♥ 91 ) 6 years
  • A podcast recommendation: I've been enjoying "Hurry Slowly".
    On the importance of nature for mental wellness with Florence Williams: hurryslowly.co/002-florence-w…
    On attention, creativity, and the nefarious effects of technology with Craig Mod: hurryslowly.co/003-craig-mod/( ♥ 10 ) 6 years
  • I missed some beautiful shots of the most friendly and photogenic trio of raccoons _ever_ because I couldn't figure out how to disable my AF-assist lamp in time (naturally, the toggle was hidden in a submenu of a submenu).
    Lesson: know how to find every setting on your camera.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • A tragedy of a drowning road system is that it takes every other mode of transport with it as crosswalks, bus/bike lanes, and sidewalks all become additional parking.
    SF is slipping under and wishful thinking isn't going to save it — a serious congestion tax is the only way out.( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • I never got the appeal of Muji, but @keiko713 showed me today that its American prices are ~30-100% higher than its Japanese ones (which are still on the label).
    Design and quality is good on any continent, but in Japan, prices are good too — making it a smart place to shop.( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • A little project for the weekend.
    One of the few books I’ve ever seen that can’t be had for a good price from Amazon, with a range of offers from $120 to $200+. Our trusty local Japanese bookseller has it for $55.( ♥ 9 ) 6 years

October

  • 50 consecutive days of meditation. (The minor accountability provided by Headspace’s streak tracker helped a lot to get here.)( ♥ 21 ) 6 years
  • Implementing idempotency keys and cultivating passive safety in APIs built on Postgres.
    brandur.org/idempotency-ke…( ♥ 50 ) 6 years
  • Here's a photo shoot of small animals in various scenes like micro squirrels parked on vintage cameras and Indian star tortoises sitting on walnuts. Terrific work.
    theguardian.com/artanddesign/g…6 years
  • One of my lovely neighbors broke their key off in the building's door and said nothing about it so that I could get out, but not back in.
    Currently soliciting ideas for a George Bluth Sr. "And *that's* why — you *always* leave a note" lesson.( ♥ 12 ) 6 years
  • Really liking iOS 11 so far. You can have both the player *and* notifications from the lock screen. Everything on one page in control center! Reduced motion mode has *gasp*, (almost) no motion.
    All very simple improvements, but infinitely better.6 years
  • RT @keiko713: Wrote a blog post about phantom WAL and Heroku Postgres follower hole issue: Battle With A Phantom WAL segment blog.keikooda.net/2017/10/18/bat…( ♥ 38 ) 6 years
  • Twitter's move to 280 characters is an interesting case study in the extreme. With the right conditions, even changing the length of a response field is a backwards-incompatible API change.
    brandur.org/fragments/280-…( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • A neat public art installation in Glen Park in SF: A lens focuses the sun to burn a line in a redwood log. It's advanced every day, creating a new line.
    After a year, it's moved to a new log. When complete, the trio will be an archive of three years of sun and weather.( ♥ 2509 ) 6 years
  • A boring story: For years my laptop had an SD card reader and I forgot it was there. I finally started using it a few months ago and it was great. Then I upgraded to a new MBP and that fleeting moment of convenience was gone.
    Today, I use a dongle like Ives Himself intended.( ♥ 11 ) 6 years
  • Got my first Touch Bar Mac yesterday. Usefulness and usability-wise it's garbage, which isn't surprising.
    What is surprising is that with its low-res display it also *looks* bad. Given their aesthetics-trumps-all mentality, quite out of character for Apple to ship this.( ♥ 14 ) 6 years
  • An experience I share here in California with relatives in Alberta/BC is that we all wake up to the drifting smoke of burning forests. Trends are sobering: iii.org/fact-statistic…
    Humanity will eventually take its environmental impact seriously, but it'll be far too late.6 years
  • I'm jealous of GitLab's database setup.
    about.gitlab.com/2017/10/02/sca…
    The "sticky connections" section is especially interesting — operations are scaled out to followers, but *only* if current for a user (tracked by WAL position). Horizontal balancing minus the misery of stale reads.( ♥ 11 ) 6 years
  • Is there any chance we can just replace the SFMTA with the @SFMTrA? Only one of these organizations is ambitious enough to actually save lives. twitter.com/SFMTrA/status/…
    (By their own admission, the city's progress on Vision Zero is ... zero visionzerosf.org/about/how-are-….)( ♥ 10 ) 6 years
  • The terrifying things even smart people will do when inheritance is available is consistently amazing; e.g. ancestry ~10 levels deep. Multiple inheritance is worse, but only by a step.
    Abolishing all inheritance is a hallmark of a great modern language. Nice one Go and Rust :)( ♥ 18 ) 6 years
  • RT @romainhuet: So excited that @stripe now supports both the @w3c Payment Request API and Apple Pay with a single integration. 💳✨👌 stripe.com/docs/elements/…( ♥ 147 ) 6 years
  • Redis streams are great: antirez.com/news/114
    Perfect for modestly-sized apps who don’t want to shell out $100+ for basic Kafka.( ♥ 31 ) 6 years

September

  • A few words on whether webhooks are still the right technology for a streaming APIs.
    brandur.org/webhooks( ♥ 29 ) 6 years
  • An astute point made in a fitting medium. Tools should be hard to learn, but the effort should pay off.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153566…( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • Gorgeous views from a hidden valley and unnamed ridge near Massive Mountain in the Rockies.( ♥ 16 ) 6 years
  • Brevity is nice, but Twitter's austerity so extreme that little of interest or meaning can be expressed.
    This totally nails it. twitter.com/poniewozik/sta…6 years
  • Has Rick and Morty even had a single dud episode yet? Feels like every one is better than the last.( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • Long, but excellent writeup on Java 9’s new module system. A huge win for the maintainability of Java software.
    openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsa…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • This convinced me that the notch is bad. Reams of complexity so Apple can pretend it has an end-to-end display.
    webkit.org/blog/7929/desi…( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • Not novel, but took a stab at formalizing the idea of staging jobs within transactional boundaries in an ACID store. brandur.org/job-drain( ♥ 17 ) 6 years
  • There’s nothing good about its characteristics in production, but Ruby is my go-to for pseudocode every time. Beautiful. Clear. Expressive.( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • Haha, this is some hard truth. From “Spec-ulation”, Rich Hickey’s take on semantic versioning.
    youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGk…( ♥ 13 ) 6 years
  • This was a fun foray into optimizing our new form-encoding package in stripe-go.
    github.com/stripe/stripe-…6 years
  • Views from Panorama Ridge in Banff National Park.( ♥ 16 ) 6 years
  • RT @philipbrown: Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency phlp.be/2ldqEE2 via @brandur( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • RT @craigkerstiens: Managing database migrations better in Postgres: craigkerstiens.com/2017/09/10/bet…( ♥ 19 ) 6 years
  • iPhone X: “… enable an entirely new experience that’s more fluid, more intuitive.”
    As if the button wasn’t removed to make it look cooler.6 years
  • TIL that poor email etiquette, colloquially “top-posting”, has another name: TOFU (text over, fullquote under).
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_s…6 years
  • In San Francisco, rain is a welcome respite.( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • This is cool. Containers serving lambda requests aren’t immediately discarded and can be reused.
    medium.com/@tjholowaychuk…6 years
  • Some detail on CVE-2017-9805, which seems like a likely candidate for the Equifax breach in Apache Struts.
    cwiki.apache.org/confluence/dis…6 years
  • RT @simonw: Hard to express the emotional reaction I had while reading this. Utterly horrifying. An amazing human story. twitter.com/inthefade/stat…( ♥ 13 ) 6 years
  • RT @craigkerstiens: Another great one from @brandur on atomic transactions to power idempotent APIs brandur.org/http-transacti…( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • RT @javisantana: reading every single article in @brandur 's blog. I don't remember seeing so much common sense in the same place: brandur.org/articles( ♥ 60 ) 6 years
  • Legitimately curious to see if Apple's upcoming event produces something I want to buy. Every recent product has been a Pyrrhic compromise.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • We now have an OpenAPI 3.0 spec for Stripe. More supported JSON schema means that it’s far more accurate than 2.0.
    github.com/stripe/openapi( ♥ 10 ) 6 years
  • Disturbing how public offices insist injury is tragically accidental. Our roads are built to trade safety for speed. twitter.com/benrosstransit…6 years
  • Aside from Nolan’s Batman trilogy and Watchmen, Wonder Woman is by far the best movie that DC’s ever produced.( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • As Canada raises rates infinitesimally from 0.75 to 1%, some discussion on the effect on real estate and inflation.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151840…6 years
  • Published a short piece on how to use transactions to build an idempotent API hardened against race conditions.
    brandur.org/http-transacti…( ♥ 43 ) 6 years
  • RT @bufo_alvarius: Building Robust Systems With ACID and Constraints by @brandur brandur.org/acid( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • Libraries for building CLI tools in Rust. Hope to start seeing more of these techniques in the wild.
    deterministic.space/rust-cli-tips.…6 years
  • Here's a quick recommendation of _Black Science_ which has some of the most gorgeous imagery to ever come to comics.( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • Taming tarantulas at Mount Diablo (photo courtesy of @keiko713).( ♥ 11 ) 6 years
  • Lots of talk of math/bits and test helpers, but little of Go 1.9’s best feature: vendor no longer included in ./…
    github.com/brandur/sorg/p…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • There’s a `position: sticky` in CSS now?! And just like that, more JS disappears. I need more designer friends.
    developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web…6 years
  • CSS variable support is at 70+% already. If you’re willing to jettison IE users, you can plausibly use them today …
    caniuse.com/#feat=css-vari…6 years

August

  • I’m just going to pitch this one more time before shutting up and sending the first copy.
    twitter.com/brandur/status…6 years
  • Deferrable constraints so you can (for ex) insert two rows that reference each other despite FKs on both relations.
    begriffs.com/posts/2017-08-…6 years
  • In light of the soon-to-come movie, it’s a great time to get better acquainted with Philip K Dick’s work.
    theguardian.com/books/2017/aug…( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • A cautionary tale of rational engineering trumped by hardline marketing for a product with no technical merit.
    nemil.com/mongo/3.html( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • RT @yukihiro_matz: link: The Limits of Copy-on-write: How Ruby Allocates Memory — Brandur Leach:
    brandur.org/ruby-memory( ♥ 37 ) 6 years
  • RT @tenderlove: The Limits of Copy-on-write: How Ruby Allocates Memory — Brandur Leach brandur.org/ruby-memory( ♥ 48 ) 6 years
  • On the internals of Ruby’s heap, copy-on-write, and why Unicorns inevitably bloat to the size of their parent.
    brandur.org/ruby-memory( ♥ 23 ) 6 years
  • In 12 years not once did I notice that the Gorillaz made up a word in ”Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head”.
    definitions.net/definition/cas…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • Go 1.9 release Q: Is sync.Map typesafe? A: Yes, it uses interface{}.
    Possibly why people have trouble with Go dogmatists ...( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • I’m loving WAL-G! Better throughput is good. Killing that taxing Python runtime dependency is even better.
    citusdata.com/blog/2017/08/1…( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • I wonder if anyone will use logical replication to upgrade from PG 10 to 11 when the time comes. Possible in theory. No tooling in practice.6 years
  • I'd be curious to hear about your system for supporting favourite independent content creators. (I don't have one.)
    brandur.org/fragments/patr…6 years
  • A++: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/wha…
    Async/await is a better model than callbacks or promises, but still forces code to be designed around it.( ♥ 37 ) 6 years
  • On failing noisily and entrenched flaws becoming de facto standards. The subtle side effects of Postel's Maxim.
    tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tho…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • RT @schneems: ACID + humans means a chemical burn or hearing colors. ACID + postgres means consistent persistence find out how: brandur.org/postgres-atomi…( ♥ 12 ) 6 years
  • RT @craigkerstiens: Yet another awesome Postgres all about how Postgres and transactions work by @brandur - brandur.org/postgres-atomi…( ♥ 21 ) 6 years
  • I published “How Postgres makes transactions atomic” which closely examines snapshots, xlog, clog, and the heap.
    brandur.org/postgres-atomi…( ♥ 79 ) 6 years
  • RT @romainhuet: We think of @stripe’s API as economic infrastructure. Learn from @brandur how we safely manage API versioning. stripe.com/blog/api-versi…( ♥ 54 ) 6 years
  • Put off learning lldb for the last five years. Spent one hour writing a reference and using it to trace Postgres. Now I feel like a Jedi.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • I tried lldb’s `gui` mode for the first time today too. It needs a lot of work, but it’s pretty fun.6 years
  • gdb + lldb have some of the most inscrutable UIs ever created, but you have to appreciate that keystroke frugality (b, br l, f, fr s, l, …).6 years
  • This new bike parkade in Utrecht is mind blowing. Every country on Earth should be trying to learn from the Dutch.
    ad.nl/utrecht/groots…( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • Precious little left over for homes, parks, and people. Imagine how beautiful a well designed city could be.
    twitter.com/mateosfo/statu…( ♥ 16 ) 6 years
  • A touching series of photography journals from Asia.
    calvertjournal.com/features/show/…6 years
  • Nice piece on partitioning from Citus. A bad key decision might take years to unwind, so think deeply in advance.
    citusdata.com/blog/2017/08/0…( ♥ 10 ) 6 years
  • A list of major projects to improve pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure in urban centers around the world.
    businessinsider.com/cities-going-c…6 years
  • I find AirBnB as convenient as anyone, but full time units and increasing local rents are as natural as gravity.
    dw.com/en/airbnb-domi…6 years
  • There's also an attached stationary boutique that sells Midori. This building has the most interesting set of shops in San Francisco.6 years
  • And Heath News Stand is great. Easy place to find the best magazines like Nautilus, Drift, and the Surfer's Journal.6 years
  • Very meta: reading about Heath Ceramics from a magazine being sold inside Heath.6 years
  • It’s a great day to rewatch Alan Kay’s excellent talk “Is it really complex? Or did we just make it complicated?”
    youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1S…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • We just added request traces to Stripe’s Ruby library for dead simple operational visibility. Please try them out!
    github.com/stripe/stripe-…( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • Put together a few words on what it’s like to publish an HTML email newsletter in 2017.
    brandur.org/newsletters( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • Best guide I could find to understanding today's Bitcoin Cash fork. In short, yes it's a fork, but a modest one.
    blog.bridge21.io/before-and-aft…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years

July

  • TIL that HTML5 added `placeholder` for <input>. Love seeing clumsy JS replaced with good, standard implementations.
    developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web…6 years
  • RT @hunleyd: #Postgres Job Queues &amp; Failure By #MVCC — Brandur Leach j.mp/2uFT7so t.co/1f0FGOiAxB6 years
  • RT @mschoening: Dynamically typed languages...( ♥ 14 ) 6 years
  • Ensuring only one copy of a running program with abstract sockets (and no filesystem garbage).
    blog.petrzemek.net/2017/07/24/ens…( ♥ 11 ) 6 years
  • RT @keiko713: EPIC TIME! cc/ @hone02 and @brandur and( ♥ 17 ) 6 years
  • eprintln! is a great idea. In practice, printing to stdout/stderr is what pretty much everyone really wants to do.
    blog.rust-lang.org/2017/07/20/Rus…6 years
  • Implementing a decoder for “Rack-style” forms (map[key][]=…). Complicated enough to be the best argument for JSON input that I’ve ever seen.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • Stumbled across B's Berlin issue at Kinokuniya. Beautiful work. The city's is so amazing that even magazines on it are inspirational.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • We used to envy Riak’s technology. It was probably never a good idea, but even so, the future seemed brighter.
    theregister.co.uk/2017/07/13/wil…6 years
  • Bitcoin is better than HBO. Still priced at $2400, but the cliffs are starting to materialize out of the fog.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147587…( ♥ 11 ) 6 years
  • Portland might just be the best North American city.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • In Chrome you can paste a screenshot into a GitHub issue/PR using the “Ctrl series” of shortcuts like ⌘-Ctrl-Shift-4 (for clipboard copy).( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • The landscape photography in the “Fortitude” TV series is just ridiculously beautiful. (Filmed in Iceland of course!)( ♥ 5 ) 6 years

June

  • cmark2jira: A tiny Vim-pluggable program so you never have to type in JIRA’s needlessly divergent markup again.
    github.com/brandur/cmark2…( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • Amazing. Again and again, the SFMTA demonstrates how to be committed to Vision Zero by way of hollow rhetoric only.
    twitter.com/Bob_Gunderson/…6 years
  • The soundtrack for Interstellar is exactly as epic as you might expect.
    open.spotify.com/track/3wa4t4bc…( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • I got a good chuckle from this piece on the confining shackles of relational data.
    mongodb.com/scale/relation…( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • From Pillar Point, where the Mavericks occur off the coast in winter. Beautiful area for day exploration.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • Great article on our bad habit of pushing problems into the future. Ask not when governments will default, but how.
    bloomberg.com/view/articles/…6 years
  • I spend more time formatting text in Confluence than writing it. It’s amazing how a tool this dull can become an industry standard.( ♥ 13 ) 6 years
  • Compilation in Rust 1.18 is 15-20% faster; not bad for a point release.
    blog.rust-lang.org/2017/06/08/Rus…( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • Lets just hope that Wirth’s Law doesn’t catch up before release in December. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_l…
    twitter.com/sdw/status/871…6 years
  • Yesterday’s Mac refreshes were the most encouraging thing to come out of Apple in years; hopefully a sign of return to undistorted reality.( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • Gaiman's “Norse Mythology” is beautiful. Dark stories of gods who are heroic and wise, but also vengeful and childish.( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • John introducing Stripe Sigma. stripe.com/us/sigma( ♥ 4 ) 6 years

May

  • RT @craigkerstiens: Awesome summary of modern advanced cloud database: brandur.org/cloud-databases( ♥ 36 ) 6 years
  • In Mongo, you can’t have model validation. If it fails after state has been changed elsewhere in an operation, your DB is now inconsistent.6 years
  • RT @easiestnameever: A Comparison of Advanced, Modern Cloud Databases — thanks @brandur brandur.org/cloud-database…( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • A month on Headspace: meditated 29 of the last 32 days. Even the light accountability from an app seems to work.
    brandur.org/fragments/head…( ♥ 8 ) 6 years
  • Rust’s inclusive range operator will be `..=`.
    `..` vs `…` was always unintuitive at best, and dangerous at worst.
    github.com/rust-lang/rust…6 years
  • New York 2140 was the best sci-fi I’ve read in a while. Neat premise and interesting prose.
    newyorker.com/books/page-tur…( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • It looks like we can expect faster Spanner operations to come! This is some very cool technology.
    twitter.com/WAWilsonIV/sta…6 years
  • Exactly what gridlocked SF needs: public transit even less competitive with private parking and Uber/Lyft.
    sfmta.com/about-sfmta/bl…6 years
  • RT @jasondmoss: A Comparison of Advanced, Modern Cloud Databases
    A non-exhaustive primer of modern cloud database solutions
    @brandur bit.ly/2q4xzXG6 years
  • RT @grescoe: Need a vacation from traffic? 11 gorgeous car-free places around the world (incl. Leonard Cohen's Hydra). bit.ly/2qVHNK0( ♥ 17 ) 6 years
  • When talking databases, we spend a lot of time on surface veneer when we should be focusing on the foundations for operable software.( ♥ 5 ) 6 years
  • RT @craigkerstiens: Always enjoy what @brandur writes, another nice read on ACID and constraints - brandur.org/acid( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • Very exciting progress on Rust’s incremental compilation towards a faster edit-compile-debug loop.
    blog.rust-lang.org/2017/05/15/rus…6 years
  • An aspirational piece on reducing moving parts, retiring things, and KISS at Lockheed’s Skunk Works.
    brandur.org/minimalism( ♥ 21 ) 6 years
  • The Atrium under LinkedIn is such a beautiful space. The walls slide open around midday and it becomes open air.
    flickr.com/photos/brandur…6 years
  • Postgres is now available with HA on all three major clouds. No excuses left for using questionable databases.
    azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services…( ♥ 15 ) 6 years
  • Fun walk up Mount Diablo last weekend. Looking forward to returning for tarantula season.
    flickr.com/photos/brandur…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • RT @rdegges: YES. This is how you do technical management.( ♥ 13 ) 6 years
  • I tried to summarize how Mongo came into its reputation of losing data (and how it can be durable today).
    brandur.org/fragments/mong…( ♥ 42 ) 6 years
  • Excited to say that Stripe webhooks are now signed and most of our libraries provide helpers to easily verify them.
    stripe.com/docs/webhooks#…( ♥ 12 ) 6 years
  • The chasm between the places we all understand to be beautiful and the smoggy hellscapes we build is fascinating.
    twitter.com/AndrewAPrice/s…( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • At this point a collapse of Canadian housing is preferable to today’s rough trend — a generational caste system based on real estate access.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • TypeScript is an obvious improvement over JS, but why set the bar so low? Is it just for backwards compatibility?( ♥ 6 ) 6 years

April

  • I’m interested in OS packaging, but clueless about it. Here’s the patch to get Alacritty building into a .app/.dmg.
    github.com/jwilm/alacritt…6 years
  • Partitioning, indexes, a short anecdote of Mongo v. Postgres, and choosing good databases.
    brandur.org/fragments/mong…( ♥ 13 ) 6 years
  • Zeit's CLI-based domain purchasing is neat. We talked about that at Heroku since circa 2011, but didn't execute.
    zeit.co/domains( ♥ 22 ) 6 years
  • A few words to disspell the common misconception that GraphQL APIs are inherently non-performant.
    brandur.org/fragments/grap…( ♥ 17 ) 6 years
  • And a great conversation about how apps exploit human weaknesses to hijack our attention, and what to do about it.
    samharris.org/podcast/item/w…( ♥ 6 ) 6 years
  • Great long form piece on why cascading makes CSS incredibly painful to scale (2016).
    mrmrs.io/writing/2016/0…6 years
  • gpg-agent/ssh-agent and shell env var injection, in theory: elegant example of the Unix philosophy.
    In practice: configuration nightmare.( ♥ 4 ) 6 years
  • I started using ctrl-py-matcher for CtrlP matching in Vim. It’s a quantum leap forward if you’re in big repos.
    github.com/FelikZ/ctrlp-p…6 years
  • Masterpiece from The Economist on how minimum parking rules and parking subsidization mandate terrible cities.
    economist.com/news/briefing/…( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • This 5-line POC was worth $10k. Lots of interesting lessons on why to avoid an overly permissive language in here.
    hackerone.com/reports/1809776 years
  • After paying ~$480k for MRuby bug bounties, Shopify gave up, rolled out kernel sandboxing, and cut bounties 10x.
    hackerone.com/shopify-scripts6 years
  • Apparently at some point I took a wrong turn in life.
    twitter.com/dcurtis/status…( ♥ 7 ) 6 years

March

  • I’m obnoxiously proud of my first patch to Postgres. Thanks @petervgeoghegan for some serious assists!
    github.com/postgres/postg…( ♥ 12 ) 6 years
  • RT @johnsheehan: This is required reading. Couldn't agree more with every bit of it. twitter.com/brandur/status…( ♥ 7 ) 6 years
  • A few words on GraphQL and how to build the next frontier of compelling web APIs.
    brandur.org/api-paradigms( ♥ 64 ) 6 years
  • Does anyone have an easy/fast way of getting new content like PDFs to iOS devices? I’ve been using Dropbox, but so many steps involved.6 years
  • Okay, I was wrong about AirPods. They’re great.
    brandur.org/fragments/airp…6 years
  • cURL’s author claimed that C wasn’t the cause of past security vulnerabilities.
    But then someone fact checked.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139669…( ♥ 9 ) 6 years
  • Excellent discussion on maintaining an independent blog in the age of social media.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139661…6 years
  • Built my first flexbox layout today. Still can be painful to debug, but good enough that I never want to touch a “float” or a “clear” again.( ♥ 14 ) 7 years
  • So hard to say how to handle this. The wealthy have no right to the city, but I’m not sure just being incumbent is as virtuous as portrayed.7 years
  • As prices soar in Berlin, the fight against entropy begins.
    nytimes.com/2017/03/18/wor…7 years
  • Genius, Zapier. A few years in the Bay with a net worth under 7 figures is enough to give anyone existential angst.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138947…( ♥ 10 ) 7 years
  • Instead of lowering the bar everywhere to egregious WYSIWYG interfaces, we should be raising it by teaching the world Markdown.( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • Confluence is a perfectly bad example of optimizing for a little discoverability over any possibility of being able to use it productively.7 years
  • To the detriment of us all, time will show that Wirth’s law is more robust than Moore’s.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_l…7 years
  • I’m embarrassed to admit how much I learnt from this article on unicode. It’s so good that I read it twice.
    reedbeta.com/blog/programme…( ♥ 36 ) 7 years
  • Yes! We’ll be seeing The Grid again.
    twitter.com/rands/status/8…7 years
  • This level of self-awareness and reflection is vanishingly rare amongst programming language designers. Bravo Rust.
    blog.rust-lang.org/2017/03/02/lan…( ♥ 7 ) 7 years
  • RT @anildash: Another excellent recent writing on tech architecture, @brandur on idempotency: stripe.com/blog/idempoten… Lucidly explains key concepts.( ♥ 57 ) 7 years

February

  • Writing Ruby without tests is like doing 120 km/h on the highway with a blindfold on.
    Total catastrophe isn’t a question of if, but when.( ♥ 11 ) 7 years
  • On the rare days that I wake up at 4 and experience the hour’s calm and clarity, I realize how stupid it is not to do it every day.( ♥ 15 ) 7 years
  • RT @Runscope: Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency by @brandur: stripe.com/blog/idempoten…( ♥ 7 ) 7 years
  • “Innovation” is the wrong word given prior art like EC2 client tokens. Thanks for keeping me honest @danfarina :)
    twitter.com/brandur/status…( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • RT @happywebcoder: Another great API technique from @stripe: Idempotency keys stripe.com/blog/idempotency If I could, I'd pay @brandur to write…7 years
  • Idempotency keys in particular are a favorite HTTP API innovation from Stripe.
    twitter.com/stripe/status/…( ♥ 30 ) 7 years
  • From running Mount Tam this morning.( ♥ 13 ) 7 years
  • Advice for the 99%: don’t use the tech du jour. Do use an RDMS with ACID guarantees. Probably just use Postgres.
    blog.sagemath.com/2017/02/09/ret…( ♥ 192 ) 7 years
  • Your database is the most important decision you’ll make in a tech stack. It will be a source of incredible leverage or profound sorrow.( ♥ 36 ) 7 years
  • Foundational software written in software that’s safe, approachable, and extensible is an important idea, and Rust is making it a reality.( ♥ 8 ) 7 years
  • I just landed my first patch into Alacritty, a Rust terminal. There are so many reasons to like this project.
    github.com/jwilm/alacritty( ♥ 6 ) 7 years
  • Unreasonably excited about plugins, sort.Slice, and server.Shutdown in Go 1.8. All solutions for real problems.7 years

January

  • (Last Saturday) Beautiful terrain on the way up to Fort Point.
    flickr.com/photos/brandur…7 years
  • RT @mattgreenrocks: Superb. We squander tons of technology and the user's time for eye candy. twitter.com/brandur/status/8253626816578314257 years
  • I wrote a contrarian piece arguing for user interfaces that are more like terminals, and less like the web.
    brandur.org/interfaces( ♥ 68 ) 7 years
  • It’s sad to see such a vibrant ecosystem go. Once Firefox is on WebExtensions, you may as well just use Chrome.
    fasezero.com7 years
  • Great talk on why lauding violence and silencing minute differences in opinion isn’t good liberal policy.
    5by5.tv/roadwork/547 years
  • RT @leinweber: @brandur look how many slack channels I’m in!7 years
  • Timely article on the nefarious effect of modern technology on attention span. Don’t romanticize interrupts.
    backchannel.com/how-i-got-my-a…( ♥ 12 ) 7 years
  • I’m really jealous of Paris’ mayor. SF would be a better place with someone even half as progressive at the helm.
    independent.co.uk/news/world/eur…7 years
  • My brother doing some Canadian sunbathing near Hidden Lake. Ambient high: -15C.
    flickr.com/photos/brandur…7 years
  • Some great timelapses of the new 35,000 metric ton Chernobyl sarcophagus being built and carted 300m into place.
    bbc.com/future/story/2…( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • My dad managed to capture the one second all day that my parallel looked decent too.( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • Backcountry ski trip up to Bow Summit yesterday.
    flickr.com/photos/brandur…7 years
  • Glad to not the only one that notices this. I don’t go to movies in Canada anymore because the ads are so extreme.
    reddit.com/r/canada/comme…7 years

2016

December

  • Browser-based interfaces like Electron and co. are being billed as the future, but they’re a future that’s distinctly worse than the past.( ♥ 11 ) 7 years
  • I’d pay money for a Spotify client as fast and responsive as Winamp 2.* running on a 200 MHz Pentium in 1998.( ♥ 25 ) 7 years
  • I’m very excited about Rocket. It’s Sinatra/Ruby with years more thinking to refine it to a far more perfect form.
    rocket.rs/overview/( ♥ 14 ) 7 years
  • This would be an incredible tragedy for the interestingness of SF. I, for one, have resolved to spend more money.
    twitter.com/dnalounge/stat…7 years
  • Now that we’ll have AirPod reviews in about a week, here’s my prediction: they’re not very good.( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • Going to check out the Rust Bay Area meetup tonight.
    meetup.com/Rust-Bay-Area/…7 years
  • It just hit me, but podcasts are now my vastly preferred media format when measured by consumption time. TV and books aren’t even close.7 years
  • I’m somewhat comforted by the nearly universal tepid reactions to the new MBP. Even Cupertino might have to pay attention this time.7 years
  • It’s a huge honor for redis-cell to have been selected as the winner! What a fun project. Thank you Redis labs!
    twitter.com/itamarhaber/st…( ♥ 16 ) 7 years
  • ”Team Tetris” and “success theater” are my new favorite organizational anti-patterns.
    hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre…( ♥ 7 ) 7 years

November

  • Was pleasantly surprised to discover that rclone’s crypt module is powered by NaCL.
    github.com/ncw/rclone/blo…7 years
  • Not the driest day in Napa, but incredibly picturesque.( ♥ 8 ) 7 years
  • RT @simonw: Smart description of great logging practice - I also learnt Heroku-style key=value logging has a formal name, logfmt brandur.org/logfmt twitter.com/brandur/status…( ♥ 14 ) 7 years
  • Wrote a piece on “canonical log lines”, a cool idea for operational visibility at Stripe.
    brandur.org/canonical-log-…( ♥ 58 ) 7 years
  • 5+ years into programming Ruby. Still awed by the sheer number of and breadth of ways this language lets you shoot yourself in the foot.( ♥ 14 ) 7 years
  • “No Escape”, killing the Esc button habit in Vim: brandur.org/fragments/no-e…
    (I went with Ctrl+C after all.)7 years
  • Retraining Vim muscle memory to use Ctrl+L to leave normal mode in case the no-Esc phenomena spreads. Stockholm syndrome dialed to 11.7 years
  • RT @itamarhaber: redis-cell: an API rate limiter as a Redis module - news.ycombinator.com/item?id=129797… by @brandur <- first module to written in #Rust, totally cool7 years
  • Microsoft dominating the front page right now. What an upset compared to five years back.( ♥ 5 ) 7 years
  • I put a few old Star Trek scenes through Primitive. This program is incredible. github.com/fogleman/primi…7 years
  • Been way too long since I was up here.( ♥ 9 ) 7 years
  • A+ commentary from Dan Carlin post-election.
    overcast.fm/+CxteFe0( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • Also, I’m loving the improvement in visual hygiene conveyed by the new `?` operator: github.com/brandur/redis-…7 years
  • A site dedicated to tracking compile time performance in Rust. This work is as important as tuning runtime speed.
    perf.rust-lang.org7 years
  • For anyone on stripe-ruby: I’d recommend upgrading to 1.56.1. We just squashed a pretty vicious memory leak.
    github.com/stripe/stripe-…7 years
  • The ~30 lines of code that bootstrap a Rust program that’s about to be run. Quite succinct and readable.
    github.com/rust-lang/rust…7 years
  • $1/month hosting if you can fit into 64 MB. So many possibilities!
    hyper.sh/pricing.html7 years
  • Cross-compiled binaries and automated CI-based releases to GitHub going in < 2 hours with rust-everywhere.
    github.com/japaric/rust-e…7 years
  • rustfmt check on line length is such a killer feature. It’s barely even possible to deviate from language conventions.( ♥ 5 ) 7 years

October

  • The Esc key gets bumped and the Fn key gets to stay and continue eating prime real estate. Most disappointing Mac refresh of all time.( ♥ 10 ) 7 years
  • Great seeing Rust take fast edit-compile-debug seriously. Of paramount importance day-to-day, but so often ignored.
    github.com/aturon/rfcs/bl…( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • It’s a little depressing how hard it is to make columns look good and be pragmatic on a screen. Not even The New Yorker will go near them.7 years
  • Just watched ”Oblivion” (2013). Maybe a little heavy on the sci-fi tropes, but still an A+ movie.7 years
  • Why walled gardens are bad: Mozilla changes APIs, breaking add-ons, then takes a week and half to approve a fix.
    github.com/vimperator/vim…7 years
  • Learn more about Redshift gotchas in 30 seconds than the official docs will tell you in 3 hours.
    github.com/open-guides/og…( ♥ 7 ) 7 years
  • Imagine if Andromeda focused on native performance over web-based everything and function over form (animations, copious whitespace).7 years
  • Just finished Mr. Robot S2. I can no longer tell whether this show is genius or just preposterously dramatic.( ♥ 4 ) 7 years

September

  • I totally missed that CloudFront added support for HTTP/2. That’s awesome.
    aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-…7 years
  • Death Guild has playlists going back to 1995. Amazing.
    deathguild.com/playlists/7 years
  • I’m absolutely loving GitHub’s new code review feature. Easily the best implementation of this idea I’ve ever seen.( ♥ 8 ) 7 years
  • The new “Projects” feature is really fun to use too. With just a little luck, this could be the end of Trello and JIRA.( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • GitHub Universe’s announcements were a lot more exciting than anything Apple did in September.
    github.com/blog/2256-a-wh…( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • A beautiful night in Calgary.( ♥ 7 ) 7 years
  • DB migrations at scale (20 PB!) are nearly impossibly difficult, but laudable when pulled off. Bravo Yandex!
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124890…( ♥ 5 ) 7 years
  • The problem with being at home: too many treats. Even with a daily 10+ km I can’t stay calorie neutral.7 years
  • From the bucket of things I never expected to see, the Magic: The Gathering World Championship final.( ♥ 12 ) 7 years

August

  • Living through years of Monday to Saturday (and often Sunday) 8 AM to 7 PM next door construction is enough to NIMBYize anyone.7 years
  • And the (currently hypothetical) talk of replacing libpq and pg gem in Rails with a Rust package is exciting to say the least.7 years
  • There’s a great discussion on the Postgres wire protocol in this episode of ”The Bike Shed”.
    overcast.fm/+DuasjJ0Bc7 years
  • Another eel: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123758…
    But seriously, I hope good alternatives appear before I end up rolling my own NaCL-based vault.7 years
  • Repost of a 2014 article on housing in the Bay Area. Though slightly dated, it’s still the best ever written.
    techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-…7 years
  • GItLab’s slash commands are a game changer.
    gitlab.com/help/workflow/…
    More of this and less clicking on little boxes please.( ♥ 5 ) 7 years
  • Around here, you can tell that a new Tartine has opened without even looking at the sign.7 years
  • Goroutines and channels are perfect primitives, but there’s room for a worker queue abstraction in the language.
    gobyexample.com/worker-pools7 years
  • “taxpayers are subsidising housing borrowers to the tune of up to $150 billion a year, or 1% of GDP”
    economist.com/news/leaders/2…7 years
  • Check out our new docs: stripe.com/docs
    Features a great new design, fast XHR loading, rich code snippets, and contextual API keys.( ♥ 10 ) 7 years
  • Building a robust state machine to run cloud servers by @danfarina.
    citusdata.com/blog/2016/08/1…7 years
  • I just realized today that Splunk uses Highcharts for their visualizations. What a great library.7 years
  • Had a great run across the bridge today, then immediately undid by getting a fully loaded coffee at Philz.( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • The only reason we don’t have drivers doing this in San Francisco is that there aren’t any pedestrian-only paths.
    youtube.com/watch?v=BHJxIw…7 years
  • Very sloppy indentation from Mr. Robot. They didn’t quite manage to capture the OCD of real hackers.( ♥ 15 ) 7 years
  • RT @leinweber: Problem: I want to add/drop/change a column or index on a live db( ♥ 102 ) 7 years
  • The best pro-Postgres article you’ll read this year: githubengineering.com/gh-ost-github-…( ♥ 23 ) 7 years
  • I get nostalgic when reading engineering documents written as Gists. Their page layout and formatting is perfect.( ♥ 8 ) 7 years

July

  • Like you needed another reason to never use Comodo, but here’s one anyway.
    thehackerblog.com/keeping-positi…
    Previously: letsencrypt.org/2016/06/23/def…7 years
  • A measurably more informed meta-explanation of Uber’s Postgres article earlier this week.
    use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2016-07-2…7 years
  • Picked up the idea of verifying env vars in CLIs (liked Etcd) off a CoreOS talk at HeavyBit’s DevGuild this week.
    brandur.org/fragments/veri…7 years
  • A few words on the unbalanced nature of hype when it comes to new technology.
    brandur.org/fragments/hype…7 years
  • Proof that it’s possible to build a compelling case for any idea. Jar Jar Binks is Supreme Leader Snoke:
    reddit.com/r/StarWars/com…7 years
  • Beautiful magazine of the week: “Cereal”, a travel and style publication out of the UK.( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • Great article on Lionhead.
    eurogamer.net/articles/2016-…
    ”Molyneux's other directive: Fable 2 must have a dog. And that dog must die.”7 years
  • Imagine a city built with pedestrian paths through protected tree-lined groves. Not conventional, but possible.
    newyorker.com/tech/elements/…7 years
  • Wow, collapsable comments on Hacker News. I never thought I’d live long enough to see the day.( ♥ 5 ) 7 years
  • Interesting take on underlying Marxist themes in “Spirited Away”.
    np.reddit.com/r/pics/comment…7 years
  • A beautifully laid out page for Dieter Rams’ ten principles for good design.
    vitsoe.com/us/about/good-…7 years
  • The SF dilemma: don’t really want to carry around a coat all day, but kind of want one for later tonight.7 years

June

  • An example of a C to Rust rewrite largely for reasons of security. Hopefully the first of many.
    blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/06/l…7 years
  • An Apple employee tried to convince me today that the Watch was a big surprise when it landed. Reality distortion field still at full power.( ♥ 6 ) 7 years
  • Catching up on what’s possibly the only series more epic than “A Song of Fire and Ice”.7 years
  • AFK while I go get my Icelandic flag and Brennivín.7 years
  • “Roy Hodgson, who gets paid £3.5 million a year, just lost to an Iceland manager who is a part time dentist.”
    reddit.com/r/sports/comme…7 years
  • Picked up “Amazing Layout Design” today. It’s an absolutely amazing resource for design inspiration.( ♥ 7 ) 7 years
  • It’s time.7 years
  • Totally understandable though.
    Who could’ve known that putting up “we live here” ads in SOMA wouldn’t be an effective speed deterrent!7 years
  • Two dead bicyclists in two separate incidents in SF today due to excessive speed.
    Vision Zero is just a hair’s breadth out of reach!7 years
  • I enjoyed “Food Rules“. If there were rules this succinct for all good habits, we’d all be a lot more healthy.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Rule…7 years
  • 8 years of < 0.5% interest, yet all but one member calls for +1-2% in 2017. Fantasy or dishonesty; take your pick.
    economist.com/blogs/freeexch…7 years
  • It took four years to make even minor incremental progress on this deranged behavior.
    bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/66477 years
  • Do members of the Java community have feelings about Lombok? We’re considering its use in Stripe’s Java bindings.
    github.com/stripe/stripe-…7 years
  • I’m convinced that many savvy couples are buying artificial diamonds for each other and no one else has a clue.
    racked.com/2016/6/14/1187…( ♥ 5 ) 7 years
  • It turns out that like many other things, drawing up a meditation calendar was the easy part. Actual meditation has so far been elusive.( ♥ 4 ) 7 years
  • Just what the world needed: annoying effects on text messages.
    Next up Apple will be announcing the revival of the <marquee> tag.( ♥ 9 ) 7 years
  • Ran a short Calorie counting experiment last week. Conclusion: my eating habits are terrifyingly bad.
    brandur.org/fragments/one-…7 years
  • Apple, don’t totally compromise usability for perceived aesthetics. There’s still time to avoid this catastrophe.
    xda-developers.com/killing-the-po…7 years
  • One day I hope to see even _one_ North American city making efforts on this scale.
    citylab.com/cityfixer/2015…7 years
  • Japan is going to show the world the limits of debt-fueled growth. It’s more of a question of where the ceiling is.
    business.financialpost.com/midas-letter/b…7 years
  • With masterful use of promises and callback abstractions, you can almost get back to readable source code.
    github.com/heroku/heroku-…( ♥ 11 ) 7 years

May

  • RT @paulg: How journalism became "Go troll Twitter for something to get mad about." goo.gl/IBTCxH( ♥ 148 ) 7 years
  • America’s saved.
    twitter.com/ped/status/736…( ♥ 8 ) 7 years
  • A dozen Lambda users; a dozen different frameworks to manage it.
    news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117516…7 years
  • RT @Michiel_DeWilde: Nice article of @brandur about static sites on AWS buff.ly/24OhXlu7 years
  • “You are no longer half-human half-camera … wonderful if you want candid, real photographs.”
    newyorker.com/tech/elements/…7 years
  • There is no team on Earth better at finding Kindles and iPads than Copenhagen airport security.7 years

April

  • Think long and hard about whether you actually have big data before leaving that RDMS behind friends. It’s tempting to think you’re Google.( ♥ 18 ) 7 years
  • A 2300-word document on how to build a 2-phase commit in Mongo to get consistency beyond the document level. docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutoria…( ♥ 5 ) 7 years
  • Head over to stripe.com/docs/api and bask in its newly ~instantaneous load time.
    Brought to you by @michaelvillar and @romainhuet.( ♥ 22 ) 7 years
  • You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful day in SF yesterday.( ♥ 6 ) 7 years
  • RT @gudmundur: New version of Pliny out (https://t.co/PirHDDPJvW), now with @rollbar goodness (https://t.co/JcBRKx8eeV).7 years
  • This episode of Surprisingly Awesome really helps to concrete the basics of musical theory. Highly recommended.
    gimletmedia.com/episode/10-cir…7 years
  • This should've happened fifteen years ago. But as they say, better late than never.
    revolutionizehaight.org( ♥ 9 ) 7 years
  • RT @apiaryio: 4/16 @github offices: World’s first ever hackathon focused on #APIDesign. Co-organized by our @manp. Join us! bit.ly/APIDesignHacka…( ♥ 7 ) 7 years
  • A very informative article on Kubernetes and its predecessors at Google.
    queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=…( ♥ 6 ) 7 years
  • If you’re in SF, you should considering coming to join us next Saturday at GitHub to talk about APIs!
    meetup.com/API-Craft-San-…( ♥ 8 ) 7 years
  • Using AWS Lambda as an online, serverless cron machine. brandur.org/aws-intrinsic-…( ♥ 27 ) 7 years
  • RT @gavingmiller: .@brandur great post on static sites: brandur.org/aws-intrinsic-… Appreciate the SSL & CD part, was the missing piece for me.7 years
  • RT @bonjouryannick: Always great to read notes on languages from great developers: brandur.org/go Thanks @brandur.7 years
  • RT @tair: Excellent notes on #golang from a seasoned #ruby dev @brandur 👍Language features, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly brandur.org/go7 years
  • RT @rwdaigle: logfmt is still the most pragmatic, functional, and concise log output format I’ve seen. Keep it simple, folks! brandur.org/logfmt#human( ♥ 4 ) 7 years

March

  • Amended this article for the first time in years. logrus-style logfmt with a human-readable message is a good idea.
    brandur.org/logfmt#human7 years
  • This is the single most concise example of the Go team’s “only we can be right” philosophy that I’ve found to date.
    github.com/golang/lint/is…( ♥ 10 ) 7 years
  • It’s like Christmas every time a new Hardcore History episode is released.
    King of Kings, episode II. dancarlin.com/hardcore-histo…( ♥ 4 ) 8 years
  • I’m so used to printers failing in every creative way imaginable that when one is “just” out of paper, it takes time to realize it.( ♥ 5 ) 8 years
  • GitHub’s `ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md` is atrocious for anyone that writes commit messages.8 years
  • Great “Common Sense” episode featuring its usual measured take on the Supreme Court's Justices and Apple encryption. dancarlin.com/product/common…8 years

February

  • “This Must Be the Place” isn't a good movie, but its rendition of the Talking Heads song of the same name was great. youtube.com/watch?v=rVoPzA…8 years
  • API Craft SF is holding an IoT event next week. You should come check it out!
    meetup.com/API-Craft-San-…8 years
  • I’m always surprised to see the low ratings of ”Pandorum”. It’s one of the best sci-fi *and* one of the best horror films of all time.8 years
  • After two hours of native extension compilation problems, I now know more about Bundler and Nokogiri configuration than I ever wanted to.8 years
  • Trying github.com/Homebrew/homeb… for service management on OSX today because the interface of `launchctl` is still trapped firmly in the 80s.8 years
  • RT @obfuscurity: So many feels and fond memories of an amazing engineering culture recalled via @brandur’s take on Heroku Values. brandur.org/heroku-values( ♥ 13 ) 8 years

January

  • First major UI error I’ve seen GitHub make: tabs changed to arrow thing on the PR view … but only from the code tab.8 years
  • World’s most awesome club event: “We're dressing up DNA Lounge as Cyberdelia, the club from Hackers …”
    dnalounge.com/calendar/2016/…8 years
  • Have been ignorant of CSS3’s “rem” (root em) unit all these years. It’s a far more sustainable way to build styles. github.com/brandur/org/co…8 years
  • I seem be the only person who didn’t like Star Wars VII, but by the time Disney releases episode XVII in 2025, I’ll have company.8 years
  • Never thought I’d see the day: I was just issued a wildcard certificate for free. AWS Certificate Manager is amazing.( ♥ 7 ) 8 years
  • There is so much Canadian schadenfreude for Alberta despite the CAD’s value suggesting that all the country’s eggs were in one basket.8 years
  • Bitcoin: better than fiction. medium.com/@octskyward/th…8 years
  • There’s nothing better for improving humility than attending your local Haskell meetup. First talk lost me in ~5 minutes.( ♥ 7 ) 8 years
  • In memory of Bowie, the Lohner mix of Disco King, the only good thing to come out of the Underworld film series. youtube.com/watch?v=b2gMMZ…8 years
  • Clever Jaws parody poster. behance.net/gallery/289482…8 years
  • What you always suspected but could never confirm: the changes in T-short width/height by wash cycle.
    threadbase.com/unravelled8 years
  • Crazy. You still can’t have both HTTPS *and* index documents when hosting a static website on AWS.
    brandur.org/fragments/aws-…( ♥ 6 ) 8 years
  • Food for thought on alternatives to moving the social responsibility of contract-level workers to corporations.
    timharford.com/2015/12/an-eco…8 years
  • How to get Vim to stop adding two spaces between sentences when you realign with `gq`: `set nojoinspaces`.
    stackoverflow.com/questions/4760…8 years
  • After missing the target for a few years, finally ran 1000 miles in 2015. brandur.org/runs( ♥ 7 ) 8 years

2015

December

  • With the Rotten Tomatoes rating system applied to TV, you need to be wary of anything rated < 98%.8 years
  • Elk Valley and the Fernie townsite viewed from the top of the Great Bear. flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years
  • Excellent article on the effect of sensor size on ISO and aperture. northrup.photo/gear-basics/ca…( ♥ 4 ) 8 years
  • The company X-mas party is roughly the one time a year that I regret not having a tailor.8 years
  • Or for creativity/WTF value, try Prophet. Set 10,000 years in the future after the rise and fall of a space empire.
    drop-brandur.s3.amazonaws.com/prophet.jpg8 years
  • Comic recommendation: Tokyo Ghost. Start reading for the art. Stay for the contemporary themes.
    drop-brandur.s3.amazonaws.com/tokyo-ghost.jpg8 years
  • Classic Haskell documentation technique: throw you straight into the deep end. Or maybe the Mariana Trench. hackage.haskell.org/package/lens-4…8 years
  • Breguet’s Marie Antoinette watch, designed to include every complication known at the time.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Ant… flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years
  • Kramer preparing to enter a scene (via Reddit). i.imgur.com/jKgvheE.png8 years

November

  • Scala has the special distinction of being the only language that makes Objective-C look beautiful in comparison.( ♥ 7 ) 8 years
  • A rare view of what technology inside a technology company is really like. gigamonkeys.com/flowers/
    (via @muyfine)8 years
  • Go’s ast package is worth taking a look at. Surprisingly digestible considering that it’s a non-trivial problem.
    github.com/golang/go/blob…8 years
  • Nothing makes you appreciate how hard it is to write fiction like NaNoWriMo.8 years

October

  • How to prevent that thing where OS X makes the dubious decision to disconnect your wifi when you lock your screen.
    apple.stackexchange.com/questions/7188…( ♥ 6 ) 8 years
  • Winning comment of the Internet yesterday. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104742…8 years
  • The power of low interest rates: major recession and widespread layoffs; < 5% change in real estate prices. creb.com/Seller_Resourc…8 years
  • From 2002: the technology may have been worse, but the *nix desktop had a brighter future. anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/scr…8 years
  • The major differences between Dreamforce and OpenWorld are one month and that one is red and one is blue.8 years
  • A chilly evening up on Twin Peaks yesterday.( ♥ 7 ) 8 years
  • Amazing work by Oslo and Madrid. techinsider.io/oslo-bans-cars…
    Meanwhile we’re fighting to raise two blocks of bike lane on Market by two inches.8 years
  • Daily tool sharpening: if on OS X, download Karabiner, and drop “Key Repeat” down to 20 ms. Changes everything.( ♥ 5 ) 8 years
  • In honor of the Rick & Morty finale (which was genius), here's the Johnny Cash cover of “Hurt.” youtube.com/watch?v=vt1Pwf…8 years
  • “It is now impossible, reckons Dr Zerbo, to test even a small nuclear weapon in secret anywhere on Earth.” economist.com/news/technolog…8 years

September

  • Patrick Collison, Alan Kay, and Stewart Brand sitting over a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog. t.co/WS8fls1d2C8 years
  • Daily tool sharpening: ripper-tags (more accurate ctags for Ruby).
    github.com/tmm1/ripper-ta…8 years
  • Daily tool sharpening: github.vim (open in browser or get a URL for selected lines). github.com/solars/github-…8 years
  • Also, Starbucks went through with it and killed La Boulange. Bummer. Best duck confit ever. t.co/UBnYxQaerb8 years
  • And all of it is yours and mine. So let’s ride and ride and ride and ride. t.co/nsrCu69uZX8 years
  • Today's tool sharpening: set-option -g allow-rename off
    (Have Tmux windows keep the same name you set for them.)8 years
  • Great rendition of La Malagueña (in the style of “Once Upon A Time In Mexico”). youtube.com/watch?v=YZWudN…8 years
  • Not to mention that every frame of the movie is beautiful enough to print and hang on a wall. t.co/7qQDlCkfRH8 years
  • And related: despite a formulaic story, Tron Legacy stands the test of time. Visuals, dialog, soundtrack, aesthetic, ideas; all top notch.8 years
  • Re-post, but this article on the UIs and effects of Tron Legacy by @jtnimoy is still one of favorites.
    jtnimoy.com/blogs/projects…8 years
  • Day one of week between jobs: tennis, writing, and running. t.co/BuwzXpEVuR( ♥ 8 ) 8 years
  • Tool sharpening today: textobj-rubyblock. vim.org/scripts/script…8 years
  • The “important questions” section in RbNaCl's README is a classic: github.com/cryptosphere/r…8 years
  • Ported RbNaCl's simplebox wrapper to Golang (simple API to fast crypto using XSalsa20 and Poly1305): github.com/brandur/simple…8 years
  • I'm incredibly excited to announce that I'll be joining the talented engineering team over at @stripe.( ♥ 33 ) 8 years
  • Added pull request links to the bottom of my articles in the hopes of pity-driven contributions of grammar corrections.8 years

August

  • Breaking down compost at the community garden. This is the most San Francisco thing that I’ve done in months. t.co/HxBAgT4m8t( ♥ 6 ) 8 years
  • I was really starting to feel like I was the only person on Earth who felt that way about Slack/HipChat/whatever. Phew.
    @ here @ here ^^^8 years
  • “We lose control of our time and what was once creative, intentional work turns into a constant stream of noise.” guilded.co/blog/2015/08/2…( ♥ 7 ) 8 years
  • I never cease to be amazed by the energy (and tolerance for pain) of the Haskell community. blog.ezyang.com/2015/08/help-u…8 years
  • Dropped today: a new GCRA-based (genetic cell rate algorithm) rate limiting implementation by @agmetcalf. github.com/throttled/thro…8 years
  • RT @blakegentry: AT&T provides a great example of why every site should use HTTPS, even personal blogs. Just use free @CloudFlare TLS! webpolicy.org/2015/08/25/att…( ♥ 8 ) 8 years
  • RT @bonjouryannick: Great article on alerting by @brandur brandur.org/alerting( ♥ 4 ) 8 years
  • RT @dmathieu: Awesome blog post from @brandur on designing alerts. brandur.org/alerting8 years
  • I really like the concise wording and unusual flow of this article on John Isner from the New Yorker.
    newyorker.com/news/sporting-…8 years
  • Finally jumped ship from Rdio. This bug was the straw that broke the camel’s back. t.co/dnTKRgCFVI8 years
  • Slightly disappointed that Thrift generates language bindings exactly how you'd expect that it would. github.com/apache/thrift/…8 years
  • Four paragraphs on “The End of the Tour”.
    brandur.org/fragments/the-…8 years
  • Really interesting article on the Academy of Art University (privately owned post-secondary) in San Francisco. forbes.com/sites/katiasav…8 years
  • "She said, 'Infinite Jest. Every guy I've ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf.'" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_o…8 years
  • Never thought I'd see the day. A Bond Seamaster without a tacky tiled 007 background or "gun" second hand. omegawatches.com/news/internati…8 years
  • A few words on how to improve legacy code.
    brandur.org/fragments/lega…8 years
  • Monodraw's diagrams look better than any text to SVG programs that I've tried. Plain text continues to dominate. t.co/zmNGr1ATSS( ♥ 4 ) 8 years
  • Trying OmniGraffle right now, but so far with mediocre results.8 years
  • If anyone has any leads on software to create low-effort, beautiful, retina-enabled flow charts and diagrams, I'd love to have them.8 years
  • The next version of iTerm2 can display images! iterm2.com/images.html t.co/1kN5YMpHn1( ♥ 32 ) 8 years
  • Finally got around to reading “The Everything Store” about Amazon/Bezos. That’s one well-written book.8 years
  • The most concise description of the tax implications of exercising start-up options of pretty much all time. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100203…8 years
  • Someone needs to tell Nike that there’s such a thing as too much branding though. I have the physical equivalent of a popup ad on my feet.8 years
  • Where have these Lunar 3s been all my life. Great look, quality build, and amazing to run with. t.co/duYJPV7L3r8 years

July

  • RT @patrickc: Inefficient waste of what could be a bustling riverside freeway, like FDR Drive in NYC. #urbanplanning t.co/rSu3wgdHun( ♥ 39 ) 8 years
  • RT @patrickc: One of the coolest urban design projects I've ever seen: gardenbridge.london. t.co/hfjn8EYgNY( ♥ 65 ) 8 years
  • Nice article on SV and the Bay Area from the Economist this week. “To fly, to fall, to fly again”
    economist.com/news/briefing/…8 years
  • Top knot inspiration album from /r/mfa. imgur.com/a/pSrly8 years
  • Love the tweak to GitHub's build/merge section today. The subtle updates from their design team continue to impress. t.co/pdxmpC0zj1( ♥ 4 ) 8 years
  • It's so hot these days that I've started breaking the cardinal rule of SF: carry a hoodie or jacket with you everywhere.8 years
  • vim-go is incredible. It's like being back in Visual Studio but without the multi-second lag on every action. github.com/fatih/vim-go( ♥ 4 ) 8 years
  • Write-up on what it's like to be doored, and how the motorist in question is at no risk regardless of negligence. nowtoronto.com/news/mean-stre…8 years
  • Excellent article on Canada's recent economic transition into a recession. macleans.ca/economy/econom…8 years
  • Was lucky enough to get a comprehensive tour of the @hello offices yesterday. Those people are doing some amazing things.8 years
  • Used upsert for the first time in an app today. So, so convenient.( ♥ 5 ) 8 years
  • US infrastructure design: “... between 2009 and 2013 pedestrian deaths jumped by 15% as the economy recovered” economist.com/news/united-st…8 years
  • Furious 7 throws so much utter unapologetic nonsense at you that your mind eventually shuts down and you become free.8 years

June

  • At the behest of @danfarina, decided to see how much the Ed25519 paper would hurt my head. A lot, as it turns out. flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years
  • [Spoilers] Same thread. Some insight into how Ted in HIMYM may have narrated unreliably to justify the series ending. reddit.com/r/AskReddit/co…8 years
  • Nice write-up on Reddit comparing the endings of the comic and movie versions of the Watchmen. reddit.com/r/AskReddit/co…8 years
  • "Garden of Words" is one of the most beautiful movies that I've seen in recent memory. i.imgur.com/oeoQ6Tj.png8 years
  • We talk about REST and Hypermedia a lot, but something like GraphQL may be closer to a future of more powerful APIs. facebook.github.io/react/blog/201…( ♥ 10 ) 8 years
  • At long length, the great reopening. Those are some nice looking tennis courts. flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years
  • TIL that `.\{-}` gets you a non-greedy Regex wildcard in Vim. stackoverflow.com/questions/1305…8 years
  • Looking at the sizes of iOS apps is downright scary. For example, Facebook's almost hit 100 MB, and that's not particularly exceptional.8 years
  • My gods, it's happening.
    Hello again Midgar. youtube.com/watch?v=hJ4_t_…8 years
  • Impressed by both the magnificent amount of effort has obviously gone into so many guitar tabs, and the total inaccuracy of so many of them.8 years
  • Everything in San Francisco is for sale right now.8 years
  • “Think of our saints, Tito. Two faces. Always, two.”8 years
  • The good news is that they gave me their formula.8 years
  • I was just schooled at the Coffee Collective in the use of the AeroPress. Maybe the best cup of coffee that I’ve ever had.8 years
  • A solid step towards helping to unravel the "microservices EVERYTHING" craze. martinfowler.com/bliki/Monolith…8 years
  • Copenhagen looks like a city from the future. Water, glass, and hard lines. t.co/JP4qg5z1Se8 years
  • The Danube at twilight. flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years

May

  • Also accidentally discovered both Aquincum's ancient military and civil amphitheatres. flickr.com/photos/brandur… flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years
  • The ruins of Aquincum (modern Budapest). Marcus Aurelius wrote part of Meditations here while fighting the Quadi. flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years
  • Selfie sticks are banned from events and places as diverse as Coachella, Wimbledon, WWDC, and Rome’s Colosseum. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfie_st…8 years
  • This Berlin apartment has a park on its roof (six stories up) complete with bench. Well done. flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years
  • Incredible show by Eluveitie. Turns out that not even in Germany do they know the words to Inis Mona though, haha. t.co/SWl1gXEwk88 years
  • Arkona has one of the most epic live shows that there is. t.co/DeTYCvpPGo8 years
  • Jo Quail may have been my favorite performance at WGT 2015 so far. flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years
  • A write-up I did after investigating degraded behaviour in our job queue, and a shallow dive into Postgres MVCC. brandur.org/postgres-queues( ♥ 8 ) 8 years
  • RT @craigkerstiens: Awesome post by @brandur in @PostgresWeekly this week around Postgres Job Queues and some semantics of them - brandur.org/postgres-queues8 years
  • I hope that in twenty years we’ll all be able to look back at the state of the telecom industry today and laugh about it.8 years
  • Discovered Ludovico Einaudi from a rain simulation program. Beautiful work. soundcloud.com/ludovicoeinaud…8 years
  • Congrats @geoghegan86! It's been a long time coming. git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=post…8 years
  • A simple article on thoughts about Amazon Kinesis after a month in production. brandur.org/kinesis-in-pro…( ♥ 10 ) 8 years
  • Unfortunately, SQL code is the most clever and the least documented.( ♥ 5 ) 8 years

April

  • Received a Sprig delivery in less than three minutes from order. Someone's got the traveling salesman figured out.( ♥ 5 ) 8 years
  • The site of Waza 2 in the modern day. San Francisco is changing fast. flickr.com/photos/brandur…8 years
  • Ex Machina wins for the least Hollywood ending ever. So refreshing.8 years
  • Pretty much best case scenario as far as a serendipitous experience that might fall out of a watch interest. reddit.com/r/Watches/comm…8 years
  • The SFMTA has now posted people at busy intersections to yell at drivers that run red lights. Nice job guys, hit ‘em right where it hurts.8 years
  • RT @ped: the eagle has landed t.co/ZuowzG8QT98 years
  • New guitar weekend! The Martin LX1. flickr.com/photos/brandur…( ♥ 5 ) 8 years

March

  • 400 concurrent threads/connections in ActiveRecord 2.3 (and stable). Not bad Rails, not bad.8 years
  • $5 rides for a long time to come. wsj.com/articles/BL-DG…9 years
  • Going paperless with your evil US healthcare megacorp: okay. Unsubscribing from unsolicited mail from your local symphony: impossible.9 years
  • Apple either just made Yubikeys and all port-eating peripherals obsolete, or they'll be backtracking inside 2 years like with the 2010 MBA.9 years
  • “Our field selects engineers using a process that is worse than reading chicken entrails.”9 years
  • This may be the best article on hiring that’s been written. sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/0…( ♥ 4 ) 9 years
  • The Interagent HTTP API design guide is now available in Simple and Traditional Chinese. Incredible community work. github.com/interagent/htt…9 years
  • You have to appreciate the comedy though. By inbox zeroing, I’m compromising other inbox zeroes, so we all have to inbox zero harder.9 years
  • Some kind of crazy Gmail bug. t.co/x34h8q1iBO9 years

February

  • Preferred denim:
    Uniqlo → J. Crew.9 years
  • RT @SpotifyEng: Elegant APIs with JSON Schema @brandur brandur.org/elegant-apis( ♥ 8 ) 9 years
  • Manufacturing lab at Autodesk. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had one, but very cool. t.co/Bp0Y34JKp69 years
  • Remember to come down and check out API Craft #9, with a talk on API longevity. Held at Creative Market on Pier 9. meetup.com/API-Craft-San-…9 years
  • “Hacking involves mashing your keyboard until code appears, ... just like in real life.” theinstructionlimit.com/i-know-this-gl…9 years
  • JWZ may provide one of the few honest narratives of what it's actually like to bike in SF. jwz.org/blog/2014/05/t…9 years
  • And also the Source-based “Accelerated Back Hopping” which you really have to see in action. wiki.sourceruns.org/wiki/Accelerat… youtu.be/NV-AWxqYAgc?t=…9 years
  • Bunny hopping in the Quake/Source engines: there is a window of exactly 1 frame where ground friction is not applied. flafla2.github.io/2015/02/14/bun…9 years
  • Overcoming the instinct to over-engineer and go all in on speculative technology. Every developer should read this. jasonpunyon.com/blog/2015/02/1…( ♥ 4 ) 9 years
  • Optimistic fire hydrant. flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years
  • Great article on React's virtual DOM differencing algorithm. calendar.perfplanet.com/2013/diff/( ♥ 6 ) 9 years
  • The most civilized Metallica concert. t.co/APATrFexx39 years
  • RT @bradfitz: We need a hip acronym like REST which means "like REST without religious pedantry": SITU? Stuff in the URL? And "situ" ~ "in place" too.( ♥ 63 ) 9 years
  • Shout out to “can I use” for being a resource that provides clear, definitive answers rather than more questions. caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox( ♥ 5 ) 9 years
  • Read “To Kill a Mockingbird” after the big Harpee Lee news. Excellent book, but one that probably doesn't need a sequel.9 years
  • Yesterday, the powder finally came! t.co/yULUsdTFvb( ♥ 6 ) 9 years

January

  • The V2 AWS Ruby SDK is refreshingly solid software. github.com/aws/aws-sdk-co…9 years
  • Candid, low-star, and well-written book reviews on Amazon are some of the most useful user contributions on the Internet.9 years
  • µBlock now has a Firefox release!
    github.com/gorhill/uBlock9 years
  • Too many pull requests. Talk about a good problem to have.9 years
  • RT @leinweber: Microservices will bring us a 5-10 year dark age of instability, complexity, and debt.( ♥ 5 ) 9 years
  • Where did we go wrong? i.imgur.com/VqoN5CJ.jpg9 years
  • Very interesting notes on iOS app and App Store viability in the Panic 2014 report. panic.com/blog/the-2014-…9 years
  • In case anyone missed it on HN, this article on software quality is excellent.
    “A Generation Lost in the Bazaar”
    queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=…( ♥ 8 ) 9 years
  • I need those new 12″ MBA’s to come out soon. t.co/S8QDJsfalR( ♥ 4 ) 9 years

2014

December

  • “Roads in Sweden are built with safety prioritised over speed or convenience.”
    Imagine trying to sell that one in North America.9 years
  • Unlike San Francisco, Sweden's taken steps toward Vision Zero that are known to work, with incredible results. economist.com/blogs/economis…9 years
  • This “my year, deconstructed” style of blog post is a great idea. blog.fogus.me/2014/12/29/the…9 years
  • I love Strava’s new “matched runs” feature. They have one of the few apps out there that continues to impress. t.co/1W42teuzkB9 years
  • Goth ninja clothing/inspiration guide. reddit.com/r/malefashiona…9 years
  • Now reminisce on what ye have lost. vimeo.com/115309653
    [OSX UI performance regressions.]9 years
  • Apple, we're three months into the release of iOS8. I will trade you handoff, instant hotspot, and SMS relay for keyboards that work.9 years
  • $0.86. Perfect timing for my return. google.com/finance?q=cadu…9 years
  • The biggest risk to Rust's success is incredible complexity to accomplish modest tasks.
    stackoverflow.com/questions/2575…9 years
  • A collection of emotive scenes from Miyazaki films. imgur.com/a/rX8ws9 years
  • This week's Economist cover nails it. 3.bp.blogspot.com/-guNxA05vt1o/V…9 years

November

  • “50 years ago, real prices started to climb ... If this is a bubble, it’s been inflating for two generations.” timharford.com/2014/11/why-a-…9 years
  • Randomly walked by a Brian Vaughan signing. t.co/ROVyhpJ6dn9 years
  • Q4 project. Overran Q3. t.co/UiUtJUBYIA( ♥ 5 ) 9 years
  • Thinking back, it's incredibly embarrassing how much time I spent getting really good at building table-based layouts in HTML.9 years
  • A powerful image of America. i.imgur.com/FY6zI4a.jpg9 years
  • Hah, the fight over the addition of ASCII art on Redis start-up. github.com/antirez/redis/…
    (I kind of like it.)9 years
  • Best part of the .NET OSS announcement today: the source code wasn't released to CodePlex.9 years
  • Now might be a good time to start planning the trip to Japan that you so far have never quite gotten around to. economist.com/news/leaders/2…9 years
  • RT @manp: I look forward to hosting another API Craft SF Meetup this coming Wednesday meetup.com/API-Craft-San-… cc @smarx @lhazlewood @brandur @newrelic9 years
  • No matter what you read online about Vim best practices, I'd very much recommend not using the Ctrl+Z/fg workflow, and not rebinding ';'.9 years

October

  • The expedition continues. No burning buses so far.9 years
  • A magnificent showcase of circa 1990's color cycling in HTML 5 (from games like Loom). effectgames.com/effect/article… effectgames.com/demos/canvascy…9 years
  • “Crash Course World History” by John Green. Incredible work.
    khanacademy.org/partner-conten…9 years
  • That said, hopefully the integration with upcoming iOS 8.1 will make Yosemite shine.9 years
  • Yosemite summary.
    Wins: Nice background photo.
    Losses: Shallow interface, less readable type, 4+ hours fixing install.9 years
  • git-getpull is a really useful tool that finds the pull request for a given commit hash. github.com/a-warner/git-g…9 years
  • Good earphones, but they fail so consistently that you could use them to track the calendar year.9 years
  • Sennheiser made good on about a year and a half worth of CX 300's. flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years

September

  • Absolutely *fantastic* work by CloudFlare today. These people know how to ship. blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-un…9 years
  • Great article containing some history on the Omega Seamaster. hodinkee.com/blog/a-week-on…9 years
  • RT @doctorow: Wendy and Richard Pini's Complete Elfquest boingboing.net/2014/09/24/elf…
    media.boingboing.net/wp-content/upl…( ♥ 6 ) 9 years
  • `set-option -g renumber-windows on` in Tmux will renumber your windows as you close them. It's a great micro-optimization.9 years
  • A small article on shell exit statuses: brandur.org/exit-status9 years
  • RT @craigmod: “Multi-tasking moves the pleasure of procrastination inside the period of work.” —@cshirky
    medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-t…9 years
  • I'm a big fan of Go's RPC. I've never had two processes talking to each other so quickly. golang.org/pkg/net/rpc/#C…9 years
  • I love GitHub consolidates multiple levels of directories if it detects that some of them are empty. Is that new? github.com/heroku/heroku/…9 years
  • Scenes from Star Trek: TOS stitched together into widescreen panoramas. Astounding work! cargocollective.com/nickacosta/Sta…9 years
  • Do any experienced Gophers know of a better way to tackle conditional error recovery in Go? github.com/brandur/heroku…9 years
  • A proposal for type annotations in Ruby. I want this yesterday! bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/99999 years
  • More reason to love SO. sf.eater.com/archives/2014/…9 years
  • Tim Harford on Hyperbolic discounting. timharford.com/2014/09/here-t…9 years
  • I love it when you start using an API and your Curl commands work on the first try. I just had that feeling with Dropbox's.9 years
  • RT @ID_AA_Carmack: It pains me to hear about GHz class systems with only 320x480 screens being sluggish and unresponsive. It is all a software problem.( ♥ 396 ) 9 years
  • cping: A tiny Go program to update CloudFlare-based DNS with your Dynamic IP. github.com/brandur/cping9 years
  • So much for amazing cross-platform support. github.com/mitchellh/go-h…9 years
  • CloudFlare makes a really great DNS host.9 years
  • My best hope for the Apple Watch is that it gives us a window to buy discounted Omegas.9 years
  • I'm still hoping for the big announcement that the Apple Watch is automatic.9 years
  • My semi-quarterly repost from /r/HistoryPorn: Hunter Thompson writing at Big Sur c. 1961. i.imgur.com/lTSL5AL.jpg9 years
  • RT @craigkerstiens: Awesome tool by @brandur for better exploring your structured log data - engineering.heroku.com/blogs/2014-09-…( ♥ 4 ) 9 years
  • Six hours later, I already can't live without this. github.com/blog/1884-intr…9 years
  • Amazing write-up on the survival of Marcus Aurelius's “Meditations” over the last 1800+ years. reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…9 years
  • I don't want to comment too much until I'm a few months in, but so far Sony XBA-1's feel like a good alternative to Sennheiser CX 300 II's.9 years
  • The Chihuly museum in Seattle is a photo enthusiast's dream. Beautiful work. flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years

August

  • I almost thought that I’d found a panel without a lineup, but actually there was a dedicated “queuing room” that I hadn’t seen before.9 years
  • Line ups for PAX are worse than for brunch in San Francisco.9 years
  • RT @charleshooper: @brandur Hey right now the API Craft meetup page has 404 members #httpstatushumor9 years
  • Learned today that (1) an asymmetrical cord on earphones is called a J-cord, and (2) most people hate them.
    There are dozens of us! Dozens!9 years
  • Simple shell-fu for disowning an already running command. stackoverflow.com/questions/6254…9 years
  • Great talks by @vinibaggio and company at @Medium tonight! flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years
  • RT @johnsheehan: #apicraftsf This Thursday. I’m giving a talk. How about “Crafting a great webhooks developer experience?” @brandur @manp( ♥ 4 ) 9 years
  • Nuget is now available on OSX! mono-project.com/Release_Notes_…( ♥ 5 ) 9 years
  • RT @Its_stolt: My @heavybit talk on Support for developers is up. heavybit.com/library/video/…( ♥ 4 ) 9 years
  • Dead on: “bike lanes were little more than paint on the ground for the cyclists to help protect the parked cars lining every street.”9 years
  • A letter from Danish tourists to Canadians regarding our singular focus on automobiles and horrific sprawl. news.nationalpost.com/2014/08/04/can…9 years
  • An amazing photographed deep dive into Rolex's 3135 caliber (and bonus disassembly of a helium escape valve). chronometrie.com/rolex3135/role…9 years
  • A $4 X100S filter ring hack. brandur.org/x100s-hack9 years
  • Found this guy outside the office yesterday. A little over two inches long by my estimation. flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years
  • And I thought I was the only one annoyed by sidewalk faux pas.
    Introducing NY pedestrian etiquette: nytimes.com/2002/07/16/nyr…9 years
  • Pro-tip for pushing to GitHub from a network where port 22 is blocked. stackoverflow.com/questions/7953…9 years

July

  • Great article on the implementation of lists in CPython. laurentluce.com/posts/python-l…9 years
  • A reminder about Pacman's “kill screen”, one of the greatest integer overflow bugs ever. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man#S…9 years
  • “Buying something made in Detroit, in this calculus, is not much different than buying a fair trade Andean sweater.” nytimes.com/2013/08/22/fas…9 years
  • Stack Overflow uses static methods and IL to squeeze out performance. Somebody should tell them about C/assembly. highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21…9 years
  • Also, Scala's `???` predef might be the most important programming language innovation of our time. t.co/zVS9fYVC8o$@???:Nothing9 years
  • I love the idea of a future, but in practice they seem to compose a lot like callbacks (which could be better).9 years
  • This post on different ways to update attributes in ActiveRecord is on an incredibly niche subject, but very useful. davidverhasselt.com/set-attributes…9 years
  • Let's hope this fad launches, flounders, and blows over quickly so we can start thinking about the next thing. nymag.com/daily/intellig…9 years
  • At 4 inches, my phone is already awkwardly small for many interactions. I can't think of a single reason that I'd want a smart watch.9 years
  • New York looks and feels exactly how it's supposed to. flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years
  • A tribute to the visual style of the 80's. The view of the future then was one of both optimism and pessimism. uzicopter.tumblr.com9 years
  • The world just tilted a little. medium.com/code-adventure…9 years
  • One day there will be a major design trend to drop interface animations in favor of instant feedback, and it's going to look revolutionary.( ♥ 4 ) 9 years
  • Go Eugenie!9 years

June

  • “As long as driving on the roads remains easy and cheap, people have an almost unlimited desire to use them.” wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-t…9 years
  • A great photo gallery of abandoned places and objects in Iceland. structor.pixu.com/gallery/1219089 years
  • A type-safe `printf` written in Haskell. github.com/chrisdone/form…9 years
  • It’s funny to read about vi being described as “an editor with a roguelike interface”. (Which it is when compared to ed.)9 years
  • I just read Cat’s Cradle for the first time. Simultaneously notably amazing, and completely crazy.9 years
  • There are some great talks from Lang.NEXT up now. Including pieces from Bjarne Stroustrup and Erik Meijer! channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NE…9 years
  • An amazing set of illustrated movie posters. abduzeedo.com/splendid-illus…9 years
  • Law of API Idealism: all API discussions eventually devolve into highly speculative echo chambers on hypermedia.9 years
  • I just noticed that Tmux 1.8 can "zoom" a pane out of the box (try `prefix`-`z`). This is a great addition to core.9 years
  • The scale of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig is breathtaking. Straight out of Middle-earth. flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years
  • This is one of those life changing tricks: get Vim splits co-operating with Tmux splits. robots.thoughtbot.com/seamlessly-nav…( ♥ 5 ) 9 years
  • I wrote a few short words on Swift, despite being completely unqualified to comment on the subject. brandur.org/fragments/swif…9 years
  • Very cool that Swift draws heavily from Rust and C#. graydon2.dreamwidth.org/5785.html9 years

May

  • My slides from yesterday, "The Story of a Thousand Services." thousand-services.herokuapp.com( ♥ 6 ) 9 years
  • The Neues Museum with its huge ancient Egyptian collection. I would have killed to see this place when I was five. flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years
  • Also, Leicas sure haven't changed their styling much over the years. flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years
  • The German Museum of Technology in Berlin. Managed to see a Z1 replica, V-2 rocket, and flying wing. flickr.com/photos/brandur…9 years
  • Apparently missed the last ever Spreepark tour by five days. It’s been sold. The world’s changing.9 years
  • In San Francisco, your edgy graphic tees proudly proclaim Berlin. In Berlin, they proclaim San Francisco.( ♥ 4 ) 9 years
  • RT @naaman: really proud and excited to release the builds endpoints on the @heroku platform api devcenter.heroku.com/articles/build…9 years

April

  • “... that you imply rather than speak; that if you speak something, you make it less.” theholenearthecenteroftheworld.com9 years
  • Wow. The original plan for “Star Trek: The Experience” in Vegas included a 1:1 scale model of the Enterprise. drop.brandur.org/star-trek-the-…9 years
  • “I’m a space pioneer. My mission is to transform industrial ruins into cultural spaces. I could save Detroit.” newyorker.com/reporting/2014…9 years
  • RT @Annasnova: What would Harry Potter look like as an ’80s Anime Version? Awesome! www.wired.com/2014/04/harry-potter-anime/9 years
  • His gallery is well worth browsing as well. simonstalenhag.se9 years
  • Great piece by Simon Stålenhag of Sweden — a beautiful mix of the mundane and the extraordinary. simonstalenhag.se/bilderbig/gaus…9 years
  • A colorized photo of the Lower East Side in NYC from the 1890's. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…9 years
  • Between normal Sunday JFK closure and other 4/20 road closures Golden Gate Park is a bit less like a highway today. Great time to go see it.9 years
  • Interesting piece on the Collision brothers, with a great bullet on why the Stripe office is no longer in SOMA. ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9…9 years
  • RT @_adamwiggins_: The Role of APIs in a Hackable World: youtube.com/watch?v=SHqtLm… (20m video) — in which I talk about smarthome, nmap, and “the curl test”( ♥ 13 ) 9 years
  • Simple instructions force a GH pull request to reset its diff against your target branch. gist.github.com/brandur/109141…9 years
  • By far the best article on SF housing and policy that I've ever read on the subject. techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-…9 years
  • At our office you have to take the elevator because the stairs are broken. Surely this must be a unique problem.9 years
  • RT @oss_rb: pliny - Base Sinatra app for writing excellent APIs in Ruby github.com/12-oz/pliny( ♥ 7 ) 9 years
  • I always know when Giants games are letting out because inevitably it’s exactly when I’ve chosen to go for a run.9 years
  • The Chinese are aiming to have a Thorium reactor built by 2015, and the Japanese by 2016. Exciting times.9 years
  • The term “lost generation” is attributed by Hemingway to Stein, who attributes to the owner of a French garage. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Gene…9 years
  • When someone commented that Stein didn't look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_…9 years
  • Great Heartbleed article including details on both the commit that introduced it and the patch that fixed it. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/04/attack…9 years
  • Heartbleed, the most metal name for a security vulnerability to date. At this point, I'm just waiting for the power riff.( ♥ 4 ) 9 years
  • Related, Firefox is fast now. Who knew.9 years
  • Just spent ten minutes closing hundreds of Firefox tabs that I'd accumulated over the last year. It was like time travel.9 years
  • I wonder what percentage of fmt.Println errors are handled in Go code. golang.org/src/pkg/fmt/pr…9 years
  • You have to hand it to Microsoft: their conferences still have the best swag.9 years
  • Wrote a few words on “microservices” and 200-500 LOC micro-microservices. brandur.org/microservices9 years

March

  • If you're a Heroku user, you should check out hk and its new shell completion. Easiest productivity boost ever. github.com/heroku/hk#shel…( ♥ 8 ) 9 years
  • An interesting thought by Felix Salmon on the over-aggrandizement of small ideas in modern web design. blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2…9 years
  • “I can guarantee that you are wrong about where your code is spending its time if you haven't run a profiler on it.” code.facebook.com/posts/47698759…9 years
  • Iceberg, an absolutely beautifully designed black and white newspaper by Socio in London. abduzeedo.com/editorial-desi…9 years
  • Incredible (and quite subtle) illustration of your favorite Community characters. kyendo.deviantart.com/art/Communitre…9 years
  • RT @petervgeoghegan: What I think of jsonb: pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2014/03/what-i…( ♥ 7 ) 10 years
  • “The most dynamic economies of the 20th century produced the most miserable cities of all.” theguardian.com/society/2013/n…10 years
  • It bothers me that the @ doesn't have a better name than “at sign.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign10 years
  • Connection draining on ELBs is finally here! I've been waiting for this feature for two years. aws.amazon.com/about-aws/what…10 years
  • “Please note, all HTML-formatted email will be merrily rejected” eudyptula-challenge.org10 years
  • A meticulously detailed analysis damning Newsweek/Goodman's conclusion that Dorian Nakamoto created Bitcoin. mikehearn.com/Hosted-Files/N…10 years
  • It's great to see that a first-rate Bundler-like package management system is being built for Rust. mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust…10 years
  • Rust has the distinction of being the only language I've found harder to get compiling than Haskell. Ownership move semantics are not easy.10 years
  • Spend my PLIBMTTBHGATY building an ultra-simple proxy in Rust. github.com/brandur/umbrel… stripe.com/events/plibmtt…10 years
  • “Why are functions in Rust not pure by default?” mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust…10 years
  • Just assembled my first Dockerfile for Ubuntu + rbenv + Ruby 2.1.1 + Nginx + Passenger + blog. Very cool experience. github.com/brandur/hekla/…( ♥ 4 ) 10 years
  • This article does a great job of articulating the strong arguments for Docker.
    “Why Docker? Why Not Chef?” blog.relateiq.com/why-docker-why…10 years
  • Another API Craft meet-up come and gone. There's no subject like Hypermedia to get passions flowing. Thanks @mamund! flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • My great aunt's place in Austin is one of my favorite examples of home design. Here's her outdoor "grotto." flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • I applaud the griefing ability of whoever started the Lady Gaga @ SXSWi rumor tonight.10 years
  • The mediator pattern, or the interactor by a different name. brandur.org/mediator10 years
  • The panel on start-ups in Berlin at the German Haus. It sounds like a pretty solid ecosystem out there. flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • Some great concept art for China’s new pedestrian-first city being built outside Chengdu. businessinsider.com/china-is-build…10 years
  • Austin's been seeing a bit of rain this year. flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • Great show by @madidiaz on the rooftops of Austin. flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • I'm really jealous of people who are holding film badges right now. flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • Google search suddenly looks so much better.10 years

February

  • RT @jxnblk: also have vim invites, hit me up( ♥ 97 ) 10 years
  • House of Cards season 2 was pretty solid.
    As a technologist, I wish they hadn't dragged computers into it, but what can you do.10 years
  • I am never going to get over these giant novelty discount cards. So much win. flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • “I can tell you everything about the Windows API, yes, even secrets those of Redmond have half-forgotten.” catb.org/~esr//writings…10 years
  • Master Foo discourses on the graphical user interface. catb.org/~esr//writings…10 years
  • RT @_adamwiggins_: My journey into the Berlin startup scene: medium.com/wandering-cto/…( ♥ 25 ) 10 years
  • Dark Tranquility. flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • RT @dhh: So very sad to hear about the passing of Ruby legend Jim Weirich. He taught me and many others so much. He will be dearly missed.( ♥ 128 ) 10 years
  • Gravity is a truly incredible movie with an even better soundtrack.10 years
  • We're proud to host API Craft no. 3 at Heroku. Mike Amundsen is speaking about building clients for Hypermedia APIs! meetup.com/API-Craft-San-…10 years
  • RadioLab about an old magic show and a trick lost to time ... until Penn Jillette dispels it in ~3 seconds. radiolab.org/story/you-are-…10 years
  • I don’t know how to feel about Hemingway App. Hemingway is one of my favourite authors, but I don’t want everyone to write like Hemingway.10 years
  • And on that note, I finished Hardcore History's "Wrath of the Khans" series recently. Really amazing stuff. dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharc…10 years
  • The guy who did the History of Rome podcast has a new one: Revolutions, currently covering the American Revolution. revolutionspodcast.com10 years
  • I forget all too often that I can go and see the ocean every day. Glorious. t.co/5t3aNNWnzu10 years
  • I love the concept from Asana that Markdown is minimum required skill to contribute web content. eng.asana.com/2014/02/scalin…10 years
  • RT @dcurtis: A sad story about a CEO's aspiration and desire, and how it manifests itself in his company, Abercrombie & Fitch:
    nymag.com/thecut/2014/02…( ♥ 48 ) 10 years
  • Mission and 3rd in SF sometime after 1978. Just similar enough to be recognizable (photo by Janet Delaney). drop.brandur.org/mercantile-bui…10 years
  • This photo of the Mission has 200+ upvotes. Some say gentrification (negatively), I'd say it's San Francisco in 2014. imgur.com/PgjJfW810 years
  • About four months into ownership, the iPad Mini (Retina) is now the only medium on which I will read a paper. flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • Interesting thought from meetup: Webhooks may be difficult for enterprise as setting up an HTTP receiver may be bureaucratically expensive.10 years
  • RIP Jade Rabbit.10 years
  • Haha, "Bloodlines of Conquest". Community is pure genius (s05e06).10 years
  • This is some really great data viz and D3 work. Kepler's Tally of Planets. nytimes.com/interactive/sc…10 years
  • RT @mtrifiro: A beautiful and thoughtful paean to the "page" as a design element /by @brandur Lamenting the Death of the Page trifi.ro/1g6XJLb10 years
  • I've been using Mosh so much lately that when I rebooted my local computer, I forgot that I was supposed to open Tmux on my remote.10 years
  • Slightly disappointed to see that I couldn't publish Marvel comics using their new API, but it's cool nonetheless! developer.marvel.com/docs10 years
  • Healthy Anti-patterns. brandur.org/antipatterns10 years
  • I wrote an article entitled, "Why I don't want your SDK in production". brandur.org/sdk10 years
  • Very practical novel writing advice from somewhere in /r/writing. reddit.com/r/writing/comm…10 years
  • Preview.app's tendency to save your files as you make changes is sociopathic.10 years

January

  • VOID's first shot at a mechanical movement watch. Elegantly minimal. voidwatches.com/store/watches/…10 years
  • Beautiful concept art by Flavio Bolla. flaviobolla.deviantart.com/gallery/10 years
  • Well, just watched Eraserhead.
    You won't hear me complaining that Mulholland Drive is too weird again anytime soon.10 years
  • Mining Gitcoins.10 years
  • RT @_adamwiggins_: A treatise on modern web design: motherfuckingwebsite.com( ♥ 6 ) 10 years
  • “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”10 years
  • Holy crap, I just started using Mosh today and it’s incredible. I want the last two years of my life using vanilla SSH back.10 years
  • “the Apple aversion to ‘its’ rivals the MS Word paperclip for intrusive AI non-help.” discussions.apple.com/thread/251321910 years
  • Awesome surf video from our very own Ocean Beach! vimeo.com/8333214210 years
  • Strava finally has an API! I made a simple dashboard to track my runs. brandur.org/runs10 years
  • Webkit's scaling model compared to Firefox's. Webkit stays proportional, allowing a large screen to be approximated. t.co/u1g0HDJqAA10 years
  • A cool hack for an element in that resizes proportionally in CSS. wellcaffeinated.net/articles/2012/…10 years

2013

December

  • Although it looks like the @ viewport CSS rule will make it in eventually. dev.w3.org/csswg/css-devi…10 years
  • First iPhone released June 2007 and the "viewport" meta tag is still the de facto real world standard. Real standards are hard.10 years
  • My great aunt's Tumblr containing her art pieces. Amazing work. lindafriedmanartist.tumblr.com10 years
  • Months after Google Reader's shutdown, I feel much better about the decision. It got me off of it and onto superior/maintained alternatives.10 years
  • Amazing article on Diffie-Hellman, RSA, and forward security, explained in very simple terms. imperialviolet.org/2013/12/03/for…10 years
  • We released the Heroku API 525 times in 2013. How'd you do? gist.github.com/brandur/8152736( ♥ 5 ) 10 years
  • From 2010, but still one of the best articles on SSL/TLS and its performance considerations out there. imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/ove…10 years
  • The greatest drinking game. OF ALL TIME. flickr.com/photos/brandur…10 years
  • Bitcoin's Gini coefficient. bitcointalk.org/index.php?topi…10 years
  • RT @_adamwiggins_: “Engineers hate being micromanaged on the technical side but they love being closely managed on the career side.” hbr.org/2013/12/how-go…( ♥ 6 ) 10 years
  • And Felix Salmon's bigger picture view of the situation is pretty intriguing as well. blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2…10 years
  • SF Streets' take on the Google bus protest situation nails it. sf.streetsblog.org/2013/12/11/the…10 years
  • In case anyone else was wondering about the boulders on 6th Street, they're a sidewalk extension pilot project. sf.streetsblog.org/2013/11/12/sfs…10 years
  • Five sections of the Berlin Wall in Paley Park, NYC. flickr.com/photos/9613311…10 years
  • You too, Brutus? t.co/TH0kiy8f6I?10 years
  • "... the dominant use case of bitcoin seems to be speculation, with a secondary use case for illegal transactions." blog.samaltman.com/thoughts-on-bi…10 years

November

  • Ah yes, my old friend and favorite Golang error: "too many errors"10 years
  • Bullet point summary of the history of Detroit. reddit.com/r/explainlikei…10 years
  • The beautiful and unfortunately named Federal Center South Building 1202 in Seattle. aiatopten.org/sites/default/… aiatopten.org/node/20410 years
  • RT @ped: THE OCTOTROPHY IS COMING BACK HOME t.co/NMb99N47Vs( ♥ 11 ) 10 years
  • I keep on telling myself that this paper on Raft is going to be a lot easier to process once I have an iPad Mini Retina.10 years
  • I’m on the map in JRuby! :) github.com/jruby/jruby/pu…10 years
  • The SF-based game jam to build ideas from Molyneux’s parody Twitter account was called "What Would Molydeux?” Genius.10 years
  • Awesome API Craft turnout tonight. Thanks @harmophone and @mashery! Stay tuned for session #3. t.co/Xmv0H1CLAO10 years
  • My favorite slide from Holman’s deck. Can we immortalize this with a meme or something? t.co/PpN1us6vwD10 years
  • Amazing talk on scaling GitHub (organizationally). There’s no video yet, but the slides say a lot. speakerdeck.com/holman/how-git…10 years
  • An account producing sci-fi plot ideas on an overvalued messaging service produces the best social commentary of its time.10 years
  • RT @tmaher: blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/11/14/oauth-sso More companies need to open source their auth systems. Pull requests welcome.10 years
  • Story from the perspective of a first time BART/Caltrain user. It reads so well because it’s all true. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=672756010 years
  • I appreciate Sightglass. They could operate in 1/10th the space and make everyone less comfortable (see: every Philz ever), but they don’t.10 years
  • Kyle Johnson's talk @ Google. Learned that there was even more that I missed in Inception, and about philosophy. youtube.com/watch?v=ginQNM…10 years
  • Join us Thursday at API Craft SF #2, and let's talk about APIs. Our guest speaker is @harmophone! meetup.com/API-Craft-San-…10 years
  • The “Unpleasant Design” book that has a jacket made of sandpaper so that it destroys books that it’s shelved with. we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2013/…10 years
  • RT @krarick: Is it O.K. to kill cyclists? Is it O.K. to give humans absolute control over 2-ton 60-mph death machines in the first place?10 years
  • The JRuby birds of a feather at RubyConf was inspiring.10 years
  • Venue550, a new gaming space opening up in SOMA. What a phenomenal space. venue550.com10 years
  • RT @igrigorik: secrets of the world's happiest cities: bit.ly/17zvhBc - hint: no, not more highways.. US planners, take note! great article.( ♥ 29 ) 10 years

October

  • RT @blakegentry: Wow, the FAA has instantly retrofitted all airplanes to be safe from interference by portable electronics! o_O faa.gov/news/press_rel…10 years
  • Metalocalypse: The Doomstar Requiem is exactly as epic as it sounds.10 years
  • Went to the symphony. Wore a blazer. Feel strangely cultured.10 years
  • Messages.app'ing people on iPhones is the IM equivalent of an aimbot.10 years
  • Great video on how bicycling infrastructure evolved in the Netherlands. youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9…10 years
  • Backstory and future of the "defenestration" building (old SRO on 6th with furniture coming out the windows) in SF. sfgate.com/bayarea/articl…10 years
  • Direct contradiction over HATEOAS between keynote speakers. This conference is looking up.10 years
  • Two menu bars for two screens?! Mavericks is so much win.10 years
  • Mavericks, the App Nap API, and the energy "hall of shame". This is so, so good. arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/…10 years
  • Really enjoying Drudkh right now, a secretive Ukrainian black/folk metal band that's never given an interview. rdio.com/artist/Drudkh/10 years
  • Hoping for a Nenshi loss tonight so that we can import him down here and have him run San Francisco. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naheed_Ne…10 years
  • Photograph of San Francisco in ruins after the 1906 quake. Best experienced on a huge screen. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…10 years
  • RT @Th_15798035965: When Banksy comes to Gotham I’m going to buy one of his pieces for the cave, then break his arm for vandalism. I’m tough but I’m fair.( ♥ 447 ) 10 years
  • Your periodic reminder that /r/HistoryPorn (historical photographs) is pretty much the best subreddit. reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/10 years
  • *top speed10 years
  • The 1930s era Schienenzeppelin ("Rail Zeppelin") with a top of ~230 km/h. i.imgur.com/j29CpIc.jpg10 years
  • Alright! Calgary's on the map for something besides excellence in drilling holes in the ground. huffingtonpost.ca/2013/10/04/spe…10 years
  • Have Git take you back to the last commit before a particular time.
    git checkout `git rev-list -n 1 --before="2010-12-07 13:37" master`10 years
  • Wes Anderson. Trailer in three days. I'm officially excited. i.imgur.com/7WceGSs.jpg10 years
  • RT @jeresig: You know how they use dynamite to blow up an oil well to stop a fire? I wish that existed for runaway reply-to-all email threads.( ♥ 45 ) 10 years
  • Think I could -1 min going early AM, -1 min by avoiding afternoon beers, -1 min eating properly. So, to win only need another -7 min, lol.10 years
  • I was just demolished in a virtual race. For a city of geeks, San Francisco is pretty fast.10 years
  • RT @jonathangrubb: Lesson from Silk Road: even the owner of an international drug cartel can't live in San Francisco without having housemates.( ♥ 201 ) 10 years

September

  • Configuring your JRuby Ruby version. stackoverflow.com/questions/1528…10 years
  • That said, I wonder if these guys could play at the permanent chess emplacements at Yerba Buena, which I've never seen in use even once.10 years
  • The villainous mid-market chess culture has been shut down. blogs.kqed.org/pop/2013/09/26…10 years
  • Transforming the old Bay Bridge into a park for adventure tourists. Great concept photos. gizmodo.com/transforming-t… img.gawkerassets.com/img/191drgto4g…10 years
  • Playing an FPS so old that by default, A/D are not strafe.10 years
  • RT @leinweber: Current status cl.ly/Rcas/image.jpg10 years
  • Brian Vargo's absolutely beautiful HighLink. brianvargo.com10 years
  • RT @heroku: Try Ruby 2.1.0 Preview 1 on Heroku right now: bit.ly/18lx3CY bit.ly/19uyduo( ♥ 12 ) 10 years
  • git-cal: GitHub-style activity calendar for your terminal. github.com/k4rthik/git-cal10 years
  • I tried to buy two of the biggest ICBMs in the Russian fleet in 2001 and 2002. khanacademy.org/economics-fina…10 years
  • In short, erosion resistance is hard.10 years
  • Just updated my Facts suite. Amazing how much broke in about a year: default Ruby version, CDN URLs, and changes in foreign APIs.10 years
  • I'm pretty impressed by TweetDeck. It's still a web view, but feels fast, and doesn't bleed out battery life like the old Adobe AIR version.10 years
  • `attr_accessible` is an anti-pattern to facilitate an anti-pattern.10 years
  • The classic reference for inventions that are "too secret" to allow 3rd party audit. Newton's 3rd Law of Motion? Bah! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive10 years
  • My 5+ year old IRC channel seems to have been reborn as a multi-person Google Hangout. Call me old, but I don't like it.10 years
  • What it actually means for a ship to "warp out" of harbor. Sounds fast, but is in fact horribly slow. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warping_(…10 years
  • The beautifully designed 1931 map of the history of the world. slate.com/blogs/the_vaul…10 years
  • None of the major prizes offered by the British government for solving the "Longitude problem" were ever claimed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude…10 years
  • Queen Elizabeth I's ROI from Sir Francis Drake's 1577 expedition was 4700%. £47 for every £1 invested. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Hi…10 years
  • This is not our office anymore. Such a weird feeling meeting the current tenants. t.co/06aaB41Hwq10 years
  • San Francisco in the mid-1800s from the Smithsonian. Mission Bay is a bay. smithsonianmag.com/history-archae…10 years
  • Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_… 1 lbs. purple-dyed silk maxed out at 150,000 denarii, the same price as a lion.10 years
  • Props to Go for first class CLI and local web support for docs. After years of working with Ruby, successful use of `ri` is still rare.10 years
  • Proposed futuristic architectural projects in SF. theatlanticcities.com/design/2013/09…10 years
  • I was just sent "Scala for the Impatient". I fit the target audience perfectly. logic.cse.unt.edu/tarau/teaching…10 years
  • Was pleasantly surprised to discover that rename scripts are no longer needed for Bitlbee's Facebook support. wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoFacebook10 years
  • RT @_adamwiggins_: Black Rock City 2013 as seen from a drone: youtube.com/watch?v=woOHbb… (4m video)10 years
  • They found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. economist.com/news/science-a…10 years
  • Good HN comment describing why exceptions are kind of bad, but good in the real world. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=631096910 years
  • Developer accessible APIs. brandur.org/accessible-apis10 years

August

  • Not sure if this place is empty due to the long weekend or if burners and hipster climbers are a perfect overlap. t.co/obB9fLSAmg10 years
  • Scrivener attempts to make non-HipChat XMPP clients somewhat workable by converting soft mentions to hard mentions. github.com/brandur/scrive…10 years
  • An API for M:tG. Amazing. mtgapi.com
    `curl t.co/mZMwgjQF30`10 years
  • RT @gregburek: This is how we deal with database corruption, from @deafbybeheading: t.co/zoDDefpfbE10 years
  • Once again, Blomkamp nails it with Elysium as an amazing sci-fi movie and not-so-thinly-veiled social commentary.10 years
  • Took ~2 min on Android to remember how much I miss Swype. The sooner Apple is willing to admit that its keyboard is wanting, the better.10 years
  • I just replaced a dozen Memcache addons. gist.github.com/elliottkember/…10 years
  • Beautiful and mysterious landscapes. 500px.com/Karezoid10 years
  • RT @friism: The cause to make San Francisco safe for bicyclists requires many martyrs: medium.com/p/1456bbd017d9 What do you think @mayoredlee?10 years
  • There's a plan on the books to reshape Folsom into a pedestrian, bike, and transit friendly 2-way street. sf-planning.org/ftp/files/City…10 years
  • Let's let Elon build a Hyperloop please.10 years
  • I started drawing a troll in the bottom corner of all my Draw Something art. He's a troll both literally and figuratively.10 years
  • RT @BoingBoing: Lavabit, email service Snowden reportedly used, abruptly shuts down dlvr.it/3mpZTH( ♥ 24 ) 10 years
  • Large refactors in Ruby are just the worst.10 years
  • Great (and lengthy) article on the past, present and possible futures of petroleum, and the nature of reserves. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…10 years
  • Dutch disease, where a country's increase in exploitation of natural resources leads to a decline in other sectors. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_dis…10 years
  • Back from the Midwest. API Craft was a great gathering, and Detroit is great. It may be the Berlin of North America.10 years
  • Land torpedo. t.co/lqyTh2Ebzt10 years

July

  • Epic elevator. t.co/6wgu6BCe9D10 years
  • Scoping and OAuth 2. brandur.org/oauth-scope10 years
  • We're very pleased to announce Heroku OAuth. blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/…10 years
  • Half of Iceland now wants the old centre-right parties back; a purely nostalgic vote – like voting for the year 1997. newstatesman.com/politics/2013/…10 years
  • From the ridge up to Grotto yesterday. t.co/1mO38Agwnq10 years
  • The curious story of the novel "The Cuckoo's Calling" makes a fascinating case study. rdd.me/9c8npc5910 years
  • Cthulhu's type signatures (Yesod in Production). joelt.io/entries/yesod-…10 years
  • The intro sequence to "Vikings" is pretty epic. youtube.com/watch?v=gmyCRJ…10 years
  • Puma's source is beautiful.10 years
  • Is there a way to easily send private GitHub docs to Readability, or do I need to build an API mash-up?10 years
  • Or more likely, we'll use them to extend surburbia to previously unimagined proportions.10 years
  • A possible utopia that could be come about by driverless cars. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600797710 years
  • Owl City's "The Midsummer Station" album art is great. umrg.edgeboss.net/download/umrg/…10 years

June

  • rss2imap, a project that could be the answer to the problem that we'll probably never have an RSS syncing standard. github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap10 years
  • Zeus is amazing, and customizing it is much simpler than expected. github.com/burke/zeus10 years
  • Perceived service quality accounts for two percent variation in tips. esquire.com/blogs/food-for…10 years
  • Here are easy steps to get a Twitter OAuth 2 access token for direct API access. gist.github.com/brandur/584593110 years
  • Every subsequent version of Twitter's API is a little more restrictive. I miss the non-authenticated user_timeline endpoint (gone in 1.1).10 years
  • I never expected my home city to be the cover child for extreme weather, yet there it is. calgaryherald.com/news/LIVE+Floo…10 years
  • As per usual, the new GitHub UI changes freaked me out at first, but are growing on me quickly.10 years
  • RT @ped: doors open for the Heroku API hackathon! there's beer, food and secret features :} herokuapihackathon.eventbrite.com10 years
  • The family tree of Indo-European languages. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…10 years
  • There isn't a new retina MacBook Air, but there is a new Hans Zimmer soundtrack on Rdio.10 years
  • Lucius Cornelius Sulla (on an ancient coin).
    forumancientcoins.com/catalog/zoompg…10 years
  • Discriminating input. JSON vs. x-www-form-urlencoded vs. query params in Rack.
    mutelight.org/params10 years
  • Tip 2: It's possible to have Firefox reset a site's HSTS setting by entering history and asking it to "forget about this site."10 years
  • Tip 1: Firefox doesn't display the "I understand the risks" section on its invalid SSL page if the site has HSTS enabled.10 years
  • SOA and Service Stubs. brandur.org/service-stubs10 years
  • Any protips on how to build a minimal ACL implementation? I'm terrified of overdesigning such a thing.10 years
  • A refreshingly objective look at Go. dehora.net/journal/2013/0…10 years
  • Tracing request IDs. brandur.org/request-ids10 years
  • Incredible article on why the right maintenance option for your local city-based highway is demolition. medium.com/changing-city/…10 years

May

  • The scarcity of Magsafe 2 adapters makes them a more tenable currency than Bitcoin.10 years
  • Check out Heroku's brand new V3 API. devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platf…10 years
  • Tests that depend on an obscure edge case in a third party library to function are the best kind of test. Keeps upgrades interesting.10 years
  • No one ever personally feels like they're contributing to bad traffic.10 years
  • One day we'll be telling our kids how we had IM clients that could log into more than one chat network. plus.google.com/11627624830312…10 years
  • By stubbing/mocking absolutely everything, all you're really testing is your double graph.10 years
  • Great article on verbose mode in Ruby. mislav.uniqpath.com/2011/06/ruby-v…10 years
  • 5k loc, 4 if statements, 0 exceptions. mth.io/talks/haskell-…10 years
  • I'm no Apple apologist, but they just replaced my iPhone 5, for free, with zero hassle. If only other retail experiences were this good.10 years
  • ShawOpen is pretty much the greatest thing ever. Every city needs this. Especially SF.
    (For non-Calgarians, it's fast city-wide wifi)10 years
  • Beautiful fantasy landscapes. abduzeedo.com/fantasy-landsc…10 years
  • Finished the Diamond Age. Neal Stephenson's best work (IMO). There's even a scene where a character develops and applies a Turing test.10 years
  • Upstream Color doesn't actually seem all that complicated after you remove the obfuscated cinematography.
    Spoilers! slate.com/blogs/browbeat…10 years
  • Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was pithy and made heavy use of parentheses.
    -- The Diamond Age10 years
  • I'm pretty used to the standard Git interface, but Tig is pretty amazing. I'll try to get it into my workflow. blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/git-ti…10 years
  • Finally read Fight Club. Every memorable line from that movie is taken verbatim from that book. The screenwriters had an easy job.10 years
  • Inked by an octopus underwater in Mexico. Divemaster also spotted us a seahorse.10 years

April

  • Railsberry was a marvellous production. Sad that it's over. Here is a photo of an empty Krakow street. t.co/j7kNB6SY3R10 years
  • Unbounded queues, capacity planning, and alarms. Railsberry. t.co/ODiPnroDn910 years
  • The Satoshi blocks are valued ~$100M at current exchange. None have been traded. bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the…10 years
  • Reminder that in 2008, a JRPG starring Charles Barkley in post-apocalyptic NY was made. The trailer is amazing. youtube.com/watch?v=8F1cOv…10 years
  • "A quick survey of the carriage I was in found about 80% were holding an Apple iPhone." (Japan)
    bbc.co.uk/news/world-asi…10 years
  • Epic finale episode of Spartacus. Just makes you want to read about Roman history all night.10 years
  • The genesis blocks. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554538310 years
  • We all know that tail calls are a virtuous language feature. mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust… [Rust]10 years
  • The Hobgoblin. stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/g…10 years

March

  • When I look at the implementation and security options available on t.co/6nPSAVURzc, I'm embarrassed for every bank ever.10 years
  • Probably the real reason that banks have such weak password restrictions: IBM mainframes. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546854210 years
  • "Oil is a metaphor for winning the lottery," said Ivar Froeness, a sociology professor at the University of Oslo. reuters.com/article/2013/0…10 years
  • Alibaba thus sits at the heart of “bamboo capitalism”. economist.com/news/leaders/2…10 years
  • Without RSS readers, the long tail would be cut off. marco.org/2013/03/26/pow…10 years
  • Went running with no technology. It was freeing.
    But now I'll never know whether I would've taken the top stop on that Strava segment.11 years
  • It was more of a "ski by feel" day yesterday, but the 20 cm of fresh snow made it all worthwhile. t.co/ul1AgN3EYZ11 years
  • I love using the expression, but did not know that Timbuktu is in Mali, West Africa.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu11 years
  • A site linked on HN today hosting an article about lousy web design trends, has mouseover dropdown menus, complete with submenus. META.11 years
  • At one point in the past, big rigs and custom hardware were for gaming. Now they're for mining.
    en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Ha…11 years
  • Plain English explanation of today's Bitcoin block chain deviation. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=535971911 years
  • Yep. That's pretty much the reason that I stopped signing e-mail. xkcd.com/1181/11 years
  • I remember how bright the future looked when Microsoft launched OData. The Netflix OData API will be gone in a month. developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Chan…11 years
  • Call me late to the game, but Ruby 2's shorthand definition for lists of symbols is nice.
    SYMBOLS = %i[conditions limit offset]11 years
  • Triumph of the City is the best, and most important book that I've read in quite a while. It's about urban economics. books.google.com/books?id=-yWTI…11 years
  • A clever trick for required named parameters in Ruby 2.0.0. stackoverflow.com/questions/1325…11 years
  • The Hugh Ferriss collection of drawings. columbia.edu/cu/libraries/i… Mostly renditions of what future urban environments could've looked like.11 years
  • For anyone pining for a new epic by Clint Mansell, "Becoming..." from the Stoker soundtrack may be what you're looking for.11 years
  • Irssi protip: Alt+A will cycle through "red highlighted" windows first (messages + mentions), then through windows with any activity.11 years

February

  • RT @krarick: @brandur wow you learn something new every R/P0Y0M1DT0H11 years
  • TIL that ISO 8601 specifies how to define a recurring time interval. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#…11 years
  • window_switcher.pl for irssi will change your life. My days of typing in window numbers is over. wouter.coekaerts.be/irssi/window_s…11 years
  • I don't find ag's leap over ack to be speed, but rather its handling of file types that it's not completely familiar with. Ack uninstalled.11 years
  • Also, I want to live in a city modelled after this campus. Paradise for walkers, bikers, and longboarders alike.11 years
  • Stanford costs 10x as much as where I went to university, but I must admit, it really is 10x as nice. t.co/v5YvcJ4e7w11 years
  • The Ruby on my projects is pretty clean these days, but the JavaScript still looks like the cat dragged it in.11 years
  • To be clear, UUIDs *are* random. Just as long as they're V4. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal…11 years
  • Reconsider that Vim Ctrl+Z / fg pattern. Terminal multiplexers are around for good reasons.11 years
  • Gwern strikes again. An absolutely amazing in-depth article on Silk Road. gwern.net/Silk%20Road11 years
  • psql + gnuplot (without leaving psql). Incredible. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521504011 years
  • Reading about Cocoa Auto Layout. The fact that there are alternatives to Interface Builder is (good) news to me. bit.ly/XNkRUy11 years
  • My Irssi to Growl pipeline has more moving parts than a Swiss watch.
    VPN + Irssi + Perl plugin + SSH RemoteForward + Growl.11 years
  • Spoiler: the ending to The Wheel of Time is incredible.
    SoT down. WoT down. Now all I can do is hope that GoT will get an ending.11 years
  • The multiple Instagram quips really made the talk for me.11 years
  • "Now I will render your books unreturnable."
    - Doctorow11 years
  • PSA: Cory Doctorow is at Borderlands tonight at 7 PM, and Brandon Sanderson is there tomorrow at 3 PM.11 years
  • What's the tool that will provide me the same quantum leap over Sed that Ack did for Grep?11 years
  • iOS should track personal autocorrect stats so users can decide whether they should turn it off. Strongly suspect it's detrimental overall.11 years

January

  • Kelly Slater's donut-shaped pool for surfing in circles. Forever. neatorama.com/2013/01/29/Sur…11 years
  • I thought they'd invent their own DCVS before giving into an open alternative. blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio…11 years
  • Great story on a recent super battle in EVE Online, a game where in-game items have direct value in real world money. reddit.com/r/gaming/comme…11 years
  • The final book (finally). Started this series on the back of a bus in elementary school. t.co/5JIwcUvn11 years
  • Two letter find in Vim. This is huge. github.com/goldfeld/vim-s…( ♥ 4 ) 11 years
  • However, consensus seems to be that an Alberta buyout isn't quite as positive as an event as a Silicon Valley buyout.11 years
  • The first company I worked at out of university was acquired yesterday. research.tdwaterhouse.ca/research/publi…11 years
  • Install the original Half-Life on my Mac. The day has come!11 years
  • env['rack.hijack'].call
    blog.phusion.nl/2013/01/23/the…11 years
  • Just re-read this excellent article today explaining why you should pick JSON or XML for your API, rather than both. mnot.net/blog/2012/04/1…11 years
  • Reviews on Goodreads are so broken. "Norwegian Wood" is rated more highly than any of the best non-fictions I've read in the last few years.11 years
  • The lake. t.co/xb1HNHK811 years
  • Found this comic I owned as a kid in an antique store. I'm officially old. t.co/pmyTJaSj11 years
  • I don't mind cold weather, but I do miss daylight.11 years
  • /r/music is jokingly going through a metal phase. reddit.com/r/music11 years
  • The JavaScript Problem. haskell.org/haskellwiki/Th…11 years

2012

December

  • The scariest situation. d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/php-endorsed.p…11 years
  • All I see here is a Dead Like Me tribute (Homeland). d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/homeland-cafe.…11 years
  • 11" MBA + full-screen Plex + transparent full-screen (not the Lion kind) Plex + Tmux.11 years
  • The proper combination of Sinatra settings to have errors raised to the terminal while using rack-test. mutelight.org/sinatra-rack-t…11 years
  • (Then consider whether Sinatra is actually so different than Rails.)11 years
  • Exercise: step out of a Sinatra route, and through all the middleware it's added to protect you from your imperfect knowledge of HTTP.11 years
  • Experimenting with Rack::Cache patterns. Love the idea of implementing client HTTP caching, and getting server side caching for free.11 years
  • In Rack::Builder what you pass into a `use` is auto-instantiated, but what you `run` is not.11 years
  • `brew install youtube-dl`
    A great answer for anyone who doesn't install Flash or use Chrome. Works on Vimeo too.11 years
  • Running today, hit the floor of my iPhone 5's operational temperature. ~-17C.11 years
  • Between Gmail and Gmaps, Google is better at Apple's operating system than Apple.
    (Had to use Mail.app for something. It was frustrating.)11 years
  • My internal server errors are causing internal server errors.11 years
  • X-Cascade. The answer to all my Sinatra composition problems. stackoverflow.com/questions/5643…11 years
  • All APIs seem great until you try to do something with them. It's a recurring problem in the industry.11 years
  • The History of Rome. thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of…11 years
  • Advice from Dad: always start with a book's 1-star reviews. amazon.com/Cloud-Atlas-Mo…11 years
  • RT @mattt: Introducing Rack::PushNotification: Run your own push notification service on Heroku. No addon required.
    github.com/mattt/rack-pus…( ♥ 70 ) 11 years
  • The location of the world's tallest tree has never been revealed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_…
    (via Know I Know)11 years
  • Law of 2-factor authentication: your 30 day computer authorization will always expire the day you're late to a Google Hangout.11 years
  • OH from noob/troll at Grove: "You know what I hate using? Vim! I'm part of the Sublime generation."
    I laughed.11 years
  • Finally figured out what the tuxedo collars are called. imgur.com/a/UlfIu11 years

November

  • San Francisco ranks 18th in per capita funding to bicycle and pedestrian projects. sfbike.org/main/city-of-s…11 years
  • For years I assumed that Ruby profilers were bad because the debuggers are bad. Turns out the profilers are actually awesome.11 years
  • Bolinas. t.co/E6zCacTe11 years
  • Sinatra's last_modified behaves in exactly the right way.11 years
  • Cross-section of Kowloon Walled City. d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/kowloon.jpg11 years
  • Even DNA Pizza is closed. It's either Thanksgiving, or the end of the world.11 years
  • RT @heroku: Support thousands of developers. Join @ped, @brandur & @daneharrigan on the Heroku API team: ow.ly/fsbL111 years
  • Simulacra & Simulation. Neo's hollowed out book in the Matrix.
    d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/simulacra-and-…
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra…11 years
  • Kreuzberg, Berlin. AirBnB neighborhoods are the best new thing I've seen on the Internet in a while. airbnb.com/locations/berl…11 years
  • So angry that this isn't a real product. thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/dharm…11 years
  • RT @ped: POST /jobs {"title": "Heroku API Developer", "url": "http://t.co/fGAMlw7t"}11 years
  • Post-rock Tuesday. postrocktu.es/day/2012/11/0611 years
  • The asset pipeline in Sinatra. mutelight.org/asset-pipeline11 years
  • IsNateSilverAWitch.com concludes: “Probably.”11 years
  • Run `bundle update <gem>`. Version goes from 1.7.0 to 1.4.4.11 years
  • *the help of a11 years
  • The British, with a help of a Canadian (!) task force, invaded Iceland in 1940. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_…11 years
  • They also brought along an old Apple signed by the Woz. t.co/hXq7pAwX11 years
  • A small, but working, version of the Babbage Difference Engine from the Computer History Museum. t.co/yzrEzZLF11 years
  • You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.11 years
  • Just got a guy in a Bane costume to say, "When Gotham is ashes, you have my permission to die."11 years

October

  • New York as the center of the Universe. 1976. d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/steinberg-newy…11 years
  • I'm perfectly okay with Star Wars episode 7! Between episodes 1-3 and the Expanded Univerise, things really can't get any worse!11 years
  • Technique for a very loud whistle with no fingers. reddit.com/r/IWantToLearn…11 years
  • x4.11 years
  • 3x Daenerys costumes so far tonight. Love it.11 years
  • Please connect to the Internet before continuing to use offline playback.
    Makes sense, Rdio.11 years
  • Launched Puma. Felt great. Then realized I'd been working with Unicorn so long that my code was no longer thread-safe.11 years
  • The Nicoyans in Costa Rica use the term _plan de vida_ to describe a lifelong sense of purpose. nytimes.com/2012/10/28/mag…11 years
  • Hardcore history. The latest series is on Genghis Khan and the Mongols. This is amazing stuff. dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharc…11 years
  • Windows RT. "The RT acronym does not officially stand for anything." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT11 years
  • Clay Shirky is a great speaker. ted.com/talks/clay_shi…11 years
  • Imperative Reaction at DNA; music I discovered in 2007. Taste doesn't change much. t.co/oFaMQcIH11 years
  • The Bay. You could take this shot from your Motorola Rzr and it would still look amazing. t.co/E36GlFlr11 years
  • The average employee of the SF Parking Authority commits more parking infractions in single shift than most people will in their lifetimes.11 years
  • Just noticed that Twitter killed RSS. At least the user timeline API can be accessed without authentication. For now.11 years
  • Hold fast or die. t.co/kNbcpytL11 years
  • RT @blakegentry: This morning I received an envelope w/ no return address. It would appear that @github is challenging us to a rematch. ...11 years
  • “We never talk about closing the streets,” said Gil. “We talk about opening them to people and closing them to cars.” www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/toronto-chart…11 years
  • Killing my experiment in S/MIME signing e-mails. Provides little practical benefit, but adds a lot over overhead to every e-mail sent.11 years
  • In case you missed it from last week, by far the best guide on how to get Mutt up and running that's ever been written: stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/11 years
  • There's something very satisfying about sending mail from Mutt. It feels like you're in a Neal Stephenson novel or something.11 years
  • Giving Strava a shot.
    (because apparently nothing in Runkeeper has improved in the last three years)11 years
  • What’s happening in Iceland’s metal scene? www.ghostcultmag.com/2012/10/what-hell-is-happenin…11 years
  • Market Street is no place for cars. www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-portanova/market-st…11 years
  • Beggars and track stands. I must be back in SF.11 years
  • The Vasa, 226 feet long, 1210 tonnes displacement, sunk &lt; 2 km into its maiden voyage. My favorite tourist trap ever. t.co/G3A9D2YT11 years

September

  • I actually can't tell whether the majority of people on this boat are speaking Finnish or Swedish.11 years
  • The GitHub drink up in Helsinki was by far the most epic I’ve ever attended.
    (Thanks for organizing @demonbane + @danishkhan!)11 years
  • Haha. Ruby "stabby procs".11 years
  • The talk on refactoring by @kytrinyx at Frozen Rails does an astounfing job of articulating the good coding habits of an advanced Rubyist.11 years
  • RT @kytrinyx: Woah, this #frozenrails talk on first class APIs by @brandur is excellent. I'm totally going to run with this.11 years
  • Slides for my talk, Composable Applications with a First-class API: composable.herokuapp.com11 years
  • I have a bad feeling that I might be missing a Red Hot Chili Peppers performance right now.11 years
  • Helsinki. t.co/Bq7ETbPC11 years
  • Affinity's Metropolitan, the bike ridden by Wilee in Premium Rush: affinitycycles.com/frames/metropolitan/11 years
  • Eluveitie + Wintersun 2012 north American tour: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cefa30wM3cY11 years
  • You'd never expect it, but the ING Direct cafe on Post and Kearny is hacker central.11 years
  • Just another one of San Francisco's exclusive parties. t.co/4LfVc8Gw11 years
  • The Game of Thrones board game is equal to the book series in raw epicness.11 years
  • With surf and skateboards featured on the roof, the bars of San Diego are exactly what you'd expect. t.co/4dUbXjmO11 years
  • Had a difficult reminder today that surfing is hard.11 years
  • Just read "Gmail as a Facade".
    You could do all that, or go a bit further and learn Mutt, and you've got a good mail client for life.11 years
  • I want to see a sequel to Tron Legacy that presents an alternate timeline in which CLU &amp; co. made it off the grid and conquered the world.11 years
  • Had a problem: needed to pick up beer so went to Bevmo for maximum selection. Now have two problems. t.co/eOxrTHdd11 years
  • 1 SSL Endpoint, N Apps: mutelight.org/1-endpoint-n-apps11 years
  • I love the simplicity of DNSimple's metrics system for a domain:
    &gt; Over the last thirty days we've answered about eighty thousand requests.11 years
  • slabText for jQuery: www.frequency-decoder.com/demo/slabText/
    Absolutely love it.11 years
  • Seriously enjoying Reamde. Certainly Neal Stephenson's easiest read to date.11 years
  • Simultaneously love and hate the syntax that CoffeeScript lets you get away with: gist.github.com/358908711 years

August

  • "Revolver" explained in two parts: (1) www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/z3dwl/what_is_thi… + (2) www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/z3dwl/what_is_thi…11 years
  • Best part about dropping Ctrl-A as your Tmux/Screen prefix is that it’s freed up for the Emacs style go to start of line shortcut.11 years
  • RT @fabiokung: Epic. @heroku weekend warriors! @ped @wuputah @brandur t.co/5QPxayoq11 years
  • Still puzzling over the fact that the croissants at Vega (a cafe in a garage) are better than those at La Boulange.11 years
  • Fixation -- a beautiful documentary on fixed gear in SF and LA. It's crazy seeing your own streets in this kind of production.11 years
  • Get caps lock working for you.
    Caps lock as Tmux prefix: mutelight.org/caps-lock11 years
  • Experimenting with Caps Lock as Tmux prefix. So far so good.11 years
  • Premium rush: one stupid stunt movie that I *will* go see. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYDIw4ZnecM11 years
  • So next week someone will invent another DSL that makes Twitter easier to use, but your bank will be writing new COBOL. blog.jelastic.com/2012/08/13/hate-java/11 years
  • Clive Owen is a wearing a London 2012 sweater in the siege scene of Children of Men (a 2006 film). Nice touch. drop.brandur.org/children-of-men-london-2012.jpg11 years
  • Just re-read Neil Gaiman's American Gods. This time around I had new appreciation for the settings in San Francisco and Reykjavik.11 years
  • The indispensable ability to switch to the perspective of your reader. www.stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesday…11 years
  • RT @ekryski: with @brandur @markhazlett @TheEricAnderson @joshuapinter at the top of Sparrowhawk. #yyc t.co/vxhwB6m811 years
  • Ensiferum’s new video for “In My Sword I Trust”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN5NpaSbVQU
    (warning: metal)11 years
  • Amazing climb up Rundle East yesterday w/ @markhazlett, @BryceMEvans, and co. Easy to miss Alberta in the summer. t.co/KgoAY3iE11 years
  • Nexus application successful.
    FYI Canadians, Nexus also qualifies you for Global Entry for quick access from countries that are not Canada.11 years
  • Nexus interview today. This should be interesting.11 years
  • A couple great passages from Philip K. Dick: the-surf.org/philip-k-dick11 years
  • Inglewood is such a great community. Additions like Gravity continue to make it even better. t.co/8Qz5rrDa11 years

July

  • to_xml(:dasherize =&gt; false, :skip_types =&gt; true)
    I’ll be proud to own an API that no longer returns XML.11 years
  • Reasonable `time` formatting for Zsh:
    TIMEFMT=$$'\nreal\t%E\nuser\t%U\nsys\t%S'
    via: superuser.com/a/7189011 years
  • The Olympics overrun their budget with 100% consistency. Largest overruns were Montreal 1976 (796%), and Barcelona 1992 (417%).11 years
  • A random photo capture.
    BBQ Dev Ops: www.flickr.com/photos/miekd/7532412420/in/photostr…11 years
  • RT @dhh: When you sell investors on a trip around the milky way, they're not going to be happy merely staying at a hotel on the moon.11 years
  • Sunday Streets is a guaranteed win every time. t.co/faIJx1IQ11 years
  • PATCH is not safe, nor idempotent, and allows full and partial updates and side-effects on other resources. weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/2/25/edge-rails-patch-…11 years
  • Microsoft will open source Entity Framework: www.hanselman.com/blog/EntityFrameworkMagicUnicorn…11 years
  • MathJax looks amazing anywhere: facts.brandur.org/harmonic-mean11 years
  • Improvements to Vim setup:
    ctrlp.vim &gt;&gt; Command-T.
    Vundle &gt;&gt; Pathogen.11 years
  • Disappointed that there wasn’t a track on the Sherlock Holmes soundtrack called “Discombobulate.”11 years
  • Good read from Linus on reverting a faulty merge: www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/rev…
    The important part involving a `git rebase --no-ff` is near the end.11 years
  • Tech now accounts for 1.6% of Canada's benchmark stock index. www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/canadas-vanishi…11 years
  • Pier 39. t.co/VS3b2Qxg11 years
  • San Francisco drivers attempted to solve the gridlock problem via their primary competency: honking a lot; with shockingly poor results.11 years
  • Complete gridlock along the Embarcadero tonight. It's good being a bicyclist.11 years
  • People in San Francisco are ridiculously fucking good at trivia.11 years
  • RT @zeke: Today I set out to answer the question: Who wears the stripes in San Francisco? project-zebra.herokuapp.com/11 years
  • The mist/rain droplets today are the perfect cooling for biking. Also good for keeping the crowds off the beach ;)11 years
  • That said, configuration through config vars exclusively doesn't always feel like the final answer. www.12factor.net/config11 years
  • In hindsight, experimenting with staging/production config in separate branches of my project was a pratical failure.11 years

June

  • The only company that does packaging better than Apple. t.co/Ot9MwcSR11 years
  • Afraid to upgrade to a faster laptop.
    Now I can tell exactly when Firefox starts chugging/devouring battery and kill it. Not so on i5/i7.11 years
  • Microsoft may do bad things.
    But, lambdas + method chains in Java 8 are a perfect recreation of a product that has worked well for 5 years.11 years
  • SF protip: if you have an engagement on the other side of market street today, cancel and stay home.11 years
  • Also, switched to Inconsolata-dz. A lot more clear than Monaco.11 years
  • iTerm2 has a feature that allows ascii and non-ascii to render differently. Easy to enable unintentionally, and can lead to visual glitches.11 years
  • Played around with iTerm2 to see why antialiasing + unicode doesn't seem to mix. Finally got that fixed.11 years
  • Evening project: installing and de-branding tires. t.co/DAXpUCOs11 years
  • At the risk of being a peon in a tide of net rage, the idea of Craigslist C&amp;Ding Padmapper is absurd.
    +1 this comment: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414913011 years
  • Workers who used a hot cell trained to use its mechanical manipulators by threading a needle with string. www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/plum-brook-nucl…11 years
  • How does CloudFlare work? www.quora.com/How-does-CloudFlare-work/answer/Matt…11 years
  • RT @dpiddee: happy cedar by default day!11 years
  • Why is it so common to see Enumerable#inject used when the alias #reduce is available?11 years
  • Building an API with .netrc: mutelight.org/netrc11 years
  • Returned $$3 tire levers that broke while levering a tire. It was satisfying.11 years
  • How?! i.imgur.com/QR7iI.jpg
    (via @exdevlin)11 years
  • Julian Assange's commits to Postgres: git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=sear…11 years
  • Meet PagerDuty co-founder at party. COMPLAIN ABOUT UI.11 years
  • Came into work a little after 430.
    @daneharrigan @leinweber @gorsuch @stolt45 were still steaming along at full power.11 years
  • Barely made it back into the country. As a people, I wish us Canadians hadn't developed such a questionable reputation.11 years
  • Just heard Germany score a Eurocup goal, kilometers from any working television.11 years
  • I'd try to take some photos, but this guy already nailed it: www.ottsworld.com/blogs/photographing-spreepark-be…11 years
  • Staring into Spreepark is like looking into an exclusion zone. Very quiet. Can only nothing but birds chirping.11 years
  • Link: swaaanson.tumblr.com/post/25005539624/kindle-notes…11 years
  • Jobs hosted “Top 100” meetings every 12-18 mo. where he invited his 100 favorite, not highest ranking, employees to discuss Apple’s future.11 years
  • That sunny dome! those caves of ice!11 years
  • tl;dr Retina, but on the wrong computer.11 years
  • Oh man, is ARGF ever cool.11 years
  • Consider adding a bin/console to your Ruby app: mutelight.org/bin-console11 years
  • Is there justification for why Sinatra uses the `at_exit` hook to start up? github.com/sinatra/sinatra/blob/master/lib/sinatra…11 years
  • Most badass climbing wall ever. t.co/mCqZ8dPp11 years
  • Watched the latest Game of Thrones on my 11" MBA. Felt very guilty for doing so. It deserves better.11 years
  • Great blog: blog.sanctum.geek.nz/
    A lot of advanced stuff on here about Vim and the like is downright hard to find out.11 years
  • Kind of a nice debug pattern if you're still stuck maintaining code that needs to be both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 compatible: mutelight.org/ruby-debug11 years
  • American top 40 domination internationally is beyond impressive.11 years
  • Typical day for me --&gt;
    Me: Ein Kaffee bitte.
    Barista: Okay, did you want anything else?11 years
  • Authbind (for people who dislike man pages without usage examples):
    mutelight.org/authbind11 years
  • In case, like me, changing an app over to heroku-postgresql:dev wasn't the most obvious thing in the world for you: mutelight.org/heroku-postgres-dev11 years
  • Unfortunate how much I depend on Rails' monkey patching just to make certain portions of Ruby reasonable. e.g. Time.11 years
  • Whoah. All roommates in bed by 1 o'clock. For a Berlin hostel, to say this is statistically improbable is an understatement.11 years
  • Having only recently discovered the hard way that making a good stencil is hard, I was extra appreciative of this one. t.co/fhRkIWMP11 years
  • The gentlemen's agreement for graffiti in Berlin is only paint over something if you can do better. t.co/5KcaYU6p11 years
  • Love it. People actually say "Gesundheit" here when you sneeze. We'd always use it in our family half-jokingly.11 years
  • Had a sudden Starbucks carving, so searched for one in Berlin. Results not promising.11 years
  • This club has four floors so that one of them can play Depeche Mode full-time.11 years
  • After many years of Twitter, my username has finally changed from IRC handle @fyrerise, to @brandur. Thanks @jdarrellg for releasing it!11 years
  • In Berlin, urban exploration is still a real thing. t.co/JlZxqJgS11 years
  • Huh. Expedia's mobile site is significantly better than their web version.11 years

May

  • Writing on paper would sure be great if it weren't so slow. It's hard to beat the novelty of journaling into a moleskine.11 years
  • Just saw a guy in Berlin riding a fixie and carrying a Chrome messenger bag. For a second I thought I was back in SF.11 years
  • The good part about OpenSSL is that it works.
    That's it. The complete list of its positive qualities.11 years
  • You just don't see this kind of thing in the Western Hemisphere.11 years
  • Imagine a gothic ball full of Victorian gowns, cravats, and top hats, accompanied by this music: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L72e7OgW5j811 years
  • Berlin ping pong. t.co/3BS2Mglu11 years
  • Sifted through a lot of confident-sounding bad diagnoses on camera Q&amp;A sites though. Like Stack Overflow without a "right answer" mechanism.11 years
  • Blurry viewfinder on the d90. Turns out my diopter wheel had been knocked out of place.11 years
  • Workspace for the next few weeks. Great light. t.co/mdyAOgll11 years
  • [America's] not-so-friendly neighbor: www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/opinion/our-not-so-frie…
    (via @josephbreihan)11 years
  • The most accurate depiction of apartment hunting in San Francisco I've seen to date: avnergeller.blogspot.com/2012/03/apartment-hunting…
    (via @michellegreer)11 years
  • Agora Collective in Berlin. t.co/mZnJ2nIo11 years
  • Amazing. Sex Bob-omb / Garbage Truck just played at DNA pizza.
    I pretty much come here for the music videos.11 years
  • Wow, seriously, Netflix doesn't even have the Matrix? Final straw.11 years
  • How Weird is on today! Why am I down here. howweird.org/11 years
  • Walking into a Starbucks now feels like an artifact from a past life.11 years
  • Elsewhere, you time your sprinklers to water your lawn. In SF, you time them to water your pavement. t.co/jf886oew11 years
  • Oh, and forgot to tweet this. Check out our new SSL endpoints: blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/5/3/announcing_bette…11 years
  • Finding the Wiggle, a route that nearly became a park, but didn't because this is North America and roads are better. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Panhandle_extension_to_…11 years
  • First K&amp;L wine club shipment is in. Now waiting for a special occasion. t.co/FIh1mUHb11 years
  • That's a sizeable messenger bag. t.co/3h013UDe11 years
  • SF Bike Party is so much win. I wanted to post some photos, but nothing I took could possibly do it justice.11 years
  • nzbs.org redesign. Brutal.11 years
  • Can't get past 30% average core usage on a c1.xlarge with Handbrake.11 years
  • Nice. Putting `bind -v` into your `~/.editrc` gets you Vi-mode in programs using editline, like IRB.11 years
  • Great article on event matching in Upstart: netsplit.com/2010/12/03/event-matching-in-upstart/11 years

April

  • Schneier / Prisoner's Dilemma on a game show: www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/04/amazing_rou…11 years
  • RT @StanLeeComikaze: Stan and his good pal @patrickhstweart hanging out. Professor X!!!! We are having a blast in Canada! t.co/h ...11 years
  • See that hipster d-bag walking his fixie up the last hill towards the Panhandle on Page St?
    That was me.11 years
  • Pool. t.co/BTbTyncB11 years
  • .NET Entity Framework automatic migrations made it to HN front page! blog.appharbor.com/2012/04/24/automatic-migrations…
    Nice work by the good people of AppHarbor.11 years
  • Decommissioning my old running shoes. They've been around the block a few times. t.co/D0UQqaGx11 years
  • PG&E service deposit required because I'm Canadian: $$90.00.
    Actual bill for last 30 days of usage: $$4.63
    Deposit/reality ratio: ~2011 years
  • Sausalito is like a different, more tropical, country. t.co/WcisTkqO11 years
  • Biking Golden Gate Bridge with only one side open is like flying the trench run.11 years
  • Offlineimap running as a long-lived process is kinda fail. Use cron.11 years
  • The Revival Tour. t.co/pcYBmeyg11 years
  • Delores on a nice Saturday is a San Franciscan's version of going to the beach. t.co/wDw34w8F11 years
  • Don't like crazy Gmail redesigns?
    Try Mutt.11 years
  • Improbably nice today in SF. At Westfield buying emergency shorts.11 years
  • Terrible website, amazing posters: clubnocturne.com/11 years
  • Yesterday, creating a new repository on GitHub was the single most annoying thing to have to do.
    Today, that's been completely overturned.11 years
  • JUSTICE. t.co/2cBzHvIa11 years
  • Today I learned that I didn't really understand git submodules very well.11 years
  • Knowing how the stereo is wired is the worst kind of incumbent knowledge.11 years
  • Yoga on the labyrinth. If this can't get me into yoga, I don't know what can: www.gracecathedral.org/cathedral-life/communities/…11 years
  • There isn't any furniture that I can buy for which I won't experience buyer's remorse.11 years
  • Flow my tears, the policeman said.11 years
  • In an event of heroic outlandishness, I went running and lost my key chain .. but not my keys.11 years
  • Death to Word: www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/…
    Authors are on the right track. I anxiously await the day they discover Markdown and Git repos.11 years
  • +1 37Signals: 6. Don’t use Cucumber unless you live in the magic kingdom of non-programmers-writing-tests 37signals.com/svn/posts/3159-testing-like-the-tsa11 years
  • The day I leave SF, I'm taking this sign with me. t.co/cX3xYUgM11 years
  • I take back what i said about there not being enough Pho in SF. Just had the most delicious bowl of it ever in the Tenderloin.11 years
  • Commenters on National Geographic might just give YouTube commenters a run for their money: photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/pho…11 years
  • Used offlineimap to sync 4GB of e-mails. Then disk/CPU/battery started disappearing. Culprit: Spotlight workers.11 years
  • 9.8G /Users/fyrerise/.Spotlight-V10011 years
  • Switching from Mutt's built-in IMAP to Mutt + offlineimap is a 100 fold improvement. Fast e-mail browsing becomes instantaneous.11 years
  • Okay, it was moved out of the AUR and is now called `passenger`. Chasing after these things is annoying, but this is pretty nice.11 years
  • `nginx-passenger` gone from the AUR without a trace. I guess this is why people use Ubuntu LTS.11 years
  • This 8-bit Google Maps prank gives me renewed hope for the feasibility of a Maps command line client ;)11 years

March

  • TIL that `/stats p` in IRC doesn't just list network staff, it notifies them as well.11 years
  • OH: I'm in F.A. ... U.X.11 years
  • I use Aurora over Minefield so that when Mozilla breaks Vimperator, the community is caught by Aurora release.
    Also, Aurora? Way cool name.11 years
  • If you're looking for a tiling window manager for OSX, the answer is Tmux.11 years
  • If you're on OSX, get BreakTime. It's a much healthier way of using a computer.11 years
  • Switched back to a keyboard with a real Ctrl button and it didn't work. Entirely dependent on crazy Apple Fn/Ctrl setup now.11 years
  • Paged just after 5 this morning. Can't pay for a better way to wake up.12 years
  • Optimized the tool set a bit more by switching from Bash to zsh this morning. It took watching @leinweber use it for a week to convince me.12 years
  • Paganfest on Apr. 17th (including Turisas, Arkona, Alestorm): www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2012/04-17.html12 years
  • It's unnatural that I still can't order IKEA furniture online.12 years
  • PG on writing and speaking. paulgraham.com/speak.html
    "Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader."12 years
  • As a Canadian living in the US, it becomes your sacred duty to receive Amazon .com shipments and forward them to relatives up North.12 years
  • Okay Austin, you win. t.co/49RxGoA612 years
  • Slate magazine's "Where’s _why?": www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/…
    (Heroku mentioned on page 2!)12 years
  • (That is, during the times of a year that you don't feel like you're being roasted alive)12 years
  • Didn't see it coming, but it turns out that Austin is a beautiful place for running. t.co/VmCHpD8f12 years
  • No music badge. Feel like an outsider.12 years
  • So many great articles on patents hit HN's front page, and not even one will ever be read by a single legislator.12 years
  • Guy just walked in with a farmer style suspender thing going on .. and it actually kind of worked.
    SF hipsters have nothing on Austinites.12 years
  • It's passed 11 PM and I'm still in a cafe coding. Austin is a great place.12 years
  • Jonathan Stark has issued a second community shared Starbucks card. Nice. #sxfreecoffee12 years
  • Is that a Duck Duck Go circle? Club #fail. /cc @SaraD t.co/rSdlkYYk12 years
  • Still have yet to attend any large event with reliable wireless. No number of fancy looking Cisco base stations help.12 years
  • Lytro session made SXSW worth it.
    This technology has a strong potential to shift the entire industry.12 years
  • Robots?! t.co/pzXtbcrC12 years
  • OH: there's a real life flash mob out there! t.co/z9cF6Jmu12 years
  • Ghostland Observatory. t.co/B14dXjxh12 years
  • Staying sober was worth it. The head of Xprize makes it on stage. t.co/FBSTaXmT12 years
  • Seems impossible, but we're still talking about startups well into drinking hours at #sxswi. t.co/0uALfxUG12 years
  • Great turnout for the MIT Media Lab's session.
    Still hoping one day it will produce results worthy of such a great concept.12 years
  • This rain is making prospects for food trucks and beer gardens pretty grim.12 years
  • Nothing like wondering why a Ruby repository is taking so long to clone, then realizing that somebody dropped a .WAR in there.12 years
  • First quake! M4.3: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes…12 years
  • Nice. AT&T Park has valet bike parking during games.12 years

February

  • Ah yes, the stuff you read on the Internet.
    Apple at $$500 Billion is *not* worth the same as Poland: www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/02/29/apple-…12 years
  • Wholesale .com/.net registrations are $$7.85 (from $$6) after the last price increase built into Verisign's contract. blog.easydns.org/2012/02/29/verisign-seizes-com-do…12 years
  • Harmy's Star Wars Despecialized Edition HD (actually a real thing): originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WA…12 years
  • Why isn't PostgreSQL using my index? www.revsys.com/blog/2008/sep/16/why-isnt-postgresq…
    (Answer: because it's probably too smart)12 years
  • Guy next to me at cafe is unboxing a new iPad. At the end of February. Can I tell him to return it without coming off as a hipster d-bag?12 years
  • Quite possibly the best bar ever conceived by mankind. t.co/58daK4W612 years
  • Simultaneous Flash + specs proved a little too much for my C2D Air.12 years
  • Last post in reference to big money Agile (contractors + conferences + dogma) as opposed to being agile. Great article.12 years
  • Agile evades criticism using standard tactics like the two above: embracing anything good, and disclaiming anything bad steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-ag…12 years
  • Always surprised to find Starbucks croissants still suck. They should be able to invent a way to do them better than a boulangerie in Paris.12 years
  • Of course the first time I ever accidentally delete my local Gem cache is at 30,000 ft. somewhere over Oregon.12 years
  • Have been using the California library system for only two weeks now and library funding needs defending already.12 years
  • Where to sleep in Paris: www.pret-a-voyager.com/2011/08/where-to-sleep-in-p…
    (Could have used this 3 months ago!)12 years
  • "Frostbeard" the Viking. t.co/rCBJD78P12 years
  • SNOW DAY! Skied open to close. t.co/fwTR0PZe12 years
  • RE: Mountain Lion Gatekeeper. How long will that 3rd option be around? s3.amazonaws.com/random-brandur/gatekeeper.png12 years
  • Blue skies make for some nice pictures, but we could use a nice 20 cm snow dump up here. t.co/9T8hjjum12 years
  • It's Unicorn philosophy not to support persistent connections: unicorn.bogomips.org/PHILOSOPHY.html
    Luckily, swapping one Rack server for another is easy.12 years
  • Sequel's filter expressions take Ruby black magic to a new level.12 years
  • The simplicity of logging to $$stdout is quite beautiful.12 years
  • Well, at the very least, being able to say you live in San Francisco makes a good talking point on ski lifts.12 years
  • The key proficiency of any travel writer is the mastery of hyperbole.12 years
  • No one is frivolous in the future. No one exhibits poor or mediocre time mgmt. All are paladins of self-organization. www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/02/shits…12 years
  • Thanks @markhazlett for organizing #CoffeeAndCode tonight. Crazy turnout. Interesting things brewing in #yyc.12 years
  • Awesome. Code haiku! RT @ethicfailblog: @fyrerise
    if i equals 5
    print error in I O file
    system dot exit12 years
  • A promising alternative to Mutt: sup.rubyforge.org/12 years
  • s/borrowed from/loaned by/12 years
  • Working off of desk space kindly borrowed from @acceleratoryyc in Inglewood. Thanks guys!12 years
  • First time ever at LAX and the only memento I'll be taking away is duty free.12 years
  • ... and since I just that back to myself: rotary telephone is not a euphemism. There was actually a rotary telephone mounted on his bike.12 years
  • ... I don't even know where to start. #onlyinsf12 years
  • Saw a guy biking down Market in an American flag bikini at 2 AM. He had to stop riding because his rotary telephone fell out of its cradle.12 years
  • Used Airdrop to transfer a file for the first time. Effective.12 years
  • Adobe's building is beautiful. t.co/0fDHQ1uw12 years
  • Switched from Vmail to Mutt and threaded sorting.
    I think I finally understand how Tom Lane is doing it.12 years
  • United just freaked me out telling me that my flight was tomorrow. Then I realized it was just a classic time zone bug.12 years
  • And if I'd said that last line out loud, it would've come out PRO-cess rather than PRAW-cess ;)
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_English#Phonemic_in…12 years
  • SF PL's process for getting a library card is pretty streamlined. Beautiful library too.12 years
  • House party @ HQ.12 years
  • Blue skies in SF today. t.co/AICkLw7Z12 years
  • Emilie Autumn last night. Her style is billed as "Victoriandustrial". t.co/Yr60FNJI12 years
  • Firefox's page up/down is far better than Chrome's because it's not animated, and therefore faster and less distracting.
    Do less, get more.12 years
  • Placards were entertaining though: one claimed that a buyer had bid $$70M for this styrofoam rock, but the Buddha politely declined.12 years
  • So, as it turns out, the museum was a front for an organization headed by a self-proclaimed Buddha. 80%+ of the pieces inside are by him.12 years
  • Free admission to the International Art Museum of America today 1100 to 1900. Going to check it out while battery charges.12 years
  • Successful core deploy from a coffee shop.
    If my previous employer would've seen this, they'd have gone instantly mad. Lovecraftian style.12 years
  • Just saw @kch execute his trademark move of getting into an Uber (outside of Philz).12 years
  • Jazz @ Revolution Cafe. Really chill cafe/bar in the Mission. t.co/76H724EZ12 years
  • Power outage at Heroku HQ!
    No effect on the cloud platform though :)12 years
  • `display: inline-block` is a hack at best, and not a real substitute for `column-break-inside: avoid`12 years
  • .vimperatorrc --&gt; `map &lt;M-f&gt; /`
    Open Vimperator find when you hit Cmd-F by accident (instead of FF quickfind with no close shortcut).12 years
  • San Francisco could benefit from more establishments selling late night food.
    Possibly poutine.12 years
  • GitHub's one click logout is so nice.
    UIs are trending towards the anti-pattern of hiding logout in a menu. Take Gmail for example. Or us.12 years

January

  • Good to know: an older version of a gem executable can be run like this: `heroku _2.18.1_ list` (compared to just `heroku list`).12 years
  • Pentadactyl definitely not a clear win over Vimperator.12 years
  • "Emerald Forest and the Blackbird" by Swallow the Sun: soundcloud.com/inferno-magazine/sets/swallow-the-s…
    Really nice new #metal (if you're into that kind of thing).12 years
  • Subject of best surf magazine came up on /r/surfing. The answer is the Surfer's Journal. Sold at Hollister. t.co/qcrcT4t212 years
  • The Great Gatsby @ Noir City as shown by Castro Theater. Best part was audience dressed as if from the earlier 1900s. t.co/k8InwxBr12 years
  • Added monthly headers because these days I tweet with what can only be described as obnoxious frequency: brandur.org/twitter12 years
  • For a month now my TODO list has been a basic text file open in Vim inside a dedicated Tmux window. Works beautifully.12 years
  • `for` loop inside IcedCoffeeScript's `await` block. Nice! Brings Node that much closer to practicality ;)
    maxtaco.github.com/coffee-script/#try:%23%20Search…12 years
  • Hm. Just saw an error on GitHub's side when doing a push .. for the first time ever.12 years
  • Ruby meetup at Heroku. There's a keg. t.co/jvO1EyNw12 years
  • Printed and scanned both a .doc and a .xls, and the scanned .jpg's were half the size of the original docs.
    MS Office is truly a marvel.12 years
  • I was just told by @exdevlin that this guy's hair reminds her of mine: img3.lln.crunchyroll.com/i/spire1/4ce09a2b8e07cfa7…
    That explains the reactions of a lot of people.12 years
  • TIL that `?`, `+`, and `|` are extended POSIX regex.12 years
  • Empty commit and push for testing buildpacks: `git commit --allow-empty -m 'Iterating'` (thanks @ped!)12 years
  • The divergence of `sed` on GNU vs. on Darwin is so unfortunate.
    People say that `brew install gnu-sed` is the right answer.12 years
  • How does Google Voice capture outgoing texts from non-Android phones? It's like magic.12 years
  • San Francisco is at its nicest in the early AM.12 years
  • Troll field gas is extracted by trolls A, B, and C. "A" platform is the largest structure ever moved at 656k tons and 472 m tall.12 years
  • Norway's largest gas field in the North Sea is called the "Troll field".
    Metal.12 years
  • Priceline, Hotwire, and Better Bidding turn a monotonous task into an interesting hobby.12 years
  • I (finally) have an American bank account. So baller.12 years
  • I've finished reading exactly one book since arriving in SF. Living here is giving me ADD.12 years
  • Rails 3.2: `ActiveRecord::Relation` now has a `uniq` method for selecting distinct values. Nice.12 years
  • The Volcano. Smuggler's Cove, San Francisco. t.co/LJhEvzCf12 years
  • #vim: Map F1 to Escape to make it less obnoxious.
    ```
    map &lt;F1&gt; &lt;Esc&gt;
    imap &lt;F1&gt; &lt;Esc&gt;
    ```12 years
  • Love Maddox's piece on SOPA/PIPA: maddox.xmission.com/
    Here's more of an optimist than me though. That's a good thing.12 years
  • New Eluveitie album 'Helvetios' out in February. Can't wait. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1lXdLus2WI12 years
  • Drinking Hoegaarden and doing laundry at Brainwash. This is the true San Francisco experience. t.co/9cXtsiNv12 years
  • Wish Path was built on Twitter as a backend. I like using it a lot more, but not enough to post things twice.12 years
  • SSN finally ready. Only 7 weeks to have a computer generate a number.
    Pretty fast for the public sector.12 years
  • Think I'd be happier browsing most of the net in text-only.
    Some sites (e.g. CNet) are getting too JS heavy for my puny C2D.12 years
  • Moved a Rails project from page to action caching this morning because `expire_page` on Heroku is a no-op: www.whatcodecraves.com/articles/2010/02/24/page_ca…12 years
  • Feeling for my countrymen in Calgary where it's currently a very grim -30C. #metal12 years
  • Finally made it out to Ocean Beach last Saturday. People surf, but only the lion-hearted (water is impressively cold). t.co/sEOFxqeU12 years
  • Forgot to mention this SSL branch of the camper_van gem that some Herokai put together the other day: github.com/dpiddy/camper_van/tree/server-ssl12 years
  • So I'm left with external dependencies either way: MiniTest (built in post 1.9) + Mocha or RSpec.
    … and generally people know RSpec better.12 years
  • Minitest has mocks but not stubs?
    The decision to include this thing in core may have been a little too hasty.12 years
  • Layered, breathable layers are kind of a fad, and not required by real hikers. @kch demonstrates. t.co/XJIaxZUZ12 years
  • As @Isabelle puts it, this is why you put up with high taxes to live in California ;) t.co/Oh7LeUnA12 years
  • Looking onto San Francisco from the top of North Peak in McNee Ranch State Park. t.co/fGI9lG9U12 years
  • It seems like it would just be annoying, but I'm really liking Google's two-factor authentication.12 years
  • #waza the poster: t.co/H9DewlCw12 years
  • DeVotchKa. #waza t.co/L9P5N96m12 years
  • The founders. #waza t.co/14ZvwhYV12 years
  • RT @leinweber: Taiko 太鼓 at Heroku #waza yfrog.us/0lvoez12 years
  • Rob Pike and gophers explaining concurrency vs. parallelism. #waza t.co/cGNsLuib12 years
  • Adam showing off his MUD during the keynote. #waza t.co/ytXg4Bz212 years
  • James opening #waza. t.co/gBfJwDg812 years
  • #waza t.co/8KAVN6SG12 years
  • Pyrrhic Victory Pt. 1 by Orphan Hammer, a wicked metal band from my hometown:
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5TiDmk7EM812 years
  • #waza tomorrow.
    It's going to be amazing: waza.heroku.com/12 years
  • Why to use a terminal multiplexer reason no. 87: for when you hit Cmd-Q or Cmd-W by accident.12 years
  • Currently engaged with practicing voodoo (i.e. shell scripting).12 years
  • Remember how in Sim City if you reduced your road budget from anything but 100%, holes start appearing?
    SF's budget is at 20%.12 years
  • Take your eyes off the pavement for two seconds in this city an you run into a pothole 5 inches deep.12 years
  • Best use of MiFi is at social security office, where I wait while the bureaucracy is still trying to assign me an SSN. 5 weeks and counting.12 years
  • Return a bad exit code when any command in a Bash pipe fails: `set -o pipefail`12 years
  • Skiing Tahoe with @pvh and @isabelle. t.co/ugX665BO12 years
  • This is work today. t.co/bDdxyE0S12 years
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: mutelight.org/articles/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-th…
    (internationally portable Wikipedia)12 years
  • Canada -- skiing near Golden a few days back. t.co/bc1I2UcI12 years
  • + Phoenix Downs (thanks for hosting @exdevlin!). t.co/a6lMqRUY12 years
  • Arkham Horror (we won!). t.co/1FjrS0oG12 years
  • Impress.js just blew me away: bartaz.github.com/impress.js/
    Even the demo is an absolute work of art.12 years
  • Scrollorama is one of those things that's so cool, it makes you want to build something around it.
    johnpolacek.github.com/scrollorama/12 years
  • Happy New Year!
    2011 held significant change for me. 2012 should prove interesting.12 years

2011

December

  • Amazing how much content I come across Googling tech subjects, read on tech blogs, or find on GitHub is written by other Heroku employees.12 years
  • Last blog post was at the beginning of August. Sad.12 years
  • Have Icelandic lineage/ancestors? Then check out: snorri.is
    I did Snorri in 2007 and it was the best experience of my life.12 years
  • All domains switched from GoDaddy as promised.
    Now that my DNS is out of limbo, my e-mail works again too. Sorry about that.12 years
  • Can't believe how much time I've spent messing around with domain transfers.12 years
  • Paul Christoforo has been Google bombed so hard that he's going to have to legally change his name.
    imgur.com/a/co8js12 years
  • Rocking some code at Kawa. Seriously missed these delicious chai lattes. t.co/BIHR2hrc12 years
  • Pretty rare to see Calgary this quiet. t.co/yzCAlTiP12 years
  • Apple waits for a product to be good before shipping. This is a very hard (if not impossible) pill to swallow for most big business.12 years
  • Amazon and the Fire: plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/EvstFn…12 years
  • Just used Overdrive/Adobe Digital Editions to help my mom get a library book onto her Kobo.
    If this is the future, it scares me.12 years
  • Wiki of tropes: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
    This is one of those things that I had no notion even existed!12 years
  • brandur.org/Dorian now fixed up and deployed on Heroku. No more ordering problems in charts and elsewhere either.
    brandur.org/twitter12 years
  • Highlight of the day: my mom receiving a robot for Xmas. t.co/EfAtu4Yz12 years
  • Hacking session over. I'll probably get in ~10 seconds of Hemingway before crashing.12 years
  • Since `false.blank?` is true, `validates_presence_of` can't be used with a boolean field. Use `validates_inclusion_of` instead.12 years
  • Just setup some apps with Heroku's Scheduler add-on for the first time. Sure beats cron wrestling.12 years
  • (Ice) skating down at the Olympic Plaza with the Blairs tonight, followed by an abundance of eggnog and rum.12 years
  • Was just owned by `default_scope`: order inserted into an SQL aggregate. SQLite let it slide, but Postgres bailed.12 years
  • Genius: devcenter.heroku.com/articles/multiple-environment…12 years
  • Had a Canadian border guard search my computer today.
    Knew things were getting pretty backward here, but didn't know the extent.12 years
  • Calgary.12 years
  • You know, I've been looking for an excuse to ditch GoDaddy permanently. This SOPA debacle is perfect.12 years
  • Bicycle assembly complete. t.co/4TsoZ8ap12 years
  • PHP 5.4 to support fancy mixins called traits.
    PHP is sure a lot more fun when your relation to it is that of a disinterested observer.12 years
  • Reread some journal entries that I'd written in Europe (old school in Moleskine).
    Introspective experience. Next time I'll write more.12 years
  • *than
    This proof reading thing is seriously not working out for me.12 years
  • Find humour in the fact that I'd spend less on a night in a dorm in Europe thank on a single drink in upscale SF.12 years
  • Just realized the famous Brandur (http://brandur.com) hosts on Heroku (http://brandur.heroku.com) when I tried to reserve that namespace. Haha.12 years
  • Sorensen's answer in this case wasn't really fair.
    Cheap energy is a nice to have, but even that wouldn't get us off oil anytime soon.12 years
  • Haha. The woman asking the oil sands question is my mom: www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4&feature=youtu.…
    Thanks for digging that one out Aaron ;)12 years
  • Grab PCKeyboardHack to map Cap Locks to Escape (keycode 53): pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/extra.html12 years
  • The Japanese showing us some serious love: fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/38824…12 years
  • A Game of Shadows is a good movie, but make sure you like 300-style stop/start slow-motion!
    By movie 3, even the dialogue be using it.12 years
  • Rocking some C#. NOSTALGIA.12 years
  • Compiling Mono off battery power. Of course I never think to do it during the 16 hours a day that my notebook sits in my hotel room.12 years
  • Fellow Canadians the Barenaked Ladies at our Salesforce Xmas party last night. t.co/maIz7CiQ12 years
  • First business cards I've had that I'm pumped about carrying with me. t.co/8KA2L83X12 years
  • Keep forgetting that being in the US means that Last.fm is free now.12 years
  • #iddqd RT @daneharrigan: I always code with godmode turned on.12 years
  • It's OSX 10.7 now and Dashboard's Dictionary widget still can't remember whether it's been set to dictionary or thesaurus across sessions.12 years
  • Grails on Heroku: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335675012 years
  • Attempted to build a synth at GitHub last night. Impressive place. t.co/VJnqQfkH12 years
  • Really good explanation for why OSX clipboards don't work under Tmux: github.com/ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard
    (+ really good solution too)12 years
  • Swap bundled Vim for terminal MacVim on OSX: `ln -s /usr/local/bin/mvim /usr/local/bin/vim`
    (/usr/local/bin should be up there in $$PATH)12 years
  • Just had to `ORDER BY strftime('%s', published_at)` in SQLite to properly order by a date column.
    I'm going to Postgres.12 years
  • No way!!! Look what I just found in the Heroku fridge. Someone has to be messing with me. t.co/HYny7F6S12 years
  • Just went to the SF Reddit meetup.
    Neither the guy from Apple, nor the guy from Google, nor the guy from Netflix knew who Heroku was. #wtf12 years
  • I proofread e-mails after sending them instead of before.
    And it's got to stop.12 years
  • Went to a Japanese style bath in Japantown. Extremely relaxing. www.kabukisprings.com/images/gallery/lg/baths02.jp…12 years
  • Is there a legal limit to the maximum duration of a car alarm? If not, there should be.12 years
  • A customer went nuts in the cafe this morning.
    Afterwards, the workers were worried he'd leave a bad Yelp review of all things. That's SF.12 years
  • The pavement here is terrible for boarding.
    Hit someone's littered mustard packet on the way back too. Wasn't pretty.12 years
  • First time I've managed to find one of these since leaving Japan. Love Japantown. t.co/nRuZ8xZ512 years
  • When the Internet goes down here, everyone reaches into their bags and pulls out MiFis. Pretty funny to see.12 years
  • So, as it turns out, the US is pretty serious about the 10 day waiting period for a social security number.12 years
  • I should really start paying for a GitHub account.
    It'll be quite some time before I pay off what I owe them from drink ups anyway.12 years
  • Just got the new Twitter web.
    I like it, but for an instant when I first logged in, I thought I caught a fleeting glimpse of ... MySpace.12 years
  • View certificate information: `openssl x509 -text -in twitter_cert.pem`12 years
  • The Citadel, City 17. t.co/gmm81dpq12 years
  • Interesting in the new Twitter interface: handles (i.e. @fyrerise) are much less significant.12 years
  • Handy OpenSSL command for retrieving a site's certificate: `echo | openssl s_client -connect twitter.com:443 2&gt;&1`12 years
  • Today I learned that ginger beer is totally gross.12 years
  • Trusted root certificates extracted from Mozilla's bundle: curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html12 years
  • Not having to deal with a weakly typed language anymore is like finally walking into the light.12 years
  • Running Vmail under 1.9.2 instead of 1.9.3 makes a big difference. I use `rbenv local` with a dedicated mail directory.12 years
  • Arkona. t.co/jiK7xAoy12 years
  • Go all the way to Oakland to see Arkona, then they change the venue to DNA Lounge .. half a block from work.
    D-bag bands.12 years
  • Rule of thumb: if Vim crashes, it's probably because of Command-T.12 years
  • ChaotH from Unexpect playing Words on 9-string bass: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLeXaxlSbc812 years
  • Longboard reassembled.
    Now just have to wait for the buzz from this bulldog to wear off, then time to go cruising. t.co/YrLdzuiR12 years
  • Everytime I eat at TexMex I regret it, yet I just keep going back.12 years
  • Visa acquired!12 years
  • Thinking about starting a service where someone comes to your place and ruthlessly disposes of the stuff you don't need.12 years
  • Junk is evil.
    I'm floored by how much of it I've managed to accumulate.12 years
  • Path — still not sure what I'll do with it, but I sat there absorbed in its gorgeous UI for an unhealthy amount of time.12 years
  • Anyone curious about getting into Game of Thrones?
    Tweet me for a free complete set! t.co/2S7EPwap12 years
  • Girl from the moving co. came by. They once had a demand for a tub to be ripped out and shipped.
    Need to ship something epic like that.12 years
  • Learnt from /r/malefashionadvice:
    1. Men's fashion forum exists.
    2. Men's fashion is honest: don't request criticism unless you want it.12 years

November

  • It would be cool if @runkeeper included some sort of error correction, or at least error flagging.
    Pretty far off: runkeeper.com/user/fyrerise/activity/6161398512 years
  • Hotel bar closed at 12? Come on!!12 years
  • Reader's Cafe at Fort Mason. Chillest cafe I've ever been to in my life. t.co/IRJKoF4R12 years
  • Pendulum bobs for Long Now's clock.
    Right is aluminum test. Left is tungsten, denser than uranium, and very heavy. t.co/d7Qnp6J012 years
  • Stopped in at @heroku for lunch: starving-samurai-42.tumblr.com/post/1350949946212 years
  • Plan B in case apartment hunt proves impossible. In SF, #occupy holds some nice oceanfront property near Market. t.co/XxGcv5lG12 years
  • Pic from my run this morning. The fog here is still cool to me. t.co/IP7eWja612 years
  • Pan handlers here are crazy and extremely aggressive in some instances.
    I blame the rental market.12 years
  • I love SF because it seems like everyone who brought a laptop to the cafe is doing something interesting.12 years
  • Asked a girl who was moving out of her apartment yesterday what she was paying vs. the new list.
    $$400 or 20% increase in less than a year.12 years
  • Getting an apartment in SF is hard.
    Getting an apartment in SF without a social security # or American bank account is even harder.12 years
  • .. so I asked about it today, and actually you can't select a seat, but are always sent to that screen anyway.
    Bad UX on a whole new level.12 years
  • Thought I was dumb for never being able to select a seat with United's self service terminals.12 years
  • Just found out about a Japanese metal band called Blood Stain Child ... and they are epic. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4YeG2euoGE12 years
  • Important article on creativity and isolation: blog.oxplot.com/2011/11/creativity-requires-isolat…
    + HN discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327705012 years
  • Back in #yyc.
    What's with this white stuff?12 years
  • Cannes from above (the famous theatre is the seaside building on the right). t.co/k7Vr5kdm12 years
  • Conditionally accepted for a Nexus pass.12 years
  • The superyacht Lady Moura was moored in Monaco.
    It has more in common with a cruise ship than other yachts, but is still only 24th largest.12 years
  • 3. Not my kind of place.
    Changed ticket and am staying in Nice. Went to Monaco today instead.12 years
  • 2. His first night, his mate's iPhone was snatched as he was using it.
    He suggested taking the metro to the hostel rather than walk 15 min.12 years
  • 1. So about to leave for Merseilles today, and this guy walks in who was just there.12 years
  • On my way to Marseilles in an hour and I've just been informed by three different people that it's a complete shithole. Outstanding.12 years
  • The mass commercialization of hotspots is a tragedy.12 years
  • Sunrise in Nice. t.co/3k4vwEYN12 years
  • Almost got locked out of my hostel for the 2nd night in a row.
    At least it's pretty warm here. LOL.12 years
  • ... but even so, boarding the Promenade des Anglais is about as good as it gets.12 years
  • Introducing "Titanic".
    Similar length, turning radius, and stopping distance as her namesake. t.co/vMWt1quX12 years
  • Nice la Belle. t.co/Ejnl3IgX12 years
  • Louvre was a lot better than expected. Hordes around the Mona Lisa, but elsewhere was okay. Breathtaking collection. t.co/cTFmekS712 years
  • At a concert. On a boat. t.co/p7jrRnvP12 years
  • The only cheap thing to do in this entire city: t.co/dZcZB9xw12 years
  • Paris catacombs were the best €8 spent on this continent so far.
    They check your bag as you leave to make sure you didn't take a skull.12 years
  • Memento mori. t.co/DX76dorM12 years
  • First thing I saw in Paris above ground. t.co/9G7SCMKv12 years
  • Flight to Paris delayed 2h+. Probably because of mist.
    (This is why trains are better.)12 years
  • Booked a preview trip from YYC to SFO. Airfare cost: almost $$800.
    Now looking at short notice Paris to Barcelona: $$37.12 years
  • Gibson's Zero History didn't do much for me, but it did introduce some cool concepts.
    e.g. The secret brand: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_brand12 years
  • Seriously considering booking a trip to SF with no hotels, and winging it with @HotelTonight for three or four days.12 years
  • Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.12 years
  • The thousand times he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again.12 years
  • Drunk hobo at the train station: t.co/BREqjMYq12 years
  • Prague. 4 am.
    Only time to catch the Charles Bridge unoccupied. t.co/FJZHFv8B12 years
  • If you plan on relying on an iPhone for navigation while outside network coverage, have a plan B.12 years
  • Just read this Wikipedia article on a famous Berlin artist squat:
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunsthaus_Tacheles12 years
  • Travel protip: if you make it to Berlin, stay a week.
    It's one of the more interesting places on Earth.12 years
  • Whoah, @doctorow is also in Berlin today. Random!12 years
  • Next stop: Berlin.12 years
  • I just imagined what it must have been like resolving logistics for a European backpacking trip pre-Internet.
    It wasn't pretty.12 years
  • I really need to put my iPhone away and go write something.12 years
  • Coca-Cola tastes weird here.12 years
  • Just noticed that Freerides are now for sale: www.originalskateboards.com/longboards/freeride-lo…
    If only I wasn't right in the middle of moving to a new city ... haha.12 years
  • To anyone else who's read SJ's bio, does the following line sound too familiar?
    "X started to cry"
    Do people actually cry that often?12 years
  • Finished Isaacson's Steve Jobs. This is the one book to read this year. Too many deep insights to count.12 years
  • Kobo battery life not quite as good as advertised.
    I think the 30 days metric comes with the assumption of 5 pages read per day.12 years
  • Just found out that parenthesis are called "brackets" in the UK. That sure explains a lot of the naming in my last company's search module.12 years
  • Gone from Belgium less than five hours and I already miss all the beer stores.12 years
  • Bruge should start a revolution and ban motorized vehicles from the inner city. One of the places where something so radical is possible.12 years
  • Cheese and 11.5% beer: t.co/h7H6AiyB12 years
  • Energy here is actually measured in kcal instead of our made up unit of Cal (with a capital 'C').12 years
  • Municipal pride. t.co/vwiOyLOf12 years
  • Rad hostel too. The lockers even have power outlets. Reading trip advisor beforehand was most definitely a good idea. t.co/3A87aQXY12 years
  • In Bruges.12 years

October

  • ... and the audience that night: t.co/jq0krxKN12 years
  • Pretty cool pic of Matt's Amsterdam crew breaking. t.co/38dkYTt512 years
  • I always admired SJ's old (1925) Spanish colonial revival mansion. Turns out he was involved in a legal battle so he could tear it down.12 years
  • Just noticed that Isaacson's biography contradicts Mona Simpson's eulogy on how she met Steve (introduced by lawyer vs. by mother).12 years
  • Use Rails' engines to share components between multiple apps: edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Engine.html12 years
  • Occupy Amsterdam: t.co/YT1y7LJF12 years
  • Before DST it's now 5 AM here, but the streets are still jammed. No one ever goes to sleep.12 years
  • Imagine the footprint of a parking lot for the same number of cars.12 years
  • Bicycles. Amsterdam Central. t.co/D4RbNiG612 years
  • I'm very late to the game, but I finally have a Google+ account.12 years
  • Sweet. Google+ finally available for Google Apps.12 years
  • Amsterdam is beautiful. So many bikes, so few cars. t.co/368qQxxE12 years
  • Reading my first book on the Kobo Touch and it's a great experience so far. Good book too. t.co/RpiJFOqW12 years
  • Delivered this morning. Really, really good timing: t.co/uZCa3Zg812 years
  • iMessage is the ultimate social critique. Apple realized there's only 1 way for the public to stop SMSing: for them not to know they're not.12 years
  • My lasting contribution to @iStock (the search team adopted my peace lily): t.co/u7eOIV9112 years
  • Oh yah, and the new version of QuickSilver supports pseudo-Vim shortcuts (i.e. C-h/j/k/l).12 years
  • QuickSilver mastery in progress.
    Recommend plugins so far: 1password, Gmail, Dictionary, iTunes, Screen Capture, Extra, Image Manipulation.12 years
  • Mutt (the terminal mail client) is surprisingly unstable considering its age.12 years
  • 200 hr standby time, 8/14 hr 3G/2G talk, 6/9 hr 3G/Wi-Fi Internet, 10 hr video, 40 hr music =~ 1 day light to medium usage12 years
  • Boarded down to finally take a photo of one of my favorite spots in Calgary: t.co/BsD1nAbQ12 years
  • Awesome card with hand sewn surf board too. (thanks Lara!) t.co/2WEittmz12 years
  • Impromptu going away dinner with my oldest friends. Emotional moment for me. t.co/8mmds6KF12 years
  • The currency converters upstairs at Chinook would've given me a better rate on Euros than my bank (TD). 1.4424 vs. 1.4486
    Lesson learnt.12 years
  • Has anybody ever successfully convinced a Hollister or Abercrombie store to turn down their crappy music?12 years
  • Long live the Palooza brothers.12 years
  • Introducing Silver Waiting. Check them out on tour pretty soon. t.co/0slTtSeY12 years
  • The girl at the café just gave me the lowdown on hair dreading for white people. Of course I'm doing it all wrong. Haha.12 years
  • I've been using iPhone 4S and iOS 5 for a week now, and I can't think of one negative thing to say.
    (This is totally unlike me)12 years
  • Really enjoyed Steve Yegge's article on Jeff Bozos: plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/Aa…12 years
  • iPhone is loaded with Lonely Planet phrase books. This is how I pretend that I'm prepared for stuff.12 years
  • Some time ago, I was introduced to post-rock. It's really nice, but what's even better? Post-METAL: kutkh.bandcamp.com/album/earth-without-light (thanks @jeka!)12 years
  • Great #coffeeandcode. We should of started doing this years ago. @markhazlett @StbG @percyhanna @ekryski & @rhettdickson (there in spirit)12 years
  • Repeat last ex command in Vim: `@:`12 years
  • American Airlines and the negative bag-check fee: blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/10/17/bag-chec…12 years
  • Verdict: iPhone 4S and iOS 5 are major, major win.
    Goodbye Android.12 years
  • The most important article on Vim that you will ever read: blog.carbonfive.com/2011/10/17/vim-text-objects-th…12 years
  • ANNOUNCE: I've accepted a position at Heroku down in San Francisco.
    So psyched.12 years
  • Made this Kobo case out of a Canada Post envelope and duct tape: flic.kr/p/awqBve Works better than the real thing!12 years
  • The lag on SSH over a 3g tether is killing me. Really need an ABORT LAST TWEET option in Bitlbee.12 years
  • Huh. After using Calibre to convert an EPUB for Kobo, you can never again adjust its margins from the reader. Bug is marked as "wontfix".12 years
  • Best part about HipMunk is when legs marked "Mystery Airline" show up.12 years
  • What if the FAA required jet aircraft be able to survive crashes into the ground? Passenger rail in the US: ebbc.org/rail/fra.html12 years
  • Bought a Kobo Touch (they're $$10 off this weekend). Surprised at how nice the form factor and packaging is.12 years
  • Trying to rekindle my lost French via podcast.12 years
  • Reread Batman: The Long Halloween this morning. What a masterpiece.12 years
  • Is it just me or are the plots of Point Break and the first Fast and the Furious almost indistinguishable?12 years
  • Enjoyed reading Rework. Best advice was right at the end: inspiration has a shelf life.12 years
  • I like how Rework calls out "dead documents" in business: docs, charts, spreadsheets that take many hours to make, and seconds to forget.12 years
  • My bro and I went to go talk to a local St. Albert Star Wars painter. Tried to convince him to try this business model: afremov.com12 years
  • Did my fav Edmonton stuff while up for Thanksgiving at Grandma's: St. Albert farmers market, ate at Oodle Noodle, Whyte Ave cafe, Muttart.12 years
  • 30 of 30 articles on the front page of HN are about SJ.12 years
  • Vim + DrawIt! + Ditaa = Diagram ownage (and nicely versionable too)12 years
  • When all the things I still need to do and to learn are thrown into sharp relief, being stuck on a problem gets even more frustrating.12 years
  • Refactored code base to use Devise because of stack overflow problem caused by Authlogic. Overflow still occurs. Authlogic was okay. Arg.12 years
  • My brother doing a presentation on Drangey and puffins at the fall feast: flic.kr/p/as7hsN Drangey: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drangey12 years
  • Nice of the Devise guys to provide instructions on moving Devise views from Erb to Haml *and* from Haml to Slim.12 years
  • One of the girls who did Snorri this year just became a notary public. So lucky! I've been looking for one of those.12 years
  • Bar tending at the annual Icelandic fall feast. Drinking on the job.12 years

September

  • Alyth Bridge pathway FINALLY RE-OPENED!! Best news for bikers all summer. bikecalgary.org/node/2699#comment-2339312 years
  • the longtime status of skateboarders as an oppressed ethnic group means that by now all of them are escape artists to some degree -SnowCrash12 years
  • Wow. The satellite #UARS with 1 in 3200 odds of hitting someone as it returned to Earth landed near to us in Calgary (Okotoks). No injuries.12 years
  • I'm registered for SXSWi 2012. (Reminder: today is the last day for early bird pricing)12 years
  • Adding @factsproject as a favorite in Flipboard works astoundingly well. So well, that I doubt I'll bother with a custom iOS app anymore.12 years
  • The official Rspec docs should be replaced with this cheat sheet: cheat.errtheblog.com/s/rspec/12 years
  • I don't think a Cron replacement that behaves in a predictable and reasonable fashion would be out of line.12 years
  • New project facts-twitter to tweet random facts: github.com/brandur/facts-twitter Currently tweeting to: @factsproject12 years
  • A "feature" of Twitter's t.co URLs is that I can assume that any long URLs sent in to the API will occupy 20 characters on the other side.12 years
  • Authlogic still busted up in Rails 3.1. Should've gone with Devise.12 years
  • Wikipedia's "centuries articles" are pretty amazing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_century12 years
  • Evil genius: "fraudster Bernard Madoff filed Benford-compatible monthly returns" timharford.com/2011/09/look-out-for-no-1/12 years
  • Developers should have to pass an exam to quality for using the `static` keyword. Have seen so many perfectly good classes butchered by it.12 years
  • Watched the Win 8 Metro vid: video.ch9.ms/ch9/a586/46671215-8ef9-4e06-b1b4-9f5e…
    The future: 5 touches and 10 animations to accomplish the work of a single keystroke.12 years
  • Understanding old British curreny (i.e. pound, guinea, shilling, penny, sovereign, quid, pence, farthing, etc.): woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questions/mon…12 years
  • Yesterday, read the first chapters of Catch-22 and Snow Crash at City Lights.12 years
  • Can my longboard come on the airplane with me? Investigation tonight: packing techniques and airline regulations.12 years
  • Introducing Parched: a very basic Git-backed wiki supporting code and Tex, written in Rails 3.1: github.com/brandur/parched12 years
  • I've been doing my Git commit messages so wrong: github.com/blog/926-shiny-new-commit-styles12 years
  • Zoned out listening to postrock.12 years
  • `scroll-mode` was removed for newer Tmux versions. Scrollback is now accessed via copy i.e. `C-b [` and paging up with Vim/Emacs shortcuts.12 years
  • Use `next` to leave a Rake task early (i.e. not `return` or `break`).12 years
  • As far as development is concerned, Ruby 1.9.3 preview is your best option. The faster startup times make a BIG difference.12 years
  • Just finished a The Statues that Walked, a book describing the history and moai of Easter Island to some depth. Highly recommended.12 years
  • MathJax doesn't fit into the asset pipeline very easily. Way better just to use the CDN.12 years

August

  • Postgres' semantic parsing is a single file of thirteen thousand LOCs. Whoah.12 years
  • Yesod 0.9 released: j.mp/yesod-09
    Recommended deploy is just a compiled binary, Nginx no longer req'd to serve static files quickly.12 years
  • FINALLY finished up the A Song of Fire and Ice series (so far). Now to do something productive.12 years
  • Learning to longboard switch is like starting to board all over again. At least the weather is accommodating!12 years
  • Introducing the Original Freeride 38 & 41: youtu.be/OW-J2pQrlsw Please, take my money.12 years
  • I'm sold. imakewebthings.github.com/deck.js/ Keynote & Powerpoint: goodbye forever.12 years
  • For clarity: the reasoning behind that last date parsing snippet is that August 2nd is the 214th day of the current year.12 years
  • Ruby: `Date.parse("Ca. 214 B.C.")` --&gt; Tue, 02 Aug 2011.
    The parser may be a little too forgiving.12 years
  • Seriously, what are the chances: flic.kr/p/aexQMr12 years
  • Listening to CJSW's metal program right now. It's good to know there's one good radio station in Calgary: cjsw.com/program/rage-cage/12 years
  • "invalid byte sequence in UTF-8"
    I hate to speak ill of one of my fav languages, but Ruby 1.9's encoding handling is kinda fail.12 years
  • Anyone know off-hand how Google+ loads image albums so quickly? If not, investigation tonight.12 years
  • Surprisingly, I'm running into far fewer problems with Flash and Chromium after moving from Archlinux i686 to x64.12 years
  • 3 SUP surf boards, 2 kayaks, 1 small truck. Ridiculous packing job by my coworker from last weekend: flic.kr/p/adDFJA12 years
  • Have SSH share sessions for fast scp/ssh init. Add two lines to `.ssh/config`:
    ```
    ControlMaster auto
    ControlPath /tmp/ssh_mux_%h_%p_%r
    ```12 years
  • The Postgres parser is built on Bison/Flex: j.mp/pUy8KD (scan.l) Use those tools to write your own language: j.mp/mStmRP12 years
  • Wasted 2h on VMWare thanks to issues like no support for 2 part kernel versions (3.0 vs 3.0.1). Gave up and had Virtualbox going in &lt;10m.12 years
  • Is it possible to deprogram corporate writers from Microsoft Word and over to an portable/versionable format like Markdown or LaTeX?12 years
  • Started boarding to Kensington despite looming shadows hanging overhead. Now hiding from this: flic.kr/p/acc3Ch12 years
  • Moved from 'A Feast for Crows' to 'A Dance With Dragons' today. Last book before a 5+ year hiatus while GRRM writes the next one.12 years
  • ♫ Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate! flic.kr/p/ab1zUz (Bow river boating w/ awesome flag)12 years
  • Awesome jazz duo (with an occasional dancer) playing at Waves coffee house right now. #yyc12 years
  • Beautiful. The Fountain's Together We Will Live Forever (guitar cover): youtu.be/VH7pp2BXGC012 years
  • Bitlbee's OTR feels like more trouble than it's worth. `set otr_policy manual` or `set otr_policy never` will slow it down.12 years
  • Subtleties of the X clipboard: mutelight.org/a/x-clipboard (+ how to setup a consistent system clipboard)12 years
  • Reading history: brandur.org/books (okay, I better work on another project for a while)12 years
  • Chrome's new "Lion scrollbars" on OSX are kinda gross.12 years
  • Reddit has an active longboarding subreddit: reddit.com/r/longboarding The hivemind seems to hate Original (what I board, haha).12 years
  • Moved brandur.org over to Columnal; now looks way better on narrow viewports. Columnal makes grid-based layouts make sense (finally).12 years
  • Going forward, all my projects will be using this: www.columnal.com/12 years

July

  • Signature capture via FaceTime app in OSX Lion: j.mp/prF6M112 years
  • Just launched a cleaner version of brandur.org12 years
  • Met a ton of native speakers of Spanish tonight -- great for my "maybe one day" ambition to learn the language.12 years
  • Steve Yegge on cat pictures, data, and getting interested in hard problems: youtu.be/vKmQW_Nkfk812 years
  • Took all night, but I redid my Facts command line interface with better docs and to leverage Thor: github.com/brandur/facts-cli12 years
  • For a nice laugh on data warehousing and "enterprisey software", go to page 54: tigerorigami.com/slides/tsmongo.pdf12 years
  • `slock` is hands down both the best, and scariest, screen lock program ever. Locked state is a perfectly black screen with no prompt.12 years
  • Those eroded trails through grass (along the shortest path from A to B) are called desire paths: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path12 years
  • Spent wayyyyy too much time tonight researching unicode.12 years
  • My Practical Tmux article gets a number of views, so I pushed my Tmux conf and launcher to GitHub: github.com/brandur/tmux-extra12 years
  • Merged a patch from an awesome dude on GitHub for Mutelight: had some extra HTML in the conf section of my Tmux article. Social coding FTW!12 years
  • Compiled my first C++0x program tonight. Using a lambda in C++ feels pretty good.12 years
  • Really loving somafm's Space Station channel recently: somafm.com/spacestation/12 years
  • Just moved all my repos from github.com/fyrerise to github.com/brandur in case anyone was looking (thanks @github!)12 years
  • "the IRS actually has a permanent office within the Google compound because they audit them year-round" 2.4% tax how to: j.mp/o1sC8712 years
  • Just noticed today, but as of Ruby 1.9.2, $$LOAD_PATH no longer includes '.' (for reasons of robustness, and being deemed a security risk)12 years
  • I especially love open source projects where the link to the source code is BIG, and right on the homepage.12 years
  • Faux named queues with Gearman: mutelight.org/a/named-gearman12 years
  • Fireworks AND lightning tonight. #awesome12 years
  • Just got told no boarding on Stephen Ave by 4 cops cruising along on their bikes. #doublestandard12 years
  • The Objective-C retain property pattern: mutelight.org/a/retain12 years
  • Cocoa: release objects created using methods starting w/ "alloc" or "new", or containing "copy". Objs from class methods often autoreleased.12 years
  • Read about MessagePack today: msgpack.org/ Efficient message serialization claiming to be faster than protocol buffers.12 years
  • Zend tip: table abstract's _primary field is lazily initialized, and only in some cases like an insert. Force init w/ _setupPrimaryKey().12 years
  • Think I finally get UITableViewController. The secret is that it's both UITableViewDataSource & UITableViewDelegate itself automatically.12 years
  • Awesome. My brother just pointed out that there's an island south of Iceland called Brandur: j.mp/brandur12 years
  • Agalloch is the perfect ambient metal for writing an iPhone app. Actually feeling like I'm making progress today.12 years
  • If you're ever left with extra breakpoints in Vim that the DBGp plugin can't remove, try `:sign unplace` or `:sign unplace *`.12 years
  • I'm starting to have doubts that Gearman is production ready. No way to have multiple queues on a server/cluster?12 years
  • Amazon Cloud Drive's MP3 storage looks awesome, but has no API and the multifile upload (Cloud Player) gives Canadians the runaround!12 years
  • How to really start appreciating Git's staging area, `--amend`, and `git rebase` --&gt; use Subversion.12 years
  • Apple's developer docs put Microsoft and the MSDN to shame.12 years
  • Want the tab for this! RT @foojie Game of Thrones Title Theme (Acoustic Guitar) - Ramin Djawadi www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-WgphHsAn0&feature=share via @youtube12 years

June

  • Next guitar project is Asturias by Isaac Albeniz. It's way too ambitious, but Youtube helps a lot: youtu.be/9efHwnFAkuA12 years
  • Regressing from .sass to .scss as default syntax is crazy.12 years
  • OMFG, just realized what Ctrl+S is useful for. Freezing screen while terminal output is scrolling by really fast! Wasn't obvious to me.12 years
  • Rails 3.1 asset mgmt. and Coffee/Sass/jQuery integration is killer. All inconveniences of working with vanilla Rails are gone (except erb).12 years
  • .@dickysum Haha, technically summer is more like 3 months. I meant that the whole spring/summer season is ~2 months here though!12 years
  • At cafe trying to code, but can't focus. Too nice outside. Luckily #yyc summer is so short that you max out at two unproductive months.12 years
  • Worse yet @exdevlin, #winteriscoming. I try to enjoy every day over 10C in this city ;)12 years
  • Got passed by a wicked longboarder today. Matched him for speed & carves. Then he pulled out tricks and extreme hairpin turns. GG.12 years
  • Was feeling pretty good about my longboarding tonight so I decided try to teach myself to board goofy. Dangerous.12 years
  • Caught the last two hours of the Comic Expo, and Q&A w/ Jonathan Frakes and the Guild.
    These days, Calgary's on the map. It's big.12 years
  • That is, from the perspective of any given end user, not in total of course.12 years
  • Still don't really understand how pretty much any usenet provider has better network throughput than Apple/Steam/Google combined.12 years
  • "the Clock in the mountain keeps time even when we pretend the past did not happen and the future will not come." longnow.org/clock/12 years
  • Simple side-by-side live and sandbox Rails deployment with Nginx and Phusion Passenger: mutelight.org/a/simple-phusion12 years
  • Actually agree with Zed: "You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession."12 years
  • Dear Marvel: Give us a movie worth caring about: mutelight.org/a/marvel12 years
  • So sweet that PHP includes an '@' error suppression operator for easy & purely opaque abuse.12 years
  • I'm sure that wherever I decided to put all my guitar picks seemed perfectly logical at the time.12 years
  • Sweet! Yesod packages finally stable enough on Cabal to install and run.12 years
  • Think or Swim + Awesome WM + terminal apps for everything = pretty badass flic.kr/p/9RqaWU12 years
  • 1 LOC in Haskell or Ruby is 4 LOCs in C# and 8+ LOCs in PHP.12 years
  • Thumb typing keyboard for iPad in iOS 5 finally! Might actually be able to type on it now.12 years
  • Amazing site with info the Hindenburg and other Zeppelins: www.airships.net/12 years
  • Looks like Google's new schema.org microdata format j.mp/schemaorg is working with the new HTML5 draft: dev.w3.org/html5/md/12 years
  • Got in a nice tennis rally tonight vs. @markhazlett, then cruised in the park on the longboard as long as I could.12 years

May

  • What I learned about JavaScript by breaking a top 200 website: mutelight.org/a/ie-js12 years
  • Royal Board Shop in Calgary runs longboard clinics on Wednesday and Saturday night rides: royalboardshop.com/blog2/longboard-clinics/12 years
  • It's beautiful longboarding after sunset. Finally got a helmet, and did my first set of hill runs today.12 years
  • Added Google/Bing/Yahoo sitemap support to Askja after working with them on a much larger scale at work: j.mp/lo7eJM12 years
  • TIL that longboarders can use a technique called "pumping" to board up to 390km along flat land without taking a foot off the board.12 years
  • Looked at the Bow River recently? It's pretty high right now: flic.kr/p/9MRnju12 years
  • Has IT blocked Exchange's IMAP because open protocols are scary? Try DavMail.12 years
  • I'm the newest member of the Calgary Tennis Club. A week ago I didn't even know that there was a Calgary Tennis Club.12 years
  • (wow!) RT @markhazlett Crazy awesome video from the Calgary Camera Store www.youtube.com/watch?v=awq90APEVgw&feature=player… "We take photography very seriously"12 years
  • Coming to terms with the fact that Facebook just may be the best way to find new symphonic metal releases: j.mp/symphonicmetal201112 years
  • Most unproductive weekend ever ... longboarding was fun though. Compensating by committing goals to paper for this coming week.12 years
  • Activated a Linode instance to replace my EC2 Micro. So far about a million times faster give or take an order of magnitude or two.12 years
  • Can't believe how easy it is to get jQuery + easing + scrollTo + localScroll working together. Four includes and one line of code.12 years
  • (and in Ctrl's place!) RT @shancarter: Apple works hard to remove the trackpad button, but then leaves this useless "fn" key on all laptops?12 years
  • Remove Chrome's smack-to-the-face-intense border around active fields: *:focus { outline: none; }12 years
  • "a Surfraw liberateur is capable of navigating speeds that leave GUI tainted idolaters agape with fear and wonder" j.mp/surfraw12 years
  • Finally using CSS reset for new projects. Better late than never I suppose. meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/12 years
  • Rspec is the way that testing was meant to be done.12 years
  • Oh man, just got major pwned by Rails' `resource` vs. `resources` (plural) gotcha in routing configuration.12 years
  • Browsing Restoration Hardware makes me want to buy a place just so that I can decorate it. Cool steampunkish collection in now.12 years
  • Just learnt about Vim's `q:` and `q/` (edit ex and search like a normal Vim buffer). Talk about the missing link.12 years
  • I'm not a big Wordpress person, but I'm a fan of how child themes work for customizing basic themes: codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes12 years
  • Foreman, a process manager for local development: j.mp/l3TFDF (super useful for a Rails app running Redis, delayed_job, etc.)12 years
  • Gtags (GNU Global) does a *much* better job than Ctags for a large PHP codebase (also, very fast incremental DB updates).12 years
  • `:cq` will exit Vim with an error code (aborting commits, rebases and such).12 years
  • SVN can't handle tracking a copy/move that's already occurred: stackoverflow.com/q/2217565 The case for Git/Hg kind of makes itself.12 years
  • dbext: The Last SQL Client You'll Ever Need: mutelight.org/a/dbext, part one of the Masters of Vim series: mutelight.org/s/vim12 years
  • Hated to do it, but I killed transparency w/ xcompmgr/AwesomeWM. Too slow/buggy.12 years

April

  • Ate at Oodle Noodle on Whyte Ave. Edmonton is pretty cool when not buried in snow.12 years
  • Minimal guide to debugging PHP with XDebug and Vim: mutelight.org/a/xdebug12 years
  • The Rails Guides are *really* good these days: guides.rubyonrails.org/12 years
  • Redesigned my blog Mutelight: mutelight.org/a/redesign (now actually readable!)12 years
  • Whoah. I think I only just realized how truly amazing `git rebase` is.12 years
  • Parentheses-enclosed parts of MSDN links are optional e.g. (VS.*) in msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752574(VS.85).a…12 years
  • Portal 2 is pure genius.12 years
  • Prevent iTunes from backing up devices: `defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true` (useful for small MBA HDs)12 years
  • Problems in PHP tend to be solved by nesting more arrays.12 years
  • I hate to repost Reddit, but this is just so great: i.imgur.com/SGo8r.png ("Cycling listening to Daft Punk")12 years
  • Turns out that army surplus is a great place to pick up messenger bags.12 years
  • So far HBO's #gameofthrones is living up to the source material. The production quality is ridiculous.12 years
  • Fellow Redditor @catsfive said hi at @kawacalgary today. Good meeting you man!12 years
  • How to detect the Konami code with Rx (reactive extensions): j.mp/fJ7vXI12 years
  • Free Kinects for all #mix11 attendees!! I'm a huge Microsoft fan suddenly.12 years
  • . @ryanjanzen: "my enunciation is killing me. I asked for a paralyzer, he have me a budweiser."12 years
  • Running Node.JS/Ruby/Python on Azure is a noble idea, but it's sure a lot of work! #mix1112 years
  • I get even more inspired at #mix11 than at #sxsw. I can't explain this.12 years
  • For the first time, have seen people use Ctrl-Z/`fg` in practice. It seems to be mainly used to multitask by ppl who don't use Screen/Tmux.12 years
  • Just wrote a simple Vim plugin for working in PHP with Zend: github.com/brandur/zendtools.vim12 years
  • Trying to build a Vim plugin makes me wish I was an Emacs user.12 years
  • Just discovered what the Thor gem does today. Will be using it for all current and future command line interface projects.12 years
  • Classic statement and response on use of `grep` in Tron Legacy: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240528112 years
  • Really like this guy's personal site and Tron legacy article: jtnimoy.net/?q=178 Jealous.12 years
  • I was a skeptic, but RVM (Ruby Version Manager) is just as cool as people say.12 years

March

  • Huge advantage to using the Google font APIs: sites look consistent even across Linux boxes with minimal or strange looking fonts installed.12 years
  • My favorite line from one of my favorite books (Catch-22): brandur.org/favors12 years
  • In .vimrc, `filetype off` and `filetype plugin indent on` should come after calls to Pathogen for bundles' `ftdetect` dirs to be loaded.12 years
  • Got my first company sponsored massage today. Now I'm hooked.12 years
  • Practical tmux: mutelight.org/a/42 (I'm now switched completely from GNU Screen to tmux. Here's how to lower the barrier of entry.)12 years
  • Most software companies share this much in common: documentation is wishful thinking. For the real story, go to the code.12 years
  • TMUX, new base session: `tmux new -s bbox`. New session that shares windows with the base session: `tmux new -t bbox`.12 years
  • Start window numbering at 1 in TMUX: `set -g base-index 1`12 years
  • Don't ask me why I do these things, but here is a page containing every single one of tweets ever: brandur.org/twitter (and a graph)12 years
  • Wrote some simple Ruby loaders for tweet backups from Tweetake & TweetScan: j.mp/fgg3wz12 years
  • Just played Sword & Sworcery for iPad, an 8-bit RPG. Such a great experience.12 years
  • Read up more on iOS firmware, signing, SHSH blobs, and jailbreaking than I ever really wanted to know. Apple is pretty much the worst.12 years
  • Anyone going to (or at) the Reddit meetup in Calgary tonight?13 years
  • Thank-you BBC: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12860842 The media is running a smear campaign on nuclear power, and that's bad for us all.13 years
  • I hadn't seen this before, and it's awesome: github.com/404notfound (move mouse inside image)13 years
  • To get Xdebug under PHP working, make sure to disable the Zend debugger first. 'There can only be one' applies to debuggers too.13 years
  • In PHP a method call after object instantiation e.g. new Actor()->act() isn't possible for no particular reason. Entire language is a hack.13 years
  • Fixed Vim's backspace in urxvt with `stty erase ^?` from the terminal.13 years
  • Finally took the time to learn dbext for Vim yesterday. Massive boost to database productivity.13 years
  • Finally got Vim buffers/Xorg clipboard/GNU Screen buffers interacting properly. See the Fakeclip plugin for Vim.13 years
  • I generally love the service, but I swear that Amazon's EC2 instances are actually getting slower.13 years
  • Let's hope that Americans are smarter than Canadians are, and this monopolistic sale gets blocked: j.mp/dIPxLO13 years
  • The South by Southwest Experience: mutelight.org/a/4113 years
  • Mobility: mutelight.org/a/4013 years
  • Summary of first week of new job --> day one: awesome, day two: awesome, day (+ night) three: REALLY awesome. Going to like it here.13 years
  • I'm really missing Austin's scrumptious Mexican food right now.13 years
  • Today, forced myself to learn and use a tiling window manager (Awesome WM). This kind of thing always hurts in the beginning.13 years
  • Wasn't obvious to me: under Archlinux, `startx` script comes with the `xorg-xinit` package.13 years
  • Simplest solution for keep shell aliases when using `sudo`: j.mp/icPPH513 years
  • Got my haircut yesterday at Birds Barbershop on Congress. Me: is this where the hipsters get their hair cut? Them: yes.13 years
  • #ie9party #swsx is rad, but I'd need quite a number more of these before considering #ie as a valid browser option, ... even while drunk.13 years
  • Was reading treets for like twenty minutes before realizing that I was in Mystery's proverbial death row. Reintegrating into society now.13 years
  • This guy next to me is using his ipad 2 as a periscope. #sxsw13 years
  • My cousin drove me by Michael Dell's house. It's epic. Looks like he's digging up a few sq kms of property to build a monolithic monument.13 years
  • Workaround and updates for the Swype word correction issues in Gingerbread: j.mp/g08Aqr13 years
  • First round of #sxsw sessions this morning were sabotaged: already hard to make because of Saturday night, and then DST gets thrown in.13 years
  • Some locals told me that Michael Cera is in Austin for SXSW Film. Michael: Canadian meetup?? ;)13 years
  • This performance at the Phoenix last night was really cool: flic.kr/p/9q3gvA13 years
  • The Converse All Star shoes outnumber the people in Austin.13 years
  • At Etsy: Code as Craft at Venue 222 #notsxsw13 years
  • Tired. Kind of wish that monster energy guys were on the road again today. #sxsw13 years
  • South by South Best joked not to speak to anyone with fewer followers or less VC than myself. Turns out this is easy for me, lol. #sxsw13 years
  • Had a nice conversation today with @notinla about IP-based geolocation. Nice to consider something I hadn't worked with in 5+ years. #sxsw13 years
  • Pleasure to meet @ksullan and @hellofisher at @222austin tonight. I missed an amp catching fire earlier too. This place is great. #sxsw13 years
  • Randomly met up with some other Calgarians at #sxsw: @jimbones & @graemeduckett. They told me to join Beluga.13 years
  • What's Beluga?13 years
  • Met @michelle_olivia & @evandeaubl.13 years
  • I think I'm the one guy here who paid to get in. Met girls who got in free with class. Next up: someone who found a badge in their cereal.13 years
  • Even Nexus had a lineup today.13 years
  • Greatly successful departure party. Never seen a group of ~20 people overpay on the tab before. Thanks everyone + @kerv @ryanjanzen @cyau2513 years
  • "I'm going to need your gun, and your badge." flic.kr/p/9p9yiJ13 years
  • In my last ever Mentor iteration demo. I think they call this "bittersweet".13 years
  • oh: what if jason agrees to go against you in his supertight jumpsuit?13 years
  • Never seen ski conditions like this before.13 years
  • Nirvana: yfrog.com/hs8scbkj 13cm last 24hr (and increasing rapidly). 105cm last 7 days.13 years
  • Business cards are obsolete. Can't wait to Bump my contact info to people at #sxsw: youtu.be/hx3FC_DWsGQ13 years
  • Android #Gingerbread: music app's scrubber still completely worthless. Come on Google, you're smart, just copy the iPhone already.13 years
  • Gingerbread is sleek -- finally a phone with a dark/black theme. The screen off animation is cool too: youtu.be/-Lv1p4TvRw413 years
  • There's a bug in how Chrome displays CSS3 columns at short widths, and it's not clear how to work around it. j.mp/gMY11x13 years
  • Awesome. Use the 'whenever' gem for periodic tasks in Rails: github.com/javan/whenever13 years
  • Some nights I get so much done in Rails that I wonder why I'd use any other technology.13 years
  • The barista at @kawacalgary is a genius: (soy) mocha with Kahlúa and whiskey.13 years
  • I fixed a problem with Highcharts expanding out of its box in a column layout by styling its layer with { overflow: hidden; }13 years

February

  • Improvised karaoke: flic.kr/p/9mEXWq (2x iPhone 4 + Youtube)13 years
  • I was getting a little worried about Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, but like Blood and Sand, the finale was *EPIC*!13 years
  • Nick Ring wins by unanimous decision! An exciting day for Calgary and Canada. #ufc12713 years
  • Dear @readability, please consider fixing this: flic.kr/p/9mej4S Before, I could use your app to read wide pages in small windows.13 years
  • Today I learned about fontsquirrel.com, widespread @font-face support, and the Google font APIs. Definitely an eye opener.13 years
  • Just joined Quora. Looks interesting, and hopefully useful too: www.quora.com/Brandur-Leach13 years
  • It just struck me that I'm going to be a PHP coder again. najafali.com/php-is-better-than-ruby.html13 years
  • For the first time in a while, I have several good ideas and the motivation to build them. Vacation works.13 years
  • Waiting for the ticket office to open at #sunshine13 years
  • You can use e-mail to reply to Facebook messages now?! How great is that?13 years
  • The metal umlaut: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut (e.g. Dëthkløk)13 years
  • Quick notes on SQL's `LIKE` operator (from Use the Index Luke!) j.mp/gUJgtF: facts.brandur.org/computer-science/databases/like13 years
  • After relying on surfing and skiing for all my exercise for three weeks, it's back to reality. Going to the gym.13 years
  • #hwy1 east of Golden moving again! /cc @DriveBC13 years
  • just made it through before highway 1 between revelstoke and golden closed due to avalanche. now stuck in golden. brutal driving today.13 years
  • Greeting cards have been needing a refresh for a LONG time and here it is: www.chirply.com/ (why didn't I think of this)13 years
  • Just realized I missed a whole bunch of @ mentions in the last few weeks. Sorry people.13 years
  • Powder conditions at Silver Star! EXTREME. Should be a wicked week.13 years
  • Guiones, the home of howler monkeys, bonfires, and turtle hatchlings: surf.brandur.org/articles/guiones13 years
  • Extend Vimperator to have an image source copy action with ';m' j.mp/ejlk4713 years
  • DSH, (kind of) like LINQ for Haskell, but safer: hackage.haskell.org/package/DSH13 years

January

  • I find out every vacation the hard way that waterproof sunscreen actually isn't.13 years
  • Experiencing serious Internet blackout since arriving in Santa Teresa, more soon!13 years
  • Listening to the Tron Legacy soundtrack from my oceanside hammock. This is the life.13 years
  • Belgian fire: surf.brandur.org/a/fire13 years
  • The Shortcut (or, the perils between Tamarindo and Guiones): surf.brandur.org/a/shortcut13 years
  • On the importance of rash guards: surf.brandur.org/a/rash-guards13 years
  • Day One: surf.brandur.org/a/one13 years
  • Tamarindo, and meeting the tour's crew: surf.brandur.org/articles/tamarindo (also, I'm going to bed, it's 6:00 AM)13 years
  • If anyone has the time, check out my new blog about surfing Costa Rica! surf.brandur.org/13 years
  • Am officially booked and registered for #SXSW Interactive 2011. Anyone else from #yyc going to be there?13 years
  • I feel like someone just made off with my wallet. Boingo is the worst.13 years
  • Couldn't even feel my Tetanus shot all day yesterday when I got it, but I wake up today and it's aching hardcore.13 years
  • Had a nice discussion about suburbia at the cafe today, and remembered this TED talk, "places not worth caring about": j.mp/Mgr2d13 years
  • Had a very cold photography run in Fish Creek this morning with @dickysum and field tested my new Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 ultrawide lens.13 years
  • Imagine the power of Erlang's live hot swapping with a fully integrated IDE like Visual Studio.13 years
  • The rad song near the end of the Sucker Punch trailer is Panic Switch by Silversun Pickups: youtu.be/HFFGguX2SZM13 years
  • My new favorite blog: artofmanliness.com/13 years
  • I get mail at brandur@facebook.com. I'm not a big Facebook fanatic, but that's pretty cool. All thanks to Project Titan.13 years
  • One thing I've learnt about CSS is that it goes from clean to an unmitigable disaster faster than any other language.13 years
  • Beautiful "Icelandic Dragon Sword" calligraphy courtesy of @dickysum.13 years
  • Just call me MacGyver: flic.kr/p/96MqCz (breaks caused by the guys who installed our new desks)13 years
  • "Icelandic Dragon Sword", since my actual name can't be written in Chinese: flic.kr/p/96QshN13 years
  • The spammers are winning the game of Internet search: hackerne.ws/item?id=205777213 years
  • Eating multiple meals at West Ed's food court to replace spent energy.13 years

2010

December

  • Black Swan is the ballet of movies. No one really gets it, but it's classy to pretend to.13 years
  • Using the little-known built-in .NET JSON parser: mutelight.org/a/4013 years
  • A barista was telling us how the network went down and wreaked havoc at the registers. It made me want to build the Git for point of sale.13 years
  • TIL compound adjectives with ill, best, better, little, lesser, well, etc., take hyphens: little-known author, best-seller list, etc.13 years
  • Guide to installing XBMC and Ubuntu on an Acer Revo: mutelight.org/a/39 (including screenshots of Aeon!)13 years
  • Aeon65 for XBMC is unreal: github.com/pix/aeon/wiki/linux-download-instructio… (best part: no mouse support)13 years
  • Christmas was over fast!13 years
  • Twitter really needs a 'quick!!! edit spelling in last tweet' button. Or I need to proofread more. Whatever.13 years
  • Facebook doesn't keep chat history?! They've really got not excuse with Infrastructure this clever: j.mp/fWVO2H13 years
  • My new watch: j.mp/gIUblc We'll see how it fairs given two weeks in the sea.13 years
  • The Tron Legacy soundtrack is awesome, but it sounds a lot more like a movie soundtrack than it does Daft Punk.13 years
  • Swype for advanced users: mutelight.org/a/38 (same content as the tips and tricks videos, but faster!)13 years
  • A plug for Swype: mutelight.org/a/3713 years
  • Getting closer to having my Jan/Feb vacation booked. Surf camp in Costa Rica: j.mp/hRZFtZ13 years
  • We have a winner: KeyRemap4MacBook. Look for Remap Fn Key --> FN to Control_L (+ Command_R+FN to FN).13 years
  • Seriously wish the Control button on Mac keyboards was bigger. The fn button be hidden underneath the casing for all I care.13 years
  • Comments on "Leaving .NET": mutelight.org/a/3613 years
  • So much for my daily blogging habits. I'm averaging only one post every few weeks.13 years
  • Simultaneous Oracle and SQL Server support in Entity Framework with designer generated objects: mutelight.org/a/3513 years
  • If you read one article about .NET make it this one: j.mp/b9wZz1 The worst part is that most .NET devs don't even know about this.13 years
  • Tried Vmail and it is the greatest tool to be released in quite some time: danielchoi.com/software/vmail.html13 years
  • Every major security breach experts say, USE BCRYPT; MD5/SHA/DES are liabilities for password storage. Industry smiles and nods.13 years
  • Lake Louise conditions are paradise! Powder everywhere and still snowing.13 years
  • Just got invited to the Swype Beta. After signing up about half a year ago, that was pretty unexpected.13 years
  • Congrats to Heroku on the buyout. Just please don't let the Salesforce web designers near the Heroku website.13 years
  • The Inception soundtrack is epic on another level.13 years
  • XPath is nice, but XML namespaces are still the most overdesigned "feature" known to man.13 years
  • Should've realized a long time ago that Willow Park would carry MEAD! flic.kr/p/8YD8KB (thanks @twitabix)13 years
  • Goal next week is to get my sleeping schedule under control. 5-6 hours ideal per night w/ afternoon nap and consistent bedtime/wake.13 years
  • How did I miss this?! j.mp/8Yfn8d Coolest event idea ever. #neilgaiman #houseontherock13 years
  • Working around PowerShell's set-alias: mutelight.org/a/3413 years

November

  • Why I track my reading and you should too: mutelight.org/a/33 (now with commenting!)13 years
  • PowerShell has a `more` command, but no `less`. I'd imagine this is Microsoft making a statement.13 years
  • I think I just froze my PowerShell by attempting to use tab completion with the SQL Server provider.13 years
  • Disqus is really cool and its styling is flexible enough to make it look great, but it looks terrible on iPad.13 years
  • Minimum width for most websites these days is really wide, and it's killer for people who don't maximize everything.13 years
  • Vim tip: have file autocomplete behave like bash instead of matching the first file: `set wildmenu` and `set wildmode=list:longest`13 years
  • Easy way to get Shift-F10 working in CoRD/RDC/VMWare Fusion: disable the OSX shortcut in Expose's preference pane.13 years
  • DataContext in a custom control: mutelight.org/a/3213 years
  • Remote desktop clients for Mac are seriously not metal.13 years
  • Tonight, I designed and built a small application to track my reading history: brandur.org/books13 years
  • The most ambitious girl (or any person) at work: mutelight.org/a/3113 years
  • I wondered why we switched to an "enterprise" wiki rather than a more sophisticated free package. Then I saw the "edit in Word" button.13 years
  • Heard somebody say that WHS rocks. It was such a fundamental logical fallacy that I started looking up other definitions for 'WHS'.13 years
  • I didn't know this existed, managed stored procedures in SQL Server (write in C#!): j.mp/hZ1kBo13 years
  • The year is 2010. Mankind can produce a mini-Big Bang with a collider, but there is still no way to run Silverlight unit tests via MSTest.13 years
  • Just finished Towers of Midnight. So epic. #wot 13 #tofm13 years
  • Best TSA line: "Whoah, whoah. Sir, SIR! That banana peel you're holding? Send that through the security scanner." (actually happened)13 years
  • All string literals in an assembly are interned by default, other runtime strings are not. That clears some things up.13 years
  • Cool, Bitlbee's Twitter support is actually pretty good now. No more struggling with Perl to get tircd working.13 years
  • Got off the highway, randomly drove around a bunch of side streets, and somehow ended up at my hotel. And the rental car is a Mustang. YES.13 years
  • Reading technical books on my iPad and taking notes on my MBA. I should probably be doing this on the Enterprise D.13 years
  • The coolest part about the iPad is that you learn to focus on workflow and not battery life.13 years
  • The Windows Phone emulator under a VM is slow to the point of unusable. Microsoft to developers: no more using Macs for Microsoft stack dev!13 years
  • As long as you're not adverse to ditching your old AWS account, simply creating a new one with the same C/C gets you free tier access.13 years
  • If the App Store for Mac does take off, I'm really going to miss the custom designed layouts in *.dmg containers.13 years
  • L4D2 runs quite nicely on the new MacBook Air 11" at native res. Final test will be the most resource intense of all: Win 7 running VS2010.13 years
  • Everyone wants to make their own web framework.13 years
  • No idea how many hours I wasted just to find out that Infragistics doesn't support the Reset action of INotifyCollectionChanged correctly.13 years
  • Firefox: about:config --> network.protocol-handler.warn-external.itms --> true. Now FF will warn you before opening disguised iTunes links.13 years
  • Noticed based on my own Facts project: Firefox 4's JS speeds have improved tremendously. jQuery animations look fluid.13 years
  • Vim is WriteRoom level 2: mutelight.org/a/3013 years
  • Nice. This is team Camel deep in thought, pondering life, the universe, and Scrabble strategy: i.imgur.com/66Sfa.jpg #reddit13 years
  • Just back from the hugely successful Calgary Reddit meetup. Redditors are the coolest geeks around. The hivemind is unquestionably real.13 years
  • Just got owned by everyone in word war, including the guys here that are handwriting and hunt and pecking. This is serious. #nanowrimo13 years
  • Mostly as a reminder to myself: in XAML, {Binding MyProperty} and {Binding Path=MyProperty} are the same thing (known as an implicit path).13 years
  • Launched a ROR app that runs fine on Phusion with > 10,000 views/day and has no caching/optimization. Ruby can't be as slow as they say!13 years
  • Still haven't finalized a novel idea, but have committed LaTeX infrastructure: github.com/fyrerise/nanowrimo10 #nanowrimo13 years
  • Trick or treaters final tally: 35 (pretty good for here!). Highlight: Lady Gaga singing Poker Face on the landing.13 years
  • Finally some trick or treaters! Was worried *there'd been a zombie apocalypse that no one had told me about.13 years

October

  • Interesting. The WP SDK's built-in data-bound application template is written with MVVM. MVVM using a singleton ViewModel ...13 years
  • List of built-in resources for Metro styling on Windows Phone: j.mp/cUmhGi13 years
  • Windows Phone 7 code samples are here: go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=190695&clcid=409 (includes a sample using reactive extensions)13 years
  • Template for high-rated Youtube comment: "<X> dislikes?? What is wrong with these people??" This is a community that would not be missed.13 years
  • Joined the Firefox 4 beta and now using Youtube's HTML5 beta w/ WebM. No more Flash stuttering on OSX! + Vimperator nightly works w/ FF4.13 years
  • Totally listening to the Dethalbum / Dethalbum II right now, and they're awesome. #metalocalypse13 years
  • Does anyone know why Microsoft installers are so slow? Speculation: encrypted packages, massive compression, 10s of 1000s of tiny files .. ?13 years
  • C# 5 features starting to roll in. Asynchrony: j.mp/cFoiHH Reminds me a lot of emerging solutions for use with Ruby's fibers.13 years
  • Usually go into these CG type movies doubting I'll like them, and come out loving them (watched "How to Train Your Dragon").13 years
  • Somebody has to stop Apple. We're going to be looking into dismantling their monopoly in all their markets in ten years time. #backtomac13 years
  • Yesterday I learned about an easy way to skip null checks when firing events: mutelight.org/a/2913 years
  • Nexus One ownership 101: at night, *always* make sure to leave it face down. Stupid glowing trackball.13 years
  • I was at a lecture on eventual consistency that cited Amazon and SO. They should've cited Twitter, master of 'at its own pace&