Galvanize I recently had a short post that rode the front page of Hacker News for the better part of 24 hours, spending at least 8 hours at the number one spot. Compared to my last popular piece , this post took very little time to write. Really it was just a thought, an annoyance that I was experiencing over…

I don’t want to download your app I’m getting sick of being prompted by random Web sites to download their special iPhone app. I really just want to use the site without having to clutter up my phone with yet another single-purpose app. I can’t put my finger on exactly when so many sites started prompting iPhone users to download…

Raspberry PI first look The Raspberry PI single-board computer has been getting a lot of buzz since its launch early this year. For the first few months it was nearly impossible to get one of these things, and even now the only distributor that seems to have a reliable stock is Farnell in the UK. Well, I just got one…

Thinking about Raspberry PI for audio I’ve been busy with some audio projects recently but haven’t had much time for writing. Hopefully that changes soon, but in the meantime I’ve had some thoughts on future projects that I wanted to jot down. Usually I take my notes on this stuff in private, but I figured why not try riffing on…

Working with chaos I was intrigued by Netflix’s recent open source release of the Chaos Monkey service. I hear stories of continuous deployment scenarios at companies like Amazon that are able to effectively detect and roll back bad code changes automatically, but a system that intentionally sabotages part of the infrastructure just seems outright crazy. I’ve long been a proponent…

Data persistence, normalization and cardinality I’m not a big fan of object-relational mappers and tricky data access schemes. I’m also a fan of good data normalization in relational database systems. I’m somewhat new to key-value and document stores, but I have done projects using things like Amazon’s new DynamoDB. I’m doing some work on a side project that involves counting…

On dependency management Like many (all?) developers, I have a list of thoughts and gripes about managing and developing libraries while working on a coding project. The experience that prompted me to finally start writing this post was trying to get the Selenium WebDriver Java libraries installed and ready to use on my system. I think I could have downloaded…

Advanced remedial Javascript I’ve been using bits of code written by Douglas Crockford for years now. As you may know, as author of “Javascript: The Good Parts” he is quite opinionated about the language. Crockford refers to some of these concepts as “remedial” Javascript. On one hand, yes, we are dealing with the most basic concepts of the language, but…

Meteor, magic and n-tier applications I’ve been shouting about how cool Meteor is recently, but as I’ve been using it I’m wondering about a few things. As was pointed out by someone else in a blog post (which I can’t find at the moment), Meteor is essentially allowing us to go back to writing 2-tier applications like we did when…

Thoughts on UI frameworks I was playing around with Node-qt recently to see how difficult it would be to do a native-UI app using Javascript. I’m thinking of something along the lines of the Leo outliner which was done with Python and QT . I’m kind of interested in how using Javascript as a scripting language would look in something…