Gonna start out the month with a fun and simple one. MP3 Blogs and wget by Jeffrey Veen. When I read this, I had a VPS, that I could barely keep running. I blindly ran the command in this post. The next morning I found that I had downloaded almost 30 gigabytes of MP3s. It forced me to learning about things about linux, and wget. This was important, because I got one of my first tech jobs because I knew about wget. #

500+ articles to read. That backlog took years to build. Years of, “Yea, I’ll totally read that”. Then not reading anything. While I was able to trash part of the backlog. (No, I don’t need to read “4 spaces are better then 2 when formatting code”). I still had a healthy backlog. To not keep anyone in suspense, I read it 1. Reading it reminded me of my favorite articles from years past. #

Well, around 3ish years ago I stared working for a company that sells software to libraries and I didn’t know a thing. I have learned a lot since then, but I am now embarking on a new journey and I would like to leave some advice to other software devs who might find themselves in similar situations. The best advice I can give is to find a community who can remind you of how important libraries are. #

Managing IAM credentials is a burden. Besides juggling N separate credentials, I don’t want more secretes to manage. There must be a better way and I’m experimenting with some tools to find a better way. #

PPK is on a tear. He’s having a conversation in public that I’ve been having for a few years. You really should read these three blog posts for context. I appreciate the discussion and I hope that it continues, but the scope is sufficiently broad enough that I won’t be able to go through it all point by point. Instead I would like to provide a framework for the disscussion, thats why I titled this blog post with a quote from Donald Knuth #

The words full stack will quickly be overburdened, but for now they represents an ideal. The basic premise laid out by Chris Dixon. The new approach is to build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses existing companies. Awesome, we now have this new word, and it’s a word that is getting used a lot from fund-raising, to job listings, to internal memos. Like any new label how the hell do you know if a company is actually full stack? #

Taken by a co-worker when App.net was still picplz. App.net is shutting It’s clearly the context for this post, but it’s not the point. I am leaving App.net to be the VP of Engineering at new company that should have a name shortly. Durring my time at App.net I constantly operated at the edge of my abilities, and past them sometimes. It was alternatingly painful and exhilirating. I will be processing my stay here for quite awhile, but the main thing I learned from App. #

Yesterday we got a look into how new news organization are working in a technical sense1. To my mind its one of the few detailed posts about how places like Vox Media are working to actually innovate. It was written by Pablo Mercado, Vox Media’s VP of Technology. He detailed a little bit about how they pull together all the talent needed for a project and how they coordinate that talent. #

Lark is a python library that provides a generic method for transforming a HTTP request into a redis command. If you know what webdis is then you’ll roughly know what this is. It does a couple of things right now: It users REST as a guideline without getting to pedantic. It has built in support for per user key prefixs. It automatically JSON encodes redis values (where appropriate). It has lots of tests (and TravisCI all setup). #

At App.net we collect a metric ton of stats. When I build anything I try to collect some stats. We all must do that. Why not right, stats are fun. The hard part comes when you need to formulate those stats into information. It’s not easy. Slowly, I learned what to watch, what was important. It’s hard earned intuition, but intuition is no substitute for a well structured argument. Which is why I loved this short piece by Edward Tufte. #