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. #

Do not feel guilty for not reading the tidal wave of information that piles up on your door everyday. Just don’t. Half the battle in this modern era of information overload is learning how to not care about all the information. We call them feeds, or streams for a reason — they never end. Your only goal should be to build a better net. It’s not to worry about unread counts or friend requests, or virtual corn fields. #

Markdown like RSS is one of those things that has fundamentally changed my relationship with the way that I work. Unlike RSS though I think Markdown is primed for mass adoption. Its ready because it fills a classic need for a lightweight-journaling-note-taking-style syntax, it has wide spread adoption ie network effects, and we are already seeing movements to standardize and proselytize Markdown to a larger community. The other day on App. #

At PicPlz we built a hybrid mobile app. We had a native container written for iOS and Android that hosted a web version of our code. PicPlz was the first time I had worked on a fully mobile website. My operating paradigm was that I was building a website for a small screen. One day, our iOS developer asked me why our follow button didn’t just react when a user touched it. #

I have been standards spelunking recently. ATOM, OStatus, JSON XMPP (hint: that one is a joke), and Activity Steams. All this exploration led me to a conclusion - standards are not the panacea I once thought. There is a lot to like about standards; hard work, thourough thought, and sometimes a success, but we can’t blindly follow the standards off a cliff. I have been presented with an amazing opportunity to spend some time looking through all this prior art. #

The new aesthetic sat in my overflow folder for a while. I probably subscribed to it while working though a best new blog list. It was always curios. The pictures were nice, but like many blogs you figure it out by reading it. When I read the Atlantic piece It finally clicked. If you don’t know, The new aesthetic is an art movement. It’s tag line would be an exploration of how our digital products effect us. #

I gave a talk at the jQuery conference on sunday. I wanted to create one page were all the information about the talk could live. This is that page. Sources: Phonegap Backbone.js HTML5 rocks offline gMail Mobile application cache Six Revisions - web development blog Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript book Lawnchair jquery-offline Details: outline gist of the talk Slides - full slides with speaker notes

I recently spent some time getting to know backbone.js. I wanted to apply it to a mobile app I have been working on. While the code is great, I stumbled on an idea while using it. When I fist start using a framework of any kind, django for example, I almost always use there getting started tutorial. You copy, and paste the code from this tutorial, and then poke and prod it until you get some kind of understand of the code. #