Posts

I enjoy the great privilege of working with Dan McKinley, whose blog is at mcfunley.com. He doesn’t post very often and his posts are reliably great. I want to call out one post specifically … Testing to Cull the Living Flower. Here’s one sentence: When growth is an externality, controlled experiments are the only way to distinguish a good release from a bad one. In it, he argues for why sites that are enjoying rapid growth must use A/B testing to build features if they want to be confident that they are making a measurable, positive impact on that growth rate. ...

For the past 18 months or so, I’ve been working on data engineering at Etsy. That involves a pretty wide array of technologies – instrumenting the site using JavaScript, batch processing logs in Hadoop, warehousing data in an analytics database, and building Web-based tools for analytics, among other things. One of the persistently tough problems is moving data between systems in an accurate and timely fashion, sometimes transforming it into a more useful form in the process. ...

I’m going through some of my favorite long reads from 2013 that I didn’t get around to blogging at the time I read them. My first pick is actually not from 2013, it’s from 2002, but I happened to read it this year. Furthermore, it was later expanded into a book that was published in 2006. I plan to read it in 2014. The book and the article, written by Charles C. Mann, are both entitled 1491. Mann’s argument is revisionist history at its best, and I mean that as a compliment. ...

One piece of news this week is that Alan Turing received a royal pardon for his conviction for indecency in 1952 for indecency. The best book I read in 2013 was Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma. I keep intending to write more about the book, but on the occasion of Turing’s pardon, I’ll again encourage you to pick it up. Most articles about Turing’s life explain that he committed suicide after undergoing chemical castration after being convicted for homosexual acts, but Hodges’ conjecture about why Turing took his own life is far more nuanced and interesting. Here’s Hodges on the pardon: ...

Philip Walton: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco Walton reacts to the types of questions he got interviewing for front-end developer positions with Internet companies. He was asked lots of abstract questions and few questions about the practicalities of front-end development. I think that it’s a mistake to focus too much on a skills match when interviewing candidates, but I also think that you should verify the skills candidates claim to have in the interview process. In other words, a company that mostly uses Python shouldn’t be afraid to hire Ruby developers, but they should make sure that those Ruby developers really can program in Ruby. Front-end skills are more generalized, and it seems crazy not to interview front-end developers about those skills. ...

Charlie Stross: Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire BitCoin is one of those things I’ve found vaguely irritating since the beginning. Stross has a strong list of legitimate reasons to be irritated. Relatedly, this post by Jason Kuznicki explains why BitCoin is likely a speculative bubble.

Harvard Business Review posted an interview with MIT professor Ofer Sharone about the limited job prospects for older workers, especially the long-term unemployed. I agree with most everything Sharone says, but I want to put a bit of a different spin on it. In the interview, he addresses the excuses people use when they refuse to consider hiring older, LTU workers–skills mismatch, underemployment, and fear that they won’t stick around in general. ...

OK, so a guy made a Web site called Tab Closed Didn’t Read to post screen shots of site that hide their content behind various kinds of overlays that demand that users take some action before proceeding. He’s written a followup blaming the problem on over-reliance on analytics, mainly because some people justify the use of these intrusive calls to action by citing analytics. Anyone who justifies this sort of thing based on analytics should be sued for malpractice. ...

Here’s a paragraph from the New York Times’ latest insider account of the efforts to fix the Healthcare.gov Web site (and deal with the political fallout of the problems with the rollout): But perhaps most important, it remains unclear whether the enrollment data being transmitted to insurers is completely accurate. In a worst-case scenario, insurance executives fear that some people may not actually get enrolled in the plans they think they have chosen, or that some people may receive wrong information about the subsidies for which they are eligible. ...

Like everybody else on the Internet, I’ve been following the dispute between GoldieBlox and The Beastie Boys, or to put it more as I see it, the fight that GoldieBlox picked with The Beastie Boys in order to generate publicity. For a really excellent rundown of the questions of law, check out Andy Baio’s fairhanded take. For the argument that questions of law aside, GoldieBlox doesn’t really deserve the strong outpouring of support they’ve gotten from the rabble, read Felix Salmon. ...