Posts

But something else has happened over the past ten years; browsers got better. Their support for standards improved, and now there are evergreen browsers: automatically updating browsers, each version more capable and standards compliant than the last. With newer standards like HTML Imports, Object.observe, Promises, and HTML Templates I think it’s time to rethink the model of JS frameworks. There’s no need to invent yet another way to do something, just use HTML+CSS+JS. ...

On Piketty on Capital Tim Bray reviews the book of the year, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and more importantly, rounds up the key reactions from around the Web. I’m very interested on the book, and I’m sure it will be on my “to read” list for a long time.

Here’s a question Paul Ford poses, and of course, attempts to answer in The Great Works of Software: Is it possible to propose a software canon? To enumerate great works of software that are deeply influential—that changed the nature of the code that followed? The list he comes up with is very solid. I feel like relational databases should also be represented – but it’s hard to pick one product. Should it be Oracle? It’s the first commercial relational database, and is still going strong. Maybe MySQL? They put relational databases in the hands of the masses. ...

Every team and company has blind spots. In some cases, these blind spots can cut across an entire industry. One of the most common is Not Invented Here Syndrome, an inability to trust software that you didn’t write yourself. In the past, many businesses had a huge blind spot when it came to open source software, often going so far as to ban it as a matter of policy. These days, many newer companies refuse to purchase commercial software, preferring only open source software. These blind spots often lead to making the kinds of expensive mistakes that are also prohibitively expensive to fix. ...

Why Use Make Mike Bostock (the creator of D3.js) explains how he captures the steps to create a visualization using a Makefile. Amazing repurposing of an antiquated command. I might consider using something a bit more flexible, like fabricate, which enables you to write build scripts in Python, but the overall concept is fascinating and cool.

Everybody is probably already familiar with the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL that was disclosed this week. I saw two explanations that really impressed me with their clarity. The first was Randall Munroe’s XKCD comic. In a few panels, it illustrates exactly what the problem is. The second is for those who prefer text, and was written by Rusty Foster, formerly of Kuro5hin, who did a great job of explaining Heartbleed in the New Yorker. ...

Recently rc3.org favorite Ta-Nehisi Coates got into a prolonged debate with Jonathan Chait (who blogs at New York Magazine) over whether it’s OK for Paul Ryan or Barack Obama to blame “black culture” for African Americans’ lack of economic progress relative to white people. Here’s Coates’ initial post if you want to start at the beginning. Anyway, the debate shifts ground into an argument about whether Coates (standing in as a proxy for African Americans) should be optimistic and grateful for the progress that has been made on racial equality in America since slavery. Chait (who is white) argues that he should be, Coates disagrees. In doing so, he provides this quotation from Malcolm X1: ...

I’m really interested in Michael Lewis’s new book on high frequency trading, basically because high frequency trading is the kind of thing I hate, and I know Lewis hates it too. Felix Salmon throws some water on Lewis’s take, and argues that HFT is not as problematic as it’s made out to be. My favorite article I recently read about HFT was Barbarians at the Gateways, a look at the technology behind HFT by Jacob Loveless. If nothing else, HFT is really, really interesting as a software engineering and systems design problem. ...

Mistakes we’ve made Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock from Hacker School writes about mistakes they’ve made along the way. This is a great example of increasing your credibility by admitting your mistakes.

Monki Gras 2014 – Craft Culture and Tech. A conference about Language and Making Stuff James Governor’s wrap-up of Monki Gras. Monki Gras is the perfect size, and the collection of attendees and speakers has been excellent both of the past two years. After a conference, you should feel inspired to go forth and climb new hills, and after Monki Gras I always do.