Programming Music

The Office Stereo Our startup has a stereo in the office because one of the most important environmental elements is music, especially for software developers. “Programming can be a bit like having a dream or being in a trance.” I don’t know who said it first but I know it can be like that for me and my team of developers. The wrong music can really kill your ability to get into the state of flow. Read On →

Maybe we should farm with spoons

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_lanier_the_internet_destroyed_the_middle_class/ I actually read this ridiculous article on Salon a few days ago, but seeing it again tonight on one of my feeds got me spun up again. The problem with the logic this guy is using is that taken to its logical conclusion, any technology that automates dull, repetitive tasks is bad. I guess he thinks we should be farming with spoons instead of tractors. Those tractors sure put a lot of people out of work. Read On →

Yahoo to acquire tumblr

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-acquire-tumblr-120000116.html What are the chances that this is going to work out? Yahoo! has a sort of spotty record with prior acquisitions. I mean after Geocities, Interclick and Flickr Yahoo! at least knows how not to do an acquisition…

Explaining to my Dad why I quit my job

Monday May 20th will be the very first day that I work for myself, full-time, on my start-up. There are plenty of variables to worry about when starting a new business but what I was most worried about was telling my father that I was going to quit my “good” job. The prospect of generating traction didn’t terrify me, and the innovative product was almost complete, but I was dreading the “talk” I had to have with my dad. Read On →

Syma s107g Modified for Speed

I’m assuming many of you are familiar with these toy helicopters. I think this is about as much fun as someone (nerdy) can have for $20. Here you can see a photo of mine after I modified it for speed 🙂 I removed all the tail decorations and supports as well as flipping the tail rotor upside down. This resulted in a dramatically improved forward rate of speed as well as some forward drift. Read On →

The Future of IDEs?

Action.io Early Private Beta Preview Are Cloud IDEs the Future? I was recently invited into the private beta for Action.io, the cloud IDE platform. For me, the neatest feature of the IDE was having the development VM built into the platform. To give you some background on why this was a big deal for me, consider by current Python workflow: Write code in PyCharm PyCharm automatically pushes code to my local Linux VM Run tests in PyCharm but execute them using a remote interpreter on the VM. Read On →

BBQ

Now that is a BBQ menu!

Show VM IP Address on Start Up

I frequently use VMs in my development projects (who doesn’t?) and when I am using a “server” version of Linux I like to log in with iTerm instead of using the tiny terminal screen VMWare presents me with. First I need to know the IP address of the VM. It almost always stays the same, but having to log in to find it is a pain. I found instruction on how to do this on Ubuntu on this page: Read On →

If It’s Evil

This article about how to make sure your Nginx config doesn’t suck is some cheeky goodness. Nginx: If it’s evil

Deleting my Facebook Account

It’s Time… Well Facebook, it’s been a good run. But, now I have to say good-bye. I’m tired of being the product that you selling to your advertisers. Your only saving grace was that you didn’t have a very good search tool, so as long as I was careful about what I put up, there was a reasonable expectation that it wasn’t very visible to the outside world. So I monitored my privacy settings, and made my groups, but now it’s too much. Read On →