joshuago’s Bookmarks

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was once great excitement about the potential for LDAP based directory servers to become more than just authentication servers and morph into general purpose datastores. LDAP directories promised a single, scalable, high performance data store that could be queried for common information across multiple applications.

"We aren't creating computers. We are creating bicycles for the mind."

"Farming is how Detroit started and farming is how Detroit can be saved."

A commit should contain exactly one logical change. A logical change includes adding a new feature, fixing a specific bug, etc. If it's not possible to describe the high level change in a few words, it is most likely too complex for a single commit.

Designers need to be there start to ship: from strategy to launch. This is different from other companies. Share early and share often. Sharing with the team and users helps make the design better. Don’t fall in love. Software is impermanent –it is always changing and you need to accept that.

Sometimes, of course, it can seem boring. Sometimes the devotion to balanced he said/she said panel discussions can leave you frustrated and angry and no smarter than you were 15 minutes earlier. Sometimes the interviewing is less challenging than one might hope. But the luxury of an uninterrupted hour of serious, straight-forward news and analysis is just that these days, a luxury. And, in today's world of media where fact and fiction, news and opinion, too often seem hopelessly blurred, it is good to have Lehrer — clearly a person of trust — still at work.

This is what a publisher should do: ensure the ongoing financial success and growth of his or her publication. Instead, what we have now in the media industry are publishers who believe their duties include dictating the editorial mission on behalf of a business principle. This is when publishers go wrong and, generally, is when they should be taken out back and shot.

First think of the consumer of the API. Think about his likely situation and the problems he's facing. He doesn't want to learn a new abstraction and he doesn't like the fact that your API is going to make him change the design of his program. Design for the benefit of the consumer, not your ease of implementation.

When I have been asked why I, as a conservative, support this man [Obama] the way I do, I can only answer: listen to him.

Over the course of the past decade we have invented a dozen technologies to solve the problem of asynchronous and bi-directional communication between the browser and the server: AJAX, Comet & HTTP Streaming, BOSH, ReverseHTTP, WebHooks & PubSubHubbub, and Flash sockets amongst many others. Having said that, it does not take much experience with any of the above to realize that each has a weak spot and none solve the fundamental problem: web-browsers of yesterday were not designed for bi-directional communication.