It took me some twenty-plus years to really learn how to program. It wasn’t for a lack of trying either, it was just that I was trying the wrong way. I tried to learn to program by following tutorials that created programs I didn’t have the slightest interest in keeping. I was trying to…
I’ve been getting solidly flamed recently, as have my former coworkers at Digg, my friends at Twitter, etc. about our adoption and promotion of various NoSQL storage systems. It seems that some DBAs are very, very upset that us internet kids are considering abandoning SQL’s ship. I’m not here to throw out a bunch of…
As previously blogged , Wordnik is a heavy user of 10gen’s MongoDB . One year ago today we started the investigation to find an alternative to MySQL to store, find, and retrieve our corpus data. After months of experimentation in the non-relational landscape (and running a scary number of nightly builds), we settled…
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
by John Perry Barlow Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.We have no elected...
I recently learned an interesting fact about Fibonacci numbers while watching a random number theory video on YouTube. Fibonacci numbers can be used to approximately convert from miles to kilometers and back. Here is how. Take two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, for example 5 and 8. And you're done converting. No...
The official source for news about Apple, from Apple. Read press releases, get updates, watch video and download images.
I wrote a script to crawl U.S. App Store customer reviews for the top 100 apps from every category (minus duplicates) and compute the most common words in 1-star and 5-star reviews, excluding words that were also common in 3-star reviews.
Startup pay kind of sucks. This is not a well-kept secret. A great startup with a dozen or so people will typically pay its employees about a third less than a big company. Some will argue that that’s because of the value of the equity that startups give you. I argue that that’s the price of doing something that’s…
I officially joined Engine Yard on January 1, 2008, about a week before we announced our Series A funding, becoming its twenty-second employee. I was Engine Yard's very first "Engineering" hire, and I would spend the next year working on Ezra's Merb project, finally releasing Merb 1.
Mike Arrington posted about a secret meeting of angels and super angels in San Francisco the other night. In the post he suggests that they are colluding to keep valuations down, terms intact, and traditional venture capital firms, such as ours, out of their deals. It's the kind of blog post that Mike has become […]
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Jan Rychter: Tech Consulting, Product Development, Data Science.
On Twitter, my friends Shani and Erie are engaged in a bit of time-honored kvetching about the legendary and general awfulness of restaurant Web sites. Who thinks it’s good idea to blast annoying music at people going to your site? Why do they so often rely on Flash, which doesn’t really add anything to the…
The official source for news about Apple, from Apple. Read press releases, get updates, watch video and download images.
