Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon
Here are my raw notes from the keynote. Update: PG posted this talk in essay form. It’s not much longer than my notes; you should probably read that instead. big startup ideas are actually t…
Things I wish I knew about MongoDB a year ago
I’ve used MongoDB for over a year at scale at both Heyzap and Bugsnag and I’ve found it to be a very capable database. As with all databases, there are some gotchas, and here is a summary of the things I wish someone had told me earlier.
Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program
I frequently see a problem when people (especially techies) try to teach programming to someone (especially non-techies). Many programming tutorials begin with basic programming principles: variables, loops, data types. This is both an obvious way to teach programming and almost certainly a wrong way to teach…
Handbook of Text manipulation on Unix
This introduction to text manipulation on UNIX platforms provides an overview of some common commands widely available and installed standard on most UNIX-based releases. Many times these standard utilities are ignored in favor of more modern text-processors such as Perl, Python, or Ruby, which are not always…
Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
When we started what became Sencha, we made a bet on the web: a bet that modern application development didn’t need anything except the browser, a great set of frameworks and a great set of tools. With those three weapons in hand, we knew developers could build applications that would delight users.
PHP Addiction
I wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. I continue to use it because I know it extremely well, it’s very easy to use and deploy, and it’s nearly maintenance-free on servers. When you’re a programmer forced to also be your own sysadmin, that’s very attractive.
How I built a Hacker News mobile web app
Last month, I tweeted about one of my recent projects, the Hacker News mobile web app. It's a simple little app to read Hacker News' stories…
How To GitHub: A Complete Guide to Forking, Branching, Squashing and Pulls
Everything you need to know to pull down, branch off of, squash, and fork in GitHub in one handy little guide.
GUM: A better CLI for Git
The books did make me think. A lot. A lot about a tool I use everyday… git http://git-scm.com .
Suffering-oriented programming
Someone asked me an interesting question the other day: "How did you justify taking such a hu...
Free Programming Ebooks
Since this post got quite popular I decided to incorporate some of the excellent suggestions posted in the comments, so this list now has more than …
Sublime Text 2 Beta released with Auto-complete and Improved UI
Sublime Text 2 Beta 2165 is out now, with the biggest set of improvements yet. Some of the highlights are:
Light Table reaches 0.1.0
The Light Table Playground is getting a huge update today that we’re really excited to show you. New to Light Table? It’s a new kind of reactive IDE, check out the original post to learn more.
Software Inventory by Joel Spolsky
Imagine, for a moment, that you came upon a bread factory for the first time. At first it just looks like a jumble of incomprehensible machinery with a few people buzzing around. As your eyes adjus…
Reddit's database has only two tables
Steve Huffman talks about Reddit’s approach to data storage in a High Scalability post from 2010. I was surprised to learn that they only have two tables in their database.
Getting Real book is now free PDF
The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
The Mathematical Hacker
The programming profession is blessed with a number of gifted essayists. Today I will pick on three of my favorites — Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Steve Yegge — because they all seem to disagree about why (and whether) mathematics is relevant to the practicing programmer. Their attitudes might be summarized as:
Python Deployment Anti-Patterns
Deploying web applications is hard. No shiny continuous deployment talk and no DevOps coolness can change that. Or to use DevOps Borat’s words: “Is all fun and game until you are need of put it in production.“ There are some mistakes I see people doing again and again so I’d like to address them here.
A set of top Computer Science blogs
This started out as a list of top Computer Science blogs, but it more closely resembles a set: the order is irrelevant and there are no duplicate elements; membership of this set of blogs satisfies…