Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location
I'm currently on a cruise ship somewhere in the Mediterranean sea, en route from Barcelona to Casablanca. Most people here are either retirees enjoying the easy life or younger fol...
Deciphering the Business Card Raytracer
I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article " A Minimal Ray Tracer " from the book Graphics…
Rotating Images
How to rotate an image, and a need trick to rotate a bitmap an arbitrary amount in a simple paint package.
GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
There’s potential for massive profits: most customers of shared hosting and VPSes never come anywhere near their resource allocations so the machines can be extremely oversold, and most dedicated-server customers keep paying the “new” price of the server every month for years after its value has plummeted through the…
Django 1.6 released
The latest official version is 6.1.3
Callbacks are imperative, promises are functional
You will often hear it said that JavaScript is a ‘functional’ programming language. It is described as such simply because functions are first-class values: many other features that define functional programming – immutable data, preference for recursion over looping, algebraic type systems, avoidance of side effects…
Why you should not trust emails sent from Google
As you might know, Google is running a vulnerability reward program , where they award researchers monetary awards or a place in their Hall of Fame when they responsibly disclose vulnerabilities. With this in mind, I was scooping around on several Google services, including Google Scholar. As I recently started a PhD…
A determined 'hacker' decrypts RDS-TMC
RDS-TMC uses an encryption algorithm simple enough to be run using pen-and-paper hardware.
San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
It's impossible to argue that San Francisco hasn't changed my life dramatically. When I moved to the Bay Area four years ago, I was an inexperienced kid who was working at a Genius Bar in an Apple Store. I didn't know JavaScript at all—hell, I could barely program and my useless liberal arts degree was doing nothing…
What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
People who worked with Steve Jobs (I'll call him Steve) usually don't talk about it. It's kind of an unwritten rule, partly because he was obsessive about his privacy.
Why We Still Believe in Working Remotely
It’s 2013, almost three years after we first raised money and started growing beyond the first four employees . At the time, Jeff wrote a great blog post about working remotely, basically laying out our plan for how we were going to make it work. Now we’re a few years in and it’s time to update it with, well, what…
Do the right thing, wait to get fired
I stumbled upon this bit of wisdom in Team Geek: A Software Developers Guide to Working Well with Others, and it resonated. It comes from Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan: Do the right thing, wait t…
Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly
Just a little something I thought was worth pointing out. @notch , the creator of Minecraft, has been posting updates on his latest toy proj...
Firefox 25 is released
We'd also like extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to Firefox 25!
How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)
Tech companies seem to be having trouble finding good technical talent. Maybe I can help. For you, the hiring person who is having trouble finding programming talent, I’ve created this brief hiring guide. It is based on my experience over the years both as a prospective employee and as a person doing the hiring.
Worst CAPTCHA Ever
By definition, CAPTCHA should be easy to read by humans but hard to read by machines. Apparently, they don’t agree with that at D&B: