A RESTful Micro-Framework in Go
After reading countless articles about the wonders of Go, I wanted to learn more. But, learning a new language— I mean really learning it, not just getting familiar with the general capabilities and syntax—is hard. I'm sure there are tons of books that would purport to teach me all about it, but there is no substitute…
I wish I could read Wikipedia like this
I love Wikipedia, but too often the articles are just not that easy to read. It’s not that my English isn’t good enough. My English good. There is Simple English Wikipedia, but it doesn’t cover as many topics and it’s not as thorough.
HTTP 308 Incompetence Expected
Internet History The Internet from every angle has always been a house of cards held together with defective duct tape. It's a miracle tha...
Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
In 2001, Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote a letter to the Budget Council of The University of Texas. A PDF is available here , I’ve typed it up so that everyone can read it. Sadly, the curriculum was changed to Java . Relatedly, the algorithmic language Scheme was replaced by Python in MIT’s The Structure and Interpretation…
US bans students from “blacklisted” countries from getting access to Coursera
I’m following a Coursera course entitled “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World” and just received a rather odd email. All students from Syria, Sudan, Iran and Cuba will no…
How To Scroll
Scroll-based interaction is incredibly popular for interactive storytelling . There are many compelling reasons for this, yet scrolling is surprisingly nuanced and easy to break. So here are five rules for employing scrolling effectively.
Notes on XKCD's “Pixels”
Max Goodhart's personal journal and sketchbook.
Myths about /dev/urandom
Randomness, entropy, and the Linux kernel.
Where do you find the time for side projects?
You work 40 hours per week. You have family commitments. How can you work on your side-hustle, when you have a limited amount of energy and time?
Rust lifetimes: Getting away with things that would be reckless in C++
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
How to Fold a Julia Fractal
A tale of numbers that like to turn: a different look at complex numbers and the strange things they do.
How NSA and GCHQ are tapping internet cables
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
Call me maybe: RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ is a distributed message queue, and is probably the most popular open-source implementation of the AMQP messaging protocol. It supports a wealth of durability, routing, and fanout strategies, and combines excellent documentation with well-designed protocol extensions. I’d like to set all these wonderful…
Generators in Firefox now 22 times faster
wingolog: article: generators in firefox now twenty-two times faster
Firm Inefficiency
Economists are often stereotyped as claiming that firms are very economically efficient, i.e., that they very effectively minimize costs and maximize profits.
Yik Yak Hack
Yik Yak is an anonymous, controversial social media application that allows people to make posts that are visible to other users within ~2 miles. Often landing a top 10 spot in the iOS App Store, this app has become increasingly popular with high school and college students. Due to the anonymous nature of the app…
Don't link to line numbers in GitHub
Today I saw a co-worker take a link from a specific line number in our team’s github repository and place it in the comments section of a user story. This is very helpful for those who need to see a quick reference to the code that could be causing a defect, but it’s wrong . Here’s what you need to do instead.
What does the NSA think of academic cryptographers?
Brighten Godfrey was one of my officemates when we were grad students at Berkeley. He’s now a highly-successful computer networking professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, …
Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol
All the recent media attention on Bitcoin inspired me to learn how Bitcoin really works, right down to the bytes flowing through the netwo...
Python 3 is killing Python
The Python community should fork Python 2.
iOS 8 Privacy Updates
A summary of all iOS 8 Security and Privacy updates and their importance.
How I made the print and eBook versions of my web book
It’s a funny feeling to spend nearly six years making something and then finally hold it in your hand. It’s simultaneously, “This is it! ” and “Is this it?” How can it be so small when it feels like such a big piece of my life?