Blog & Notes

Setup a web server, the 2012 edition. See also: LAMP guides

Building a restful API in Java

Math.net Numerics, a great numerics library for .NET.

Tip for Go repository layout problems: “If you want to work on github.com projects locally, the easiest thing to do is work on $GOPATH/src/github.com/{user}/{project}. This will allow your local changes to apply and still work with go get able URL's.“

All of mbostock's blocks

Andrew Gerrand's github home, a resource of good Go code.

Best wishes for 2013

Joel on MBAs: “Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. "It's ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!" they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand.“

Parsing addresses is hard: Parsec, ZipRipJS.

Parsing URLs in JavaScript: js-url

When the Nerds Go Marching In, how a team of engineers build the software that drove Obama's reelection.

Typicons, free-to-use vector icons.

Unicode—The film

xkcd 1110 is cult.

The combination of gorp and revel seems an interesting Go-based web framework.

A WebSockets 101

FontAwesome is helpful. Don't know if Adobe Edge WebFonts is.

Wanna build your own Linux distro?

deadweight helps finding unused CSS.

Retina Capture. Capture screenshots for both normal and Retina displays.

Rails callbacks will hit you, and what to do about it.

Here's how to add App banners to your website to provide a link to your app in the Apple AppStore.

How to implement the Apple PassBook server side in Rails.

Never heard of him, but for those that get into Java (or have to live with it), this is a nice list of tech docs: Torsten Horn Techdocs

Go-powered web services with Rails, here

Bought a Nexus 7, and quite like it.

Get Forward, a platform for e-commerce

Cross-compilation with Go: Here

Tomorrow theme for VIM and such.

Interesting new projects in the Rails world (and some of them get baked into Rails 4.0, from what we know): jbuilder, strong_parameters, turbolinks, and cache_digests.

Rather helpful to convert EDI flat files into XML: edifact-xml. Also: EDI-to-XML

Have to try zeus to speed up Rails tests.

Seriesly, a time-series DB in Go.

Another series of CSS3 buttons

I guess Apple won't like DatabaseKit as they have Core Data.

Ideas, from Sequoia.

Great advice and intro to Ember.js. Although I was experimenting with AngularJS recently, it's good to have options.

Backbone.js Hacker's Guides: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

EpicEditor: A JavaScript Markdown editor. Looks good, given the 0.1.0 version tag.

tl;dr legal: Software licenses summarized in plain English.

ElasticSearch over nginx, with authentication and stuff.

Brackets, an open source code editor for the web (by Adobe).

Some other useful Go resources/articles: Tideland Common Go Library, Go at CloudFlare, 10 things you probably didn't know about Go.

How to retinafy your web site. A great resource by Thomas Fuchs (for a great display).

Always a good read: Malcolm Gladwell's blog

Sometimes it feels just like: http://www.gifbin.com/985083

The Power of Context, by Alan Kay.

Two insights into management style: Microsofts Lost Decade and Show How, Don't Tell What - A Management Style by Ryan Tomayko of GitHub.

Elon Musk, of PayPal/Tesla/SpaceX fame, thinks about Jetson Tunnels and Hyperloop.

Nice visualizations: San Francisco vs Silicon Valley

Webwandern: Hike the Alps, couch potatoe style.

Prose, a content editor for GitHub.

Nice article on Rails and VIM, although I've been using Sublime Text 2 quite a lot lately.

I'm enyoing Google Go quite a bit these days. A wonderful, fast, and straightforward language. If you're working with ElasticSearch, you might like my Go-based command line client for ElasticSearch.

Sticking to Sublime Text 2 for now: Here's some help for beginners and some more advice.

The 80.000 particles system in JavaScript. Click, hold, and move your mouse.

Web Page Test: Multi-browser test platform, and free.

Nicer forms and select boxes with Chosen and Select2.

SpriteMe: Generate sprites for the hundreds of images on your web site.

Theory X and Theory Y, or why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers.

The shapes of CSS.

Sidekiq, an alternative to Resque.

Ember seems to get going slowly. I personally like it better than Backbone, but it's just a matter of taste I guess. Together with their approach to routing (here's the gist of it and an article by Tom Dale) and data, it looks more promising day by day. Wonder if it's going to be a part of Rails 4.0.

Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?, a paper by Cormac Herley, Microsoft Research

Statsd is great stuff: Why using it, statsd repository, on events, statsd with AMQP backend, a Ruby implementation by 37signals (batsd) (intro here), with different backends and an alternative to Graphite.

The paranoiacs guide to securing your laptop.

WebDev for Go; proxies requests, recompiles, and restarts real server if required.

config.threadsafe! to be removed from Rails 4.

jQuery transit: Super smooth CSS3 animations for jQuery.

Chronic: I'd call it shut up. For cron.

GMaps is the easiest way to use Google Maps.

The DotFile society.

Google Search Parameters in 2012.

Just deployed my first Scala Play! 2.0 app. With Capistrano and railsless-deploy.

Stripe not only has one of the best API docs ever, but also releases stuff in the Open Source, e.g. Einhorn, a shared socket manager in the realms of FastCGI, Unicorn, and Rainbows.

I like Go better and better the more I read about it: Parsing huge XML files, network programming, and a nice intro to Go by rsc. These guys really know what they're doing.

Mac OS X Sublime Text Keyboard Shortcuts

What does a F1 car look like when cut in half.

Async.cs: A great and clean Async threading class for you .NET devs (by Sam Saffron of StackExchange).

Vert.x: JVM-based, polyglot, async web development framework. Write your apps in a JVM language (Java, Scala, JRuby, Groovy, JavaScript, Clojure, you name it).

Opa: Although it's funny name (for Germans), its a fresh and interesting approach to web development: One language for client and server; data stores are a first-class citizen, not an afterthought (although currently only Mongo and Couch).

Node.js and Express is now rather standard. To me it seems, people use this more and more. Also, see Ringojs.

Vibe.d, a web framework for D.

Also, for JVM, there's AWF in the Apache incubator.

Gorilla is a nice, low-level support framework for web applications. I like the approach of not adding another layer on top of the OS/language, but rather add features that make it easier but don't hide the OS/language.

APIs are UX for developers, probably the best summary I read about API design so far.

Down to Fax: Dating site für Internetausdrucker

Excellent TED talk

Single Sign-On can be that simple, yes

“People join good projects and leave bad management.“ - Michael Feiner

“A High Frequency Trader's Apology“ (Part 1, Part 2)

“Men have become the tools of their tools.“—Henry David Thoreau

Open Smart Argentina on Twitter and keep scrolling down (i.e. press 'j')

Demoscene—The Art of Algorithms, which also comes with link to a documentary

I'm very pleased to finally see a lot of innovation in programming languages: Go is v1, Mozilla comes out with Rust, Julia is an excellent alternative to R (and all those expensive commercial packages), Dart maybe gets a foot into the door, Node and the excellent V8 Engine of course, people talk and write about Clojure, Scala and Typesafe with its excellent Play 2.0 web framework. I think it is very important and healthy to have alternatives. And maybe, just maybe, languages are starting to be not so much based on the programming spec but on the lower-level VMs like JVM, LLVM and such.

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.“—George Orwell

Excellent description of Bayes Theorem

Very helpful: A free and open currency exchange.

SocketRocket: A WebSocket library for Obj-C

Effective Scala: A tutorial from Twitter

Don't know about HTTP caching? Go, read this.

How many servers does Google have? 1,791,040... exactly ;-)

Real-time processing with Storm, open-sourced at GitHub.

Some Ruby tricks

How to set up a mail server on GNU/Linux systems.

ZooKeeper, and how to update thousands of config files in under a second.

Do you really need a framework... when all you need to do is to paste some code to have a NHibernate session per request.

Gamification of Sex. Turn down the volume before clicking that link ;-)

Die GLS Bank, und was sie von anderen unterscheidet.

Strata Conference 2012.

How @antirez manages his todos.

Hack of the day: The long range Illy WiFi antenna

Getting started with User Experience Design

Initializr: Pre-package your newly HTML5 project

ASCII flow is genius.

A todo list cli.

Patched Ruby 1.9.3-p0 to be ~30% faster with Rails. link

spdycat: A command line SPDY client.

Copy-writing in emails

Didn't know there's a word for it: Mojibake, or: When software renders unreadable characters because of e.g. encoding issues.

Come work at Twitter

mitmproxy: A SSL-capable man-in-the-middle proxy.

SSH hacks: Now look what you can do with that simple tool.

Clever CSS tricks to do nice and clean tabs (CSS-only).

Happy new year everybody!

Sprite Factory, very useful tool for generating CSS sprites.