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  Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.Shit workTake a look at Twitter Lists. The idea behind Twitter Lists was that users would carefully cultivate lists on Twitter of different accounts they’re following (or not following). These could be divided into lists like Family, Friends, Coworkers, People I Find Mildly Attractive, People To Murder, People I Find Mildly Attractive And Want To Murder, and so on.The problem is that, anecdota...

   Design,Facebook,Twitter,User oriented     2011-11-03 13:28:59

  Hash Tables in Javascript

IntroductionHash tables are a permutation of associative arrays (i.e. name => value pairs). If you use PHP, then you are very familiar with this type of data structure already since all PHP arrays are associative.The Javascript language implements very loose and somewhat limited support for associative arrays. Any JavaScript array can use other objects as keys, making it a hash, but there exists no formal constructor for initializing them and it is more or less unweildy to work with. A short ...

   JavaScript,Hashtable,Implementation,Array     2011-11-26 02:43:40

  5 Ways to Boost MySQL Scalability

There are a lot of scalability challenges we see with clients over and over. The list could easily include 20, 50 or even 100 items, but we shortened it down to the biggest five issues we see.1. Tune those queriesBy far the biggest bang for your buck is query optimization. Queries can be functionally correct and meet business requirements without being stress tested for high traffic and high load. This is why we often see clients with growing pains, and scalability challenges as their site becom...

   MySQL,Scalability,Methods,Implementation,Practice     2011-10-18 02:57:27

  Live in Beijing and Thinking about Starting a Tech Company? Read. This. Post. Now.

The Disrupt Beijing Hackathon starts in a little more than 24 hours, and we’ve been working hard over the last few days to make it even more of a no-brainer for local Beijing developers to attend.In addition to the chance to be the next GroupMeor win valuable prizes, we have decided to give all Hackathon attendees who complete a hack and present in the 24-hour period free tickets to the Disrupt conference Monday and Tuesday. That’s a $1,000-plus value for s...

   Startup,Beijing,TechCrunch,Disrupt,2011     2011-10-28 12:41:43

  How Speeding The "Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime" Could Change This Modern World

Math breakthroughs don't often capture the headlines--but MIT researchers have just made one that could lead to all sorts of amazing technological breakthroughs that in just a few years will touch every hour of your life. Last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms was presented by a group of MIT researchers. It's possible that under cert...

   FFT,Speed-up,Fast fourier transform     2012-03-20 07:47:04

  Why I Quit My Job to Start a Tech Company

Back in November of 2006, before NY Mag and TimeOut put startups on the cover, before the “tech bubble”, before Twitter and Foursquare were popular, before working at a startup in NY was considered a reasonable thing to do, I was a private equity investor for a $1.6 billion fund called Quadrangle Group. It was just my third year out of college and I made a little over $250,000. For a Brazilian immigrant who spent most of his childhood kind of worried he would have to do physica...

   Start,Company,Creative,Innovation,Techno     2011-08-16 08:38:35

  Some Thoughts on Twitter's Availability Problems

As a regular user of Twitter I've felt the waves of frustration wash over me these past couple of weeks as the service has been hit by one outage after another. This led me to start pondering the problem space [especially as it relates to what I'm currently working on at work] and deduce that the service must have some serious architectural flaws which have nothing to do with the reason usually thrown about by non-technical pundits (i.e. Ruby on Rails is to blame). Some of my suspicions ...

   Twitter,Architecture,Availability,Design     2011-08-12 07:39:21

  JavaScript interview questions

This post will cover the JavaScript questions I have encountered and have seen during my programming career. They will mainly focus on vanilla JavaScript though there are lots of excellent frameworks out there and many people are using them in their daily work. this keyword this keyword is an very important but easy to confuse concept in JavaScript since it is always referring to the calling object of the function. 1. What will be the output of below code snippet? function User(name) { this....

   JAVASCRIPT,ALGORITHM,THIS,CLOSURE     2019-03-09 07:05:46

  Clojure & Java Interop

About a year ago I got a phone call asking if I wanted to join another team at DRW. The team supports a (primarily) Java application, but the performance requirements would also allow it to be written in a higher level language. I'd been writing Clojure (basically) full-time at that point - so my response was simple: I'd love to join, but I'm going to want to do future development using Clojure. A year later we still have plenty of Java, but the vast majority of the new code I add is Cloj...

   Java,Clojure,Interoprability,Commit,Function call     2011-12-29 09:11:22

  Notes on Programming in C

Introduction       Kernighan and Plauger's The Elements of Programming Style was an important and rightly influential book.  But sometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbook approach to good style instead of the succinct expression of a philosophy they were meant to be.  If the book claims that variable names should be chosen meaningfully, doesn't it then follow that variables whose names are small essays on their use are even better?  Isn't MaximumV...

   C,Notes,Tips     2011-12-09 07:55:47

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