I love it loud, mostly I have alway referred to myself as a "literal rock-star developer," because I sing lead and play guitar in an 80s hair-metal band called Hairstrike. Yeah, 80s butt-rock: GnR, Def Leppard, Ratt, Dokken, Whitesnake. The whole ridiculous thing. We wear costumes (see above photo) when
A man I'll never be: a software engineering identity crisis The first LPs (that's "long-playing record" to you children in the audience) that I ever bought with my own money were two used ones: "A Farewell To Kings," by Rush, and Boston's self-titled debut album. I was a big Boston
Welcome to management I have been working in startup tech for over 25 years now, about half that time as a manager. After being an IC for such a long time, I was frankly excited to learn some new skills. I wanted to be a manager because I thought I could have more
Ghost on AWS Lightsail When I resurrected this blog, I wasn't sure what to host it on. Not exactly morally opposed to good ol' WordPress, but my experience with that thing is that it's pretty huge, "fucking ponderous." I wanted something a little more lightweight, but not
Brain and brain! What is brain? I mentioned in the last post, I've been playing around with OpenClaw, like so many of the Twitter tech intelligentsia who are hoping the Singularity doesn't hit before they can vibe-code a Salesforce replacement or a marketing funnel to make them kajillions of dollars. I
All that is old is new again I started this blog back in 2005, after I wrote my book for SitePoint. I wrote a lot back in those days, still the early days of the Web. I was working for Mitch Kapor at the Open Source Applications Foundation. I stopped posting during my tenure at Yammer, now
Major Geddy updates In the most recent round of updates, Larz Conwell has done a shit-ton of amazing work on templates: making the templating system play nicely with various formats: EJS, Mustache, and Jade. It can now happily figure out what sort of template from the file-extension, and you can even
Fleegix on Geddy It's taken some time, a lot of late-night hacking, and tons of work by contributors like Daniel Erickson and Larz Conwell , but the Geddy Web framework is starting to grow up and become pretty fucking solid. It's finally far enough along I can replace my
Older programmers with families considered harmful? At a recent meetup, a guy in the community (a guy whom I generally have a lot of respect for) said one of the stupidest things I've heard in a long time (and that's saying something, given the silly shit I hear coming out of my
Logan, client- and server-side JavaScript test runner Some of the work I'm doing at Yammer involves writing JavaScript code that runs in different environments. We're using geddy-model code in the browser, as well as with TheRubyRacer (which embeds the V8 JavaScript interpreter in a Ruby process). This code is part of the
Geddy models/validations for Node.js The last couple of weeks have been a blast. I've been settling into my new job at Yammer, getting to know the guys on the team, and enjoying the insanely delicious food. Yes, we have a chef that comes in; it's pretty ridiculous. By happy accident,
What's next is Yammer I've just come back from a meeting at the offices of my new employer, Yammer, Inc . I've accepted a position there as Senior Front-End Engineer, doing development work primarily in JavaScript and Ruby. I start next week, after enjoying a little family time this week
REST easy with Geddy for Node.js Geddy is a small Web-app development framework for Node.js. It uses a router syntax similar to Rails or Merb, and now has tools for quickly creating RESTful, resource-based routes as well. Building and installing Geddy Prerequisites: An up-to-date version of Node.js. I'm
Geddy: Web framework for Node.js So I've posted previously about the embarrassment of riches that we have with Node.js modules, specifically Web frameworks. I count no less than 14 frameworks and micro-frameworks for building Web-apps with Node right now on the list of Node modules . I had actually hoped to
Node.js frameworks Quite a growing list of Node.js modules and projects on GitHub. It's like a Cambrian explosion of JavaScripty goodness. If you're thinking of building a Webapp with Node, it's hard to know which of these embryonic frameworks to pick -- or if you should
Reflections of a JS guy on AS3 I've been doing a bunch of stuff with AS3 at Slide, and as a long-time JavaScript guy, thought it might be interesting to record my impressions of the language so far. I'll do the bad news first, so I can end on a positive note.
New gig at Slide, new digs in SF, new \... Python? Okay, yeah, so I've left the blog pretty quiet the last couple of months -- it's been a busy time with lots of changes. After being without a full-time gig, doing a bunch of contract work, and looking around a lot, I accepted a job offer
Fleegix on Sinatra The Sinatra Web dev framework has been around for a while, but I've recently been seeing it popping up a lot more. Simon Willison , the co-creator of the Django Python Web-dev framework, even mentioned it to me at SXSW Interactive when I buttonholed him after his
Leaving Seesmic I started at Seesmic a little over a year ago , and it's been great helping the platform grow from a full-page Flash app prototype to an Ajaxy Web app backed by a solid REST API. There is a time for every purpose under the sun , and now
Apple MobileMe using fleegix.date.Date for timezones Sometime last year I found out that Apple was using the fleegix.date.Date plugin to build the timezone support in the MobileMe calendar, and recently had the opportunity to take a look and see what they did with it. The MobileMe calendar is quite pretty, as you might expect
Fleegix.js and Framework Scanner A former colleague of mine, Teodor Moisa , pointed out to me recently that Fleegix.js is one of the libraries showing up in the scan performed by Framework Scanner . This is a very cool utility by Mats Bryntse that compares the impact on the global namespace by various JavaScript toolkits.
BOSH and iframe cross-domain pain A big feature of the new Seesmic.com Webapp is our auto-update feature which provides near-real-time updates in the UI of videos as they're posted. Under the hood the auto-update uses simple long-polling of our XMPP service via BOSH, using Jack Moffitt'
WTF, global \"item\" symbol in IE Like any self-respecting Web UI developer, I have a lovingly cultivated hatred of Internet Explorer. IE and I go way back -- I've been developing for IE since version 3, and I have a fairly well evolved sense of sense of what breaks there. So it's
Kerblooey accessing DOMException location property This past week I ran afoul of an interesting bug in Firefox 3 trying to serialize some stuff with fleegix.json.serialize . Iterating over the properties of the DOMException (which for some inexplicable reason isn't an instance of a generic Error , but that's another rant) reveals
Fleegix.js 0.5.0 released Okay, so the docs are all polished up, and tarballs/zips are freshly cooked, piping hot from the oven, so here it is, Fleegix.js 0.5.0 . Mmm, tasty JavaScript. The code name for this release is "Palace of ECMA Supremacy." Any questions or concerns regarding this
