So, I have finally fixed this stupid site. I spent years devising plans for rewriting it in lisp, or something, then one day read this essay about perfectionism and decided I was being completely ridiculous. Yes, that is my dog in the header, thank you for asking.
Some would have balked at the prospect of hand editing years of predominantly embarrassing posts, but I soldiered on through good times and bad. I am still messing with the layout and I haven’t even looked at the damn thing in Internet Explorer yet. (If you have IE—I don’t at home—let me know if something is really messed up.)
Evidently, once upon a time I had a career writing a lot of code for various Microsoft platforms. I feel like that part of my life needs to remain there for posterity, even though I am very happily participating in the open source, OMG-scale web world these days.
If I leave those posts there, perhaps someday someone can explain them to me. Very few of them make any sense to me now. I do remember fielding the e-mail from the ignoramus I-banker that prompted me to write Significant Digits for the Inummerate. With a little luck, his life is now ruined forever.
I thought I would miss debugging obscure threading issues, and rooting through core dumps, and staring at disassembly, but I was wrong. I have come to appreciate the sublime beauty of fork, the challenge of writing code for epic scale, having the damn source code, and solving problems that matter to people that are not evil mutants. I haven’t hand-edited XML in two years. Life is beautiful. Hopefully with the whole “blog” issue out of the way I will be able to think of something interesting to talk about.
Tags: Financial Industry, Internet, Scalability, Software, Web
Posted in Web | 2 Comments »
That site I have been working on in semi-secret for the last six or eight months is now live. Here it is:
http://feedeachother.com
Explanations, walkthroughs, etc. can all be found there.
Most of the credit for this thing really goes to Udi Falkson, one of my old Cornell friends who actually had the balls to quit a great job at Yahoo! to work on this full time. The lion's share of the code is his. I've seen it, and trust me, his dried blood and guts are all over this thing. At least I am pretty sure that's what it is.
Please check it out if you have not already, and add me as a contact. I am very proud of this site–working on something that you personally love and want to use is really satisfying.
People that I would like to thank, some of whom are pretty unlikely to ever notice this unless they google themselves:
- Darrel Herbst, an early adopter and the source of a lot of typically brilliant feedback.
- Katya Bassil, for being the best tester ever. You can thank her for Cute Overload working flawlessly.
- Evan Reiser, for tons of good feedback, visual nitpickery, and for scouring the interweb for competitors.
- Ron Eigen, for general enthusiasm and inviting a million people.
- Rich Hedge, for awesome legal advice.
Tags: Tilting at Windmills, Web
Posted in Web | No Comments »
Hey, by the way, the last post is likely to be my last Windows-oriented post for the forseeable future. I have recently quit the financial sector and will be starting a fantastically cool new job here in a few weeks. I no longer have a Windows machine at home at all, so unless I take up Mono, expect a lot of posts that mention emacs from now on. I think this will be for the best, since I've been kind of bored and nonplussed with .NET stuff lately, F# notwithstanding.
Giving up on Microsoft development entirely was a little bittersweet until someone showed me XMLScript a week or two ago–clearly, a lot of people in that world are out of their god damned minds. Best of luck writing xhtml-serving web applications defined in xml markup with client script written declaratively in more xml, also exposing xml web services to rich client applications defined largely in XAML, updated automatically as defined in xml configuration files, to those of you lucky enough to get to do this.
Tags: Etsy, Financial Industry, Languages
Posted in Web | 5 Comments »
