A concise blog.

I'm in the middle of reading The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. It's a great book, and I highly recommend it. It's a brief history of Bell Labs from about 1900 to 1980, and it covers the inventions that were produced there (the vacuum tube, the transistor, coast-to-coast telephony, information theory . . . and counting! I'm only halfway through the book). It also covers the process by which these discoveries and inventions were made. Here's my favorite passage so far: " . . . some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn't the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, a

Does your web surfing ever look like a ping pong match?  Sometimes mine does.  I went from an article on the Slack engineering blog  to one of the engineer's personal blogs and ended up with this gem about how continuous shipping and coordinating with the marketing team (so they only hype products that are already developed ) can relieve deadline-related stress. How simple!!  How elegant!!  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. https://medium.com/javascript-scene/why-deadlines-need-to-drop-dead-321739ae6be1#.bwwrcxo71

This is your data: This is your data without a backup: Any questions? This is especially important in programming because your data is your work product. Seriously - back up your data.  Frequently.  And keep an offsite copy.  I saw this first-hand this last week: my experience as a server administrator made me realize the need for quick system-level recovery, so during the web development course I'm in I wrote a bash script that: Runs a git command to track all changed files. Runs a git commit. Runs a git command to send that commit to GitHub. Runs a TimeMachine backup. This gives me a TimeMachine restore point every time I make a git commit, and I only have to run one command to do four things (the syntax is at the bottom of the blog). What I didn't  know is that it would come in handy last week: last week was project week, which means that I was put in a group and told to build a full-stack application in four days.  On day two, the servic

This is my programming-related blog.  There are many like it, but this one is mine.  My focus is simple: sharing short, valuable pieces of information.  I'll mainly stick to the process of programming or where the industry is headed - I may occasionally include syntax or a non-programming-related items, and I'll also link to other posts that I found valuable. When elaboration is necessary, I'll elaborate.  Otherwise, I'll let the text speak for itself. I plan to post about twice a month.