Category Archives: Opinion

At RubyFringe last July, Giles Bowkett gave a presentation that, afterwards, rapidly became the talk of the internet. ‘He had 900 slides,’ they said. ‘He wrote a program that composes music,’ they whispered. ‘He went 2 hours over, but the … Continue reading →

Architecture students are like virgins with an itch they cannot scratch. Never build a building till you’re 50, what kind of life is that? —Steven Malkmus, The Hexx by Pavement Recently, two different texts with two very different visions of … Continue reading →

Today, Facebook announced the ability for developers of Facebook apps to create and share custom FBML tags. The idea is that the tags would make some functionality the developers provided available to other people building things on Facebook. One of … Continue reading →

The following is the personal statement I submitted today as part of my application to NYU ITP. If accepted, I would start at ITP next fall. The prompt for the essay was: “Tell us about your biggest failure.” With so … Continue reading →

Conference organizer extraordinaire and general all-around good guy Chad Fowler interviewed me via email last week as part of a series of preparatory posts he’s doing in the run up to RubyConf in November. He just posted the interview here: … Continue reading →

I found out this week that my talk was accepted for this year’s RubyConf! I’m very excited as this will be the first time I’ve spoken to a group this size. The conference will be held November 6-8, which is … Continue reading →

“The enemy isn’t Microsoft. The enemy is non-use” — Matt Asay, The Ten Commandments of Open Source For the past month, watching Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — two relatively noble politicians who largely want the same good things for … Continue reading →

Avi Bryant is the Steve Albini of web development. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Bryant is a Smalltalk programmer famous for creating Seaside, a web development framework that reverses a lot of the common assumptions shared by its … Continue reading →

Our country tortures. It conducts raids on hospitals. It flies false flags. It makes “wanted dead or alive” pronouncements. It posts rewards. It attempts (and sometimes carries out) assassinations. International law and military law do not put endless restraints on … Continue reading →

Following on from my recent foray into logo design, I was interested to see Damien Katz’s recent call for a logo for his excellent open source project: Couch DB. Would it be an opportunity for a follow up? Somewhat hard … Continue reading →