At Nerve, whenever I fetch any data from anywhere, I use a GraphQL-style query to do it. Hear me out! Hear me out. I can feel your rage through the screen, but I've been using this approach on a substantial project (i.e. not a toy) and it&...
Hysteresis is a weird and kind of ill-defined term from nonlinear dynamics (which is the study of systems whose outputs(s) are nonlinear functions of their input(s).) The gist is that a hysteretic system depends on past values of its input as well the present value. You can'...
This is a brief write-up of a trick I learned that helps me write code faster and more accurately. I say "trick", but it's really something I started to do without noticing as I moved further into my career. When you're working on something...
It's a pedagogical pet peeve of mine when technical concepts are simply listed in their fully developed state, with little in the way of motivation, derivation, or historical context. This, I think, is like publishing a cookbook filled with beautiful pictures of cakes, but no recipes. My aim...
Right after college I spent two years at Microsoft, working on an internal pipeline that handled real-time telemetry data for Hotmail, OneDrive (SkyDrive back then), and some other major services. All told it was a great job; I got to hang out in Seattle and learn from some very smart...
CORRECTION: In this article I make that case that Mario's name is just Mario, not Super Mario. Hacker News user bitwize pointed out that in certain games Mario's bigger form (the form he turns into after picking up a Super Mushroom) is indeed referred to as...
EDIT: Part 2 is up! It's a pedagogical pet peeve of mine when technical concepts are simply listed in their fully developed state, with little in the way of motivation, derivation, or historical context. This, I think, is like publishing a cookbook filled with beautiful pictures of cakes,...
I've been writing some guides at my startup, Nerve, for newer engineers. My aim is to cover things you don't necessarily have to know to do your job, but which will probably come in handy at some point in your career. This is a guide to...
The other day I came across some people on The Internet talking about a certain scene from Labyrinth, which is a movie from the 80s (if you haven't seen it you should - lavish musical numbers, very unsettling Jim Henson puppetry, David Bowie doing contact juggling in spandex,...