admin

It’s not the money

General Commentary, Shenanigans 2 Responses »

Aug 092014

A couple of months ago, Mayday.us launched a big crowdfunding push to raise a crapton of money to form their own Super PAC, meant to fund and support candidates who would run on campaign platforms of reducing the influence of Super PAC money in elections. The overall goal, reduce corruption in federal politics, is a great agenda, but a SuperPAC built around limiting how much money people can spend in elections isn’t actually solving problems with American democracy. Continue reading »

A new kind of social network revisited

General Commentary, Shenanigans 5 Responses »

Jul 162014

After a lot of thinking a blogging aloud about what I think social networks are and what I think a social network (and social applications) should be, it’s time to revisit my original thoughts about a next-generation social network and see how well they stand up, as well as flesh out just what features a social network should support. After trying to get myself to separate the social network itself from the application people may be using to tap into their particular social networks, I wanted to re-visit how my original app idea and see what features should be moved to the actual network itself.

Down with 1 social app to rule them all!

General Commentary, Shenanigans Comments Off

Jul 012014

I wasn’t very happy with where my last post ended. It all boiled down to “I wish Facebook was open source” or “I wish App.net had worked out better”. Part of that was that I spent the whole post operating on the assumption that underneath any application using this social network would be, well, 1 central model that everything would use. I think that assumption may be flawed. What if there wasn’t a central model behind all of these applications, but rather just a single protocol creating multiple models of people we connect to and how.

What is a social network anyways?

General Commentary, Shenanigans 3 Responses »

Jun 182014

When my friend Warren posted his issues with commenting on posts shared across social networks, it got me wondering how commenting would work in my hypothetical “next-gen” social network. My initial write-up on the idea focused mainly on the idea of the main content itself, so it got me wondering how to integrate things like comments into a feed-based social network. As I thought about how comments might fit into this new concept, I also started wondering about just what purpose comments served in a social network. I don’t mean in a “don’t read the comments” sense, but rather what role are comments serving in a social network? Continue reading »

A new kind of social network?

Shenanigans 6 Responses »

May 202014

My friend Warren Myers posted a question about the viability of a subscription-based social network not too long ago, and the concept kind of stuck with me. I’ve thought about the idea off and on since I’ve read it and initially commented on it, and it’s led to the point where I’m thinking about the concept less as a “Google+/Twitter/Facebook with a monthly fee” but more of a thought experiment of what if I were to design an all-new social network from the ground up, what would it look like? Now, all the social networks we know and use exist, and I’m not going to pretend we’ve never had such things. Also, this is all really based around how I use social networks, which is primarily content consumption, not content creation. That said, here’s where I see social networks going. Continue reading »

Peformance tuning a RESTful API (part 2) – Better living through better logging

Java, Work Comments Off

Apr 262014

Read any technical blog post that gives a deep dive into fixing any type of issue, and 1 thing you notice fairly quickly is that going through the logs is an important part of the process. Debug issues in any application you’re working on, and 1 thing you notice fairly quickly is whether or not your logs are any good. It’s a distinction that can make all the difference when the question of “What the deuce just happened?” rears its ugly head. Better logging can make your life easier, largely by telling you all about the state of what’s going on in your code so you can spend your time actually fixing and updating things instead of running down just what is going on in the first place.

Performance tuning a RESTful API (part 1)

Java, Programming, Work 1 Response »

Mar 252014

I spend a lot of time at work on a read-only RESTful API. A little bit of big picture here, the company I work for, Digitalsmiths, builds the data delivery APIs for TMS (they provide most of the scheduling data you see when you “Guide” on your TV remote). This is powered by Digitalsmiths’s own APIs. Basically what happens is that the TMS API is a front-end for our own API. Calls come in, we build queries for our own API, and query said own API, process the results and then return the appropriate data. When the API was first written, the data covered just the US and Canada. As TMS expanded started to cover other countries, that data grew, and with that has come some growing pains. Continue reading »

If “it’s not that important” why are we even bothering at all?

General Commentary, Programming, Projects Comments Off

Feb 192014

Have you ever been working on something, and had a thought how something should be done, started to talk it out with somebody, only have the phrase “it’s not that important” get used? If it’s not important enough to think about doing well, why are we thinking about doing it at all then?

What’s your expertise?

General Commentary, Work 1 Response »

Dec 312013

Work anywhere long enough, and you’re going to become the <something> person. From that point on, all questions, advice, etc. on that topic by default go to you. In my experience, this isn’t usually the result of some deliberate action to make a person the <something> “expert”, it’s the result of the work they get assigned and end up doing. The bigger questions are, what are your areas of expertise, what would you like your areas of expertise to be, and what are you doing to make the 2 previous answers line up?

Halls or Hall and Greens or Green?

Shenanigans Comments Off

Dec 252013

Rather than let people live with the running disagreement that’s been rampant in my house, here’s a simple little script to tell you if you should deck the hall or halls before the hanging of the green or greens service at church. Continue reading »

Older Entries Newer Entries