Links

• May 27 2011 - Timeline tools ... My memory is awful, it really is. I maintain a private personal blog which I use for capturing extremely short pieces of content that I want tagged and timestamped. Works well for those random thoughts that are maybe not suitable for sharing but which I want to capture nonetheless. Anyway, I'm looking for sometime similar to aid my memory at work and have been considering something more along the lines of a timeline of sorts where I can jot down major company moments, hires etc in a format that's easy to explore and I came across the following online timeline makers which all seem to fit the mold of what I need.
• Sep 21 2010 - Engineering Management (link) ... Great article(s) on some of the management principles in the engineering group at Facebook from Yishan Wong who was at Facebook through some very interesting growth times. I found reading this to be inspirational so posting for posterity… http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management.html
• Sep 2 2009 - hanselman tools 2009!! ... Saw this on reddit tonight, hanselman has updates his legendary tools list for 2009. So what was going to be an evening of actual coding is slowing turning into an evening of trying out cool new tools that have made his list.  (I’m writing this blog post in windows Live Writer after seeing it in the list) But what’s an hour or two of my time compared to the time that must go into compiling this list?
• Sep 1 2009 - sometimes it's helpful to think about what NOT to do ... Came across this list of “anti-patterns” on wikipedia tonight. I’m tempted just to copy and paste the contents here but that would make me feel dirty. Definitely a good list though and something worth reminding ourselves of every once in a while when thinking about the systems we build. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
• Aug 7 2009 - the rise and fall of myspace (and twitter) ... This is a great post on how myspace rose and fall and how the same thing applies to Twitter (and I’d imagine Facebook as well) Some really good thoughts. Getting popular before you have your mission can forever trap you into that identity vacuum where popularity is everything. http://codybrown.name/2009/08/06/myspace-is-to-facebook-as-twitter-is-to-______/ A good read, and the level of blogging I’d like to work towards (more pictures!).
• Jul 23 2009 - manager schedule vs maker schedule ... Popular comp-sci essayist and lisp hacker extraordinaire Paul Graham recently posted this article on the difference between a manager’s schedule and a maker’s schedule. This is really inline with my own views on this issue and really sums up a big problem we have where I work with meetings being scheduled with the makers and the impact that has. We’ve had tons of discussions around the cost of mental context switching, but even that’s an understatement of the problem… Great work, it’s always helpful hearing echoes of these types of thoughts beyond my own everyday sphere.
• Dec 12 2008 - ajax for mac lovers ... Another Ajax Framework :  (or rather, an Application Framework) http://cappuccino.org/ http://cappuccino.org/learn/  Demo app built using it: http://280slides.com/  And a teaser for all those interface builder lovers out there : http://ajaxian.com/archives/nib2cib-use-interface-builder-to-design-your-ajax-apps I came across this in reader this morning and was totally  blown away by how well the 280 slides application  worked. It's really impressive... on non IE browsers. I sent the link to a co-worker to check out and he basically dismissed it as too slow and unresponsive, "
• Sep 3 2008 - From Chrome with Love ... A million bloggers all posting on the same topic, why shouldn’t I join in. The Google chrome team has got to be enjoying themselves right now. I read the comic yesterday and really enjoyed it. Seeing a company I can’t help but admire sit down and rethink the browser in so thorough of a manner is inspiring. Even just the QA involved is pretty damn impressive. I’ve been using the chrome browser for a day now and have to same I’m pretty happy with it.
• Jun 14 2008 - Dynamic vs Static... no wait make that DBC! ... I need to blog this basically to toss it in my archive. There have been some interesting posts on the religious debate of static vs dynamic languages. I don’t know why I always get drawn into these lines of thought, but I do. (in fact I just added a “versus” label) I say drawn in because my underlying philosophy in all of these things is to choose the right tool for the job and leave it at that.
• May 7 2008 - poetic words = exciters of nearby symbols ... In GEB Hofstadter mentions the complexity in building an isomorphism between two poems written in two languages. “In ordinary language, the task of translation is more straightforward, since to each word or phrase in the original language, there can usually be found a corresponding word or phrase in the new language. By contrast, in a poem of this type, [Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll] many “words” do not carry ordinary meaning, but act purely as exciters of nearby symbols.
• Mar 28 2008 - robots are your friends ... OMG, I so love this freaky dog robot thing… we need more like this! Truly exciting the kinds of things that are going on, I can’t wait to have a robot servant. Watch these all the way through, in the following order. The second one is f’n hilarious after you watch the first. The original Quadruped Robot Dog Thing /o:p the spoof Spoof of Quadruped /o:p and just for fun