found drama

get oblique

Linkdump for January 14th

by Rob Friesel
  • Bulletproof Accessible Icon Fonts
    Hot on the heels of Ian Feather's piece on SVG vs. icon fonts (vide infra), the Filament Group published their own lessons learned about using icon fonts in the wild.
    (tagged: accessibility fonts icon fonts )
  • Software in 2014
    Tim Bray's current "state of the union" on the software engineering field, with a slant toward developing for web apps and mobile.
    (tagged: Tim Bray article )
  • Web Performance Waterfalls from 10,000 Feet
    Waterfall Smell: Large Resources

    Patrick Meenan on what I'd like to call "waterfall smells". In a nutshell, he uses shrunk-down images of resource waterfalls to demonstrate that sometimes you don't need to actually drill down into the nitty-gritty — that sometimes there are certain shapes that are dead giveaways of certain performance problems.

    (tagged: performance webdev )
  • How to be a mentor
    Nicholas Zakas, this time on the subject of (surprise!) how to be an effective mentor:

    Your goal is to prevent career-threatening lapses in judgment.

    (tagged: mentoring career development )
  • Ten reasons we switched from an icon font to SVG
    Ian Feather:

    Through a combination of all of the above, using font-face for icons has always felt like a hack. It is a brilliant hack, no doubt, but it's still a different asset type masquerading and being manipulated into something greater.

    I have a feeling this is going to become one of those "classic" web dev blog posts.

    (tagged: icon fonts SVG )
  • The Open-Office Trap
    Maria Konnikova, writing for The New Yorker:

    That increased satisfaction, however, may merely mask the fact that younger workers also suffer in open offices. In a 2005 study, the psychologists Alena Maher and Courtney von Hippel found that the better you are at screening out distractions, the more effectively you work in an open office. Unfortunately, it seems that the more frantically you multitask, the worse you become at blocking out distractions.

    (tagged: work productivity workspace cognition ergonomics )
  • KrakenJS Suite
    Kraken is a convention-over-configuration framework for building web applications on top of Express.js (which is itself built on top of Node.js). Looks fully-featured and, like most similar frameworks, is actually a collection of modules with some convenience inter-op middleware.
    (tagged: JavaScript Node.js Express.js KrakenJS )
  • Small Batch Brewing Kit Buyer’s Guide
    At HomeBrewing.com. Going to keep these kits in mind; this may be the year I break the seal on brewing my own beer.
    (tagged: beer homebrewing )

reading a thing on 2/1

by Rob Friesel

If you missed it today on Facebook or Twitter or any of the other places this went:

Geek Mountain State Presents
Vermont Science Fiction

stars and shit

We are pleased to announce that Geek Mountain State and Phoenix Books are teaming up for the third entry in the Vermont SF Writer’s Series, Vermont Science Fiction! This reading follows two successful events held in the fall of 2013, Strange as Science, Dark as Night (in partnership with the Renegade Writer’s Collective) and Dark Mountain State (in partnership with Quarterstaff Games).

While we’re stuck indoors due to the cold, we’re reminded of the cold of space, trapped and protected at the same time by the walls which hold back the sub-zero temperatures. Vermont is the ideal place to see the results of the progress and scientific achievement which drive the world, and it’s a good time to get an idea of where we could be headed. This reading event will focus exclusively on science fiction stories from a range of local authors. Come join us to listen and chat about writing and science fiction!

[…]

To RSVP, head over to the event page that we’ve set up on Facebook.

It’s on February 1st at 3pm at the Phoenix Books location in Burlington, VT.

Anyway, it should be a good time, and you should come watch me embarrass myself by reading a piece that no one has bought/published yet.

dream.20140107: overlap

by Rob Friesel

You’re at a co-worker’s party. You spend most of the time chasing your kids around the house as they zip up and down the stairs and between the people engaged in the conversations that you’d like to be engaged in. You catch some smiles and a few one-liners as you get close enough to them, your colleagues, friends, and would-be friends. There’s only some mild frustration over this.

Then someone asks if you’ve ever been to this house before, and you explain that it (in fact) used to be your house. That you lived there a few years ago. Called it home. Paid the mortgage. They’ve done a good job fixing it up, you explain; a true enough statement considering that only slightly more than the address has stayed the same since you last crossed the threshold.

But you decide to share a secret with everyone. You point out the side window. See that? Between this house and the next one over is a ramshackle building: siding that is cracked and peeling (and some of it hanging off), broken windows, rotted trim, a pile of shingles around the foundation. You explain that “the secret” is that that building “belongs” to this house. It looks like someone else’s house (perhaps jammed in a little too close to the property line) but it could not be part of this property.

Only it is. It is neither a shed nor a garage. It is simply a second house on the same small urban plot. You lead a small group over into the house and navigate its interior. It is (unsurprisingly) in an even worse state than when you had last sworn to clean it up or tear it down. The floors are all slanted. Broken glass and jagged metal litters the floor. Mold covers everything. And that’s when you notice that you’ve come over here in bare feet.

search term haiku: December 2013

by Rob Friesel

constant zombie fear
cherry picking in work place
ClojureScript review

“Search Term Haiku” is a series wherein I examine this site’s log files and construct one or more haiku poems from search terms and phrases that led visitors to the site. Where possible, I attempt to keep the search phrases intact. However, as these are haiku poems, I do need to follow the rules.

2013 Personal Goals: year end wrap-up

by Rob Friesel

And now to wrap up the 2013 goals. 1 So many things made this a big year — good, bad, just plain weird, or otherwise. Let’s look at what we set out to do and then footnote the hell out of it with all of the other interesting bits. Continue reading →

  1. First Quarter results are here: /2013/03/2013-goals-q1-check-in; Q2 is here: /2013/07/2013-goals-q2-check-in/; and Q3 is here: /2013/10/2013-goals-q3-check-in/[↩]

Linkdump for December 31st

by Rob Friesel
  • Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco
    Philip Walton:

    To put that another way, if a talented computer science grad, fresh out of college, with almost no front-end experience can outshine a great front-end engineer in your interview, you're probably asking the wrong questions.

    Whether or not you agree with him on every point, he raises a lot of interesting questions about how we interview and evaluate candidates that we're targeting for front-end-oriented engineering positions. It's created quite a bit of discussion, too; here are two that I enjoyed: one by Alex Maccaw, and one by Nicholas Zakas.

    For what it's worth, there's definitely no one-size-fits-all solution to interviewing, evaluating, or hiring front-end engineers. There are so many factors involved: What does your stack look like? How do you divide your work internally? Are you looking for generalists or specialists? What did you need from people last year? What do you need from people next year? These are really hard questions, and the stakes are high.

    (tagged: recruiting interviewing hiring )
  • Map of the DOM in relation to HTML and JavaScript
    the DOM in relation to HTML and JavaScript
    Posted by Rachel Nabors. Mostly I just like the illustration. (And though I was down on Cody Lindley's JavaScript Enlightenment, sounds like DOM Enlightenment is worth a go.)
    (tagged: DOM JavaScript HTML )
  • The Future of JavaScript MVC Frameworks
    @swannodette on Om, as a next-generation, super-fast client-side MVC. It's ClojureScript, so naturally the underlying premise is that immutable data structures and a functional programming style (even if it's "tucked away" under an OO façade) are the keys to the performance kingdom. Interesting read, especially the technical details under the "How it works" heading.
    (tagged: JavaScript ClojureScript React Om )
  • Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard
    The venerable Chris Coyier, giving his introductory take on Grunt.
    (tagged: Grunt JavaScript )

Linkdump for December 16th

by Rob Friesel

review: Practical Data Analysis

by Rob Friesel

Practical Data AnalysisI just finished up reading Practical Data Analysis by Hector Cuesta (Packt Publishing, 2013) and overall, it was a pretty good overview and recommends some good tools. I would say that the book is a good place for someone to get started if they have no real experience performing these kinds of analyses, and though Cuesta doesn’t go deep into the math behind it all, he isn’t afraid to use the technical names for different formulae, which should make it easy for you to do your own follow-up research. 1

Jeff Leek’s Data Analysis on Coursera provides the lens through which I read this book. 2 That being said, I found myself doing a lot of comparing and contrasting between the two. For example, they both use practical, reasonably small “real world” sample problems to highlight specific analytical techniques and/or features of their chosen toolkits. However, whereas Leek’s course focused exclusively on using R, Cuesta assembles his own all-star team of tools using Python 3 and D3.js. Perhaps it goes without saying, but there are pros and cons to each approach (e.g., Leek’s “pure R” vs. Cuesta’s “Python plus D3.js”), and I felt that it was best to consider them together.

Cuesta’s approach with this book is to present a sample scenario in each chapter that introduces a class of problem, a solution to that problem, and his recommended toolkit. For example, chapter six creates a stock price simulation, introducing simple simulation problems (especially for apparently stochastic data), time series data and Monte Carlo methods, and then how to simulate the data using Python and visualizing it in D3.js. Although the book is not strictly a “cookbook”, the chapters very much feel like macro-level “recipes”. There’s quite a bit of code and some decent discussion around the concepts that govern the analytical model, and (true to the “practical” in the title) the emphasis is on the “how” and not the “why”.

While I did not read the entire book cover-to-cover, I would definitely recommend it to anyone that wants an introduction to some basic data analysis techniques and tools. You’ll get more out of this book if you have some base to compare it to — e.g., some experience in R (academic or otherwise); and you’ll get the most out of this book if you also have a solid foundation in the mathematics and/or statistics that underlie these analytical approaches. Check it out on the Packt Publishing site: bit.ly/1co6hOZ

Disclosure: I received an electronic copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review.

  1. As an aside, this seems to be par for the course for the “technical” data analysis books, blog posts, and MOOCs that I’ve encountered. That is to say, “the math” is touched on, but if you don’t already have a background in linear algebra (or whatever) then you’re going to wind up taking it on faith that support vector machines do what you need them to do.[↩]
  2. I wrote about my experience in Jeff Leek’s class in April of 2013. (See: “reflecting on Data Analysis”.)[↩]
  3. Both the Python standard library and a collection of libraries like mlpy and matplotlib.[↩]

Linkdump for December 2nd

by Rob Friesel
  • Creating Desktop Applications With node-webkit
    By Mike Cantelon, writing at the StrongLoop blog. This isn't the first time that node-webkit has come across my radar, but this is a good little intro for someone who hasn't heard of it before.
    (tagged: node-webkit Node.js JavaScript WebKit )
  • Offline First!

    This website is starting a discussion about mobile first app development that goes beyond shrinking content to phone and tablet screen sizes.

    (tagged: webdev frontend offline mobile )
  • What Screens Want
    Frank Chimero:

    So now we no longer buy the thing we want, we buy the shape of the thing we prefer.

    Fantastic.

    (tagged: design UI UX interface design interaction design )
  • airbnb/javascript
    Airbnb was kind enough to share their JS style guide with the world. And since I'm in to this sort of thing… Overall, I like this style guide quite a bit, and it's fairly comprehensive. A couple of observations though:

    1. No mention of try-catch or exceptions. (This is one place the Google Style Guide still reins supreme.)
    2. The evidence suggests that using concat (and not slice) is more performant for copying arrays. (But we're also in the land of diminishing returns at that point…)
    3. I disagree that it's OK to use Number and Boolean constructors for type coercion. It's not strictly wrong but I've written before about situations where they can give you misleading results.
    (tagged: JavaScript style guide Airbnb )
  • Automattic: No Email, No Office Workers
    Matt Mullenweg, interviewed at Business Insider about Automattic ("the WordPress company") and it's company culture. Although a bit short and fluffy, it's still interesting. And/but/however, this quote from Mullenweg stuck out to me:

    The idea of a meritocracy is that it's what they do, not who they are.

    While this is a nice thought, I think it misses the mark ever-so-slightly. Meritocracies are a nice idea, but are basically bullshit. The notion of "it's what they do" is great, but there's still an element of assessing "who they are" buried in there. (And also: let's not forget that some companies and/or open source projects can still get torpedoed by productive but highly-poisonous people.)

    (tagged: Automattic culture business )