Viewing profile — mchadwick

Likewise. Machine names are there to make your life easier. Cute names aren't fun when you have more than a couple. When your brain's as small as mine, you have to minimize your lo…

$0.02: The animated widget inviting me to share your text through half a dozen mediums obscured your text in such a way where I couldn't read it.

Philadelphia, PA Vistar Media is company building some neat stuff in the "Digital Out Of Home" space. Right now, it's just us three founders -- two of which are coming from Invite …

Not quite a mental calculation, but still in the spirit: One rough estimation I often find myself using is that a US dollar bill is six inches long. Using either folding or flippin…

Google does an interesting engineering interview. The best advice I can give: 1) Read the first couple chapters of Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen et. all) enough times to know …

I have been horribly burned and disfigured following this advice. It's important to keep in mind that just because it's unlikely the spot price will go above the reserve price, the…

We've been running hundreds of instances on EC2 for a couple years, and have never seen one just "go down." However, we will get notifications of "degraded instances." When an inst…

The Linux kernel (Popular. Not hot nor trendy). Over the past 12 months, I've touched Redis, Node.js, Clojure, and a few others on this list, but nothing blows my mind more than le…

http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/joint-compilation-of-sc... Above is an overview of how the Scala compiler attacks this exact problem. Long story short: It is able to grok just…

http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ A self-contained issue tracker. I switched from hand-hacked TODO lists to Ditz a few weeks ago, and haven't looked back. I'm able to organize my tasks as…

I had actually tried to do this exact thing. Problem A is that you can't execute very much in a clients browser at any one time. Okay, so you make the jobs smaller and fetch more. …

That's extremely helpful. Thanks. Sometimes it's a bit daunting to be very pragmatic up front.

I've been working on an application where each user on the system would, of course, incur some processing and some storage cost on my end. I would like, at some point, to have diff…

Obviously a bit off topic, but his graphic representation is astounding. Though not quite a Tufte archetype, I gleaned more insight from the image than the article. Very well done.…