Category Archives: Technology

HAvroBase: a searchable, evolvable entity store on top of HBase and Solr

Building out a social consumer internet product that could change quickly and evolve over time puts special requirements on the underlying data store. You need to be prepared for scale but not investing too much too early, your business may … Continue reading

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Static-typing is a powerful metadata database, exploit it!

Today someone decided to pretend they knew something about how a modern statically typed language developer works.  Perhaps they are big emacs fans or something because they felt that static-types leading to autocomplete in an IDE was somehow a feature … Continue reading

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Building the ideal web application template engine

A month and a half ago I had put out a call for what I was calling the ‘ideal web application template engine‘ along with a list of requirements that I thought would be present in such a system.  Since … Continue reading

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Android Dalvik VM performance is a threat to the iPhone

One of the peculiarities of Apple is that they have set themselves down a path where every Apple developer needs to learn Objective-C (and C/C++) to build applications for their platform.  The biggest characteristic of Objective-C vs Java is dynamic … Continue reading

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Off-loading real work to YQL instead of using your server

Just saw a cool blogpost about summing up all your subscribers on RSS, Facebook and Twitter. The only issue is that it requires PHP to work. I decided to quickly rewrite it as a YQL Execute table instead. So rather … Continue reading

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Maven artifacts need to be more discoverable

The laundry list of repositories that are filling the POM in Maven projects has to go. The ideal of having a central store of all artifacts is clearly dead and we have to move on. My proposal is two fold. … Continue reading

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How Facebook could open the Open Graph APIs

I was pondering how Facebook could really answer it’s critics in a profound way that would really up-level the social fabric of the internet while also satisfying those that want ultimate control over their data. Continue reading

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The ideal web application templating system

When a designer and a developer work together to create an HTML web application one of the biggest issues is how you translate their vision into code in a way that allows for iteration and flexibility when those designs change. Continue reading

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Making Open Data Tables even easier: YQL Storage Editor

One of the big benefits of YQL is that you can make your own Open Data Tables and use them. However, one of the disadvantages is that you either have to host your tables on a publicly available URL or … Continue reading

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Coders At Work Interview

Peter Seibel wrote a great book called Coders at Work which contains interviews of various programmers throughout computer science history. Yury Lifshits has put up a site called Interview 2010 that lets you both define interviews and respond to them. … Continue reading

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