Late last night Ivan Kirigin (founder of Tipjoy, now at Facebook) asked via Twitter why I still code. My tweeted answer was that I really enjoy it. On the train into NY this morning I have been thinking more about why that is and have come up with a bunch of reasons:First, I discovered coding in the formative teenage years and at that time got deeply into it. I had the great luck that at age 15 a neighbor who was studying “Informatik” (Computer Science in German) took to mentoring me and givi...

Late last night Ivan Kirigin (founder of Tipjoy, now at Facebook) asked via Twitter why I still code. My tweeted answer was that I really enjoy it. On the train into NY this morning I have been thinking more about why that is and have come up with a bunch of reasons:First, I discovered coding in the formative teenage years and at that time got deeply into it. I had the great luck that at age 15 a neighbor who was studying “Informatik” (Computer Science in German) took to mentoring me and givi...

Yesterday we had a little snafu at one of the companies I work with. Some users received duplicate and even triplicate reminder emails. This snafu was caused by what I consider to be one of the key mistakes when first working on production systems: rookies trust their own code. By this I mean assuming that code you wrote yourself has the behavior you think it should have and then not guarding in other code against possible errors. The particular case in question involved two parts: code to id...

Yesterday we had a little snafu at one of the companies I work with. Some users received duplicate and even triplicate reminder emails. This snafu was caused by what I consider to be one of the key mistakes when first working on production systems: rookies trust their own code. By this I mean assuming that code you wrote yourself has the behavior you think it should have and then not guarding in other code against possible errors. The particular case in question involved two parts: code to id...

Over the weekend I decided to play around a bit with jQuery. I had done tiny bits of Javascript front end stuff previously and had heard a lot of good things about jQuery. As a disclaimer upfront, I have not looked at any of the other Javascript libraries, so this is not a comparative view (not even a comprehensive view for that matter). I had a concrete project in mind. DailyLit breaks books up into installments of roughly 1,000 words. As a brief historic aside, when Dickens went from monthl...

Over the weekend I decided to play around a bit with jQuery. I had done tiny bits of Javascript front end stuff previously and had heard a lot of good things about jQuery. As a disclaimer upfront, I have not looked at any of the other Javascript libraries, so this is not a comparative view (not even a comprehensive view for that matter). I had a concrete project in mind. DailyLit breaks books up into installments of roughly 1,000 words. As a brief historic aside, when Dickens went from monthl...

MultiplicationShooter1.0: I am a huge fan of MIT’s Scratch project. It is a visual programming environment for kids. Instead of writing code in a text editor, kids snap together templates to form scripts. The scripts are attached to sprites. Creating sprites is also super easy in the integrated graphics editor. Another wonderful thing about Scratch is that with the push of a button you can publish your project to the Web (where it runs as a Java Applet). My kids have created many projects wit...

MultiplicationShooter1.0: I am a huge fan of MIT’s Scratch project. It is a visual programming environment for kids. Instead of writing code in a text editor, kids snap together templates to form scripts. The scripts are attached to sprites. Creating sprites is also super easy in the integrated graphics editor. Another wonderful thing about Scratch is that with the push of a button you can publish your project to the Web (where it runs as a Java Applet). My kids have created many projects wit...