Blog
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Let's stop saying Master/Slave
Language is a tricky thing. It engages us both consciously and subconsciously. Consciously it is a tool used to express meaning and invoke understanding. Subconsciously it triggers emotions and memories. Language we use in our technical work is not immune to these subconscious effects, no matter how scientific we try to be. Positively, words and phrases may trigger memories of lessons learned in the past, allowing us to grasp concepts quickly and clearly. But equally language may have negative connotations that can cause discomfort and/or introduce undesired distractions. At it's worst language can be downright hurtful, even if such pain is an accident. We as communicators need to be aware of this even if we had no intention of causing such a impact.
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The 10 year anniversary of the London Bombings, and my related mental health challenges
10 years ago, on July 7 2005, four suicide bombers attacked London. Three of them detonated their bombs on separate Underground (subway) trains in the morning rush hour. The fourth followed suit about an hour later on a crowded bus. 52 people, plus the 4 bombers, died. Many others were injured, physically or mentally.
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The Test Tube - Speed Dating meets User Experience Testing
One of the things I love about working out of WeWork Labs is coming across people in the technology world I wouldn't normally meet, and finding out about what they're up to. A couple of the members here run a meetup called The Test Tube (twitter at @testtubenyc). Its elevator pitch is 'Speed Dating meets User Experience Testing' which at first sounded like something I wouldn't be that interested in. Other WeWorkers (yeah, I just did that, sorry) were highly complimentary of it though so I decided to try it out. And I'm very glad I did.
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Building a Clojure project on Travis CI that's in a sub-directory of the repository
This wasn't entirely obvious to me, so here goes.
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Clojurenote - A Clojure library to access the Evernote API
Recently I've been having a lot of fun using the Evernote API from Clojure, especially as part of developing Orinoco. I've now open-sourced my lowest-level Evernote code as Clojurenote.
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Why Evernote?
I've been using Evernote a lot recently. In fact, I've gone a little bit overboard. Being an every-day human user wasn't enough so I started writing applications that use Evernote. And I went to their conference. And I'm even in the analysis stages of starting a business based on Evernote. But why? Here I give a few reasons that hopefully give some method to my Evernote madness.
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Connecting to a remote PostgreSQL Database on Heroku from Clojure
Sometimes it's useful to be able to debug a local application running against a remote production (or staging) database. The app I'm currently working on is a Clojure app, running on Heroku, using PostgreSQL as a database. It wasn't entirely obvious (to me) how to do this, but here's how I did it in the end.
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My Evernote Conference 2013
The Evernote Conference (EC 2013), which happened last week (Sept 26, 27) in San Francisco, was not my usual conference. Typically I go to events that are mostly or solely geared around software development, that I've heard good things of directly from friends or colleagues, and where I know I'll come across a few people I know. EC 2013 had none of these. So why did I go? And how did it turn out? I'll give you the skinny - I didn't get quite all that I hoped, but got more than I expected. For more, read on.
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20 years of Desktop Computers
This week I sold my iMac. I now no longer own a desktop computer, for the first time in 20 years. I'll get to why at the end, but I thought it might be fun to take a look back over these 2 decades of my personal PC history.
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Asking better questions
I didn't know Aaron Swartz. I met him very briefly in December but that was all. Nevertheless it's been a realization this last week and a half hearing from those that did know him what an amazing human he was, and how much of a loss there is for the world in his passing away too soon.