Recently

Well, time has passed extremely quickly, and it’s another month.

I wrote & published 4 things in a row for MapBox. The most interesting was the introduction of the MapBox Javascript API, something that I worked a few weeks with Ansis to unify but the underlying projects have been more than a year’s work. What we did recently is packing - writing extensive documentation, writing tons of tests (with my favorite boring old school test framework), and dealing with packaging. They’re all hard, picky work, and acquired tastes - but it’s really satisfying to make previously technical things accessible.

Consumption

I loved Dr. Dobb’s interview with Alan Kay.

Extracting patterns from today’s programming practices ennobles them in a way they don’t deserve

And

Binstock: You seem fastidious about always giving people credit for their work.

Kay: Well, I’m an old-fashioned guy. And I also happen to believe in history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field.

It’s the perfect counterpoint to an interview with Stephen Wolfram, a less modest, and historically aware individual.

Reading has been sporadic, but Foxfire is soothing my mind with its reassurance that people can be good and miles more comfortable with aging than I am.

After being kind of unimpressed with Schneier’s Liars & Outliers, I got Applied Cryptography, which will be a more challenging read, but closer to the center of his expertise.

I’ve also been reading v8, the Javascript engine, to better understand it and have rational arguments about Javascript performance. Understanding compilers is a geeky passion, but treating them as immovable objects is much worse.

On Tristen’s recommendation, I’ve been listening to a lot of Colin McPhee, via a skating video been listening to Funky Notes, and getting back into Swan Lake.

I’m making a very small move to a different room of my house, and using it as an opportunity to refactor some posessions and such.

There’s much more to come here - a lot of projects are waiting on the final tap to make them worthwhile to talk about - more about statistics, a bizarre way of doing testing, playing any canvas element. I’ve also got an expansive post on clustering algorithms and a library I’ve been writing about them. I’m also researching uncompressed image formats and have a few unfinished iPhone apps that are kind of cool.