TECHNOLOGY IS POLITICS
It's not possible for technologists to avoid politics because technology is politics: You're writing an instant messaging app that can more easily share information with law enforcement agencies, or one designed to make that impossible. Either of those alter how governments interacts with their citizens. You made a ride-sharing app. It's now easy for drivers to sign up and start making money, at the expense of existing taxi drivers. Your app alters the workforce.
Read moreELECTRONICS KIT FOR MY KIDS
Cory Doctorow mentioned that Elenco makes a perfect copy of the Radio Shack 200-in-One electronics kit. I hadn't read to the end of his article before I'd placed an order. It's not an exaggeration to say this kit pushed me into my career. I got the original Radio Shack version for Christmas one year when I was a kid, and on rainy days I'd work my way through the book of kid-friendly projects.
Read moreWE HAD A SCARY BASEMENT
When I was a kid, my parents had a horror movie basement. It was unfinished, poorly lit, and apparently designed to terrorize kids. It was divided into three approximately equally sized rooms: The wooden, backless staircase from upstairs dropped you into the first. It was mostly OK, but the only light switch was on the far wall away from the base of the stairs, so you had to feel around in the dark to turn on the lights.
Read moreMY PHONE WAS LYFTED
My son needed a ride to a Boy Scout campout yesterday and neither Jen nor I were home to take him. I had the idea to call a Lyft driver for him. My son accidentally left his phone in the Lyft car and this is the timeline of what happened as we tried to get it back. I'll call the driver "Joe": 5:09PM: I book a ride through the Lyft app.
Read moreCHRISTMASES PAST
How I imagined the backstory of the dad from "A Christmas Story": I’ve seen things. Lots of us have: it was a long war. Terrible things, like Anzio ’44. Wonderful things, like summer in liberated Paris. I’ve seen these, and I’ve remembered them. I wasn’t supposed to be home very long, just a while to relax a bit and then join my buddies on our way to Asia, maybe Africa. I’ve heard Brazil is lovely.
Read moreADVENTURES IN COMCAST SUPPORT
We live outside San Francisco, and Comcast is our cable provider. We wanted to watch college football on TV so I visited Comcast's website to add the "Sports Entertainment Package" for $10 per month. Immediately after turning on the big game, we found that the BTN channel was in old-style "standard definition" (SD), not HD. On top of that, Comcast's channel feed was so terrible that it was almost unwatchable: we couldn't always see the football.
Read moreWHAT I TELL MY KIDS ABOUT THE INTERNET
Hi kid! You don't know me, but I'm one of those "Internet expert" kind of guys they interview when something bad happens. I won't bore you with the details, but let's just say that I make big computer systems for a living and I know how they work. I'm not your mom or dad, or a teacher, or your church leader, or your coach, or a cop. I don't know you, either, and honestly, I don't care about you personally so much that I'd want to scare you or exaggerate things or otherwise lie to you.
Read moreMY FCC NET NEUTRALITY LETTER
This is my letter to the FCC on September 12, 2014 regarding the upcoming net neutrality decision making process: I am a Comcast customer, and I am paying them for a 100 million bit per second connection. Comcast has a monthly data cap of 300 billion bytes (or about 3 trillion bits) per month. At the speeds I’m paying full price for, I can use up my entire monthly data allotment in about 8 hours.
Read moreCUT HOODIES SOME SLACK
No good article about the Bay Area misses jokes at hipsters in their hoodies, whether biking through The Mission or chairing board meetings in The Valley. It's an easy laugh and a nodding wink to your audience to assure them that you're on their side, that you know how silly grown adults look in their kiddie jackets. But consider: San Francisco is walkable, and people take advantage of it. My stroll from the bus terminal to my office is about a mile, and the sidewalks teem the whole way.
Read moreSCALING WITH EVENTUAL CONSISTENCY
Originally published on the Crittercism Engineering Blog and reprinted with permission. by Kirk Strauser on April 8, 2014 CAP theorem hates you and wants you to be unhappy Some guy who isn’t fun at parties came up with the CAP theorem, which basically says it’s impossible to be consistent and available at the same time. In short, things will break and clients will lose access to a storage backend, or units in a storage cluster will lose the ability to talk to their peers.
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