Eric Brewer and Daniel Abadi expand our notions of what the real trade-offs are in the CAP theorem.

An scientist’s idea of literary criticism is different from most people’s. It involves math.

Chuck Jones inspires UI designers in this classic paper from Ungar and Change.

In 1991 Ungar and Smith wrote about the experimental programming language SELF, and in it described duck typing, callng it behaviorism

The great benefit of knowing the command-line is being able to write scripts to analyze scripts, all in ~1 minute.

How I write CSS.

I hand crafted the CSS for site. It’s still a work in progress. I learned that while semantic tags are good for HTML, they’re not that great for CSS.

After a lifetime of programming and compsci education, I’ve had some issues learning with Python. It screws me up in small ways. It’s a wonderful language, but dear god I wish these things were different.

When I first read the gang of four’s Design Patterns I dismissed most of it as a coverup for the unfortunate parts of C++’s object design. That was definitely unfair, since the strongest benefits of Design Patterns come from managing huge code bases, a fact that I missed with all the small examples.

But even still, I would love a book on design patterns that is built for modern interpreted languages, with duck-typing and no type checking.

font-feature-settings is a great CSS feature to play with, but it should probably be turned off in code blocks.

With Markdown and hightlight.js, that means adding this little piece of CSS to your stylesheet.

pre, code {
    font-feature-settings: normal;
}