The Case for Secrecy in Web Experiments

I recently read Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. It was good! You should read it. I want to say this up front, since after some preamble I’m going to describe a Rube-Goldbergian attempt to poke petty holes in it. I don’t want the reader to lose sight of the big picture, which is that I was trying to do this in the spirit of the book. Which...

There were rumblings earlier this week that Alphabet executives mused about killing GCP. I think they probably won’t do it [1]. But as a side effect this has provoked yet another round of everyone pouring one out for the most beloved Google ex-feature ever, Google Reader. I miss the RSS world of the early 2000’s as much as anyone. I miss it...

Here are some links to recent work I’ve done elsewhere. Ship Small Diffs - I tried to transmute the anguish I feel looking at huge changesets into words. Mistakes You Apparently Just Have to Make Yourself - Getting youngfolk to listen to you is harder than I realized. Fourteen Months with Clojure - Going back to my Lisp roots here. The...

Coda and I have been using Clojure to build Skyliner for the last fourteen months or so. I thought it might be a good idea to write down some of our experiences with this, for the benefit of others considering it for practical work. The beating heart of Skyliner, a deploy encoded as a finite state machine. Learning languages is easy,...

I’ve worked with deploy systems in the past that have a prominent “rollback” button, or a console incantation with the same effect. The presence of one of these is reassuring, in that you can imagine that if something goes wrong you can quickly get back to safety by undoing your last change. But the rollback button is a lie. You can’t have a...