You Can’t Have a Rollback Button

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,...

Building a web application is a young and poorly-understood activity. Toolchains for building code in general are widely available, relatively older, and they also happen to be closest at hand when you’re getting started. The tendency, then, is to pick some command line tools and work forwards from their affordances. Git provides methods for...