All entries of my technical and business blog

Feedly Background Tab

Mar 26, 2013 google

After transitioning away from the doomed Google Reader to Feedly, I found it to be awesome! I only had one gripe with the shortcut key scenario… when you went to view the entire article in a new tab, it was always focused. This meant I’d still have to middle click with my mouse to put my tabs in the background.

Make sure not to "too" future-proof your code

Mar 19, 2013 programming

When doing a bit of code review, I saw an incredibly ornately architected future-proof module written by one of my programmers on my team. It had taken him roughly 3x as long as I had estimated, but the code was very complete. It was created in such a way that every single portion of it was modular and could be interchanged quite easily.

Quick performance test with apache's ab

Mar 12, 2013 apache performance

In a break from my normal type of tutorial, I just want to give a real quick overview and highlight of a fictitious “case study” to demonstrate the importance of load testing your application with apache’s ab tool.

Release the quality you'd expect

Feb 19, 2013 misc-web programming ux

Recently, I had a programmer create a new feature for one of our products. He inadvertently caused another feature of our product to look less polished and function a bit weird. (I called it ‘wonkified’). The consensus of the group was to push out the feature, and then go back and fix the broken part of the old feature in the next week or so.

Car analogy to explain old browser support

Feb 12, 2013 misc-web

I constantly look for ways to explain to non-technical people the daily challenges I must face and decisions I make. I like using analogies. One of the biggest ones I face where I work currently is the support of out-dated browsers.

Ubuntu: lightdm login manager does not display properly on boot

Feb 5, 2013 linux

When I installed Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04, I had the problem where the terminal would boot up until it said something about checking battery state, and then freeze. If I flipped to a different terminal, I could sudo launch lightdm - and then login on the first terminal. Obviously, this wasn’t my first choice in fixing this, though.