I got into a conversation with someone about their development team. They specifically are hiring a 50/50 mix of senior and junior developers, to help with cost. I think it's a great idea but for our industry as a whole. It could allow us to restore a bit of the diversity we've been lacking while still getting very smart people.
We're a mix of junior and senior developers but we're solving a slightly different problem. While we're also a dev tea…
We're Wizard Development. We'll be posting about software development, robotics, workflow, and how technology changes our lives. Talk to you soon.
I've been making my way through this presentation by Maciej Cegłowski
Some kinds of services are just crying out for decentralization. Fifty years from now, people will be shocked that we had one social network that all seven billion people on the planet were expected to join.
Imagine if there was only one bar in Düsseldorf, or all of Germany, and if you wanted to hang out with your friends, you had to go there. And when you did, there were came…
Yesterday at JSConf 2014 we had a nodebots event. (We also had noderockets, nodeboats and nodecopters.) One of my favorite bots is below.
We have a lot of different parts here.
Facebook sponsored the entire event. So props to them for making it happen.
I'm still hunting …
I've been doing a lot of outward thinking* lately about Wizard Development's vision. "Vision" means a lot of things to a lot of people, so I should specify. To me it means the general principles and goals by which everyone in our company should guide their actions. I believe that, in general, everyone is a nice person and will try to act accordingly. However, having specific and clear goals will help everyone work together. Here are Wizard's:**
…
This post was written in 2014 and it's advice is absolutely less relevant today, nevertheless it's one of the top search results for this problem.
At One Month, we've chosen to operate our app across several domains depending on what course you're taking. (OneMonthRails.com, OneMonthHTML.com, or the primary domain OneMonth.com)
As a result we broke a lot of our tracking that we do to figure out how people are using our site. We use a services c…
If you saw me talk at ManhattanJS you know I have a dream about a decentralized mesh network that supports decentralized applications that cater to our decentralized behaviors.
There are a lot of parts to this dream, the hardware, the network, the software, the apps, the critical mass. All sorts of things. A ton of things. So I have to start somewhere. hackerchat should be the app with some plugable network backends. The two backends I have are o…
I don't write a ton of nodejs modules. I work on a few*, and I don't even work on them as much as I like. However I do end up using a ton of them. Here are some cool things I'd like to see that would make my life easier as a node developer.
We see the latest readme, and the latest version number, but no info on the old versions. You'd have to go download them and check their readme's and and docs.
The rea…
On the NY Hack and Tell mailing list we've been discussing the recent news of Netflix paying Comcast for bandwidth. The two sides of the debate seem to be such;
Netflix had a cheaper inadequate backbone provider who doesn't have fast enough uplinks to major providers. Deals between providers can be anything they want, and Netflix just sidestepped the issue and got their own connection to Comcast.
Comcast is pushing smaller backbone providers o…
Protip: Cross-Origin Resource Sharing headers are sent slightly different between Firefox and Chrome when hosts have a non standard port.
Today is my birthday. Last year you, my friends, helped me donate almost $4000 to both the Brooklyn Free School and Room To Read. It was amazing. I've never been so proud of everyone.
This year I turn 30. The gravity of this event has yet to dawn on me. However, more importantly I know what I want for my birthday.
DonorsChoose.org is a charity site that gives to teachers. The teachers express a need for equipment, DonorsChoose gets them a good pr…
I gave a quick lightening talk last night atBrooklyn Internets. In fact I sponsored the event. It's the first event I've sponsored and I couldn't have picked a cooler group.
There were a ton of great talks that night. And there was mine. I spoke on how to get a site up and running on AWS using Route53 and S3. I also go to show off my new websiteBlakeIsBeautiful.com.
You can find my slides from the night here.DNS and You (pdf)
I wish I could ha…
A while back I was hiring for a junior spot on my team at a largish company. I had been at it for over two months. There had been lots of recruiters, tons of resumes, many phone screens, a lot of failed code challenges and a few in person interviews. By the time they reached the end of my funnel I had 3 basic types of candidates in the following ratio.
I find graphs help get the point across.
I found a candidate, a yo…
I gave a talk at BrooklynJS last night on making a decentralized chat server in JS. It's similar and compatible with my ruby talk. We didn't get to play with it (not a lot of time) but it was a lot of fun to present. I also got a musical intro which blew me away. =)
Here are some photos from the wonderful Brian Brennan.
Code
I've been asked a few times what to buy when starting with electronics, especially when it comes to micro-controllers and sensors. You're going to end up buying a ton of parts while exploring. You'll have a hard time using a lot of these components until you're comfortable with their conventions. It's also important to make sure your everything works together.
For starters, lets go with a kit - the SparkFun Inventors Kit.
It comes with a wonderf…
