I read Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the commons on a whim after seeing it mentioned in a discussion about open source software communities. I believe this isn't an uncommon way for software folk to become aware of this book. Of the many fascinating insights Ostrom presents there are a few that h…
Let's say we've written a web app in Haskell. $ curl http://localhost:8000/hello/World Hello, World! $ curl http://localhost:8000/hello/Haskell Hello, Haskell! It sure would be nice if we could share it with other people. Let's deploy this wonderful thing to the internet using Heroku. Haskell and…
The operations practice of defining infrastructure as code has been popular for a while, and it’s for good reason. Lot's of strange and unexpected things can happen to our very important web-servers, so being able to quickly build another one in a (close to) identical state can be very handy. Sadly…
A few years ago I watched the Structure and interpretation of computer programs video lectures, kindly posted publicly by MIT OpenCourseWare. There's so much interesting material in them but one part really struck me, in 5B: Computational Objects Gerald Jay Sussman defines a pair "in terms of nothi…
I've been making software professionally for about nine years and I really love it. I believe software has this empowering potential, I believe everyone should be able to understand it if they want to. This means I prefer open and accessible tools and standards wherever possible. It also means I try to learn in the open, sharing what I learn as I learn it.