Heaven and hell

Suzuki told an old Chinese folk tale about the difference between heaven and hell. In hell everyone has very short arms. They sit around tables full of sumptuous food, trying to eat with very long chopsticks, but they can’t get the food in their mouths because chopsticks are too long and their arms…

Anyone Can Get a Black Belt

I’ve always thought that if you were practicing martial arts, getting a black belt was the pinnacle of your career. As it turned out, I was wrong. And while I was reading about different ranking systems I realized how much we, computer programmers, could learn from traditional…

naively programming

I was looking for an old story of mine on our internal Medium and stumbled upon another story, an experiment I tried a few months ago. Realizing that the experiment ended up being a success, I decided to re-package it for the big Medium.

debugging

People hate debugging. Debugging can be painful, frustrating, and often unrewarding. And yet, I love it. I wanted to write about it for a long time but I could never find the right words. I finally found them. In a TV show, out of places.

Debugging is about finding the bug…

I was working on making Charted embeddable today (coming soon!) which meant I had to brush up on my iframe skills. It’s been three years since we published Third-party JavaScript and Ben gave his talk on seamless iframes, and yet seamless iframes are nowhere to be seen. What happened there?

C++ is Russian literature

And pretty much everyone dies

From the interview with Jodi Picoult:

The one genre I absolutely cannot stand is Russian literature. You need genealogy charts to just figure out the characters, every novel is a…

leaky pipes

a poem

was watching a news segment

about napa earthquake

and leaky pipes

and technicians

who had to fix them.

not to worry

bukowski this time

he sits there
big in his chair
contented
and he tells me he
abandoned his previous
project
went to a different company
started all over
again.