Recent Posts
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Announcing Tetra – 22 Aug 2013
Today I am very pleased to announce the launch of Tetra - a new iPhone and iPad game app that I have been working on over the last three months.
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Implementing Letterpress UI in UIKit – 30 Jul 2013
Good artists copy. Great artists steal. — Steve Jobs, (mis)quoting Pablo Picasso.
Letterpress is a fantastic game. I remember how magical and fun the UI felt when I first played it. Letterpress was released when I was in the midst of completely rewriting the Exec Errands app, which involved a lot of custom UI components. I learned a lot about custom UI for iOS during that project, but Letterpress had some super advanced mojo happening in its UI. I wondered if I would ever be good enough to create something quite so magical as that. I was also shocked to learn that the entire UI of Letterpress is written using OpenGL instead of UIKit. I guess that's why they say, "You never go full Brichter."
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2013 Resolutions – 01 Jan 2013
• Earn 1 Bridge Master Point
• Drop 20 pounds
• Read the A Song of Ice and Fire series
• Read 3 graphic novels
• Walk 1000 miles (~20mi/week)
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2012 Year in Review: Side-Projects – 31 Dec 2012
One of my favorite pastimes as a programmer is to work on personal projects outside of work. I use side-projects as a creative outlet to work on new and interesting things. I also use them as a learning exercise. If I start a side-project, there must be "one new thing" about the project I don't know how to do already. This can mean learning a new language, API, framework, algorithm, whatever. The end result is that I level up my skillset with each project. I recommend this system for every programmer.
Here is a list of side-projects that I started, developed, and shipped in 2012:
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A Better Makefile for Bootstrap – 04 Dec 2012
tl;dr Bootstrap's Makefile is not so good. So I'm starting to make it better.
A little bit of backstory:
My current side-project is learning how to play Bridge. To help learn about the bidding process, I am making a simple static site web app out of a coffeescript playing card library, BankersBox for client-side storage, and of course Bootstrap for layout and styling. The project is called bridge-trainer.
Since each component has a compile step, I decided to take a Jekyll-like approach by compiling the overall site into a
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The New Exec iPhone App – 27 Nov 2012
Three months of intense work later, the new Exec iPhone app is here! I did a full overview of the development process on the Exec blog. Hopefully I will be able to do some deep-dive technical posts about actual implementation of some of the custom UI classes at some point. In the mean time, enjoy the new app!
Read the overview writeup here!
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Dreaming of Space – 19 Oct 2012
After reading the post Small by Alex MacCaw I was moved to recount a dream I had recently because the experience was similar to that described in the post.
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Adian for App.Net Update – 12 Oct 2012
Apple just approved the v1.0.28 update of Adian for App.Net! This update includes many updates requested by users, but here are two updates which might be nice for most people to know about.
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IFTTT Needs Webhooks, Stat – 05 Aug 2012
If This Then That (IFTTT for short) is a cool web service that lets users manipulate and react to events on different websites by taking other actions in response.
For example, I can tell IFTTT: IF I post a new photo to Instagram THEN take that photo and store a copy in my Dropbox folder.
IFTTT currently has 50 channels (or services) that you can wire together in similar fashion to create all sorts of interesting combinations of events.
However, one output channel is sorely missing: Webhooks.
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Array Iteration Interview Problem – 01 Aug 2012
Over the past year, I have interviewed several cadidates for programming positions at tech startups. The following problem is a variation of a question I have asked in each of those interviews.
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Startups, Fix Your Blog Links – 28 May 2012
In this next installment of my "Startups, fix your X" series, I present another issue that has irked me for some time, but I have finally been bothered to write it down.
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Fixing Obfuscated Emails in Gmail with Dotjs – 25 May 2012
Even though moderm email spam filters have become sufficiently good at protecting our inboxes, people (including myself) still feel the need to obfuscate their email addresses when listing them on public websites so spam scrapers don't get their address. Seems reasonable.
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Startups, Fix Your "From" Field – 24 Mar 2012
A short rant. I have seen this problem happen too many times to stay quiet anymore. I have reached out in private when this happens, but I'm going to write a public rant so I can stop repeating myself.
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Behind the Scenes: Launching ExportMyPosts.com in 4 Days – 21 Mar 2012
In the time between finishing at Twilio and starting at Exec, I had four days off. A few days prior, Posterous had been acquired by Twitter. This gave me an idea, and it was one I knew I could build in those four days. This post will explore how I built and launched ExportMyPosts.com in those four days, and what building-blocks I used to get there.
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Joining Exec – 16 Mar 2012
Once in a while, an opportunity comes along that you can't refuse. Two weeks ago, one such opportunity came knocking. After careful thought and deliberation, I am excited to announce...
I am joining Exec!
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Create Your Own Posterous with Jekyll, PHP, Mailgun, and S3 – 12 Mar 2012
A few weeks ago, I decided to create an email-powered blog that is hosted in an Amazon s3 bucket as a website. I wanted to be able to email new posts to the blog and have them published automatically. I use the email subject line as the title of the post and the email body as the text of the post (written in markdown).
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March Madness Bracket Challenge 2012 – 11 Mar 2012
I have been running an NCAA March Madness bracket challenge on my website since 2005. It's back this year!
Head over to http://brackets.jazzychad.net and create as many brackets as you like.
You can also create pools so that you can rank your brackets against friends or co-workers. I know a couple of companies that use my site to run their office pools each year. Pretty cool.
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BankersBox - A Redis-like API for localStorage – 05 Mar 2012
Today I am happy to announce the open-sourcing of BankersBox, a javascript library I have been developing inside Twilio.
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My Mixergy Interview – 23 Jan 2012
Last week, Andrew Warner asked to interview me on Mixergy about my experience with Y Combinator and Notifo.
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Fouling Out and Moving On – 08 Sep 2011
Today is a bittersweet day. I am closing one chapter of my life and opening a brand new one.
My startup is dead.
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Applying to YC as a Single Founder – 31 Aug 2011
In a comment I made on Hacker News, I expressed my desire to write an article about the differences and misconceptions between being a single-founder and having co-founders. This is not that article, but it is related. The application for YC W12 is open, and in response to my comment I received a few emails asking about applying to YC as a single-founder. What follows is one of the emails (used with permission) and my response.
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Announcing BlogFire – 10 Jun 2011
After a month in review, BlogFire is finally available on the App Store. Go get it now.
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Startups Are Hard – 02 May 2011
Startups are hard. No, startups are damn hard.
Contrary to popular belief, there are no clouds of money that float around Silicon Valley and rain on anyone that utters the phrase, "I'm a founder!" Unfortunately, starting a company and raising money is just as hard as ever; it's just that the investors don't have as much leverage as they used to, but they still have a lot.
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VorePad - Convore client for iPad – 22 Apr 2011
VorePad is now available on the App Store. Go get it now!
VorePad is the premier iPad client for Convore, a great online forum and chat site launched this past February as part of Y Combinator's Winter 2011 batch.
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GramFrame for iPad – 07 Apr 2011
GramFrame for iPad is available on the App Store. Go get it now!
This is the story of GramFrame, an app that turns your iPad into a beautiful ambient display using images from Instagram.
Back on March 16, I created a very simple app in a couple of hours and wrote a small post to see if anyone would want it. Turns out a few people did, so I built it.
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Hacking Twitter's Javascript – 27 Mar 2011
New Twitter uses a massive amount of javascript (for a webapp). Nearly 1 Megabyte of minified, obfuscated javascript powers the site's frontend.
For some unknown reason (maybe I couldn't sleep), I decided to read all of it.
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Twitter and Me – 14 Mar 2011
This is the story of Twitter and the last four years of my life. It's a pretty long story, but one that needs to be told.
Twitter and I have a very interesting past. When I say "Twitter" I mean both the service and the company itself.
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First Post! – 13 Mar 2011
This is my first jekyll post! I was inspired by Stammy's post about using jekyll and getting myself back into writing.
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Bits
- Inspect Javascript Timers Greasemonkey Script – 20 Mar 2011
- iPad Screensaver App – 16 Mar 2011
- First Bit! – 13 Mar 2011
