There was a brief period of time during my senior year of college when I got the idea into my head that I should take a year off and pursue a startup. I had a prototype of mobile support software running (think Wufoo for apps), so I scheduled a meeting with a local angel investor. I’m paraphrasing, but his words went something like this: First of all, don’t quit school....

Today I finished up The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks, which is a surprisingly relevant collection of essays about software engineering, despite being written 42 years ago. Some of the essays I found quite boring, but those were usually essays that also detailed systems specific to the 70s. Most of the book tends to deal with the people of software engineering, and management tactics around the profession. I won’t rehash them all here; however there is one section in No Silver Bullet - Refired that I found particularly compelling:...

It’s been over two years since I have implemented Paperclip, the awesome image attachment gem, into a Rails app. The basic setup is still very easy and clean to do, as is the initial setup to get S3 storage working. But what’s not well documented is how to use Cloudfront to serve up your image attachments rather than pulling them from S3. Thanks to this helpful answer on stack overflow, and a little digging into the code of Paperclip itself, it turns out to be trivial to implement....

Yesterday was my last day at Curious, where I’ve been employed as an iOS and Ruby engineer since September of 2014. Before that, I contracted with them to create the very first native iOS app they put to market, in October of 2013. To say that I’ve met great people there, learned a ton, and been impacted in a positive way is an understatement. The perceptive reader might question why I decided to leave....

We have been taught to dread death, as if it were the end of the show. It won’t happen anymore. And therefore to be afraid of all the things that might bring about death; pain, sickness, suffering. And if you don’t know you see, if you are not vividly aware of the fact that you are, basically the works, you have no real joy in life… Being a stranger in the earth....