Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora

A few months ago, I started contributing to the Diaspora project. I began by refactoring their test suite and setting up a continuous integration server. Then I installed Jasmine and started mucking around with the JavaScript. That was all pretty straightforward.

A few weeks ago I made a slightly more controversial change.

[…]

Safe Facebooking

I have a Facebook account on which I have duly locked down the privacy controls (several times, it feels like). In theory, no one can get at my information unless we become Facebook friends.

In practice, I’ve discovered, it’s another story entirely. After spending the better part of ten days, recently, integrating Facebook into another […]

Why I Don’t Work At Google

I have a few friends who periodically ask me, “Why don’t you work at Google?” To non-developers, Google seems like a programmer’s paradise – smart people, free food, scooters! and interesting projects to work on. Google does indeed have all of these things. It’s not enough. […]

Why Rails is Still a Ghetto

(With apologies to Zed.)

A few of the talks at GoGaRuCo were crowdsourced – anyone who wanted to talk about anything put their title and description up on Uservoice. Folks who registered got 10 votes each, and the top vote-getting talks were accepted and scheduled.

Out of this came “CouchDB: Perform Like a Pr0n Star” […]