Last November I was invited to speak in Paris. I had just taken a new job with a company called Obvious and I was pretty confident that this was going to be my last talk – maybe ever. I had been discussing/thinking about this idea of guilt for a while (in particular the feeling of guilt that comes with maintaining an opensource project) and felt like the venue that dotjs was providing made a lot…
The other day in IRC my good friend Divya brought up Dustin Curtis’s recent blog posts by saying “it seems like he’s so sad.” I agreed. To be sure, Dustin’s more recent writing covers topics that his blog has been more or less focusing on since it’s inception (largely tech), but this undertone of “sadness” seems more explicit than in the past. And it was precisely this explicitness – and perhaps…
A good friend wrote me a few years ago with the subject: rien ne tient en place. I don’t speak French. But google assures me it means: nothing holds it in place . One time after class, a professor shared he had been translating books on the side. He found it somewhat entertaining and a good source of additional income. We talked about it for a while and by chance I mentioned I only spoke english.…
Today’s contribution comes from another good friend of mine, [Divya Manian](//twitter.com/divya). Worried that my introduction was sounding a bit too “officious"… I’ll just say I met Divya on a boat full of JavaScript nerds in Austin, where she went on at length about how she hated how i wrote code. Despite this, she’s incredibly talented, well read, and offers a really interesting perspective on…
It’s wonderful to watch Noam Chomsky completely write off Postmodernism. If you’re unfamiliar with Chomsky, he’s a largely well regarded, American intellectual and MIT professor of Linguistics and Philosophy (emeritus). And yet, despite his accolades, his dismissal of the Postmodern movement itself isn’t anything special. What’s truly great however, and really worth considering, are the grounds by…
The following article was written by my good friend and colleague, [Angus Croll](//twitter.com/angustweets). Angus works on the web core team at twitter, talks at conferences around the world, and runs an amazing [blog](//javascriptweblog.wordpress.com) on javascript. Beyond this, he’s also a huge book nerd, so I thought it would be fun to get him to write about code from that perspective. Check…
In 1981, the Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth invited artist Andy Warhol to his New York studio to film a short scene which focused on Andy eating a hamburger. If you haven’t seen it, watch it now . Through this film, we see an otherwise ordinary activity reinterpreted as art. A gesture not unlike Duchamp’s fountain . A little over a year ago, Elliot Cable began a similar experiment. He began…
i think there’s something to intimacy. even though it’s almost certainly the wrong word for what i’m talking about (i really mean something closer to a gender-inclusive-bromance). nonetheless, i want to make a case for it. and i want to make a case for it in terms of the creative process. and in terms of engineering as one such example of this process. arguably, the greatest philosophical work of…
I offered the following bit of advice on twitter. Drop out of school or study english. That’s how you win at javascript. — ♒∆✝ (@fat) May 28, 2012 A number of people agreed. A number disagreed. But the vast majority suggested I was being controversial for controversy sake. Or a “hipster.” Or something. This is not the case. So, in an attempt to rectify that, I offer you this sincere exegesis of my…