Chaos Server

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. - Edsger Dijkstra I've basically achieved code complete with Episode.Next. It's a feeling of joy that it's all working, but also I'm not quite sure what to do next. What an interesting sign that I got the entire basic app to work in 1-2 days, and then spend the next 3-4 months making performance improvement after performance improvement to it. I have on performance improvement left I could do: change the synching code to use web workers. It's so smooth and fast now, I'm not sure there is any point. The single best thing I did in the architecture was to abandon doing everything directly in the browser and move a chunk of processing up to Google App Engine. It let me do a ton of optimizations to TheTVDB API that turned into super-fast optimizations. What did I do? Stripped out all the XML meta-data I didn't use. Allow APIs that would...

In the middle of the afternoon yesterday I sat back and realized my office was quiet. Sure, Mrs.Chaos and Mini-Chaos were out running errands, but far more important was the fact that old ChaosServer had been retired and now my office has a MacBook Air (with SSD) and a MacBook Pro (with SSD) and nothing was spinning. All the fans were powered down and while I was happy typing up email for work and ChaosServer was streaming music - there were no fans running. Just a blissful silence.

There’s actually a pretty strong benefit to [having podcasts] requiring a lot of effort: fewer bad shows get made. - Marco Arment When someone you consider smart says something dumb, you start to second guess everything they say. Marco made an offhand comment about being glad that it was hard to create podcasts because it meant there were fewer bad podcasts. The reality is that when you make it hard to share stories, than people who are really good at telling stories you want to hear, but aren’t technically save, can’t share them. In the world of computer sciences, there was a project to create a purposefully complex and impossible to use programming language. It’s called INTERCAL which stands for Programming Language Without Pronounceable Acronym (for obvious reasons). The joke idea was - if programming was easy, than dumb people would do it. So if you made programming really really hard, than only the smartest people would be capable of doing it and therefore you would have o...