- How Things Work: Summer Games Edition — admire the real craftsmanship in those early games. This has a great description of using raster interrupts to extend the number of sprites, and how and why double-buffering was expensive in terms of memory.
- IAMA: Etsy Ops Team (Reddit) — the Etsy ops team does an IAMA on Reddit. Everything from uptime to this sage advice about fluid data: A nice 18 year old Glenfiddich scales extremely well, especially if used in an active active configuration with a glass in each hand. The part of Scotland where Glenfiddich is located also benefits from near-permanent exposure to the Cloud (several clouds in fact). (via Nelson Minar)
- Who Learns What When You Log Into Facebook (Tim Bray) — nice breakdown of who learns what and how, part of Tim’s work raising the qualify of conversation about online federated identity.
- lolcommits — takes a photo of the programmer on each git commit. (via Nelson Minar)
"etsy" entries
Four short links: 13 August 2013
Retro Hackery, Etsy Ops, Distributed Identity, and lolcoders
Four short links: 9 November 2012
Civil Drones, Fencing the Public Domain, Quantified Spy, and Data Daemons for Fun and Metrics
- Helping Drones Play Nice With Other Aviation — The U.S. airspace is quickly being filled with simultaneously flying drones. To such an extent, unmanned aircraft could soon become a nightmare for the ATC controllers. The ADS-B will improve Predator B’s crew situational awareness making the drone capable to operate more freely and safely in domestic and international airspace in accordance with civilian air traffic and airspace rules and regulations.
- Reclaiming NZ’s Digitised Heritage — Out of a sample of 100 books: 50% of NZ Heritage Books (published before 1890) have been digitised; 90% of digitised texts are fully accessible; 98% of accessible texts are downloadable; Despite all works being in the public domain, only one did not have any licencing restrictions applied to its use. Most groups who digitise then go on to put restrictions around their use. [T]here are also many instances where arbitrary restrictions are being applied to the detriment of the public good.
- Self-Spy (GitHub) — Log everything you do on the computer, for statistics, future reference and all-around fun!
- statsd (GitHub) — Etsy’s data-gathering daemon, written up in an excellent blog post.
One Short Link: 14 June 2012
Opening Doors
Etsy did something significant. I’m not talking about funding scholarships to Hacker School, though kudos to Etsy, 37Signals, and Yammer for putting money into it. And serious respect to Marc Hedlund for putting it together—he didn’t just submit a bug report on the world, he submitted a patch. Marc’s Ignite talk at Foo about this was incredibly moving: he accomplished something at scale, something beyond a single hiring decision.
What I find truly significant is the stark quantification of the untapped (previously uninvited) interest: 661 women applied where 7 had applied before. The number of scholarships and the size of the programming class were dwarfed by the number of women who wanted in, and jubilation at the success of the Etsy campaign has to be accompanied by serious thought about how to tackle the next order of magnitude in scale. And because it’s a problem worthy of your cleverness, I’ve made this the only short link today. Use the time you would have spent reading about Map/Reduce and devops to solve this scaling problem instead—you’ll truly be working on something that matters.
Four short links: 12 April 2012
Financial Data, 21C Learning for Parents, IQ Battles, and Etsy Hacker Grants
- Big Data in Finance (PDF, 9M) — Algo trading systems have begun to resemble an arms race. Competition, data, and the race for real-time.
- A Parent’s Guide to 21st Century Learning (Edutopia, free registration required to download) — What should collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking look like in a modern classroom? How can parents help educators accomplish their goals? We hope this guide helps bring more parents into the conversation about improving education. (via Derek Wenmoth)
- Chess Intelligence and Winning — survey of IQ gaps between contestants needed to win competitions. We could view cops and killers as being involved in a grim contest. In the USA around 65% of all murders are solved. That converts to an average “murder” ELO rating difference between police and murderers of 108 ELO points. It is also known that the mean IQs of murderers and policemen are 87 and 102, respectively. So successfully solving murders is a puzzle then the “a” coefficient is 0.041, and each IQ point difference is worth 7.2 ELO points. I suspect this is masturbatory math extrapolation rather than anything significant or predictive, but the cops-vs-robbers IQ contest was an interesting angle. (via Dr Data’s Blog)
- Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology — Today, in conjunction with Hacker School, Etsy is announcing a new scholarship and sponsorship program for women in technology: we’ll be hosting the summer 2012 session of Hacker School in the Etsy headquarters, and we’re providing ten Etsy Hacker Grants of $5,000 each — a total of $50,000 — to women who want to join but need financial support to do so. Our goal is to bring 20 women to New York to participate, and we hope this will be the first of many steps to encourage more women into engineering at Etsy and across the industry.
Four short links: 26 July 2011
Advertising Keywords, Javascript Koans, Etsy Open Source Testing, Wieldy Selections
- Google Keyword Advertising — interesting infographic about the most lucrative advertising categories for Google. #20 is an eye-opener!
- Javascript Koans (GitHub) — an interactive learning environment that uses failing tests to introduce students to aspects of JavaScript in a logical sequence. (via Javascript Weekly)
- Etsy AB (GitHub) — Etsy’s framework for A/B testing, feature ramp up, and more. (via Randy J. Hunt)
- Chosen (GitHub) — a JavaScript plugin that makes long select boxes more wieldy. (via Steve Losh)