The real estate market has dried up. In the first wave, everyone who felt the pressure of a crashing housing market tried to sell their home as quickly as possible before it fell any further. This, of course, created a cycle where prices fell even quicker. People went underwater on mortgages. Many areas took 50-60% [...]

Rich client-side applications written in Javascript (such as those using Backbone.js, Ember, etc) are quickly replacing many server-side implementations (such as those that render pages using PHP, Ruby, etc). Of course, they are many hybrid approaches today, but does it make sense for a server to become purely a REST API and the entire application [...]

Cyclic dependency injection is your code asking you to make a choice rather than remain on the fence. Here’s a story of what happened in my case. I ran across a troubling case of cyclic dependency injection in the constructors of some code. Here is the code for two simple classes where a CustomerModel checks [...]

Engineering for business is clearly not the same as engineering in an opensource, academic, or hobbyist environment. One of the key differences is that deadlines and business value change the requirements of the system. With such pressures, engineers are often forced to take up technical debt – quicker, dirtier solutions in order to get the [...]

Some of the greatest things we all love and use today have been created, not by business masterminds, but rather by people who explored their creativity. Everything from computers, the Internet, to the Linux Operating System, and even the airplane – all invented by people who had a tremendous passion for something they loved. Rarely, [...]

Venture capitalists are eager to give their money away to a great startup idea. Yet, one of the chief complaints is a lack of great ideas. How can this be? You can take a stroll down Silicon Valley and the numerous startup hacker dojos and see top notch developers slicing and dicing away at what [...]

With the recent media buzz around SOPA and PITA, as well as on-going debates about MPAA and software piracy, it helps to take a step back to see what all the fuss is about. At the root of the debate is the fundamental concept of “intellectual property” which can be divided up into more specific [...]

One of my favorite web designs is Mint.com. Here’s their header:   The lightweight simplicity of the logo, menu, and white space is very appealing to me. Nothing looks too crowded or overwhelming. But also, there is quite a bit of care and detail given the simplicity. The logo has a leaf with a dollar [...]

A large part of stress is thinking about something that worries you for too long or in a repeated cyclic fashion. It can happen very naturally, as our minds can be free to wander at any given time in the day. Sometimes we let problems cycle in our minds uncontrollably. This starts the process of [...]

You’ve heard it before. Things that tend to have higher risk exhibit higher reward, and lower risk exhibit lower reward. You’ve seen it in Las Vegas casinos. You’ve seen it in your 401k choices. You’ve seen it in adventures. And you’ve probably seen it in business. But there’s logical trap that snags a lot of [...]