NASA and others have discovered seven earth-sized planets orbiting around a single star, in very close orbits. It’s fantastical beyond fantasy. Imagine looking up from your back yard to see other planets passing by in their orbits. I want to go to there.
From NASA Telescope Reveals Largest Batch of Earth-Size, Habitable-Zone Planets Around Single Star
Liftoff episode 41 reminded me of the discovery. Love that show.
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David Heinemeier Hansson recently wrote about growth and startups. It’s nice to see my sentiments articulated, and by someone who’s successful despite having an uncommon take. The last two paragraphs sum it up nicely:
As Douglas Rushkoff says, we need a new operating system for startups. The current one will keep producing the same extractive and monopolistic empires we’ve gotten so far. No, what we need is a new crop of companies that are institutionally comfortable with leaving money on the table.
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They’re a bit weird, for sure. Many cultures mourn their dead in person. Some people can handle it, some people can’t. Some find it helps with closure, others may not. Sometimes people die unexpectedly and it’s nice to have one last chance to see them and say goodbye.
I went to two open-casket funerals in 2016. For me, it went something like this:
Walk up to casket Think to myself, “Hmm, grandma didn’t really look like that.
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Recently I began to optimize voxeling’s usage of WebGL buffers. The goal was to get rid of render performance bottlenecks so I could further increase the draw distance. In real life humans can see about 2+ miles away before the curvature of the earth drops things out of view. The game engine was previously only able to draw out to roughly 700 feet before stuttering, but the latest code can draw to about 1500 feet.
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What I would like people to do if they’re professional programmers is think about how you can use your skills not just for business. How can you change the world in ways which aren’t necessarily directly correlated to making money? Because, are all the good things in the world directly correlated to money? I don’t think they are. [We] should be thinking about how we can use our amazing, fabulous skills that we all have, that most people don’t yet have, to change the world for the good that we see.
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Refactoring – Not on the backlog is a great read, and advises you to improve your code with every feature request you complete, instead of making it worse. The key is to refactor iteratively as you work.
We took this “gradual refactoring” approach at DeviantArt and I highly recommend it. You also get the side-effect of maintaining developer morale since large, long-lived codebases are often soul-crushing things to maintain.
So please, stop plowing through your tickets.
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If your web application calls out to third-party APIs, set aside some time to review the timeouts surrounding those requests.
Carefully choose a timeout for the initial connection attempt. Choose a low timeout and perhaps add a retry if you really need the call to go through. Carefully choose a timeout for the overall request. How long are you willing to make your users wait for the response? Do not rely on the default timeouts set by your HTTP client library, language runtime, or HTTP server.
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I highly recommend against being a morning person. As a morning person, you may consider it a virtue to be able to spring out of bed excited to start your day. The flaw with this approach to life becomes apparent when you spring out of bed too swiftly, bend down to grab your shirt too eagerly and end up pulling your back out.
You have been warned. Please govern yourselves accordingly.
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My brother-in-law’s making a squad-based point-and-click adventure mystery game set in near-future Florida. If you like point-and-click adventure games, check it out on Kickstarter!
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