The Red Envelope Race
I will never watch every movie on my Netflix queue. The Kindle bookstore has a thousand times more books than I will read in my lifetime, with more being published each day, and the library is right...
View ArticleFizzBuzz without multiplication or division
This is the first of a three-part series: Part 2, Part 3. I use FizzBuzz as a warm-up question on interviews, so I have had time to ponder it quite a bit. As a thought experiment, I wondered if I...
View ArticleFizzBuzz without multiplication or division, part 2
This is the second of a three-part series: Part 1, Part 3. Last time on Lost In Permutation, I wrote a FizzBuzz implementation that didn't use the run-time multiplication and division operators....
View ArticleFizzBuzz without multiplication or division, part 3
This is the finale of a three-part series: Part 1, Part 2. FizzBuzz is a good problem for interviews because it allows you an adaptive scale of interesting things to ask. If the candidate struggles to...
View ArticleUntitled
In 1450, there were about a hundred new books published. Last year, there were more than a million. A new book comes out every thirty seconds. It would take you fifteen years just to read the titles...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cheezburger DVCS Workflow: A History
I wrote an article on my company's technology blog! In the beginning was the Code, and the Code was with Subversion, and the Code was Subversion. Cheezburger was with Subversion in the beginning....
View ArticleDedicated Maker Time
Back in 2009, Paul Graham wrote about Makers and Managers, and how their schedules differ. I try very hard to remain on a Maker's Schedule, but in a mostly-remote company like mine, it is very...
View ArticleTeam Coherence
When a piece of technology appears to be the work of a single mind and possesses the dense layers of coherent complexity that can only be the product of a large team, it is evidence of a deep...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bokode prototype
I got an itch to reproduce MIT Media Lab's Bokode, a really clever optical hack. Their system uses an LED, a diffuser, an image screen, and a pinhole lens. I don't have the components on hand to make...
View ArticleClik here to view.
iOS '86.0.1
Have you seen iOS '86? The idea behind it: what would happen if designers from the Macintosh System Software team in 1986 were to get their hands on a (somehow monochrome) iPhone 4S? It's a pretty...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Multiple Users in Google Chrome
Like Private Browsing, Chrome now has a feature where you can have multiple browser sessions running side-by-side. This is very excellent, because it means you can be logged in to the same site as two...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mucking Calls
Programming involves a lot of the same motions as horse stall mucking. We're all just shoveling parameters from one function call to the next. Occasionally, I can even see through a hole in the barn...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Specialization is organizational growth
A company cannot grow without specialzation. There are a certain number of logical roles that must be filled: design, cleaning bathrooms, testing, sales, accounts payable, shipping, bills, hiring,...
View ArticleHow to get a job at Cheezburger
How do I get a job at icanhascheezeburger? Well, first you remove that extraneous 'e' from icanhascheezburger. Also, it's generally considered disrespectful to call a company by one of its product...
View ArticleLaziness
Friday, Cam and I were trying to figure out why a new AJAX call was failing for logged out users, but not for logged in users. The exception logs weren't really helpful: somewhere deep inside .NET,...
View ArticleCheez Disconnected
My heart sank when Scott made the announcement on the first evening of CheezCon Winter 2012 -- he planned on leaving Cheezburger at the end of the year. Scott represented our department to the board...
View ArticleClik here to view.
JavaScript tail-call optimization decorator using exceptions
JavaScript does not have tail call optimization, at least until proper tail calls arrive in ES6, because of the existence of <function>.caller and <function>.callee. So, if you’re doing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beginner's Guide to TOTP
I’ve been a long-time fan of two-factor authentication, using Google Authenticator to represent “something I have” in addition to the password, which is “something I know.” So, of course, when GitHub...
View ArticleTurkey Day Down Time
Based on a true story, Thanksgiving 2012.Thanksgiving is a four-day long American holiday dedicated to stuffing yourself with seasonal food and shopping on the Internet in your underwear. So it was no...
View Article
