Lethain - lethain.com - Irrational Exuberance
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War Card Game in Python 3 Dec 2012 | 12:47 am
While cleaning out my code repository on my laptop I ran into an implementation of the card game War I wrote during a programming interview. It's far from spectacular, but does seem like a pretty good...
Reflection on RethinkDB 2 Dec 2012 | 10:46 pm
Since first reading about RethinkDB I've been thinking about giving it a go, and this weekend I finally did, throwing together a very simple example which uses RethinkDB to store crawled pages and ext...
Kill Your Heroes, Stop Doing it Harder 26 Nov 2012 | 05:09 am
The project launch is eighteen months late, company revenue is dropping significantly, key people are leaving and being replaced by new hires. What to do? Well, work harder! Does it work? Of course ...
Configuration Driven Behavior 25 Nov 2012 | 10:49 pm
Building technical leverage goes beyond implementing systems and tools, it's also an opportunity to explore how system design leads to reusable, flexible and useful tools. One of the most interesting ...
Extraction: Get Metadata from HTML Documents 24 Nov 2012 | 02:15 am
I needed to extract titles, canonical urls, descriptions and images from HTML pages, and decided to split that functionality out into its own library. Then I decided to actually go through the process...
Social Hierarchies in Engineering Organizations 5 Nov 2012 | 02:16 am
I recently read Anthropology of Mid-Sized Startups, which argues that as technology companies grow they begin behaving as tribes or religions. The article's premise captured me more than the execution...
Creating Multi-Worksheet Excel Docs with xlwt 4 Nov 2012 | 07:35 pm
This tutorial walks through using the xlwt library to create a multi-worksheet Excel document in Python. We'll be using the example of calculating our AWS server expenses, and in adition to xlwt, we'l...
Building Technical Leverage 4 Nov 2012 | 07:35 pm
Last year I had the opportunity to speak briefly with Kevin Scott, SVP of Engineering of LinkedIn, and he mentioned building technical leverage as one of his engineering organization's primary goals. ...
Hosting a Paper Reading Group 29 Oct 2012 | 03:53 am
Every engineering team I've been a part of has eventually started a technical paper reading group. At Yahoo! it was a group of engineers from a variety of teams, and at Digg it included the entire eng...
Why Pagination Was Hard at Digg 25 Aug 2012 | 06:44 pm
My previous coworker Can Duruk recently posted an excellent article covering some web development tips he picked up working at Digg. One of his comments about pagination provoked some confusion on Hac...
