Not too long ago, my friend Warren wrote an article proposing some campaign finance reforms. This got me thinking about whether or not there’s a reliable to way of dealing with monetary donations to political candidates that both encourages integrity once a candidate reaches office, and can stand up to legal challenges. Personally, I think there is, but to do so we’re going to have to approach the situation from a different angle.
I mentioned in a previous blog post that we had used DynamoDB on an internal project at Bronto (my employer, but I don’t speak for them – they have people for that). That project is the Bronto Cantina – which launched to the whole Durham office a couple of weeks ago. It was a pretty neat little application, most of which was written over the course of a couple of days, followed by bits and pieces of cleanup afterwards to get a test setup up and running. Now we’re live, and I wanted to say a few words about it.
So I hadn’t touched Campus Navigator since it was first released in February 2013. Elon University, which I used for my sample implementation, has changed a lot in the nearly 3 years since I published that example, so I spent a little time during the Christmas down period updating that reference implementation, which is now live.
My friend Warren Myers had an interesting blog post on voting mechanics on various websites, along with “like” mechanic various social networks use (like buttons, +1 buttons, tweet favorites, etc.). I’ve made my feelings on things such as “like” buttons known, so I’m not going to go into those here. Warren raises some good points about the issues with voting on a lot of sites, but there are some places where I think works well that I think are worth noting, along with why they seem to work well. It’s important to note these reasons if you want to make sure your voting mechanic improves your site.
Wil Wheaton’s RPG show, Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana, recently finished its first season, and it’s been a lot of fun, not to mention a very well-done story. Normally, you wouldn’t think that an RPG show would make for particularly good television (even if the “television” is airing on YouTube), but it’s a testament to the world-building, story, characters, and players that it worked as well as it did. Continue reading »
If you’ve worked long enough, you’ve hit on something that involves multiple people. At that point, the common line is to “get all the stakeholders” together so everyone’s on the same page and actually working together. It’s a good philosophy, that works when you’re getting just the people involved in something together – and nobody else. The problem is that that’s rarely how these situations play out. Continue reading »
In 1 of my posts about social networks, I harped on the idea of the social network itself being an open platform, with apps running on that platform. What I should have pointed out is that email has been operating as apps on a platform, and they’re a perfect example of what I was talking about. Continue reading »
A while back, my friend Warren answered somebody’s question on Quora about a name for their startup. Another college friend and I saw this and had some fun with it, but it does bring up an important point that needs to be pointed out – not everything you’re doing is some type of magical secret sauce.
For the first half of the summer, I took the online Functional Programming Principles in Scala course on Coursera. I should probably point out that I didn’t take the $50 official I’d heard good things about the language, mostly from Dick Wall on Java Posse podcasts, and it seemed like a good way to try functional programming again after a brief, rather unpleasant, introduction to Lisp in college. Overall, my main goals were to a) re-acquaint myself with functional programming and b) get a basic, can-start-on-some-code-now understanding of Scala.
A couple of months ago, Mayday.us launched a big crowdfunding push to raise a crapton of money to form their own Super PAC, meant to fund and support candidates who would run on campaign platforms of reducing the influence of Super PAC money in elections. The overall goal, reduce corruption in federal politics, is a great agenda, but a SuperPAC built around limiting how much money people can spend in elections isn’t actually solving problems with American democracy. Continue reading »