Philosophical Hacker

If you’ve ever looked at analytics for software products, you’ve probably run across a graph that looks like this: Graphs like this one depict cohort analyses.1 This particular graph is from Google Analytics. Apple also has one for app analytics. So does Fabric.2 Cohort analyses can be very useful. For example, Eric Reis, in The Lean Startup, recounts how cohort analysis helped his startup realize that their efforts at improving their product weren’t working: »

This past November 26th marked my one year anniversary of the day I started meditating. I wanted to jot down some miscellaneous thoughts about the journey that I haven’t already covered in my posts about meditation, startups, and leadership or my post about meditation, addiction, and smart phones. Here I go. Improvement isn’t Perfectly Linear So it turns out that in spite of my goal to meditate every day this past year, I only actually managed to meditate ~ 273 out of 365 days (almost 75%). »

“Good programmers are passionate about what they do” is basically a platitude in our industry. 🙄 On the whole, this may be true, but lately I’ve been interested in how our passion for programming might get in the way of us doing well for the companies we work for and may even lead to us being worse at programming specifically. 🤔 Here are some ways I think this passion can make us worse at what we do: »

A few hundred years ago, Renè Descartes, the fella who brought us the Cartesian coordinate system 📉, isolated himself for a while to figure out (among other things) whether we can know anything for certain. The result of his retreat was his Meditations on First Philosophy, one of the most important philosophical texts of the modern era and one of my personal favorites. Early on in his Meditations, he decides that it’d be useful to engage in a thought experiment. »

A few months ago, I stumbled upon something I found hard to believe: Some people continue smoking cigarettes because they are unaware of how bad it tastes. Although it was counter-intuitive, I had pretty good reason to believe it, as it was suggested by Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist who developed a mindfulness-based smoking cessation program that’s supposedly superior to the standard one developed by the American Lung Association. 😮 »

I almost gave up on becoming a programmer. I took two years of college-level programming in high school and I didn’t particularly care for it. Although I did fairly well in those classes, at the time, I probably had something like the following thoughts about programming: I’ve given this a fair shake. I’ve taken two years of classes, and I’ve decided that programming is some tedious bullshit 💩. I need to find something else. »

Edit: James Shore, the guy who attempted to shame Uncle Bob on Twitter, has fairly pointed out that I’ve omitted some of the context that makes his shaming appear more reasonable. I’ve edited this post to include more of that context. Holy crap! In case you missed it, Uncle Bob got excoriated on Twitter earlier this week for a comment he made about the media’s coverage of the separation of immigrant children from their parents. »

I’m a big fan of KPCB’s internet trends report, and I’ve been following their reports for the last few years. This year, I’ve decided to clip and comment on what I think are some notable trends they’ve captured for 2018. Here are 2 trends that really stood out to me from this year’s report, along with some commentary. 1. The End of Mobile’s Golden Era Mobile’s growth has been slowing for years and others have already noted the effects of this. »

Here’s a written version of my recent React Orlando talk: I want to talk about some patterns, principles, and tools for testing react native applications. I’m going to focus a lot on the “patterns and principles” part of the testing equation because, as we all know, the improper use of tools can actually be worse than not having those tools at all. Michael Scott’s misuse of the fork-lift in Daryl’s warehouse came to mind while I was pondering this truth, and it turns out there’s a gif of this exact moment in the show. »

Recently, I’ve been wondering, Should new APIs created in 2018 be RESTful or be built using graphql or be something else entirely? While pondering and researching this question, I’ve stumbled upon some broader realizations like, Most web APIs and SPAs aren’t actually RESTful. 😨 In fact, I’ve never worked with a completely RESTful API. We’re reinventing the wheel and making our lives harder — on the server and on the client — by ignoring the standards around REST APIs 😞 The same force that explains our half-ass adoption of REST (i. »