NoSQL and the Tar Pit

In a Quora answer I went back to a theme that I mentioned when discussing Bret Victor a few months ago. Here’s something that struck me yesterday when reading Out of the Tar Pit which is a very good essay that seems to signal the direction that many smart people think software development should be …

SFW Refactoring

Having split the Ruby and node.js versions of the Smallest Federated Wiki, seems like authors are now moving to further refactoring. Seems like the client code, and maybe some plugins, are getting separated to further projects.

GitHub

Bill Seitz notes that Instapaper can’t grab the meatier plaintext from Markdown files on GitHub. I’ve noticed that GitHub doesn’t seem to play nice with other services at all. It breaks the WordPress bookmarklet I use (to write this post, for example). No idea why. Is it a bug or a deliberate thing?

Aaaargh! Quora. No! (Should I learn Clojure for Android programming?)

Having contrasted Quora, positively with StackOverflow, I find that Quora is also starting to play the “word-shaping” game by which either an algorithm or a tone-deaf moderator decides to constrain how you are allowed to express your questions 🙁 No idea why they really feel the need to do this. But it basically has the …

Questions for 2014 : #5 A New Web Stack

Dave Winer tweeted that a “new webstack” was being built. I agree. A big question is how to support / engage with Mozilla. To me, it’s clear that the new stacks needs to be more peer-to-peer and less dependent on other people’s clouds. And for that to work well we need support from the browser …