Those Who Can: Teach!
Way back when I was still working toward my fancy degree in library studies, a professor afflicted with a love of the more philosophical side of things forced my class to read a book by Jerome Bruner...
View ArticleDocumentation Undead
It’s a dusty word: documentation. Look at it. It practically makes you sneeze just looking at it there on the screen. Documentation is not particularly lively. It doesn’t like to go out. It doesn’t...
View ArticleQ & Beta
Next week the project known as ‘Q’ enters its user-testing phase. Once again, I am reminded a lot of the Paul Valéry quote that “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Valéry’s statement is as...
View Article… But How Can I Think If I Don’t Smoke?
Five days ago, I quit smoking. I went cold turkey, not because that was the plan but because I couldn’t decide on what the plan should be. Four hours of indecision later, I realized I was already deep...
View Article“… so I wrote a long one instead.”
There are dark corners of my code. I fear them. How long have these variables dwelt untouched in these meandering variants of fresher code? Are these pieces even used anymore? Or are they pieces of...
View ArticleSite Seeing
Victory! Yes, for months my Rails applications have been periodically crashing. No, I didn’t know what to do about the unfortunate and deeply sad state of affairs. After months of work coding several...
View ArticleThe Need for Speed(y Searches)
More is more. 750,000 images is a lot of images, each nestled in a rich bed of additional data. So when it came time to build an internal application to search all of these images (published to our...
View ArticleRuby on Rails, You Auto_Complete Me
Why are the instructions always wrong? In the middle of developing yet another internal application in Ruby on Rails for metadata entry, it became clear this week that I needed to be able to type a...
View ArticleSliders, Ruby on Rails, and How to Build Something in Ten Days (Kind of)
Let me first apologize to anyone who has to look at the code I wrote over the last ten days. It probably looks a little like spaghetti thrown at the wall and then ironed into the plaster. I was coding...
View ArticleLabs Qv2 is Live for Testing
Please (provided you are behind the firewall and a staff member at NYPL) attempt to break this: q.nypl.org. Based on several interviews and some user testing conducted by Michael Lascarides, Trevor...
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