Since I began at Open Sky a few weeks ago I have been tasked with building out a great team. Over the course of my career I have interviewed hundreds of people (mostly developers) and hired dozens. At OpenSky I was able to find and hire 6 fantastic employees in my first 6 weeks a...
Did you think it was turtles?
I couldn’t be more excited to announce that I have accepted a position at The Open Sky Project. I am leading the architecture, development and technology. It’s rare in life that one has the opportunity to do what they love to do and be paid to do it. Even rarer is to do some...
The reasons to switch to UTF-8
Most developers know the basics of VIM, enough to edit a conf file, but most stay there, unaware of the power and beauty of vim. One of my developers has expressed desire to abandon the bloated GUI ways of eclipse and discover VIM. I have been using VIM for such a long time I for...
Every self respecting linux, mac os X or *nix user should have a solid handle on managing jobs in unix. The following will explain how to run tasks in the background, bring tasks to the foreground, background already running tasks and keeping a task running while logged out. Run...
du is the *nix command for disk usage. It tells you how much space everything in the given directory is taking up. GNU du introduced a handy option -h making it human readable, or showing sizes using K, M, G rather than bytes. Unfortunately this makes it not sortable numericall...
Amazon has done it again bringing another computing service to the masses. This time it’s the Content Delivery Network or CDN. Cloudfront is a direct competitor to other popular CDNs such as Akamai. While Akamai requires a fairly substantial amount of traffic to become a cust...
Today I was visiting a friends office and like many offices in NYC they have a shared bathroom in the hall for the entire floor. In this building it had five buttons on the door that when pressed in the correct order unlocked the door. A simple password. In our office we have a s...
Someone asked me a question today “Why would anyone choose SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) instead of REST (Representational State Transfer)?” My response: “The general rule of thumb I’ve always heard is ‘Unless you have a definitive reason to use SOAP use REST’�...