Lost Change

Netta Marshall has captured one of the most unique photos of San...

Thu, 17 May 2012 20:56:00 -0700

Netta Marshall has captured one of the most unique photos of San Francisco’s Ferry Building I’ve ever seen.

"If you’re in the Valley for any amount of time, you’ll have missed opportunities. …..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:11:08 -0700

“If you’re in the Valley for any amount of time, you’ll have missed opportunities. … Opportunities were rarely as close as they might seem in hindsight. There are a million ways my life could have turned out worse, too. And money doesn’t make that much of a difference. A friend and I* made games on the Facebook platform in its early years. There were times we made five figures in a single day. I didn’t do much with it - I bought a Mac and had one $17 martini at the Wynn. But I was high on the validation, and it did little but make me more aloof. The money went back into our company. Most of it’s gone. I’m kind of glad it is. The morning of the acquisition, I pulled out my offer letter and smiled. I was lucky to be that close in the first place. You can’t second-guess your decisions. You gather information, you think hard, you pick what feels right, then you walk into the future with serenity.”

- Robert Cezar Matei, who declined an offer to work at Instagram

"Last summer there was one listing in a really hip, desirable part of the Mission, where I actually..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:41:45 -0700

“Last summer there was one listing in a really hip, desirable part of the Mission, where I actually had a fistfight break out in the line of people to get into the open house. I needed a bouncer. There were 80 people there; it was really nuts.”

- Sheri Castilyn, a leasing agent with Rentals in SF, on San Francisco’s absurd housing market right now

"But one day, you’ll get out of school and go somewhere besides the small town you’re in..."

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:33:59 -0700

“But one day, you’ll get out of school and go somewhere besides the small town you’re in and you’re going to discover that there are groups of people just like you — not that they do what you do or act how you act, but that they refused to change who they are to fit in, and that makes them just like you. And when you find them, you’re finally going to feel at home.”

- Joe Peacock

This is what it has felt like to move to San Francisco.

Introducing Ospriet

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:53:00 -0700

About a month ago, I launched http://designfromthegut.com for our SXSW session to allow audience members to submit and vote on questions/comments for our panel through Twitter. The site was powered by an app I wrote with Dustin Senos called Osprey, which I wrote a bit more about here. I was hoping to open source it but didn’t have time to before SXSW even though others started asking to use it. Then Mashable wrote about it, and I received several more requests over Twitter and email to release it.

So yesterday, we did. Our open source team at Twitter loved the application as an example of what’s possible with our API and were interested in releasing it under Twitter. Having no qualms with this, Dustin and I spent the last few weeks cleaning up a lot of the code, abstracting all of the custom fields to a single set of configuration files, and writing a lot of documentation. We renamed it Ospriet, the Anglo-French term for Osprey and published it to GitHub under the permissive Apache License 2.0 so others can use it in an open-source or commercial setting. The app still needs work but we’re very excited to get this out the door. Personally, it’s the first project I’ve open-sourced, and both Dustin and I are proud (and in a bit of disbelief) to be able to contribute it to the open source community on behalf of Twitter.

Go rummage through the code and docs, and let us know what you think!

Tonight.

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:05:38 -0700

Tonight.

tax season

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:24:00 -0700

karina: hey
couch: hey
karina: johan is doing his taxes drunk
karina: that is all
karina: he's moved on to swedish taxes wsdfsaghjklhaq ewiuopB
karina: "0-=
karina:
karina: that was not me

“You could not be dumber, get off of Tumblr” Eat It Don’t...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:58:37 -0700

“You could not be dumber, get off of Tumblr”

Eat It Don’t Tweet It

"I think weird things start happening when the nerds are also the homecoming kings."

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:40:19 -0700

“I think weird things start happening when the nerds are also the homecoming kings.”

- Jason Goldman

"I think if everyone tweeted less the overall quality would improve, so maybe I’m trying to..."

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:03:02 -0700

“I think if everyone tweeted less the overall quality would improve, so maybe I’m trying to compensate for the rest of the universe. Then again my last three tweets were poop related.”

- Loren Brichter

Osprey

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:30:00 -0800

[Disclosure: I work for Twitter as a software engineer.]

In 2006 and 2007, I really wanted to go to SXSW but was still in college so it wasn’t very feasible. You’ll recall that 2007 was the year that Twitter exploded at SXSW and the service has grown incredibly since. Between then and now, I’ve watched many friends and colleagues attend — and heard of their tales through 140 characters. The panels that were excellent, the ones that bombed, the parties that were unbelievable, the conversations that were unbeatable, etc. Experiencing the event second-hand became a common frustration of Twitter users—myself included—especially as hashtags and retweets gathered momentum as a way to post live updates, and share others’ thoughts. Caterina Fake coined the term FOMO — the fear of missing out — due to events like this.

This will be my first year at SXSW — and my first time speaking at it. As our panel has prepared for the event, we wanted a way for the community to interact and contribute to our discussion. On a call, we had the idea to create a way for people to submit thoughts and questions to us during the panel in real-time, like Google Moderator, but built on Twitter so anyone could participate. My gut reaction here made my stomach churn a little — if we used the existing mechanisms of Twitter, retweets and hashtags would be the customary signals available for us to monitor through the API. I didn’t want to use those though, and impose our discussion onto those not at the event — often times, the internet needs to be quieter.

There are other mechanisms available through Twitter we could use, but we’d have to build something on top of the service to fully utilize them. My two favorite signal mechanisms are replies and favorites, because they are inherently quiet. Replies are scoped to only those who follow both accounts, and favorites are nearly silent — but we can monitor both through the API, with a little work. This is how Osprey was born.

Implemented for our panel at http://designfromthegut.com, Osprey is an application built on top of Twitter that allows people to submit questions via @-replies, and vote up submissions they like via favorites. We’re opening it up in advance of the panel so those interested in the topic can submit comments, questions, or thoughts they’d like to see answered during the panel. We’ll start it fresh again on Friday before the session for real-time questions.

The flow looks like this: you have a question or comment so you post a new tweet to our panel’s account, @dftg and the application listens for these @-replies via the User Streams API. When a reply to this account comes through the stream, the application parses the text of the tweet to remove ‘@dftg’ at the beginning, and reposts it as a new tweet on behalf of @dftg, with attribution. If I posted:

@dftg What are your thoughts on Apple’s approach to design?

then the application would post a new tweet that looks like:

From @couch: What are your thoughts on Apple’s approach to design?

The application behaves this way for a few reasons, foremost for counting favorites. Twitter does not currently offer a public favorites count API, so I can’t query how many times a tweet has been favorited. The only way to get this count currently is to monitor favorite events that come through on a User Stream. Additionally, favorite events are only pushed for tweets originating from the account established with the User Stream. This means I could not have the application simply retweet the user’s tweet natively, it must to be reposted to the account.

While seemingly more complex, there are several niceties about this setup. When reposting the tweet, I pass the original tweet’s ID along so the new tweet is effectively formed as a reply, binding the two entities through metadata. Additionally, as a participant, one can browse through @dftg’s timeline to see all of the questions submitted, the original author (and their original post), and then easily favorite any of them in a client of their choosing. If others want to follow along outside of the event, they can opt-in by following @dftg.

As users mark tweets they like as favorites, Osprey stores in a database the tweets that have been favorited in the original data structure provided through the API, but additionally adds a user array that stores some account data so the application can keep track of who and how many favorited the tweet. If a user removes one of the tweets from their favorites, they’re also removed from the user array. After enough users browse through the submissions, the favorite counts will populate and the application’s interface will bubble up the top audience picks, where our moderator can make a choice about which to direct to the panel. The application additionally recognizes favorite events from our moderator’s account as a sort of “moderator’s pick” to elevate that choice in the interface as well.

When tackling how to build this application, I thought this would be a good opportunity to experiment with node.js and MongoDB as I hadn’t really used either. The application doesn’t have high-stakes — if problems arise during the panel or time to develop wasn’t on my side, there is always a microphone. But we’re in a decently-sized venue at the conference and we though it could be a bit of fun to have a real-time discussion.

So the nitty-gritty: on the backend, the application uses node.js with Matador for some clean MVC architecture and mongoose to interact with MongoDB to store the favorited tweets. ntwitter is used as a simple abstraction of the Twitter API for node. To enable near real-time updates of new submissions and favorites in the interface, the application also employs WebSockets via socket.io.

On the front end, the application uses Bootstrap for the scaffolding and basic responsive layouts, underscore.js for data manipulation, twitter-text to process the text in tweets, hogan.js for template rendering, moment.js for formatting and localizing timestamp strings, and Twitter’s Web Intents for performing actions on Twitter. There’s even a little bit of intelligence for reloading content—should WebSockets fail if the site’s in the background—by way of the new Page Visiblity API proposed by the W3C.

When it came time to deploy, I considered three different node hosting providers: Joyent’s no.de, heroku’s node service, and nodejitsu. I ended up using nodejitsu, who I’ve found to be really fantastic. Due to the use of these open-source libraries and frameworks, many of which are rather new, the application had a considerable number of requirements for its hosting provider: support for node 0.6.0 or greater (for Matador), WebSocket support, and custom domain mapping. Joyent’s no.de doesn’t support custom domains so they were out of the running. Heroku looked promising, and after successfully deploying the application with a custom buidpack to enable node 0.6.0 instead of their Cedar stack’s 0.4.7 default, all looked okay — until I realized they don’t support native WebSockets. I then chose nodejitsu: they supported all of the application’s requirements, include database creation through MongoHQ, and were very responsive and helpful on their IRC channel.

I’m excited to see the app in action, but I was also walking through a dark tunnel with only a flashlight when building it so pardon if it hiccups or if you see some of its wiring hanging around. That’s always the conundrum of development though: if you’re not embarrassed by your first version, you’ve launched too late.

Notes:

Special thanks to Dustin Senos for his help with Matador, and Jacob Thornton and Dave Gamache for assistance with some pesky CSS.
Do I plan to open-source this? ~~Maybe. The app still needs separation of configuration options and some general clean-up. If you’d be interested in seeing it released, let me know!~~ It’s available now on GitHub! I’ve also posted an update on the release. Go forth and hack!

to do, wendy macnaughton

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 11:28:49 -0800

to do, wendy macnaughton

"He’s telling you the story of, “If you bust your ass and don’t sleep, you’ll..."

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:23:00 -0800

“He’s telling you the story of, “If you bust your ass and don’t sleep, you’ll get rich” because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! … I recommend that you do what you love because you love doing it. If that means long hours, fantastic. If that means leaving the office by 6pm every day for your underwater basket-weaving class, also fantastic.”

- Jamie Zawinski

This is what we’re building.

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:01:06 -0700

This is what we’re building.

"China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable..."

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 08:00:05 -0700

“China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences.”

- Walter Isaacson

New York Mag’s depiction of where I work in their...

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:39:00 -0700

New York Mag’s depiction of where I work in their salacious piece out today.

lulinternet does Drive.

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:12:37 -0700

lulinternet does Drive.

"Refashioning oneself, and embarking on changes that sometimes require you to cut loose parts of your..."

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:14:31 -0700

“Refashioning oneself, and embarking on changes that sometimes require you to cut loose parts of your past (either temporarily or permanently), is a form of growth. And I feel like so many of the innovations involving technology and persona being put forth right now are being fashioned by people with myopic “everything is great right now and will be that way forever” outlooks, and that they don’t really have any sense of what life beyond their VC-funded Silicon Valley privileged existences might be like.”

- Maura Johnston

Went sailing with co-workers yesterday afternoon. Played...

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:00:05 -0700

Went sailing with co-workers yesterday afternoon. Played helmsman as we went under the Golden Gate Bridge during Golden Hour.

Morley Safer of 60 Minutes reports on a film of San...

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 20:03:00 -0700

Morley Safer of 60 Minutes reports on a film of San Francisco’s Market St., shot in April 1906, days before the infamous earthquake and subsequent fire that destroyed a large portion of what was then San Francisco. The film, shipped by train to New York the night before the earthquake, offers one of the few glimpses on celluloid of the city at that time.

You can download the full, original film from the Internet Archive.