Posts and projects tagged with programming

  • Conversion Lift (work)

    In February, 2017 I took over the Conversion Lift team in addition to managing the Search Lift team. Conversion lift uses advertiser defined conversions along with A/B tests to determine the effectiveness of an ad campaign. When the team moved to LA it was a single person, the te ...

  • Search Lift (work)

    I started at Google in the Search Lift group. Search lift uses search activity to determine organically if advertisements are working. In November 2016 I took over as Engineering Manager for the team and managed it through a number of transitions and onboarding of new members. Un ...

  • Open Source - Logging & Config Update

    I mentioned earlier a pair of packages I released to the Go community while at Fog Creek. Now that I am no longer with the company, we agreed to redirect folks to my personal fork of the two libraries so that I can maintain them. You can now access the config library at github.co ...

  • Linked List Fun

    Talking to some folks the other day a couple of fun problems came up: How do you find cycles in a linked list? How do you reverse a linked list? Both of these algorithms can be implemented with very little extra memory, and I thought it would be fun to build them in Go. The ful ...

  • Fog Creek Open Source - Logging & Config

    Today I opened sourced, via Fog Creek, two libraries I have been working on. The first is a simple INI config file reader. While the package is small, it has 100% code coverage with tests, something I am pretty proud of. You can get this package on github.com/fogcreek/mini. The s ...

  • HashTables for Fun

    My buddy and co-worker Blake Caldwell posted a fun little note on Hashtables today. It got me thinking about the simple hash table implementation I have been using for cough cough years. So I thought I would put it up on github and write a bit about it. First, let me introduce ...

  • Tagged Logging

    There are a lot of logging libraries out there. A LOT. So why did I want to write a new one for a project we are doing at Fog Creek? The answer is tags. Logging libraries deal with two fundamental areas, what to log and where to log it. Where you log things is a question usually ...

  • Strangeloop

    Had a great time at Strangeloop last week, culminating in my talk which is now on YouTube. If you haven't been to strangeloop, and you are a software developer, I highly recommend it. The conference was really interesting, the people were great and the opening party at the City M ...

  • Go Interfaces and Pointers

    The Go programming language has an interesting take on pointers. While pointers exist, they are often hidden or dereferenced automatically. This behavior can be confusing around interfaces. Go doesn't use pointers to interfaces. So when you are working with something that is an i ...

  • Polymer, Hello World, NEXTSTEP Style

    I am at Google I/O this week. Since I am mostly doing web development right now, I was most interested in their announcements around polymer and web components. Polymer looks like a really cool library on top of a really cool technology, and the talks I have seen have prompted me ...

  • Is HTML for Pages or Apps?

    As I was learning about Polymer today at Google I/O, one of the speakers said something that sounded funny to me. I realized it is because I am old. No really, it is because I am old. I remember when the web "came into being". At least publicly. Back then, we thought of the web a ...

  • Strangeloop

    I will be speaking at StangeLoop this September. Check out the website for up to the minute details. My talk is titled The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing based on Peter Deutsch and James Gosling's earlier discussion of these fallacies. Abstract The wild growth of the w ...

  • SAS

    We were thinking about our road map for Kiln today and I got to thinking about the underlying principles, or themes, I want to guide our planning. Coincidentally, when I got off work and was poking around the web I ran across this post on principles and it motivated me to write u ...

  • Monte Carlo

    Chapter 4 of the The New Turing Omnibus is about the Monte Carlo method. I spent a fair bit of time learning about Monte Carlo methods for my PhD and have had to explain it to a few people as a result. When I read this chapter, I thought back to my favorite example, and thought I ...

  • The Turing Omnibus

    I started reading The New Turing Omnibus. I am not sure what blog post pointed me at the book, but I read that it is a great tour of computer science, which sounded interesting so I thought I would jump right in. The first chapter is on Algorithms, which made me think of the firs ...