Mike West
is a web developer working for Yahoo! in Munich, where he builds websites that (on good days) inform and delight. He writes occasionally, codes, and takes pictures.
Recent Writing
-
Some Thoughts Regarding Caja
Yesterday, Yahoo! made some announcements regarding The Future™ of many of their high profile properties. Specifically, they’re (slowly) opening up, enabling third-party developers to build applications that can be seen on and interact with your My Yahoo! page, or your mailbox. I think this is a great step, and one I wish they'd made before they laid me off.
-
My job’s value
Recently, I wrote a short article on the effect a team’s sense of ownership in it’s projects can have on the finished product. The surprising twist in my professional life last week has led me back onto the same train of thought, but I'm coming to it from a slightly different angle.
-
Has Mike been laid off? Yes. Yes he has.
Yahoo! decided to stop doing development work in it’s German offices, which leaves me in a bit of a bind. I'm suddenly incredibly motivated to look for new work. If you've got leads for me, please drop an email (mike@mikewest.org)
-
I ♥ GitHub
Over the last two or three weeks, a substantial subset of my friends and colleagues have started using GitHub to host some of their personal projects. I'm really enjoying this influx, and it’s inspiring in a way I didn’t really expect. GitHub has done nothing less than to make my friend’s coding activity visible to me, and mine visible to them. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s simply transformative; If this is how “normal” people feel about Facebook, then I can start to understand how it’s captured so much mindshare.
-
An Admonition Regarding Details
Details are everything, but worrying about details at the expense of progress puts the cart before the horse, misses the forest for the trees, makes perfect the enemy of the good, and can be described by many other metaphors with similar meaning.
-
The Inspiration of Ownership
On the bus home from work, I was listening to this week’s On the Media. In particular, I was struck by a great interview with the man who designed the field-organizer and volunteer training programs for Barack Obama’s campaign: Marshall Ganz. If you’re at all interested in the political angle, I'd suggest you listen. If you’re at all interested in how I'm planning to apply this seemingly unrelated topic to the technical field of web development (et al), keep reading.
-
Flickr’s API is driving me nuts
I'm trying to do something with the Flickr API that I consider to be relatively trivial. I have the impression that the API is fighting me every step of the way. Why, oh why, can’t the wonderful people who designed Del.icio.us’s new API hop over to Flickr and slap together something that makes sense from the perspective of the end user?
-
Generating Etags for static content using Nginx
Nginx is a brilliant little HTTP server that I'm using on this website to quickly serve static content. It bothers me a (very) little that it doesn’t correctly generate Etag headers for static content, however. I'm attempting to remedy that oversight by releasing an Nginx module:
nginx-static-etags. -
The Overton Window at Work
The ‘Overton window’ is a bit of political jargon that describes how politicians influence the perceptions and debates that go on among the voting public. In this thinly veiled (but mercifully short) rant, I argue that it’s equally applicable to my workplace.
-
Smoothly Migrating to a New Server
Hopefully, you didn’t notice a thing yesterday when I moved the site off my shared accelerator at Joyent, and onto a custom built slice at Slicehost. That was very much the goal. Briefly, I’ll go through the steps I took to make the transition as smooth as possible both before the launch and directly afterwards.
Links from del.icio.us
-
Rands In Repose: ‘A Signature Cadence’
For whatever reason, I've not been particularly enthused about Rands' recent articles. In fact, this is the first article he’s written in a little while that I've actually fallen into and really enjoyed reading. He’s making the simple point that authenticity in user interface design is desirable, and does so with gusto, pulling out some of my favourite examples of clever little bits of UI that involve me more deeply with a site/community. Flickr’s erstwhile “loves you” logo, for example (I'm somehow not surprised that Flickr doesn’t love me anymore…).
-
HTTP Client – Mac Developer Tool for HTTP Debugging
HTTPClient looks like an absolutely brilliant OS X tool for doing much of the HTTP debugging work that I'm used to doing with
curl -I. It has a very simple interface to customize a request, providing simple mechanisms for things like adding headers to the request which can get a little annoying to do on the command line. There’s a nice introductory screencast on Viddler that’s worth taking a look at to get a feel for what’s possible. Give it a look… -
David Goodger: ‘Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python’
I'm starting (slowly) to teach myself Python, as its a pretty wide gap in my skillset. Brad’s been quite helpful thus far, giving me good pointers to various helpful resources, and this PyCon ‘07 presentation is no exception. It summarizes PEP 8’s recommendations on Python style, and then dives into Python idioms that I should work on internalizing in order to make my written Python more Python-like. Looks like a good read, I’ll be sifting through it over the weekend.
-
David Beazley: ‘Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers’
I've started to play around with Python on the side as a sanity-protection measure, and I'm enjoying it. I ran into
yieldlast night while sifting through some code I'm trying to port, and spent the next hour or so reading through relatively bad Generator tutorials. Steve pinged me this presentation an hour or so ago, and it’s helped quite a bit. The complexity explodes somewhere in the middle, but it’s generally a great introduction to the power of generators, and a good explanation of what, exactly, they can do for me. I'm saving it off here so I can come back to those complex bits at the end once I know enough Python to muddle my way through them. :) -
Ryan Tomayko: ‘Things Caches Do’
I somehow find myself wanting to reblog basically everything that Ryan writes. This article is no exception. With clever diagrams and clear prose, he explains both the need for, and workings of a gateway cache. He doesn’t go into a ton of detail, but he hits all the important highlights, and clearly points to places to go for more info. A great, and worthwhile, read
Photosets from flickr
Twits from Twitter
-
With the help of Ikea, I'm imagining ways of rearranging all the random electronic crap behind/in my desk that's noisy and blinky and etc.
-
Klaus's CSS Reviewr ( http://www.klauskomenda.com/tools/cssreviewr/) is awesome! (And has ruined my motivation for CSS Lintr. *sigh*)
-
Why is it so dark? And so cold? Stupid winter.
-
Still scanning. I can almost see desk under all that paper! *sigh* I should do this more than once every 6 months...
-
@Carlo: Yes, please. A new one. Aluminum unibody goodness. Just the base RAM, please: I'll upgrade it myself later.