Foo Hack

A tech blog? How early 2000’s of you…

Isaac — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:45:39 +0000

It occurs to me that I’ve not updated this blog at all this year. Don’t worry, this isn’t some kind of apology post, it’s just that it occurs to me that the conversation has become increasingly less about large essay-like missives to the tech world at large, and more about targeted communication to subject-matter groups.

So, to recap, I’ve been maintaining a package manager for node.js, and writing JavaScript at a company, and I’m going to be writing JavaScript at another company in a month.

The NodeJS community continues to impress and delight. This is a fun group doing fun things with a fun platform.

Transition

Isaac — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:46 +0000

My last day at Yahoo will be 2010-01-22.

Yahoo has been a mostly great company to work for, and YUI is by far the best team that I’ve worked on here. It’s a shame that I didn’t join YUI sooner; I still feel like I just got here. The quality of this team made the decision very difficult, and that says a lot about the job that Eric Miraglia and Thomas Sha have done building it.

If you ever get a chance to work at Yahoo, take it.

I feel so very fortunate to have met so many of Silicon Valley’s bright minds in the last 4 years, and to have learned so much about the web, about business, about people, and about the science and art of software development. I’ve been a student, a teacher, an expert, an amateur, a mentor, and a mentee.

Thank you all so much for what you’ve given me.

Simple Node Server

Isaac — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:09:00 +0000

Here is an example of a very simple lighttpd/nginx-style web server written in NodeJS.

I’ve called it simple-node-server or “sns” for short, and you can fork it on my github account.

There are a lot of folks building SSJS clones of Django and WSGI and Rack the like. However, Python and Ruby have blocking IO, and even while they have the capacity for asynchronous behavior, it’s not the default.

I believe that, in order to get a really good JavaScript application framework, and cultivate new development in this green field, we must start with what we have, and iterate until it is closer to the ideal. I am skeptical that we’ll be able to get there by cloning the productions of synchronicity, no matter how sophisticated they may be.

It is possible today to build a web server in a day, in a flexible dynamic language, which can serve an alarming number of requests per second, by embracing asynchronous architecture.

Let’s play: simple-node-server

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Isaac — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:07:36 +0000

Lot going on this summer. My roommate moved back to CT, meaning that I had to buy a car and get a new apartment. I moved from the YAP team to the YUI team. Also, I’ve been spending more and more of my free time playing around with server-side Javascript, specifically Narwhal and Jack. My github account has been pretty busy.

I won’t say that I’m retiring this blog, exactly, but the posting frequency may be dropping considerably. Instead of 1-2 posts every month or two, expect more like 1-2 posts a year, if that.

In the meantime, I’ve got all sorts of other stuff going on at my tumblr blog, so you can follow me there.