Planet Chris

“An ecosystem engineer is any organism that creates, significantly modifies, maintains or destroys a habitat”— WikipediaWhen you are working on platforms, you have the needs of the producers, consumers, and the market itself. As the market, or platform owner, your job is to make sure that the ecosystem as a whole is healthy.One key is to not get too greedy at the platform layer, as Bill Gates put it:“A platform is when the economic value of everybody th...

Phabricator is an incredibly well-coded PHP application but lacks a bit on the documentation side.  Then again, what open source project isn’t?  Over the past months I’ve been slowly integrating Phabricator, a newish review tool, with Bugzilla, a much older tool.  The most recent step saw me needing to add a custom field (DifferentialCommitMessageCustomField class extension) to revisions: Creating the DifferentialCommitMessageCustomField extension was fairly simp...

[MVC is] a particular way to break up the responsibilities of parts of a graphical user interface application. One of the prototypical examples is a CAD application: models are the objects being drawn, in the abstract: models of mechanical parts, architectural elevations, whatever the subject of the particular application and use is. The “Views” are windows, rendering a particular view of that object. There might be several views of a three-dimensional part from different angles ...

    You might have noticed it already: in the past few weeks you might have missed Anselm's Web Development Reading List issues here on SmashingMag. No worries, from now on, we’ll switch to collecting the most important news of each month in one handy, monthly summary for you. If you'd like to continue reading Anselm's weekly reading list (and we encourage you to!), you can still do so via email, on wdrl.info or via RSS. &...

“But, as in-flight wi-fi speeds and entertainment options keep getting better and better, the temptation to be distracted on planes becomes greater and greater. Just like on the ground, it now takes an act of will to be bored enough on a plane to actually enter that good headspace where you can make something. For now, I stick to my rules: turn off the seat-back TV and never pay for wi-fi.” I'm with Kleon on this one, I love being disconnected when traveling via plane and using ...

“The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.” We're in the midst of eclipse fever, living just north of totality. And I'll be up very early to se...

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This is a guest post by Kaixi Ruan. Backpack is a module system for Haskell, released recently in GHC 8.2.1. As this is a new feature, I wanted to know how people use it. So I searched Twitter every day, and the other day I saw this tweet: Are there other examples than String/Bytestring/Text? So far I haven’t seen any; it seems like backpack is just for glorified string holes. There were a number of good responses, but I want to give another use case from deep learning. In deep le...