Two years ago, I wrote a blog post that got some notice, which surprised me. It was a piece about going back to Emacs as my primary content creation tool, first as a CEO, and now as a CTO. A brief recap is that I spent most of my career as a programmer and a software architect, and preferred Emacs as my code editor for much of that time. Reconsidering Emacs was an experiment that I was excited about, but wasn't sure how it would work out. On the Internet, the post was met with roughly equal parts disdain and appreciation, but tens of thousands of people read it, so it seems that I touched on something interesting. Some of the more challenging and funny posts on Reddit and HackerNews predicted that I'd have hands shaped like claws or that I'd have lost my eyesight because I use white...
Slack is amazing. We, here at Fugue, are an engineering-centric organization distributed across three offices with several developers located in one-off locations around the world. Having a real-time, easily accessible hub for communication has helped us stay gelled as a community. It’s a technical resource, a sounding board, and a water cooler all in one. But Slack is not all unicorns and rainbows. Like many other organizations, we’ve discovered that replacing email (for the most part) with Slack has brought some challenges. As the company grew, the volume of discourse on Slack became unwieldy. Channels propagated and we were faced with Slack bloat. The problem was not just one of noise, it was one of uncertainty as well. What Kind of Uncertainty? You see, important conversations...
We were feeling a little wistful, so we asked our team: What was your favorite technology you received as a holiday gift when you were a kid? Here are their answers, in alphabetical order: Andrew "When I was in third grade, my mother brought home a copy of Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash. I was totally dazzled with how easily I could create animations, and from then on, I made all of my school PowerPoint assignments in Flash. I also used to post my animations on my friends' Myspaces, back when that was still cool. Additionally, my experience learning ActionScript paved the way for me to be the JavaScript developer I am today." Becki "Cosmic Osmo, a surreal point-and-click children's game from 1989, is not as well-known as Cyan's later games (hello, Myst!). But it was a gift I'll...
For this Thanksgiving, we asked our team one simple question... What software are you most thankful for? Here are their answers, in alphabetical order so we don't play favorites in the ongoing Emacs vs. Vim battle: Alex "I'm thankful for netcat. It's the Swiss Army knife of networking. It's never something that I think to install or use ahead of time, but when you need it, it's great to have." Andrew "npm makes setting up your node environment a cinch on any machine. It outputs exactly the correct amount of logs to make you feel like you're doing something complex and impressive without looking absurd." Becki "Spotify's Discover Weekly feature is so accurate to my bizarre taste in music that it's uncanny. I'm sure there's actually a team of teeny-tiny DJs inside my computer,...
Years—no, decades—ago, I lived in Emacs. I wrote code and documents, managed email and calendar, and shelled all in the editor/OS. I was quite happy. Years went by and I moved to newer, shinier things. As a result, I forgot how to do tasks as basic as efficiently navigating files without a mouse. About three months ago, noticing just how much of my time was spent switching between applications and computers, I decided to give Emacs another try. It was a good decision for several reasons that will be covered in this post. Covered too are .emacs and Dropbox tips so that you can set up a good, movable environment. For those who haven't used Emacs, it's something you'll likely hate, but may love. It's sort of a Rube Goldberg machine the size of a house that, at first glance, performs all...
We knew this day would come and we :heart: it. Amazon now supports Python in Lambda. When we're not building Fugue, frequenting our favorite place for burgers and wings (Rex's Downtown Grill FTW!), or finalizing our plans to colonize Mars, we write Slack bots. We have a few Slack bots sitting on EC2 instances managed by Fugue but nothing running in Lambda... yet. Our goal for this project: User types a keyword into Slack Slack POSTs to a URL hosted on AWS API Gateway, backed by Lambda Votebot posts voting ballot to Slack, ready for votes via reaction emoji User closes the ballot and bot tallies then posts the results. In short, this: (More options were available, but not shown in this screenshot.) Then, once we've battled over which pizza is best, we close voting...
Our product, now in beta release, is called Fugue. It's a distinctive word. And, unless you're a musician, it's probably not a part of your standard vocabulary. This video blog is solely about that word—fugue—and its primary meaning in music. Metaphors are some of the most powerful tools we have in language for illustrating what's in our minds: how an innovation might work, what patterns in art and nature might be useful in solving a particular problem, which traditional parameters might we break through to, well, have a breakthrough. We take metaphors seriously as brainstorming points and as a place to start philosophically. At 10,000 feet, the fugue, as a form in music, meshes with a fundamental aspect of the computing architecture we're creating. For more information, check out CEO...
We should have some ways of coupling programs like garden hose - screw in another segment when it becomes necessary to massage data in another way. Doug McIlroy, Bell Labs – October 11, 1964 At Luminal, we're unabashed fans of Unix and the Unix Philosophy. Last year, we marked the 49th anniversary of the Unix pipe (|) and we'd be remiss not to mark this year's golden date. You can revisit last year's #Pipeday post to learn more about why the | set the course for a standard software interface, as well as the accompanying modularity in computing. For the 50th anniversary, we thought it would be fun to turn it over to members of our growing team to find out what the | means to them. Pipes mean simplicity and composability for me. Simple functions tend to be easy to reason about,...
March 8 was International Women's Day. Some celebrated. Some scoffed. Some lives are so tough that calendars mean little. In the U.S., a Presidential Proclamation highlights the entire month of March; it's an eloquent document with compelling reminders of sacrifices made, achievements earned, brutalities endured, present and past, by women. The genderless, luminous being attached to my beautifully gendered identity and sexed body laments the necessity of these kinds of declarations. But, I would use any tool, including "March," to spell out history and reality in the public forum, in a persistent attempt to stop vicious patterns from repeating themselves. I remain certain that an honorable alien trying to understand humanity, Googling rape statistics alone (much less employment...
Startups don't care about security. We hear this a lot. It may be a descendant of "developers don't care about security… that's InfoSec's concern," a situation where at least someone in the organization was paying attention to security. In the developer-dominated world of tech startups, such a statement would be nonsensical. If a startup has dedicated InfoSec staff, they're probably not a startup anymore. To be fair, early-stage startups have a lot on their plate: fundraising, product development, acquiring customers. Speed is of the essence for startups and they need to avoid distractions that can slow them down. Worrying about security too early can feel a lot like building at scale when you only have five customers. In most cases, a focus on security doesn't contribute to the...
.png?width=36&height=36&name=linkedin%20(1).png){kind=small}
.png?width=36&height=36&name=twitter%20(1).png){kind=small}
