Archives

2025

January

• Living Parklife with Rails, coming from Jekyll
• How I'm thinking about AI (LLMs)

2024

December

• Including Rails View Helpers is a concern

November

• Keep your secrets.yml in Rails 7.2+

October

• A mostly technical reflection on Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants

September

• Spectator Sport, a brief introduction to an upcoming Rails plugin
• Seeing like a Rails and Ruby platform team
• The secret to perfectly calculate Rails database connection pool size
• The Novice Problem

July

• Notes from Carrierwave to Active Storage
• On the importance of Rails code reloading and autoloading
• Introducing GoodJob v4

June

• Rails Strict Locals, undefined `local_assigns`, and reserved keywords
• Recently, June, 2024

April

• A comment on Second Systems
• A Ruby Meetup about Rails autoloading and 3 Podcasts

March

• Rails Active Record: Will it bind?
• Low-effort prototyping

February

• Farewell Brompt

January

• Replacing Devise with Rails `has_secure_password` and friends
• Two stories about technical debt, I guess
• The answer is in your heap: debugging a big memory increase in Ruby on Rails
• Trigger GitHub Actions workflows with inputs from Apple Shortcuts
• Recently, January 3, 2023

2023

December

• Solid Queue first impressions: Nice!
• Recently

November

• The Rails Executor: increasingly everywhere

October

• Reflections on GoodJob for Solid Queue
• Writing Object Shape friendly code in Ruby

September

• In defense of consensus

August

• Appropriately using Ruby’s Thread.handle_interrupt
• Fake the algorithm til you make it
• How to isolate I18n configuration in a Rails Engine
• Recoding America

July

• Systems of utopia

June

• 19 sales & marketing strategies in 19 weeks

May

• Rebuilding Concurrent Ruby: ScheduledTask, Event, and TimerSet
• Whatever you do, don't autoload Rails `lib/`

April

• The Constant Rabbit
• The Dawn of Everything

March

• How GoodJob's mountable Rails Engine delivers Javascript importmaps and frontend assets
• Recently, March 12, 2023

February

• Service Object Objects in Ruby
• Slop and call
• Prevent CDN poisoning from Fat GET/HEAD Requests in Ruby on Rails
• Introducing GoodJob Bulk and Batch

January

• Framing open source contributions at work
• How GoodJob's Cron does distributed locks
• Conflict, at work
• 2022 in review

2022

November

• Liberatory accountability
• Environment, at work
• Worknotes: November 13, 2022
• Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity

October

• Productive Struggle
• Worknotes - October 23, 2022
• Impenetrable legal language

September

• Persian Tahchin-inspired crispy chicken rice
• Weeknotes: September 19, 2022
• Reflections on Brompt, 2022
• Object Thinking

August

• Weeknotes: Aug 29, 2022
• Still only myself

July

• Hate and sarcasm
• Four dumb-cringe tech interview stories
• "What the fuck are you talking about?": The story of NodeTiles
• We're all just people here, even platforms
• Worknotes: Week 9

June

• Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing
• Laws of Spacecraft and Software
• Hench

May

• Worknotes: Week 5
• Weeknotes: Week 0

April

• Recoding Gender
• Science in the Capital

March

• Working the problem
• Sense-making list-making
• Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
• Five years on food stamps
• Bullshit Jobs
• Over-rapported
• OOP the easy way

February

• Software models
• It asks you to be interactive
• Even if the answers are messy and provisional
• TIL: ActiveRecord transactions roll back on Ruby Thread abort

January

• Javascript is a management problem

2021

December

• I'm burning dude... where do we go from here?

November

• Types of Corruption
• Conflict in the matrix

October

• Behaving like the character in a story
• TIL: Detecting block returns in Ruby

September

• Home buyer letter

July

• GoodJob, what's new: Cron, concurrency controls, and a dashboard demo (v1.12.0)
• Paranoid and Reparative readings

May

• GoodJob Updates v1.5 - v1.9: Dashboard, daemonize, async_server, and graceful shutdowns
• Is SecureRandom.choose the wrong name for generating randomized strings with Ruby?
• Generic advice for managers

January

• GoodJob 1.4: JRuby compatibility and more

2020

November

• Maimonides' levels of charity
• If you can hook them for a day, you can hook them for two
• Dying on management mountain
• Triangular eating
• Better by our own standards
• The five ideals explained

October

• The furthest to go in efforts to reach their full humanity
• The sublime
• Centering Civic Tech
• GoodJob v1.3: Web dashboard and full documentation
• Performance facilitators not supervisors

September

• Respect our vendors

August

• GoodJob v1.2: Multithreaded queue isolation and LISTEN/NOTIFY
• GoodJob v1.1: async and improved documentation

July

• Introducing GoodJob 1.0, a new Postgres-based, multithreaded, ActiveJob backend for Ruby on Rails
• Retail politics
• Engineering Operations is not the same as Development

January

• Decade in Review 2010-2019

2019

December

• The water never goes away
• To care about AI

November

• Deterministic test data with Faker, FactoryBot, and RSpec
• Because it helps them to release software
• The Concrete Sumo - Ethics in Software Engineering Discussion Guide
• Public comments on Sunset housing

October

• Trust and safety
• Adults in the room

September

• Attention

July

• Truths about the interpretation of falsehood articles

June

• Wiggle your toes

May

• Team Number One
• Core promotion challenges

April

• Quantitative usability, assistive technology, and the right to privacy
• Weeknotes for April 7, 2019

February

• Weeknotes February 24, 2019
• Weeknotes February 17, 2019
• Weeknotes - February 10, 2018

January

• Having a creator's profile
• Just the fact there doesn't seem to be a reason doesn't mean there isn't a reason
• The work of product management

2018

December

• Advocacy, inquiry, and very large teams
• What are the rewards?

November

• Difficult workshops and vulnerability
• Market perils and political exclusion
• Asymmetry of happiness and misery

October

• Notes from Priceonomics Information Marketing Workshop

September

• Disfunctional workplaces

August

• Goal Evaluation Practices
• Lighthouse Labs retrospective note
• Best Practice Practices

July

• The concrete sumo

April

• There is often a crisis

March

• 2017 Professional Goals Reviewed
• Japanese processes
• If you replaced “accessibility” with “responsive design” in 2018, this is what you’d get

2017

December

• To test god
• Design Principles are insights made actionable
• Taking responsibility for safety on the line
• People do not need or await permission to move
• The Three Ways Explained

July

• Having and losing effective Crew Resource Management

May

• Smart smart cities

April

• High school app advisor

January

• Engineering Practice Ad nauseam

2016

December

• Speaking with and listening to authority
• We make the road by walking

November

• Hating is Lazy
• Clarity and Accuracy

October

• On secrets

May

• Idleness and disability

2015

December

• We are all resistant to change

2014

October

• Universal prefaces

February

• Rigorous complaint

2013

September

• testing
• Now exhale

July

• Meet Ravel!

June

• State of the Shirt, 2012

May

• Selling
• Automatic analysis
• That whereof we cannot speak we must consign to silence

2012

December

• A gentle & conceptual introduction to Node.js

September

• Reimagining Chicago's 311 activity with Super Mayor Emanuel

August

• Put Your Civics Where Your Houseplant Is

July

• Hard data on the status of Open311

April

• A Commonplace Book

March

• State of the Shirt, March 2012

February

• Methodological Belief

January

• Protest shirts
• 2011 in review

2011

November

• Nonprofit Naming
• Speedgeeking on Wordpress Filters
• Literacy is more than reading

October

• The point where creativity and invention occur
• The work itself isn’t inhumane
• Fundraising Tool Memo Boilerplate
• The prevailing worldview of the present
• That Californian Ideology
• Community mapping class interview & outcomes

September

• Project fecundity
• Meet AmeriCorps no more
• Crime and Data Leadership
• Ambiguous URL
• Shifting beliefs, remaking the pie
• Where rhetoric is substance

August

• 7 years in Boston

July

• Similar message, wider audience
• DonorsChoose Contest Update: Consolation Prize Edition
• A modest web-app proposal
• Competitive Collaboration or Collaborative Competition
• The event is a tyrant
• Planning is timeless

June

• Print & Share: not everyone is a social media ninja (nor need they be)
• Developing intent
• Irrefutable gerunds
• App contest submission boilerplate
• Data divides and umbrellafication
• Wisdom and discernment
• Data Leadership
• Minimal Mass
• Uncrime Mapping
• Data-driven, content-first design

May

• "Describe the basis for your approach to this project. How did you determine the need for this project now and who was included in its design?"
• Nailed that response
• Capturing well-being, not simply access and speed
• Failure on balance
• A reminder that it's still about power
• Philanthropy's progressive legacy
• Reductionist function and practice
• Apps off the approved vendor list
• Lovingly reimagined, progressively remade

April

• Belief-based design
• Shirt sales, scraped daily
• Social Media Community Architect and Manager
• Apparently I'm nonprofitly conservative
• That national interest thing

March

• ...it was sexist when I got here
• A form from my favorites
• Towards advocacy-based media
• Advocacy in print - Survival News for 2011
• How to decorate your office without really trying
• The 48 hour mobile web app: Drunken Stumble

January

• Notes from the City of Boston's Open311 / Citizens Connect API Developer Meeting
• Adding class to Wordpress linked images
• Authenticity and such
• The benefits of age
• Mediation Journal, Version 0
• Assessment of needs-assessment needs
• Adding hyperlinks to print publications

2010

December

• De nada, Una Pequeña Casa
• T Shirt
• Mediation journal pieces
• Boston Bike Crash Map in the News
• Blue Ribbon Commissions in Print
• Proposals to change the tax-deductibility of donations
• Public data vs. Self-reporting
• This is me not being cynical about nonprofit innovation
• Undermining nonprofit significance

November

• Accessible leisure through technology
• Boston Bike Crash Map
• A difference of a map
• Goofus & Gallant, MBA
• Metaphors and diversity
• Learning styles and chemistry

October

• Life before the chart
• Stop being a weenie and just go make something
• A deucedly outrag* wordlist
• Professional writing sample
• The mission of the symphony
• Fairly fool-proof whole-wheat popovers
• No wonder you weren't good at it
• When all you have is a hammer
• Don't confuse "online" with "Twitter"
• This image will save us
• Scientific disunity
• The Analog Divide
• Digital literacy dichotomies

September

• Mystics, poets and best practices
• Kitchen Consensus Conjecture
• "...be manically participatory..."
• This is not a website
• Commodity work
• Making language of meaning
• Nonprofit Social Media Literacy
• Find fresh perspectives at NonprofitMillennials.org

August

• Fondly remembered experiments in minimal webdesign
• P, NP and Panlexicon
• Social Media Strategy and the Dodo Bird Effect
• Art, I hardly knew ye
• Wealth Parade

July

• What does your computer symbolize?
• Zilch for a nonprofit
• The medium is the method
• The move towards empowerment
• Colin Rhinesmith

June

• Task identification and completion
• Typology versus taxonomy
• Fierce editing
• Management Theories and Interventions
• Straightforward Project Satisfaction and Fulfillment
• Typology of Social Giving Transactions
• Forces of Organizational Entry
• Zen and Postmodern Art
• iPhone apps allow giving, just not charity
• Get your own
• Goodbye Producers' Forum
• Stages of team development

May

• Write first, outline later
• Try it again
• A definition that is good enough
• JFK accuses media of sensationalism, triviality
• History is an art form rooted in scholarship

April

• Corporate social distractibility
• Ethical omissions
• I am now a Technology of Participation facilitator
• Principles of Organizational Development Practice
• Broken ladders
• The Economy: it's made of people
• Leaders and privileged voices
• Mendacity in order
• Do what I say
• Internships and the media
• Quotes on self

March

• Email Moderation Rules
• "If you don't know how to notice, you can't do anything well"
• A rhetoric for writing in the post-digital era
• The author function and the internet
• Two of charts
• Frequency of occurrence of letters in English
• Numerical Indifference

February

• Laying out latest layout
• Good enough data
• Models, feedback and crows
• Cleaving the visual experience
• Mount Vernon, Port Huron and Sharon Statements in Comparison
• Quality of life, mind and language
• Motivated design
• A temperance of words
• Criticism for everyone
• Washing of dishes requires great peace of mind
• Ethical flexibility for export

January

• Amperlamb
• Hippostrophe
• He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on concepts.
• Still Ferrari-less
• Insufficient funds
• Social media is women's work
• American Press Subsidies
• The poor, the dead, and God are easily forgotten
• Two tales of Island 94
• Notes of the first water
• Radical volunteerism, or not
• Criticism of Actor-Network Theory
• Modern and post-modern science
• Umberto Eco on Modernism

2009

December

• Critical Thinking contextualized
• Transactions vs. Relationships
• Academia on the experience of poverty
• Easier drawn than said
• Axemaker conclusions
• Gatekeeper Code
• Like Wikipedia, but before
• Social Assistance Cynicism
• Invoking the first amendment

November

• Three Story Intellect Model
• Going crazy over social impact
• Ace Advertising
• Gifts of Magnificence
• Poverty mythology
• Unions and the media
• The journalism landscape in a nutshell
• Ethics made easy
• Outside of my jurisdiction
• My nonprofit Facebook strategy and tactics
• Metaphor death

October

• Starvation begets starvation
• Charity, Mercy and Sin
• Quotidian insights
• Frames for Copyright
• The motion of gifts
• We participate, they profit
• Why framing matters
• Not another Rogue's nest
• Twenty-four dollars
• Kick in the baud
• An ample account
• Leverage your nonprofit status
• Chasing Best Practices
• God didn't do Best Practices
• It's complicated
• Obviously not to scale
• Social work is women's work, so we don't care
• Speak up for democracy
• Teaching through breakage
• Catastophizing and other thought distortions
• In the beginning, God separated Heaven and Earth
• Welcome Grassroots Users of Technology
• Perspectives on Building Power
• Millenial Nonprofity Exposition
• Janets Spiral Periodic Table
• But licensed in how many dimensions?
• Nonprofit Budgeting Scenario

September

• Intellectual activity
• My use of the comma
• Technology 2.0: Mapping Presentation
• Technology 2.0: Mapping
• My featured dead cockroach
• [REMOVED] Boston Subway in Vector Format (SVG)

August

• Anxiety Reading
• Adding HTML to your
• Drupal: Adding a geocoding failure message to Location Module
• Good advice to live by
• Religion and individualism
• From Self-Actualization to Neo-Liberalism
• Marketing in Wealth Bondage

July

• Different Strokes
• Media and Radical Technology
• Moving Day
• Slow Down
• Clarity of hindsight: law vs. policy
• Three Americas
• Nonprofit Discretionary Tests

June

• Judging reality and experience
• Attributes of Respected Chairs
• A quote for the rain
• Charting work success
• Political Rhetoric

May

• Business rhetoric

March

• The essence of Capacity Building
• Current Consumption of Currants
• Example of the (false) metaphor of the tube
• Lying in subtext and by omission
• 3 Fortunes
• Harnessing inequality
• Pratfalls to writing authentically
• Satyagraha versus Duragraha
• Cold-Start car advice
• Cell phones and "personal" computing
• Double Loop Learning
• Quotes on Thought and Process
• Excerpt: Sectors of the US Right---Active in the Year 2001
• Biscuit Recipe

February

• Meandering thoughts on creativity, change and consciousness
• Press Release Rhythm
• Thoughts on Nonprofit growth, management and culture
• 18-25: moving from Becoming to Being
• Existential Charters
• The Purpose of Copyright
• The (false) metaphor of the tube for communication
• Mission and Promise: there is a difference
• Online Fundraising: please do it right
• Self, Language and Consciousness
• The Ethics of Awareness
• Guest Post: Understanding and Negotiating Your Non-Profit Salary
• Tips for researching and applying to nonprofit jobs
• Notes on silence
• Know your organic PLU by number
• Two videos for February 1st

January

• Types of Facilitator Interventions
• American Commissar: my family archive project
• Obama Painting
• Archetypes of history
• Patterns of Meaning
• Using distinctions to create meaning
• 2008 in Review
• Weingarten Rights

2008

December

• Human Measurements
• From "Web 2.0" to "Produsage"
• The Nonprofit between Scylla and Charydbis
• How to write a cover letter for a job application

November

• Lessons from the 1960s
• Interview Questions
• Strengthening Organizations through Community Engagement
• Equally good alternatives to collaboration
• How to create cross-sector nonprofit value
• Being Wrong is Right, but not in the education system
• When "good" is better than "best"

October

• Birthday Wishlist
• Buyer's Remorse Hacking
• Community Organizer = Community Outreach Minister
• Small Government / Small Paper
• Blog Action Day: Poverty
• Graphical Organization of the Talmud
• Making ReCAPTCHA not suck
• Nonprofits and the Economy of Free
• Questions for external brand interviews
• PopCo Cake Recipe

September

• Nonprofits and Political Activities
• Search is not Serendipitous
• Exploring Poverty: Participation, Practice, Imagination and Exploration
• Why are nonprofits tax-exempt?
• Pod of Whales
• What is a nonprofit? A structural definition
• Get a Government Job

August

• Radio Ga Ga 2: The role of nonprofits in constructing a better world
• Failure of confidence
• How to make do with what you got
• Makes You Crazy
• How to write a grant the way I want to be taught grant writing
• Lessons for Nonprofitteers from Majora Carter
• Nonprofit Board Management, Governance and Advice
• Caring on the Internet
• Are you Ahw or Arr?
• Cleaving Running Reds from Jaybiking
• What to ask before building a website
• Drupal: theme override for Upload.module's attachments list
• Digital Media Forensics

July

• Individual Challenges for Nonprofit Leaders
• Poverty as the singular moral challenge
• Job qualification: Not a jerk
• Political News Coverage
• How to use a fridge crisper
• Vegan Baking Tips: Egg Replacement and Oil
• Tragic Food
• Facebook to Phone Trees: Nonprofit Technology for Everyone

June

• Fluoride, teeth and brushing advice
• Lumifi Search Widget
• 7 Nonprofit Challenges
• Line up in order of your SSN
• Other words for "Lie"
• Conference notes: managing nonprofit technology projects
• Contextonomy

May

• NTC08: The Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We're Forgetting) about Online Outreach
• JP Cafe Brownies
• Binaries and Teaching

April

• Boston Vegetable Planting Chart
• Enchilada Sauce
• Brompt is a blog reminder
• Cat, New
• Progressive Terminology for Discussing Poverty
• Nonprofit Job Misconceptions
• Transitivity Fallacy

March

• Free society
• A millenial idea
• Why I like Apple Computers
• Breakfast Cereals, oh my
• Writing my Congress Critter
• Capitalism and Morality (Thai Beer and Monks)
• Reject or Denounce

February

• Excel Escape Characters
• NY Times on Public Television
• Perspective
• ORS amounts for a Nalgene bottle

January

• To "decimate"
• 2007 in Review

2007

December

• lolart
• Medicalization
• Understanding Beliefs (and how to change them)
• Detective Nonsense
• Bees and Biology
• Remember Paul
• Hold the salt
• Reading List
• Design Analogies
• Destructive rhetoric
• Apple and Green Papaya
• Cribbed Apple Salsa
• King Corn
• Struck by Cain
• Consumption and deregulation
• Fat facts
• vis-a-vis viz. vis-a-vis, viz.
• Creating meaning through interaction
• Happy Birthday to me
• Volunteer logic

November

• Biology cliche
• Close to the Machine
• Knorking
• Cold Reading
• Creating Models
• Criticism of Civic Literacy
• Donations and Volunteering
• Chill Units
• Nightmares
• The John Hancock Building
• Understanding Academia and Legitimacy Exchange

October

• Alternatives to a Nonprofit Job
• San Diego is Burning
• Opportunities in Disguise
• Google Relevance
• Puddingstone
• Woody Allen Assignment
• Pancake Recipe

September

• Who is using Drupal?
• Latin Transit
• An important distinction
• Opinion on Nonprofits
• Politics of Fear
• Drupal WYSIWYG Editors
• Plagiarism
• Setting up Octave and Gnuplot on Apple Mac OSX
• Toe straighteners
• Fears of death
• Hemp milk
• Pasta dough recipe
• Tee
• Thesaurus computations
• Thesuarus computations

August

• Trustworthiness
• Verb to do
• Unintuitive: check
• More thoughts on an interesting thesaurus
• Two stories on a theme
• DESC Scripting and Conflict Resolution
• Geekout: Video on Maps for Cable Access TV
• Walkabout Trail, RI

July

• "Should I get a nonprofit job?"
• Planning Strategic Planning

June

• Small things of Spring

May

• Spring arrives

April

• New England Construction
• Introducing Panlexicon.com
• Nonprofit Communications 2.0
• Copyright and the Nineteenth Century
• MeetAmeriCorps still a success

March

• Arguments I've heard against Open Source
• Ways and Water
• Airport Vehicles
• But it's just a logo

February

• Self-photography
• The Future of Cable Access
• Valentines Day 2007

January

• Boston's Best Tacos

2006

December

• Happy Holidays 2006
• Love
• Happy Birthday Rebecca
• MeetAmeriCorps is "social networking"!

November

• Nonprofit Technology Sandwich
• The Drink
• Denim flashback

October

• Boston Obscura: A halloween story
• Office faceoff
• Spooky baking
• Nonprofit Competition & Concept Map
• Travel: Amherst
• Germania St. #3
• Meta photography in Powder House Square

September

• Germania St. #2
• Germania St. #1
• Radio Ga Ga: Discussing AmeriCorp*VISTA on WUML
• Rhode Island Turf and Grapes
• Evening cruise on Boston Harbor
• Views of Santa Barbara

August

• Deeper than Porter
• Education + Urinal = ...?
• Planes galore
• Rubbed away in DC
• About in Dorchester
• Solar Powered Art
• Node101 Weekend in New York City
• Youth Channel Blockparty
• Central Park Pictures
• Web 2.0 will save us
• Night and Day
• Night scenes
• Meta photography in Boston

July

• Piecing together Cambrige
• Gone bicycling
• Vote Ben
• First Monday Night Write
• Making smoothies
• No chirps for Lowell
• A response for Net Neutrality
• Canoes on the Mystic River
• Run
• Sails on the Charles
• Breakfast smoothie
• Two, two, two yolks in one
• Harbor Island info
• Zuchini harvest
• Zandvoort
• Charles on the 4th
• A new look
• Fiction Post Disclaimer
• Chase Palm Park
• San Francisco nights
• Santa Barbara Summer Solstice 2006
• Two minutes for Paul and Liz
• Views of Isla Vista

June

• Hot Slow Sunday in JP
• On San Francisco Bay
• Now that's a lot of mustard

May

• X Salad Sandwich
• Emo lyrics for Jason

April

• Great Minds Dress Alike
• Dave Alpert at the Abbey

March

• On the bookshelf
• My First T-Shirt
• Making Art with Inkscape

January

• Ghost train
• NY nightlife

2005

December

• Trash piano
• A hole in the ice
• Walking in Circles
• Word of the Day: Cankle
• Somerville Community Mapping

November

• Boston Fallout Shelters
• My pigeons in a row
• Thanksgiving reloaded
• Content Map
• 23rd Birthday/Thanksgiving Spectacular, Part 1
• Scooped!
• I, defender of democracy-ocracy-cracy
• Rubbed away
• First Light in Coolidge Corner
• Autumn Pollution
• Pool Soup