It was quite a beauty for its day. CDnow started off as a Telnet store, back in the days when people did not even consider the danger of sending your credit card details without encryption. When the CDnow web site was developed, there were not many mature web servers available, so the founders wrote their own in C, called "mserver" (or, Matt's server, after Matt Olim, co-founder). On top of C, Matt started a language called SDK (Site Development Kit), a scripting language tied to Oracle which did many things far ahead of its time.
I helped host the first Philadelphia Women in Technology Summit during Philly Tech Week 2012. Being the only man at a tech conference gave me enormous appreciation for women in tech, and the extra steep hills they have to climb.
Just a quick post to provide a link to a book I helped write a chapter in, although I must admit, I had a bit of sticker shock!
Python isn't named after a snake, it is named after Monty Python. Being half British, my father ensured I grew up ensconced in Monty Python. My Godfather, a force in me becoming a programmer, was also a huge Monty Python fan. He authored books on early computer science.
The Second Life community of LSL programmers had a pretty good sense of humor. The wiki page was defaced, and after a few years, I decided it was time to recover some of the funnier pages that were posted, which all had nuggets of wisdom. Without further ado...
I was featured on a news segment for "Right Now on the Net" about Second Life. Reporter Erin O'Hearn ask questions about Second Life in general, and some of the controversies it faces, as any new medium does.
Several friends and I worked across multiple continents to find the source of a "Nigerian Prince" phishing scam... bringing some levity to a tragedy.
We can learn an important lesson about open-source contributions from the early space program.
I gave a lightning talk at DjangoCon US 2018, asking people how their lives could be different if they changed "just one thing." I share some of my recovery story as told by my GitHub activity chart!
Over the past few weeks, as the COVID-19 crisis has escalated, I've seen many friends and groups I am involved with flock to Zoom to keep in touch.
I designed my first theme for VSCode. Download it if you love purple as much as me!