There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things — Phil Karlton Doing cache invalidation by hand is an incredibly frustrating and error-prone process. You’re very likely to forget a spot and let stale data get served. That’s enough to turn most people off russian-doll caching structures, like the one we’re using for Basecamp Next. Thankfully there’s a better way. A much better way. It’s called key-based cache expiration and it works like this: The cache key is the fluid part and the cache content is the fixed ...

6ShareYou’re in the middle of a crazy startup development sprint. Pressure is sky high as you might have to fire everyone if you don’t generate significant traction over the next 4 months. Make it or #fail situation.The guys (I wish we’d have girls but … wait we have a student, anyway) are killing tickets and you’re pretty much on the target you’ve set with your investors. Not comfortably confident but ok.And you catch your guys debating, for multiple days, whether they should be using “n/a” or a slashed zero to represent a div by ...

I prefer to come into work a little earlier before our 9 a.m. start time in order to leave before 5 p.m. My boss has no problem with my hours, though an older female colleague apparently does. She regularly tells me that this “special” work schedule is damaging my career trajectory and conveys to others that I am a diva. To that I reply, according to whom?There are many workplace assumptions that employees accept without question. Why does the traditional work day start at 9 a.m? Who decided 14 days is the proper amount of annual vacation time? Why do employees need to give a two-w...

Google. It’s one of the most common household words in today’s modern society, and yet for a company that is used by most of us essentially as an algorithm, it tends to trigger a highly emotional response when overheard. It’s a dream job for college students nearing graduation, a highly coveted invitation to lunch by friends and colleagues who work near campus, and the bane of existence for those who produce content for the Internet. For several years, most of the public has seen quick glimpses of the life of those who work at Google: offices filled with primary colors, co...

The other day, I wrote a post declaring that I will no longer try to increase my productivity. This doesn't mean I won't read productivity blogs, and tweak things, and manage my "system". It means I no longer think about any of that stuff as having anything to do with productivity.Productivity is what happens when you're doing work. Enhancing your productivity is what happens when you do a lot of work, for long enough to get better at it.Look, throw all your stuff in Dropbox, live your life out of plain text files, use gmail to communicate, turn off tasks and chat, leave things in their de...

There is a class of messages which are generated on demandrather than explicitly posted into a message queue.If you call Get­Message or Peek­Messageand the queue is empty,then the window manager will look to see if one of thesegenerated-on-demand messages is due,messages likeWM_TIMER,WM_MOUSE­MOVE,and WM_PAINT.Neil wonders,"In that program that called Invalidate­Rect 100,000 times,how many paint messages were generated?"The Zen answer to this question is "Yes."A more practical answer is "As many as you can get."When somebody calls Invalidate­Rect,the window manager adds the spec...

After I wrote my last post, a surprising number of people emailed me asking why I decided to join a startup after graduating from Duke. Many of those I heard from face similar decisions today: either they are college seniors choosing between a big company and a startup, or they are recent graduates who work at a big company and are thinking about making the switch. What’s interesting is that most are already leaning towards the startup career path: it seems they just want someone to assure them it’s a rational move. Their friends and family are skeptical: “How can you ...

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. â€“ PicassoMany people (including my mother-in-law) think that computers are becoming so smart that programmers will be no longer needed in the near future. Other people think that programmers are geniuses who constantly solve sophisticated math puzzles in front of their monitors. Even many programmers don’t have clear idea what they do.In this post I want to provide some explanation to uninformed people what programmers really do:Programmers are translators of human ideas into the language of computers.They are a link bet...