Thoughts on Empathy in Engineering I’ve become more and more aware recently of the importance of empathy in how I do my job. Which, in some ways, is a bit comical because if you were to list some adjectives to describe the classic stereotype of the software engineer you likely wouldn’t mention “empathetic” in that list. I don’t know that I would either. But, nonetheless, empathy for my users – understanding them – is increasingly important for what I do. Posted by Matt Farmer on October 22, 2015 · 2 mins read
Making the Case for the Cutting Edge at LambdaConf 2015 Ed Node (2020-10-02): Since I wrote this post Lambda Conf was involved in a pretty public debate about whether or not to deplatform someone who alledgedly professed views sympathetic to white supremicy. That occurred in 2016. While I have no plans to attend Lambda Conf again because of the bad taste that left in my mouth, the 2015 conference was my first ever conference talk and was significant. I’m leaving this post up, with this note, in acknowledgement of that. Posted by Matt Farmer on May 24, 2015 · 5 mins read
Building Your Web Application Muscles with Lift On May 6th I gave a talk to the Atlanta Scala Users Group designed to give an introduction to CSS transforms and Comets in the Lift Framework. There was no video, but if you’re interested in the slides, here they are! Posted by Matt Farmer on May 07, 2015 · 1 min read
Lift Delegation Proposal This is an introduction for an idea of mine I’m calling Lift Delegation, a feature that I’m hoping to implement in the Lift Framework that would allow Lift applications to be implemented in a master/delegate model with a small amount of state and content from the master made available to the delegate application. So, what does that mean? Posted by Matt Farmer on March 21, 2015 · 16 mins read
Excluding Components from an Aggregate SBT Build While working on upgrading Databinder Dispatch’s liftjson module to use Lift 2.6 I ran into an interesting challenge that Nathan, the project’s maintainer, hadn’t found a good solution to yet. Specifically, here’s the situation: Dispatch is built for a bunch of Scala versions. The liftjson module won’t build on Scala 2.9.3 because we (the Lift Committers) never issued a build of Lift for 2.9.3. Posted by Matt Farmer on March 07, 2015 · 4 mins read