So, I gave a talk On Tuesday, I gave my first talk ever in front of a technical crowd to the Developers of Athens. My topic was Scala and Lift. This wasn’t my first time being in front of an audience, but it was my first time giving a primarily slide-driven presentation about some highly technical stuff. It was my first time speaking about Lift publicly. Posted by Matt Farmer on August 09, 2014 · 8 mins read
Economies of Scaling Back A few of you who have followed me for awhile know that I’m a Christian. Part of my faith includes periodically reading things from other believers who have come before me. A few days back a contemporary Christian publication posted an excellent collection of quotes by Charles Spurgeon, a well respected Baptist preacher. There was one selection in particular that seemed to relate to me, especially as a member of today’s technology industry. Spurgeon writes, Posted by Matt Farmer on June 21, 2014 · 6 mins read
Re: Why you should take notes by hand — not on a laptop Interesting article on the front page of Hacker News right now: “Why you should take notes by hand – not on a laptop” by Joseph Stromberg at Vox. I’ve generally favored taking notes by hand for the same reason they outline as the result of a study in the article. Specifically, that people taking notes on a laptop tend to do worse when questioned on the contents of those notes. There was, however, one interesting point I wanted to harp on: Posted by Matt Farmer on June 07, 2014 · 4 mins read
Gotchas: Loops in CoffeeScript are not closures So I’ve decided I’m going to start writing about the various gotchas that I come across in this software engineering journey of mine. My hope is that these writings will get a decent page index and will bubble to the top of the search results the next time someone runs into the same issues I do. In today’s edition of “things you don’t expect languages to do” we’re going to have a brief chat about CoffeeScript’s for loops, and some gnarly behavior to be aware of if you aren’t currently. Posted by Matt Farmer on May 10, 2014 · 4 mins read
Lessons Learned from my First Hackathon This weekend I participated in Atlanta Startup Weekend with the My Chef’s Table team. We placed second and it was an excellent experience overall mostly because it’s something very different from my normal operating mode. Given the choice I’d prefer to take my time with a product, so putting the artificial time limit of 2 days to build something gave me an opportunity to put myself outside my default mode of operation. Posted by Matt Farmer on May 05, 2014 · 3 mins read