April 2013
1 post
In Engineers We Trust (to Get Shit Done)
rentifyengineering:
Hi, I’m Buford, CTO over here at Rentify, and here, the engineering team has only one simple rule: Get Shit Done.
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January 2013
2 posts
2 tags
On San Francisco
I didn’t know I was in love with San Francisco until I landed back in SFO from New York. On the way back on the 101, you get a great view of the San Francisco skyline as you come over the hill near Bayview. Somewhere inside of my chest, I had a stirring. Some might call it an emotion. And it forced a smile to thin my lips. I was home.
SF, at first glance, is small, and dirty, and full of...
3 tags
Testis, testis, 1, 2. Phew!
That moment you’re checked to see if you have cancer.
Warning: this article contains some not safe for work subject matter, and an inappropriate view of life.
The Fear
I was 14 years old playing Super Nintendo when my little brother’s neighborhood friend raised her thick plastic glittery shoe, and, without warning, planted it straight into my crotch, crushing my left testicle. It...
October 2012
3 posts
3 tags
What I learned from giving my game to a 3 year...
Itzko is 3. Max is 30.
Itzko
I’m not friends with most 3 year olds. They’re filthy, loud, and usually violent, much like San Francisco’s Mission district. When I had to babysit a 3 year old a few weeks ago, I was desperate not to accidentally let him kill himself, so I did what any strung-out, exhausted adult would do, I gave him my iPhone.
The kid’s name is Itzko....
5 tags
Air Bulgarian - Language Learning Game and How I...
Air Bulgarian - Language Learning Game and How I Built It
здрасти! Hi there!
The world is getting smaller. Ten years ago, I didn’t even know that Bulgaria was a country. Today, I’ve been there three times, dozens of my friends and acquaintances are Bulgarian, and I’ve had one wrapped around my finger the last five years (or me around her’s). Luckily, she speaks...
4 tags
Don't Use GrexIt
Email is important to me. If you launch a product around email, you cannot make email worse for me. If you do, no deal.
Like many others out there, I struggle with keeping up with the torrent of email I receive daily, so I gave GrexIt a shot, hoping that it might streamline communication and collaboration right from my gmail inbox, but it did the exact opposite.
A few days after granting...
September 2012
6 posts
3 tags
Fixing orientation in Cocos2d with iOS6 when...
Fixing device orientation for Cocos2d in iOS6
iOS6 has caused a ruckus for Cocos2d developers with games that are only in landscape mode that have Game Center enabled. Either this happens:
or this happens:
Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'UIApplicationInvalidInterfaceOrientation', reason: 'Supported orientations has no common orientation with the application, and...
2 tags
Effort - This Changes Everything
Early 2004, I was unemployed, without transportation (in a city with no public transportation), in debt, partying like a poor college student except I wasn’t in college, going through stretches of homelessness. My life was not going as planned, until I discovered effort.
The first time I traveled outside of the country, I was 26. Hell, the first time I traveled outside Oklahoma, I was 23....
2 tags
Leave Breadcrumbs
Jane and Jim are in the prime of their careers. They both work hard and are successful. But only one of them leaves breadcrumbs.
Jane
Jane writes code. She’s been writing ruby the last 8 months, and she has joined Coursera, Codecademy, and RailsTutors to help her further her knowledge of ruby/rails while broadening her horizons to the world of backbone.js, a deeper grasp of jQuery, and...
4 tags
Swift Command Line
Swiftcommandline is a quick way to edit, go to, or open commonly referenced files or folders
Install
github - swiftcommandline
git clone git://github.com/bufordtaylor/swiftcommandline.git
make install
source ~/.local/bin/swiftcommandline.sh from within your ~.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc file
Shell Commands
s <reference_name> <file> - Saves the path to the file as...
4 tags
Productive Vim
I’ve been through text editors before, but this one is different. I might put a ring on this one.
Vim is a text editor designed to reduce the amount of keystrokes in order to accomplish the same amount of work. The best part about vim is that your hands never have to leave the keyboard. In this post, I’ll be talking about how I set up my vim to make my work highly efficient for me....
3 tags
Ears-a-ringing: How the medical industry keeps me...
There are no medical centers open on Sunday in San Fransisco except the larger institutions like St. Francis Memorial Hospital - AKA the emergency room. On a sunday of last month, I shook with fever, winced from a dull pain in my ear, and miserably wiped the mucus from my reddened nose. After two days of this, I sauntered my way to St. Francis, and with a nasal passage sealed tight, I asked to see...
July 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Culture Fact - A Case Study of Eventbrite
Disclaimer: I’ve been a software engineer for Eventbrite for over three years - from the days where we were 10 people sharing an office with four other companies, to the 200ish person company taking up two floors of our giant office. These views in no way represent Eventbrite’s official stance on anything.
A few days ago, I read the Culture Myth, and while a lot of the things...
3 tags
Convenience Kills
I haven’t relaxed since I was in work/school 90 hours a week. When I don’t finish the things I want, I can’t relax.
I just spent a month in Europe on vacation and I felt like I didn’t get anything done. I didn’t open source my previous meme game. I didn’t finish my language learning app, or finish the Stanford machine learning course, or workout as much as I...
June 2012
1 post
5 tags
Best Medicine for Burnout: Vacation
I was sitting at a computer 16 hours a day. I was gaining weight, losing my charm, my sense of humor, who I am. I had developed an ulcer, and fierce pessimism. At the office, I was spending a lot of time away from my co-workers. My side projects waned and sputtered. I worked on them, but they seemed to go nowhere. When my friends invited me out to deflate, I seldom went. The idea of...
March 2012
1 post
9 tags
What Happens When You Piss Off the Internet
I like open source. When I sought out on the endeavor to create a mobile tower defense game, I announced that the game would be open source, and it would be free. The game is called Meme Defense. As one might guess, it’s about Internet memes. Not exactly an original concept, but I was more concerned about the engineering aspects of the game rather than the skin. Tower defense games, to...
February 2012
3 posts
4 tags
Inside A Live Kickstarter Campaign: Part 1
With 15 days to go, Meme Defense has raised 36% of it’s campaign goal and it has 398 likes on Facebook. Most of the campaign money has come from Twitter at 22%.
Feb 10th - Feb 14th: Most all of the pledges were from people I knew. I received a few pledges from Kickstarter’s Discovery and one from Kickstarter’s Search. At this point, I did very little marketing except...
3 tags
Facebook Likes are cheap for Kickstarter campaigns
I’m making a game (Meme Defense) about Internet memes, so it’s easy to believe that once Facebook got word of the idea, things started to spread without much force. However, the results were not what I was expecting.
To date, Meme Defense has 39 backers, mostly from friends that I’ve shown the game to and either their excitement or their need for a t-shirt got them to pledge...
4 tags
Efficiently Managing Two Jobs (AKA working 16...
When I saw this post in November about Jack Dorsey, I was taken aback at the skepticism the article received, but I had nothing to say to the contrary…until now.
Listen, working 16 hours a day is nuts, and probably not cut out for many people at all, but I do it, and I love it.
Qualifications:
I’m a software engineer for a San Francisco startup called Eventbrite. I spend 8-11...
October 2011
2 posts
2 tags
You Are the Average of Your Five Closest Friends.
I won’t name names, so we’ll call her Jane.
Jane’s five closest friends are two engineers at Google, an engineer at Eventbrite, an architect, and her father (which is so cute), who is the president of a national soccer team in Jane’s home country.
Jane graduated with a degree in Business Administration. That was a mistake. BizAdmin in San Francisco basically means she...
3 tags
Thanks for the Future.
My parents didn’t have much money when I was growing up, but they worked hard. I don’t believe they’ve ever been on a vacation. They managed to buy a Compaq Deskpro 386 a few years after it came out. That’s where all my free time ..well, all my time was spent. I had it all, Arkanoid, Lemmings, virtual pinball.
I beat the games, eventually mastered them, and I was...
September 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Multitasking is a Myth - 10 Tips On Staying...
I’m focusing on writing a blog entry right now. The most important concept is to look at one task at a time and — TOUCHDOWN Raiders!! Fuck yes! Winning season this year, I swear to god!!
Oh, I’m also streaming an NFL game in the background, but it’s okay because I’m good at multitasking. Over my tenure of being an Internet user, I have found that my ability to...
3 tags
Americans Only Live on the Weekends
“What’d you do this weekend?”
On Monday, it’s is the most common question asked around the office, and by the time we see what Friday afternoon looks like, that question becomes, “What’re you up to this weekend?”
Most common answer: “Caught up on sleep.”
I try my best to never have the common answer.
For example:
Three weekends ago, I went...
August 2011
2 posts
1 tag
30 Things I've Done at Startups
I wrote and pushed code to the production servers on my first day at work.
To: team@company.com Message: “Just checked in 10000 attendees on our new iPhone app I finished last night.” CEO replies all: “Fuck yeah!”
I have had pixie sticks and Red Bull as a meal.
I was in the room as Zuckerberg unveiled the Facebook Graph API. I was in the room as Steve Jobs unveiled...
3 tags
Planning for the Apocalypse (by being less...
I often go to extremes. This is largely due to my unattributed selfishness and desire to have everything I’ve ever wanted.
I also have fears about the end of society. This is largely due to my reading the news every day. Now I’ve watched plenty of movies in which people die horrific deaths. There’s always that asshole who lost his glasses mere seconds before a dinosaur...
July 2011
1 post
1 tag
Not My American Dream
I spent 25 years in Oklahoma. That’s a long time for any place, but longer in Oklahoma. The flow of time there is frozen. I didn’t know that I hated Oklahoma for a very long while. I simply thought that life was meant to be lived in all the glory that American suburbia had to offer.
I drove to Denver once. I had to pass through Kansas to get there. Denver itself was Oklahoma...
June 2011
4 posts
2 tags
What kind of traffic does #2 on Hacker News yield?
I started this blog a couple weeks ago because I wanted to share some protips I practice regarding productivity, health, programming, and general lifehacks. My second post about discomfort as a motivator created a little stir in the Hacker News community last week and I wanted to present the numbers I saw.
Let me come right out and say that I didn’t have analytics installed for the actual...
2 tags
Please, make yourself uncomfortable.
Here’s me at any given weekday around noon:
I’m staring at some code usually written by some French guy back in 2003. After I curse the French, I refactor a chunk and restart my server, alt-tab over to my browser, immediately command-T and type ‘r-e’ until reddit.com appears in my omnibar, browse Reddit’s front page, reach over to grab a bite from lunch, command-L...
5 tags
I don't always sit down at work, but when I do,...
Being a programmer is hard on the body. Given, there’s not a lot of risk of slicing a finger off, or breaking a leg, but programmers don’t exactly have swimmer’s abs either. What tends to go wrong for the common fellow nerd who spends hour after hour exercising his or her brain rather than their body?
Weight issues - This one is easy pickings. When you sit for 12 - 14 hours a...
