There was an event when a startup I was at asked Basho (they were the company behind Riak db) about backing up our data. Backing was a little side-feature that was possible to rig up, but I recall they looked at this inquiry as if I had two heads -- as if to say, it's replicated, why jump the shark? There was a bug with one of the Riak releases, and all the data was lost. (When we scaled up with this buggy Riak release, the empty node assumed master roll, and all the child nodes went, ah... the new state has no data, let's all delete records 0..k. Fun times.)
As someone who spent the weekend figuring out `flexbox' to align copy around a webpage, after years of floating divs and pulling my hair out, I can appreciate this video. Creative destruction is an awe-inspiring, yet wistful force of nature.
Without too much effort, I keep a NOTES file in each project directory. I keep it out of source-control. Anything that is worth preserving (backed up and checked in) goes in README. I also use a file called SCRAP for ephemeral matters, again, in each project root, not checked in. A great pattern that has served me well.
In using cowboy directly, it would be a mistake (at least from personal experience) to rely of cowboy for anything other than your api endpoints and/or dynamic templates. Static assets, including html, are best served via nginx, with cowboy serving requests to your application. I've never had a cowboy + OTP project not lean on nginx in some way (yet).
Long-time vi[m] user, and always learning/amazement. This very morning I learned about the `-c` flag. So, `vim -c "set spell" my-misspelled-file.txt` starts up vim with a given setting.
Never bought one, but if Nintendo's 20/20 hindsight claim that the ~Wii U confused consumers~ was the reason for its relative miss, then that's an incredible lesson learned.
For anyone who is a web hacker rather than a designer, I highly suggest trying out SVG here and there in your web projects. SVG is a fantastic bridge for anyone who wants to put some graphics (dynamic or otherwise) in place, is used to just having copy as content, and/or is a bit afraid of opening PS/Gimp.
David Mamet once lamented that the computer has taken over the horse, in films. Where once the hero would jump onto their ride to go fight justice, now we have her pulling out the keyboard.
Just wanted to share a sentiment from a living luthier that I like.
Samuel Zygmuntowicz (a modern maker) has remarked, Strad made new violins. It's a reminder that age has little to do with the quality in some fine antique instruments. Strad's craft to fabricate brand-spanking-new violins made him quite a wealthy man (because they were fine instruments then, as they are now).
I use Erlang/OTP as my go-to language. The flack about its ugly syntax certainly puts Erlang in the unfashionable camp. But unjustly. I use it because I like single assignment of variables, pattern-matching, and I also think FP is pretty swell. Someone said recently that the Erlang community could be as small as one-thousand serious hackers. Now that's relatively small!