Swizec's articles in the "uncategorized" category
I aim to write mindblowing emails with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them.
Below are 424 articles filed under uncategorized. Enjoy ❤️
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails 💌 on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. 👌"
4 years of coding in San Francisco, lessons learned
April 15th, 2019
Pirates’ downfall causes global warming
February 28th, 2019
I built a node app to thaw my favorite snack 🥕
October 11th, 2018
How much do techie immigrants make?
October 12th, 2016
Code completion is bad mmkay
November 14th, 2014
I was wrong about AngularJS
September 24th, 2014
What happens when you stop saying No
September 10th, 2014
Why I love Tinder
June 13th, 2014
(ab)Using d3.js to make a Pong game
May 28th, 2014
Are introverts more creative?
March 11th, 2014
When the universe tries to communicate, or how I almost didn't get home
February 5th, 2014
Why I don't have a 5 year plan
January 31st, 2014
Mixing mixpanel into backbone
January 24th, 2014
You, take a break
December 20th, 2013
The weirdest thing women say to me
December 11th, 2013
How I accidentally lost my social skills
November 26th, 2013
My old code is atrocious
November 12th, 2013
I give up, Apple will never understand dual screen as well as Linux
October 24th, 2013
About achieving polymorphism in Javascript
October 15th, 2013
Bayesian modeling for the perfect pizza
October 8th, 2013
Adventures in homelessness
September 30th, 2013
My new favourite pomodoro app
September 20th, 2013
Are map, reduce, and filter turing complete?
September 17th, 2013
30 day fitness experiment with results
September 6th, 2013
Longtrip, On the road
August 11th, 2013
Longtrip, barrieri di lingua
August 5th, 2013
Writing modular Backbone with Backbone.SubRoute
July 31st, 2013
Always look for the gem
July 23rd, 2013
CircleCI - sexy continuous integration for private repos
July 5th, 2013
Onboard a Delta transatlantic flight with tattered seats
June 28th, 2013
Force users to add a facebook login with devise omniauth
June 20th, 2013
Dynamic languages have jumped the shark
May 31st, 2013
How I became a 3 hour per day workout nutter
May 28th, 2013
Mouse movements in a day of coding
May 7th, 2013
Writing a REST client in Haskell
April 25th, 2013
I love being a geek
April 23rd, 2013
First JavaScript meetup in Ljubljana is right around the corner
April 18th, 2013
How CamelCase ruined my day and my dev environment
April 16th, 2013
Why you don't have a flight transfer in North America
April 2nd, 2013
A tale about always-on DRM and web security
March 28th, 2013
It takes about two months to write a technical book
March 26th, 2013
Testing Javascript API calls with Capybara and puffing-billy
March 14th, 2013
Sexy animated spirographs in 35 sloc of d3.js
March 7th, 2013
#ifihadglass - the app I want to build
February 28th, 2013
In praise of the pass phrase
February 14th, 2013
Vine - the crappiest app I can't help but love
January 31st, 2013
Cool thing Thursday: Daleron Cold 3
January 17th, 2013
The trials and tribulations of a large-ish dataset
January 15th, 2013
Project soundtracks - how I killed procrastination
January 8th, 2013
A New Year's Eve in Belgrade
January 3rd, 2013
Testing Backbone apps with Mocha
December 27th, 2012
Thoughts while munching green tea fortune cookies
December 26th, 2012
Bacon muffins - a doomsday experiment in cooking
December 22nd, 2012
The 10x programmer in you
December 20th, 2012
The 10x developer in you
December 20th, 2012
Elegantly using socket.io in backbone apps
December 14th, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: A 300 euro keyboard
December 13th, 2012
Is writing the same as coding?
December 11th, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: Emacs tramp-mode
December 6th, 2012
Being young and naive
December 4th, 2012
Testing socket.io apps
November 30th, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: alertify.js
November 29th, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: Leanpub
November 22nd, 2012
I made $730 by selling an unfinished book for 3 days.
November 20th, 2012
Game development in Webgl
November 19th, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: HelloSign
November 15th, 2012
What writing a book feels like
November 14th, 2012
Single page web apps: the worst of both worlds
November 12th, 2012
A retrospective of an unproductive day
November 6th, 2012
Experienced developers can't solve this problem
November 2nd, 2012
Cool thing thursday: Pocket.co - feed your inner internetovore, keep your browser happy
November 1st, 2012
Lessons learned after a month of freelancing full time
October 30th, 2012
Symfony and the scary world of PHP
October 26th, 2012
Apple just doesn't get it anymore
October 24th, 2012
Why you can't focus on a single great idea
October 9th, 2012
Aho-Corasick string matching algorithm in Haskell
October 5th, 2012
Implementing the aho-corasick algorithm in Haskell
October 5th, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: Fog of World
October 4th, 2012
Elementary.
October 2nd, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: Ceylon
September 27th, 2012
On becoming a college dropout
September 25th, 2012
Cool thing thursday: in-browser 3D modeling with live preview
September 20th, 2012
Fizzbuzz without ifs in 90 char. I will buy you a beer if you can do better.
September 17th, 2012
Teleportation, would you use it?
September 13th, 2012
Turns out I'll be writing a book
September 11th, 2012
Monads, monads, monads, monads
September 3rd, 2012
I've hit a glass ceiling of coding productivity. Now what?
August 30th, 2012
Services I want to pay for
August 28th, 2012
Python and lazy evaluation
August 24th, 2012
The birth of LISP - a summary of John McCarthy's original paper
August 22nd, 2012
Is there a freelancer friendly bank?
August 21st, 2012
Amdahl's law in action - 27s to 0.03s by changing a function
August 17th, 2012
Entrepreneurs, this is how much confidence you need
August 16th, 2012
App.net put a price on early adopter pride. And it worked.
August 14th, 2012
An elegant way to randomly change every list member in Haskell
August 13th, 2012
Scraping with Mechanize and BeautifulSoup
August 10th, 2012
Despite daily strength training I'm not fit enough for WW2
August 7th, 2012
A roadtrip: wherein Swizec is not to be trusted with important objects without supervision
July 29th, 2012
Blackbox testing node.js apps
July 23rd, 2012
Why I will always suck at programming [Grega Stritar]
July 19th, 2012
Geek at a music festival: Day 5
July 16th, 2012
A history of my worst technical achievements
July 9th, 2012
Levenshtein distance in Haskell
July 6th, 2012
Weather - the best thing about Silicon Valley
July 3rd, 2012
What is leisure?
July 3rd, 2012
Haskell and randomness
July 2nd, 2012
You don't have to cross the chasm anymore
June 26th, 2012
Can you make a CAPTCHA to tell coders from non-coders?
June 21st, 2012
Give me your guestpost and I will give you my love!
June 20th, 2012
How to make the perfect iPad stand out of LEGO's
June 19th, 2012
Why I still haven't learned Haskell
June 18th, 2012
a post about this
June 15th, 2012
Making statsd talk directly to a browser
June 15th, 2012
The best 70 cents I have ever spent on the iStore
June 14th, 2012
A patent for swinging on a swing
June 12th, 2012
Why people making compilers are superheroes
June 11th, 2012
there was an idea in this post
June 9th, 2012
why I don't sleep
June 9th, 2012
New Foursquare [screengrab porn]
June 7th, 2012
Flotr2 - my favorite javascript graph library
June 1st, 2012
Natural Language Generation system architectures
May 30th, 2012
Project Management Techniques to Help Start-ups
May 29th, 2012
This week, the future finally started
May 24th, 2012
Disability, startups and loneliness
May 21st, 2012
A year of 750words.com - with shiny graphs
May 18th, 2012
Web page segmentation
May 16th, 2012
My brain can't handle OOP anymore
May 7th, 2012
Steal my startup idea: Rent-a-mum
May 4th, 2012
Skype does not an IDE make
May 2nd, 2012
Three benefits of trying to gain weight
May 1st, 2012
Making our irc bot talk
April 25th, 2012
There is no do or do not, only try
April 24th, 2012
My impressions of Diablo 3
April 22nd, 2012
Does a new age of kings approach?
April 19th, 2012
Comparing automatic poetry generators
April 18th, 2012
Using Backbone to improve multiselects
April 13th, 2012
What Refactoring is, and what it isn't
April 11th, 2012
Google+ redesigned into Facebook
April 11th, 2012
19 months from launch to $1,000,000,000 acquisition: Instagram
April 10th, 2012
Tracking RSS readers with Google Analytics
April 6th, 2012
Would you subscribe to this service?
April 5th, 2012
Online, real names provide anonymity
April 3rd, 2012
The exciting future Javascript
April 2nd, 2012
Science Wednesday: Defining poetry
March 28th, 2012
An evil business model that works
March 27th, 2012
A test post and a story
March 25th, 2012
I wish this existed
March 23rd, 2012
I am a software developer, not a 15 year old
March 22nd, 2012
What Starting feels like
March 21st, 2012
Selling to girls
March 20th, 2012
Django and IE9 don't play well together
March 19th, 2012
For better productivity, I watch 6 hours of TV a week
March 15th, 2012
Closure and currying magic for cleaner javascript
March 14th, 2012
The one book that gets me offline
March 13th, 2012
Startup world, Y U SUCK AT MOTIVATE?
March 9th, 2012
Why geeks think girls don't like them
March 6th, 2012
A Google phone interview
March 2nd, 2012
I'm a pro blogger now!
March 1st, 2012
Unit testing is for lazy people
February 27th, 2012
The commonest javascript bug
February 24th, 2012
I made a steampunk costume
February 23rd, 2012
FANN - neural networks made easy
February 20th, 2012
I walked all over a lake!
February 18th, 2012
Two business things Slovenia needs to change
February 15th, 2012
Possibly the ugliest python ever to escape my brain
February 13th, 2012
Study Break! What students do for mental breaks from studying
February 12th, 2012
Amazing air machines
February 8th, 2012
The greatest story I have to tell
February 7th, 2012
Udacity - learn how to give an autonomous car its brain
February 6th, 2012
Top 10 iPhone Apps for Web Designers
February 3rd, 2012
TEDxBled pitch
February 2nd, 2012
Everyone should learn [about] programming
February 1st, 2012
Three cool things
January 31st, 2012
Heroku, mongo, node.js - a problem
January 30th, 2012
Lychrel numbers
January 27th, 2012
A month wasted
January 26th, 2012
A visit to the dentist
January 25th, 2012
I Don't Know
January 24th, 2012
I Don't Know
January 24th, 2012
This Haskell is wrong. Why?
January 20th, 2012
Blogging, hats, stuff
January 19th, 2012
Are you a boy scout coder?
January 17th, 2012
Shoes
January 16th, 2012
Why you don't exercise every day
January 15th, 2012
Geeks of america, please start fighting SOPA
January 12th, 2012
Minimum substring cover problem
January 11th, 2012
Collatz, Haskell and Memoization
January 9th, 2012
A message from your future self
January 6th, 2012
A message from your future self
January 6th, 2012
Programmers are born not made
January 5th, 2012
Deca - a cool systems programming language
January 4th, 2012
Sabbatical week day 3: Raining datatypes
December 29th, 2011
Sabbatical week day 2: I fail at Octave
December 28th, 2011
Sabbatical week day 1: Toshl and Toggl datasets
December 27th, 2011
Learning me a Haskell
December 23rd, 2011
The problem with threads
December 21st, 2011
Today I nearly died ... four times
December 21st, 2011
5 months of blog traffic in 4 days
December 20th, 2011
A lesson about client-side templating
December 19th, 2011
Why programmers work at night
December 15th, 2011
Science Wednesday: Self-driving cars
December 14th, 2011
The best $5 I have ever spent
December 13th, 2011
A food experiment
December 9th, 2011
Can I please take all my classes online?
December 8th, 2011
Fun javascript feature
December 7th, 2011
Stop being so fucking productive
December 6th, 2011
Simple trick for testing forms full of checkboxes with django
December 2nd, 2011
I wish my doctor was a vet
December 1st, 2011
Music and The Zone
November 29th, 2011
A turing machine in 133 bytes of javascript
November 28th, 2011
Nondeterministic turing machine simulator in 23 lines of JavaScript
November 23rd, 2011
TEDxYouth Ljubljana report
November 22nd, 2011
Best blogging week I have ever had
November 21st, 2011
Strangest line of python you have ever seen
November 18th, 2011
Why I only work with startups
November 17th, 2011
I suck at implementing neural networks in octave
November 15th, 2011
We are not generation sell
November 15th, 2011
TV's are now computers O.o
November 14th, 2011
fun vs. reason
November 12th, 2011
Parsing JavaScript with JavaScript
November 11th, 2011
Timekiwi - delicious timelines
November 10th, 2011
I think I finally understand what a neural network is
November 9th, 2011
Going to the dentist is like trying out a new opensource project
November 8th, 2011
@donalddesantis is wrong about girls
November 6th, 2011
First steps with Octave and machine learning
November 4th, 2011
Sleep hacking
November 3rd, 2011
Handling timezones in python
November 2nd, 2011
Poking a sleeping giant
November 1st, 2011
Beardvember. DOIT!
October 31st, 2011
Making a Möbius cake
October 30th, 2011
Notebook fetishism
October 27th, 2011
The strange world of getting user data onto a piece of paper
October 24th, 2011
#WebcampLj was bitchin'
October 23rd, 2011
Weird feeds
October 20th, 2011
A for loop is not a for loop is not a for loop
October 19th, 2011
Programmers are fucking lazy
October 18th, 2011
Firefox's "funny" css3 image scaling quirk
October 17th, 2011
Economy next on the noobs' list of things to ruin?
October 15th, 2011
A technical post about cake
October 14th, 2011
What are you proud of?
October 13th, 2011
ml-class.org vs. real world ML class
October 11th, 2011
Crowdsourcing elegance
October 10th, 2011
Steve Jobs
October 6th, 2011
I suck at [formal] education or does education suck?
October 4th, 2011
I want to analyze your blog
September 30th, 2011
Measuring vocabulary richness with python
September 28th, 2011
NaN does not equal NaN
September 27th, 2011
The end of my internet diet experiment
September 26th, 2011
#Geeksonwater
September 24th, 2011
Spending money online is crazy hard!
September 24th, 2011
So how many readers _actually_ read a blog post?
September 16th, 2011
Our intuitive understanding of distance fails us
September 6th, 2011
I went through YC as an intern, here's what I learned
August 31st, 2011
Why don't computers understand timezones?
August 25th, 2011
Why an internet diet and not cold turkey
August 19th, 2011
How Ayrton Senna can make you a better anything
August 12th, 2011
Software dev isn't just a logical process
August 10th, 2011
The man you want to be does not matter
August 3rd, 2011
Somebody finally figured out how to do marketing on Twitter!
July 25th, 2011
Someone finally figured out how to market on Twitter
July 25th, 2011
Crayons ... best productivity hack ever?
July 21st, 2011
The entrepreneur's curse
July 11th, 2011
Your Twitter bio sucks - I think I can fix it
July 7th, 2011
First steps with OS X Lion
July 5th, 2011
JavaScript's native map reduce and filter are wrong
June 29th, 2011
I couldn't get into YC so I joined a startup that did
June 24th, 2011
Daemonizing node.js processes
June 19th, 2011
I am not an entrepreneur, I am an indie web developer
June 17th, 2011
Using backbone.js for fun and profit
June 17th, 2011
My new footer gives you a glimpse into my life
June 14th, 2011
The Twitters pitched 5 products, why I chose the first
June 9th, 2011
Doing a startup taught me the value of staying in school
June 2nd, 2011
Why trolling is a art
May 30th, 2011
Implementing a weighed random choice in Clojure
May 26th, 2011
750 words a day keeps the insanity away
May 16th, 2011
Using prime numbers to generate pretty trees
May 10th, 2011
What Munchkins can teach us about entrepreneurship
May 4th, 2011
Ubuntu's app management better than Apple's
April 30th, 2011
Even with Narwhals ubuntu is still a bitch to install
April 27th, 2011
The three types of projects worth your time
April 18th, 2011
A cool JavaScript property you never noticed
A few years ago I was playing around with JavaScript trying to find the cleanest way to implement callbacks in functions. Primarily I wanted a readable way to make certain the last argument passed is a callback, withut having to rely on knowing how many arguments there are and so on. Instead I stumbled upon a pretty cool feature of how javascript handles function arguments.
April 16th, 2011
Comparing clojure and node.js for speed
April 7th, 2011
Circadian rhythm meltdown
April 5th, 2011
I got punched in the face and survived
February 27th, 2011
A case for multi-tasking
January 24th, 2011
Tweet a photo every time your mac wakes up with a simple hack
January 14th, 2011
Execution shapes ideas
January 3rd, 2011
DjangoCamp was bangin'! (before unseen epic last slide of my talk)
December 13th, 2010
Twitter censoring the WikiLeaks debate?
December 5th, 2010
Evolving a poem with an hour of python hacking
November 30th, 2010
Clients need deadlines too
November 10th, 2010
A wit
November 3rd, 2010
Some general impressions of the US
November 1st, 2010
A flight
October 14th, 2010
Doing nothing is the hardest thing ever
October 4th, 2010
Hard work is a total waste of time
September 22nd, 2010
Apple's Ping is a big pile of steaming dung
September 3rd, 2010
The strangestest Hello World I ever made
August 19th, 2010
Programatically uploading to blobstore in python
August 10th, 2010
Django protip #2: Forms are awesome
August 3rd, 2010
The mountains are beautiful magnificent beasts
July 26th, 2010
Django protip #1: A better App structure
July 21st, 2010
Small trick for seamless base64 password storage in django
July 14th, 2010
Today was the worst day I've ever had
June 21st, 2010
This summer a bunch of hackers might realize your crazy idea
June 18th, 2010
List of things I need to do before I'm 30
June 10th, 2010
The best post in the history of posting on the internets
June 6th, 2010
The upcoming month right out from hell!
May 31st, 2010
Malo delo? Poserjem se na vas in vaše demonstracije
May 18th, 2010
First hike of the season
April 26th, 2010
Do you memento mori?
April 21st, 2010
A little bit of burn out? Perhaps
April 15th, 2010
How long is your coding schlong?
April 7th, 2010
How I justified a weekend of videogaming and gorging as an exercise in hardcore personal improvement
April 6th, 2010
The creepiest fucking image ever!
March 30th, 2010
Yay my blog is up and running again! :D
March 29th, 2010
David Heinemeier Hansson is wrong! Startups work.
March 26th, 2010
The bliss and curse of mindsets
March 15th, 2010
The Slavic Esperanto
March 8th, 2010
Philosophers are crazy people!
March 5th, 2010
The real-time WebCamp bash
February 21st, 2010
Exam season eats time like women, internet and television combined
February 15th, 2010
Maths is purdiful
February 4th, 2010
Apple pulls another Newton with the iPad
January 27th, 2010
Caek!
January 23rd, 2010
Why bigger penis == bigger confidence [nsfw-ish]
January 20th, 2010
Python multiprocessing is fucking sweet
January 18th, 2010
How ikigai has changed my style
January 12th, 2010
How Lisp changed my style
January 11th, 2010
The kind of professor we can all but hope to meet some day
January 11th, 2010
Ljubljana hasn't heard of plows --> snow driving yayz!
January 8th, 2010
The best copypasta ever copy pasted
January 8th, 2010
Came up with a wisdom
January 6th, 2010
The greatest casual game ever devised
January 6th, 2010
3 pikchurs of a pretty goat
January 4th, 2010
Kids, shrooms are fucking cool
January 1st, 2010
Rape has never been so beautiful
December 31st, 2009
Everybody should watch Children of Men
December 28th, 2009
These are the times I love my job
December 28th, 2009
Like Angelina and Scarlet having sex with your eyes
December 23rd, 2009
Brittany Murphy was really hawt
December 21st, 2009
How I discovered one of the greatest influences on my life
December 15th, 2009
Switching from apache to nginx is a dream
December 14th, 2009
The webcomics I love
December 13th, 2009
A quick quip
December 11th, 2009
A careless rant about human rights
December 10th, 2009
Why the digital book revolution is stupid
December 8th, 2009
Heaven is where your code lies
December 7th, 2009
Shaved! \o/
December 1st, 2009
Webcamp Ljubljana was a blast
November 29th, 2009
DJ Dejan - a NSFW blast from the past
November 29th, 2009
The perfect woman [nsfw]
November 24th, 2009
NaNoWriMo day19, so not gonna make it
November 19th, 2009
A portfolio is born
November 17th, 2009
Humar bi moral postati legenda, pa ne bo
November 14th, 2009
Howto convince the iStore you're from the US and circumvent regional copyright restrictions
November 12th, 2009
The power of 20 minutes - an inspiration
November 12th, 2009
NaNoWriMo day 12 - sloooowly, very slooowly
November 12th, 2009
NaNoWriMo day 10 - where the fuck did the week go?
November 10th, 2009
Open question, please help
November 4th, 2009
NaNoWriMo day3, when nothing happens
November 3rd, 2009
NaNoWriMo day2, time goes quick
November 2nd, 2009
Gonzo Steampunk Vampires, Halloween and Beards
November 1st, 2009
NaNoWriMo day1, or how strange inspiration can be
November 1st, 2009
Ubuntu release party, start:up and weed
October 30th, 2009
Why people use IDE's (and how badly Win7 sucks)
October 25th, 2009
A smart (funny?) words I said
October 21st, 2009
You know what, I fucking love my faculty (FRI)
October 19th, 2009
The university lecture structure is all wrong
October 13th, 2009
My life is a derivative of a derivative
October 11th, 2009
Yeah but you're weird
October 6th, 2009
First traditional pub&bar crawl 2009
September 23rd, 2009
A smart words I said
September 19th, 2009
My room in "funny" pictures
September 13th, 2009
A season for catching colds
September 6th, 2009
Snow Leopards in mah rooms!
September 2nd, 2009
Fighting Twitter spam with bayes
August 31st, 2009
Everyone should work out! (here's why)
August 27th, 2009
The asinine pricing of Snow Leopard
August 26th, 2009
From idea to seedcamp application in a week
August 24th, 2009
Having discipline is painful
August 17th, 2009
Do we rely on open APIs too much?
August 12th, 2009
How MAFIAA killed itself and why Goth is undead
August 10th, 2009
Why I hate working from home
July 30th, 2009
Incapable of proper sunscreen use
July 27th, 2009
Erasem's Knight's Tournament 2009 (with pics)
July 20th, 2009
Br
July 10th, 2009
Our digital lives are empty and sad
June 29th, 2009
Unit testing is anti-productive
June 23rd, 2009
Slovenia desperately needs more burlesque
June 19th, 2009
Internet memestalgia
June 11th, 2009
I am a Groundbreaking Thinker ...
June 10th, 2009
Slovenia php conference day2 (live blogging)
June 6th, 2009
Slovenia Php Conference 2009 (live blogging)
June 5th, 2009
The game of Quantum Wolf Hunt
May 31st, 2009
Debauchery at BcLj2
May 16th, 2009
Duke Nukem Forever is never
May 7th, 2009
Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana finalists congratz
May 4th, 2009
Change is good, change we like
April 23rd, 2009
Time is short whey you're old
April 17th, 2009
The failing economy paradox
April 5th, 2009
The day my elaborate prank failed
April 1st, 2009
A man's straying eyes
March 31st, 2009
Battlestar Galactica - best video novel ever
March 31st, 2009
Followers don't matter
March 31st, 2009
Ville Depp and Johnny Valo
March 27th, 2009
I swallowed a dead raccoon
March 26th, 2009
Stupid users are a myth
March 17th, 2009
Man better transport than Car
March 16th, 2009
Moved to wordpress
March 15th, 2009
jQuery imageless buttons a la Google take two
February 19th, 2009
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails 💌 on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. 👌"