Author Archives: Bryan Woods

Of Musicians And Programmers

By Bryan Woods | January 21, 2009

Jeff Atwood posed the age-old question again today on his blog, and I thought it was worth a little more introspection as someone who was (is?) a musician first, programmer second.
The question: “Why are so many programmers musicians?” (Note: the question is coming from a programmer, not a musician, which is the first notable point. [...]

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Donating A Dollar A Day For A Year

By Bryan Woods | January 21, 2009

I’ve decided I’m going to donate $1 a day to things I like for a year, and started last night with a donation to the This American Life Podcast.
I have several reasons for wanting to do this.  First, making a donation to things that have given me joy gives me more joy. Second, making frequent [...]

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What Can You Do When You Can’t Sleep?

By Bryan Woods | January 9, 2009

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Making UITableViews Suck Way Less

By Bryan Woods | December 3, 2008

Usually I wouldn’t get involved in arguments about which configurations framework designers choose to make default, but in the case of the iPhone’s UITableView, it’s pretty apparent the default options are going to lead you in circles of UI Case Study research and aesthetic ponderings before you realize a flip of a switch will solve [...]

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Why I write software (and why I think you should too)

By Bryan Woods | December 2, 2008

Just as you can split the world between smokers and non-smokers, or perhaps survivors and non-survivors, or people who have jumped out of a plane and those who have not, etc, it is possible to split the internet-dwelling public into two distinct groups:
Those who write software and those who complain incessantly about the software others [...]

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Beautiful Moments in Programming: Phusion Passenger

By Bryan Woods | December 1, 2008

 

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Writing PDFs with Ruby on Rails Using Prawn and Prawnto

By Bryan Woods | November 30, 2008

I’ve had the opportunity to spend the last few days working with the amazing Prawn Ruby gem and the equally stellar Prawnto Rails plugin., which allow you to dynamically create PDF files from a Ruby on Rails application. It’s elegant, fun, and stupid simple, and since I’ve never written a tutorial before, these libraries inspired [...]

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First in a Series: Beautiful Moments in Programming

By Bryan Woods | November 19, 2008

 
 
 
Django’s Pythonic SQL abstraction is a beautiful sight to behold.

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So what’s the deal with those Twitter charts, anyway?

By Bryan Woods | November 17, 2008

A couple of nights ago I posted some Twitter charts, the most interesting of which is reposted to the left (click to enlarge).
What you are looking at is a dendrogram of the people I follow on Twitter, sorted by their use of English. Dendrograms are great for showing off the results of a clustering algorithm, [...]

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We need an open source iPhone community like, now.

By Bryan Woods | November 17, 2008

Recently I’ve downloaded a few iPhone applications that have used the UITableView in ways I could have never even imagined. Really classy, brilliant interfaces that make using the software a real delight.  Check out Tweetsville, Facebook, and Twinkle to see what I’m getting at.
Tweetsville in particular is outstanding. The amount of work Ed Voas put [...]

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