Author: Josh Sherman
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My experience with the Mandela effect
Remember that time I was bit by a dog? I sure as hell do. It was a choatic ordeal where I was living in fear of potentially contracting rabies as we waited to see if the dog that bit me ended up dying in quarantine. The doctor assured me that…
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It’s never too late to start tracking metrics
Dashboard-driven development, metrics-driven development, whatever you may call it, it’s super important. I’m embarassed to that this, but after running a successful site for over four years, I didn’t have a dashboard with even the most basic of metrics like new users per day or anything insightful about the site’s…
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Stop submitting feature requests for Open Source Software
A few years back I wrote about my experiences contributing to and maintaining open source projects. Since then, I’ve done my share of forking, pull requesting and even starting up new projects that people are forking and pull requesting. I make a very conscious effort to contribute to projects that…
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Bitmaps vs. Sets to track Monthly Active Users in Redis
Recently I was building a piece of functionality to track the daily and monthly active users on one of my sites. I already track this data in MySQL but retrieving the data was sluggish, even after creating a few new indexes, so I decided that I would use Redis. The…
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ERROR: Invalid position ‘1’
This error drove me mad. I had searched the interwebs at least a few times for it and couldn’t find a solution. All I wanted to do was block some lame ass script kiddie from scanning my server. I know the ufw command I was entering was fine, because it…
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Don’t try to speak my language
You may think you’re being cute. You may even think you’re being relevant. The fact is, you come across like someone that’s out of touch and trying too damn hard. I know you don’t mean it that way, and I think I may actually empathize with you a small bit….
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PHP is ꜱtupid and so are you
I hope you’re really fucking pissed right now. I hope you go thermonuclear on the comments box. Why? Because it really just proves how right I am about how stupid you are. You let some silly blog post get under your skin. Thing is, I really didn’t know what to…
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My skills have nothing to do with my interest
Recently a former co-worker of mine (by way of company acquisition) reached out about a project he was hoping that I would work on. I declined but worked in a small bit of permission networking and made an introduction to one of my buddies because I thought that he may…
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Who the hell are you and why are you emailing me?
I got this email the other day from WeVue, a Tampa-based startup for which I am acquainted. The email was regarding the “war for talent” and was pushing some webinar they are doing later in the month. Knowing how these things work, I assume they are going to be showing…
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How to block AdBlock users without JavaScript
This is probably one of the most rotten experiments I have done in recent times. I wanted to see what would happen if I blocked site usage from folks using ad blocking software. Would it cause a stir? Would people figure out that their ad blocker is to blame? Would…