Programming

Time Should Fade (Almost) Everything...

Update: There aren’t APIs for most of the services that I’d want to use here, so I’m putting this project on pause for now. I’ll probably hack something together for my own use, but trying to turn this into a service doesn’t seem possible given API usage guidelines from these services. I posted the following to Twitter the other day: So, if all goes according to plan, all of my Twitter history up to yesterday-ish will be deleted, and I will have setup some code (that I control) that will delete everything older than 7 days on an ongoing basis.

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Saying goodbye to Google Analytics, Hello Piwik

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was looking at reducing my dependence on free services as an experiment to see if I can improve my privacy. That post was about changing my behavior as a consumer. This time, I’m looking at the services I use in my personal development work, especially those services that feed ad networks. In the case of my personal sites, this means Google Analytics (GA).

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Some Observations on the Mobile Market in India

Living in India has given me a new perspective on a lot of things. Professionally, I’m constantly learning a lot just by seeing how differently people use their phones, and how different the market and ecosystem around mobile is here. Intex? Karbonn? Spice Mobile? Oppo? The biggest eye opener has been seeing the number of India-focused brands here in the smartphone market. In the US, there are global brands like Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and LG and then a spread of other smaller brands.

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Why we stopped using Trello, even though we love it

I tweeted this earlier … we’ve stopped using @trello at @fanzter, but I still love the product. The new board view looks great: http://t.co/fhvRuFN87X #fb — Sujal Shah (@sujal) June 18, 2013 … which prompted a few people to ask, "Why'd you stop using Trello?" The answer is pretty specific to us and our particular organizational inertia (such as it is for a small company like us), but here it is:

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Sensors, LEDs & iPhones, oh my!

Over Christmas, I hacked together my first hardware/software project. It's been a long time since I've picked up a soldering iron, let alone built something worthy of sharing. It turned out to be a fun little project. Cause, effect, agency I got the idea to do a project over Christmas while looking for toys for my son for Christmas. I wanted to find something that would teach him simple cause and effect relationships where he could cause something (e.

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Proxigram supports Facebook

You can now pull in photos from your Facebook account. Right now, it grabs everything, but I have controls in the works to let you choose privacy settings or hide individual photos. There's pseudo realtime support, too. Proxigram should update basically as soon as you upload the photo. As always, everything is on Github.

Proxigram now supports Flickr

Quick update on Proxigram: it now supports Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing service. If you're a Pro account holder, it will even get realtime updates from Flickr, just like Instagram provides. The "point" of the app has changed, too. The goal is to build a single API endpoint for all of your photos. While the photos will still be hosted on their respective services, you can now get one read-only API to see a normalized view of them all.

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Proxigram - a sprint using Node.js, Express.js, & the Instagram API

I'm happy to share a little experiment I played with this week. I needed to take a look at Node.js & it's family of technology for a project but found it hard to find good explanations of best practices, etc. There are a half-dozen competing boilerplate/template samples that have very little in the way of explanation or comments. So, I decided the best way to get familiar with the nitty gritty of building a Node/Express app was to write one.

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Google I/O: An unadulterated celebration of technological imagination

That mouthful is my one sentence description of Google I/O. The demo floors and tonight's After Hours party are full of whimsy and wonder, literal playgrounds for technology geeks of all stripes. The atmosphere at I/O is all about the possible, the future, and the fanciful. There are companies making robots, others building home mesh networks that can control all your lights, and yet others working on all sorts of crazy gadgetry.

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