Supply Without Demand
Two posts I have stopped being able to scroll past. The first is a screenshot of a small web app, captioned with the “triumph” of having vibe-coded it in a weekend. The replies are mostly other people sharing their own...
My name is Josh. This is my website. You can find talks I’ve given and things I’ve written here.
The One-Way Doors That Remain
Almost every practice we have for building software was designed around an assumption that’s quietly stopped being true. Test coverage budgets, code review queues, refactoring debt, junior hiring pipelines, the ratio of product managers to engineers, the number of services...
Don't Juggle Other People's Balls
A few months ago I stumbled across Murray Bowen’s work on overfunctioning and underfunctioning in family systems. It’s a framework from therapy, not management, but the pattern it describes hit uncomfortably close to home. It gave me a name for...
Abolish Golf
Golf courses occupy over 2.2 million acres of American land. That’s more than 3,500 square miles, larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Globally, countries dedicate more land to golf courses than to solar and wind energy installations. We are...
The New Open Source Is Specs, Not Code
This week, a Cloudflare engineering manager “rebuilt” 94% of the Next.js API surface in under a week. He used Claude across 800 AI coding sessions, spending roughly $1,100 in API tokens. The result is something resembling Next.js that benchmarks at...
Innovation Outsiders
The vast majority of big pillar innovation work being done in corporate america is relegated to innovation outsiders – groups external to the core product delivery teams (Labs, Innovation Teams, etc.). They are expected to find a business partner or...
Course Complete!
So… it has been a while since my last update. This spring’s semester wrapped up well for both me, as well as the students in my Python for social scientists course.
Computation Frameworks for the Social Sciences (aka I’m teaching a class)
This spring I am teaching my first course! It is a pretty small seminar, 8-10 graduate students, but they all seem excited about the material. It is a “Programming for Political Scientists” course that will use Python to both teach...
Rook
As I said in my last post, I am working on setting up a statistical web service using R. I decided to use the Rook library to do so and wanted to give a brief overview of how Rook works...
Rook and R Webservices
Recently I have been working on setting up a webservice that does some non trivial statistical work. Normally, my go to when building web services is Ruby/Rails due to ease of use, then I offload anything computationally intensive to something...
Exponential Growth and Resource Consumption
In August, while on the road moving to Duke, I heard a great interview on NPR with David Suzuki. During this interview he talked about the relationship between anything that grows exponentially and the resources that it consumes. In particular...
Getting into Git
This monday, I was asked by [Mike Ward(https://web.duke.edu/methods/)] to give a talk to his ICEWS group at Duke about the wonders of source control and how to get started using git. I was excited to do it because I am...
Bullet Plugin for Rails
Recently I have been working on improving the performance in one of my clients Rails applications, trying to get page load times down. Looking at the query log it was obvious that there was way too much activity going on...
LAMP Development for Windows
I have been doing development in PHP for a long time and have yet to find a really satisfactory solution on Windows. When I recently flattened my home PC and had to restart I thought I would try a new...
Building Grammars in .NET
As I’ve shown before (here, here, and here), the Microsoft .NET Speech API allows you to quickly and easily build applications that take advantage of the good folks at Microsoft Research‘s work on speech recognition. The general process is that...
Getting your C# app to run in the System Tray
While making some additions to the Speech Framework, I needed to figure out how to get my WPF application to run in the system tray. For the speech framework, the sys-tray is a natural place for the application to run,...
Javascript, Flash and cross-browser clipboard fun
Recently I have been wrestling with writing some code that will manipulate text on a user’s clipboard in a web browser. I thought I would share my findings here for others who might be interested in the same topic.
Miles per Gallon vs. Gallons per Mile
A new study by Richard Larrick of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, recently published in Science magazine shows that most people have the wrong intuition about how to save gas. This is because they misunderstand what the “miles per gallon”...
Speech Plugins: Weather
In this entry we’ll look at building a basic plugin for a speech engine (Microsoft Speech III), that will respond to simple queries about the weather. For this tutorial we will be using the Yahoo Weather API. Note that if...
Microsoft Speech III: Setting up a pluggable infrastructure
This post will build on the work done in Microsoft Speech II, where we saw how to interact with our computer via voice. In this tutorial we will build a plugin infrastructure which we will use to add functionality to...
Microsoft Speech II: Getting your computer to listen
In this post I’ll show you how to take our simple project from the first example, Microsoft Speech I, and get it to understand input spoken into a microphone. Note that everything I’m showing can be found in the MSDN...
Microsoft Speech I: Getting your computer to talk
This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of posts that detail my explorations with the Microsoft Speech recognition and synthesis libraries built into Vista. I am working on automating certain parts of my home and (after...