"Ok, so what the crap is Mongo? I find the best way to describe Mongo is the best features of key/values stores, document databases and RDBMS in one. No way, you say. That sounds perfect. Well, Mongo is not perfect, but I think it brings something kind of new to the database table."

"Deploying to Heroku with git push is awesome. I’m running a couple of different environments, though, and there’s extra stuff that I want to do when I deploy. Rake to the rescue!"

" 2168 // We have two choices:
2169 // Create a gradient based on a planar wave.
2170 // Or, composite two other image layers.
2171 // The more complexity available, the more likely it is we will create a composite
2172 // layer instead of a single layer. This recurses, of course, so we can have
2173 // composition layered arbitrarily deep."

"Both McLuhan and Heidegger are unequivocally pessimistic about technological change. I wonder if it’s not possible to do further damage to their ideas by blurring their warnings together. I wonder if McLuhan isn’t also talking about reframing thought as a reified and externalized storehouse of “raw material”. Certainly, when you watch digital addicts trying to function in the physical world, you recognize their discomfort with the body (boring!); but also their discomfort with the mind as private, internal, and sacred (even more boring!). The mass Gnosticism of the internet seems more like yearning for release from body and soul. Nevertheless, we remain nailed in place."

"Explaining Redis is tough, it’s easy to say “a data structures server” or “memcached on steroids” or something more jargon filled. It’s not exactly a key value store, it’s definitely not a relational or document-oriented database. The biggest selling point of Redis is that usually as programmers we have to bend our data into a table or document to save it, but with Redis we can persist data as we conceptually visualize it. Tasty!"