Author: grant

Be relentlessly resourceful

I was writing a talk for investors, and I had to explain what to look for in founders. What would someone who was the opposite of hapless be like? They’d be relentlessly resourceful. Not merely relentless. That’s not enough to make things go your way except in a few mostly uninteresting domains. In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Which means you can’t simply plow through them, because you don’t know initially how hard they are; you don’t know whether you’re about to plow through a block of foam or granite. So you have to be resourceful. You have to have keep trying new things.
Be relentlessly resourceful.

–Paul Graham
(via Ben)

TSPL 4th edition

The 4th edition of The Scheme Programming Language by R. Kent Dybvig is announced in the MIT Press catalog.

“The fourth edition has been substantially revised and expanded to bring the content up to date with the current Scheme standard, the Revised6 Report on Scheme. All parts of the book were updated and three new chapters were added, covering the language’s new library, exception handling, and record-definition features.”

The paper catalog gives a date of July 2009. The online catalog gives a date of September 2009.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11984

(via comp.lang.scheme)

What file is a name defined in?

 

#lang scheme
; What file is a name defined in?
;; definition-source : identifier -> (U symbol path)
;; Returns a symbol or path for the module that contains
;; the definition for a given name.
(define (definition-source id)
  (let ([binding (identifier-binding id)])
    (and (list? binding)
         (resolved-module-path-name
          (module-path-index-resolve (car binding))))))
(definition-source #'map)
 ; => #
(definition-source #'+)
; => #%kernel
; "The + procedure is defined in the built-in kernel module
; (it has no Scheme source file)."

(via PLT)

How To Nail A Job Interview

What is it that certain people say or do during a job interview that makes them stand out? Why do some people struggle to find work, while others land a job in no time? I wanted to know, and the only way to find out was to experience the interview from the other side of the table. If I could be the one asking the interview questions, not answering, I could see first hand what made candidates stand out. I could then take that knowledge and cater my behavior in any future interview to give myself the best chance of getting hired.

This fellow recorded interviews, highlighted key points, and posted both here.
(via Seth)

Simple Yearly Archive

Simple Yearly Archive is a rather neat and simple WordPress plugin that allows you to display your archives in a year-based list. It works mostly like the usual WP archive, but displays all published posts seperated by their year of publication. That said, it’s also possible to restrict the output to certain categories, and much more.

The default WordPress “Archive” widget is nice, but once you get more than a couple years worth of archives it starts to take up a lot of space and as such become very ugly. This plugin deals with the problem rather nicely by allowing you to include the archive anywhere you wish. For example, I put it on a page (aptly) named “Archive”.
The one thing that you will probably want to do right off the bat is to configure a date-format for the posts and display post-count per year.

Ext JS

“Ext JS is a cross-browser JavaScript library for building rich internet applications.”
In particular, it allows you to build desktop-like applications that run in a web browser. Considering the speed of CPUs and Internet connections today, this could be pretty interesting.