Blog

Some people have to deal with quite a fair bit in their morning commute. Thankfully I am not one of those folks. Whether it’s rolling over the Burrard bridge on my bike, or strolling around false creek to take the Aquabus, I seem to have faired quite well when it comes to commuting to the office. Vancouver [...]
Read More

Every person who writes, whether for business or otherwise, should read this essay. Though his focus is on political language, I believe Orwell’s arguments are equally valid for almost all business-related writing. Too long, didn’t read? This is the executive summary: Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing [...]
Read More

For such a small and innocuous bean, coffee is one of those things that has the potential to strike a chord with so many varying personality types from all walks of life and cultural backgrounds. At 2Paths, we have our very own espresso machine which has allowed those of us with a penchant for coffee to [...]
Read More

Largely for my own reference, here are some Unix shell tricks that have come up lately. If you’re using Linux, Mac OS X, or other Unix-like systems, these might be handy. Redirecting output When a process starts, it opens three file descriptors: file descriptor 0 for standard input (STDIN), file descriptor 1 for standard output (STDOUT), and [...]
Read More

We recently had a tech talk about scalability as it pertains to developing web applications. Many best practises were discussed including load balancing, clustering, highly-available databases, eventually consistent application designs. In most web applications, the proportion of dynamic requests (application logic) to static requests (images, javascript, css, html, flash) is usually quite low. As a result, [...]
Read More