14 January 2016
tl;dr I've found a new blog that I'm enjoying reading so far, and thought readers might want to browser-bookmark for future consumption.
Twitter sometimes dumps some good stuff into my face, and in this case, this comes to me via James Ward over Facebook. (I think he posted it to Twitter and it echoed to his Facebook feed, but details, details. I saw it through Facebook, so Facebook gets the credit.)
Meet TechBlog. I have no idea who they are other than what I see on the website---my guess is that they're an online real-estate system of some fashion, but whether that's as a competitor to Redfin or something, I really can't say. But their blog is a very nice mix of technical topics, and the writing is quite well-done. Consider this list of posts that I flagged just browsing the first three pages of the site:
In particular, James linked to the first post (the category theory one), and it's a good read. I still don't claim to completely understand the mojo and mystery around monads, monoids, category theory, endofunctors and all that other jazz, but the author does a great job of setting up the real-world business problem, then talking about the abstract stuff (the basics of monoids and functors), then talking about how this can be used to solve their problem, complete with Java interface examples, and builds up from there. It's a very well-written piece, and maybe finally I begin to understand the ideas here better.
I don't know who these folks are, but damn, I'm impressed. Not that the random musings of a longhaired geek in Seattle makes all that much difference to them, I imagine, but well done, folks, and I'll be looking to consume more of your posts over the next several months, so keep 'em coming!
Last modified 14 January 2016