Embracing change

It’s a month past due so here is my obligatory “I changed my job” post. Over the last nearly 8 years at Comcast as part of the ‘Online’ group and later as founding member of mighty Comcast Interactive Media I’ve made many business connections, met a number of excellent peers and forged a few relationships that will last a lifetime. As a happily married 40+ dad with mortgage and college payments I often feel over the hill with regards to blogging and living out loud....

March 3, 2012 · 5 min · Aaron Held

Crowdsourcing the arts and a misunderstood artist is seen in a new light

This weekend I attended a gallery opening of an exhibition called ‘50 Americans’ featuring the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Usually I have to spend the first few minutes or an Art exhibition reading the background to understand the story that the gallery is telling through the art. This one was different. Rather then view the Mapplethorpe images through the lens of an expert Sean Kelly’s people found 50 Americans, one per state, to curate the selection....

May 9, 2011 · 2 min · Aaron Held

Using python-dulwich to load any version of a file from a local git repo

On Monday we are kicking off an innovation week (more to come on that topic) and I’ve devised a little project that includes nearly every buzzword I’m interested in. I’m spending some time doing some technical spikes to see what is possible and I found a need to load a particular file from a git repo given the path and tree hash. I grabbed my trusty python, dulwich (native python-git library) and gave it a shot....

April 2, 2011 · 1 min · Aaron Held

the measure of Awesome

Development at work has been trending well in the new year and the team is getting excited about our formal incorporation of practices such as TDD and pair programming. I’m definitely perceive an intangible benefit in culture and fun. With a full test suite and engaged developers working out loud coding is fun again. I give a lot of thought to developer efficiency and generating metrics around our output is very important to me....

January 23, 2011 · 2 min · Aaron Held

OSX vs Ubuntu, Windows wins?

Ever since Barcamp I’ve been shopping for a personal laptop for general use as well as a development machine that I could use for work. Our work issued machine is a loaded mac powerbook. With a unix core osx has given me much of the power that I used to enjoy when I’d used linux as a primary os. However Apple is not doing wonders for free software and I felt the need to get back to my roots and move back to Linux....

January 2, 2011 · 2 min · Aaron Held