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Kellan Elliott-McCrea: Blog

laughingmeme.org

A personal blog of Kellan Elliott-McCrea. I don’t really know what a “laughing meme” is. It sounded cool in 1999.

Software / engineering practiceEngineering management / careersAI / ML

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
1,607 from 10 Apr 2002 to 26 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (12 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://laughingmeme.org/feed.xml

Latest

October 2026

  1. Sick Day Project: Outlanders 2 “Wiki”
  2. Goblin Village

September 2026

  1. Managers Are Catalysts

June 2026

  1. Canonization and the Overhang

May 2026

  1. The Importance of Tools and the Hedonic Treadmill of “Feels like Magic”

March 2026

  1. Coding on Vacation
  2. Hack: claude -p
  3. Timberborn 1.0, HTTP Lever, and Claude Code
  4. Socialize the Plan
  5. Ed’s Software, in a Time of Fear

February 2026

  1. Software Practices from the Scrap Heap?
  2. Code has _always_ been the easy part

June 2025

  1. Web app for looking up NYC street trees

May 2025

  1. Vibe coding for teams, thoughts to date

October 2024

  1. GDrive to S3

August 2024

  1. Fixed the XML

June 2024

  1. A Link Blog in the Year 2024

May 2024

  1. Minor blog updates
  2. What we mean to others

January 2023

  1. Software and its Discontents, Part 3: Rising Cost and Elusive Success
  2. Software and its Discontents, Part 2: An Explosion of Complexity
  3. Software and its Discontents, January 2023, Part 1

November 2022

  1. Full stack
  2. Boiling water with the lid off
  3. ideas.txt: Find Me There
  4. Twitter Messiness Was A Feature

October 2022

  1. Quick and dirty overview of tasks in Obsidian

September 2022

  1. Climate and tithing
  2. A techie thinking about IRA

August 2022

  1. I need a CRM
  2. Why is productivity tracking popular with management?

June 2019

  1. New-ish site

November 2018

  1. What I'm up to: tech leadership
  2. What I'm up to: researching

July 2016

  1. Don’t pave the paths used by the unhappy cows

February 2016

  1. I have some questions about mobile, geo, and platforms

January 2016

  1. When does conversational commerce make sense today?
  2. Towards an understanding of technical debt

November 2015

  1. Optimizing for Learning

August 2015

  1. Five years, building a culture, and handing it off.

June 2015

  1. More thoughts on the Keyboardio Model 01

April 2015

  1. "Engineering capacity for an economic revolution"

January 2015

  1. A little bit on the technical track

December 2014

  1. 2014 End of Year Booklist

November 2014

  1. Annoyed by "The Peripheral"

October 2014

  1. Pumpkin Pudding

September 2014

  1. "Wolf" narrative considered harmful (also biologically unlikely)

July 2014

  1. AWS Redshift: "Missing newline: Unexpected character 0x4f found at location 3"

May 2014

  1. Communication Skills
  2. Shell trick for the perpetually distracted

December 2013

  1. Explaining to the phone how to be a CTO

November 2013

  1. Slow Twitter
  2. 5 Approaches to Handling Bugs We Tried Before Our Current Approach

October 2013

  1. A quick knot in a few Flickr threads

August 2013

  1. Paths to Production Confidence, Part 1 of N

July 2013

  1. Surviving being senior (tech) management

May 2013

  1. Novels, Yes And Improv Comedy

March 2013

  1. Mr Chaturong Nakmamee – Koh Tao, Thailand
  2. Going on a honeymoon, be back soon

February 2013

  1. The one thing thats worked so far
  2. Competence!
  3. Are you here? A feature on the side

December 2012

  1. entrepreneurship, its also not just hacking up a website
  2. remembrance engines, from the comments
  3. Two Weeks, With A Ring

October 2012

  1. Notes towards a future understanding of distributed documenting behavior.

September 2012

  1. The veggie burger, not to mention the ethos and the beer list, at the Randolph are legit
  2. Business Transcendental
  3. App.net and Cargo Culting

August 2012

  1. Openness Rocks
  2. I got a postcard from Vik today

July 2012

  1. oldtweets

June 2012

  1. A new (to me) spam type: the "let me write you a blog post"
  2. The ambivalence of backing a successful Kickstarter project
  3. Random Walk as Cargo Cult
  4. Move fast, break stuff
  5. The Dagger and the Coin by Daniel Abraham are solid

April 2012

  1. "Where the best and brightest come to shine..."
  2. Room for disruption

March 2012

  1. Open 24 hours
  2. because as soon as we started [pinning] for you
  3. Austin plans, so far (SxSW 2012)

February 2012

  1. Remembrance Engines

January 2012

  1. Pour Overs
  2. "They can even stop when they have a map that is just good enough."
  3. Conflicted on: per country censorship, responsibility, and the cost of doing business

December 2011

  1. 15 Minutes Spent Sleuthing the Case of the Missing Fab.com Engineering Team
  2. pinterest.api.php

November 2011

  1. Some *.es domains coming for renewal this week
  2. Snooping on an iPhone apps API usage (aka light weight reverse engineering)

September 2011

  1. What apps do you use to explore your city?

August 2011

  1. kindle.amazon.com doing some things ridiculously badly
  2. Booknotes: Kindle Highlights to Tumblr, a Bookmarklet
  3. Slow News, Redux

July 2011

  1. Slow News
  2. Getting started with Flickr real time APIs (in PHP)
  3. Cost of false positives
  4. Morning thought: transparency is for customers

June 2011

  1. Notes on Feature Based Group Forming
  2. "Sorry! We did something wrong." – Twitter, on suspending my account.
  3. Flourishes, Craftsmanship, Dates, History, and Flickr

May 2011

  1. Shipping, it gets harder
  2. The Brooklyn Problem

April 2011

  1. Roots
  2. Upcoming Gigs
  3. dirty hands

March 2011

  1. +1 for knowing your history
  2. Airbnb was the breakout app at SxSW 2011
  3. stellar.io
  4. Anti-Social SxSW
  5. "The internet is too important to outsource "
  6. Good work, not done by the humble

January 2011

  1. Tip: Flickr standard photo response as slideshow
  2. ville, noun
  3. Sub-optimization
  4. Theres a feed for that
  5. WifiMug.org data and doing the right thing

December 2010

  1. Why did Flickr miss the mobile photo opportunity that Instagram and PicPlz are pursuing?

November 2010

  1. You and ...
  2. Project Idea: Accolad.es (working title)

September 2010

  1. Dinosaur Development
  2. Blogging like 2004

July 2010

  1. Cow Clicker
  2. Freds wrong (or quoted out of context)
  3. weathernear.me
  4. Worse then soggy
  5. Status Update

May 2010

  1. Siren Noise
  2. Minimal Competence: Data Access, Data Ownership, and Sharecropping.
  3. Henry Blodget: "Facebooks Approach To Innovation Is The Secret To Its Success"
  4. 4584

April 2010

  1. Binary Search, and Testing
  2. Sunday Morning Thoughts: Facebook, Graph API, and Open Graph
  3. Canon S90
  4. Upgrading Jaunty to Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) on Linode?

March 2010

  1. Armory Data Mining

February 2010

  1. KrazyDad: Mayor of the North Pole
  2. geobloggers: Flickr Photos now in Bing Maps
  3. A Whole Lotta Nothing: Skinner Boxes
  4. Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on the Cheap
  5. Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr
  6. What Second Life can teach about scaling

January 2010

  1. (One of the many) Ebook Dilemmas.
  2. 4294967295 and MySQL INT(20) Syntax Blows
  3. Counting Things, and RPEs

December 2009

  1. Quotable

November 2009

  1. On a roof top in Brooklyn ....
  2. A Certain Kind of Memory
  3. Sky Captain is Building Ur Cloudz
  4. What Everybody Knows

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