Author: David Faden
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Interview: Jordan Gilliland
Jordan Gilliland, now a director at Coupang, and I worked together at Google across a team or two, finally together on Google Now (predecessor of Discover), where we collaborated on something that almost launched. I’ve got fond memories of those times with him, which included my first time in a Tesla and many trips to…
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Small melilot flowers taste like snap peas
Helping with weeding a Living Classroom garden today, we pulled up a lot of what Seek tells me is small melilot: I nabbed a few of the plants we pulled to give eating it a try: One source said the flowers are edible so I decided to start with them: I tried a few of…
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Putting an Ohlone site on the map
Reading the Wikipedia entry for Adobe Creek yesterday, I was surprised to see mention of an Ohlone site not too far away from us off of El Monte Road in Los Altos Hills: Evidence of a smaller settlement within Los Altos was uncovered in 1971, when an Ohlone burial ground with skeletons—one with ceremonial beads—was…
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Putting Foothill College’s “Native Hill” on the map
I walked to Foothill College earlier today seeking the “Native Hill” described on this California Native Plant Society page (Archive). (I actually first heard about there being a native plant garden at Foothill College via a reference in this presentation from a Girl Scout describing her planned work at the Los Altos Woodland Library garden.)…
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Weeding at the school
I got to do some weeding at the school’s Living Classroom garden Saturday morning, only getting rained on a little. I’d noticed some of the weeds going to seed and so hoped to avoid some of the spread. I think I pulled out around 12 species of plants, working over around 2.5 hours. In the…
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Poppies in Los Altos
I’m intrigued by references to poppies in early Los Altos. For example, in a 1909 brochure from Paul Shoup, et al, marketing the area, there’s a photo of poppies with the caption: “Los Altos is famed for its fields of poppies.” And in Joe Salameda’s book “Memories of Los Altos“, J. Gilbert Smith is quoted…
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Static photo album creator
I’ve published a utility for creating a static photo album (no server-side stuff, just HTML + photos) given a folder of photos: https://github.com/fadend/go-photos. I was inspired to do this because in looking for costs to cut, I decided to stop paying for Photobucket. Whatever you used to find under https://s114.photobucket.com/user/dfaden (broken link), you can now…
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Another walk, another weed
I swung by the library to return some books, then picked up a few more: The game design book was waiting there for me. I searched for “startup” in the catalog on a whim, which led me to the others. (Per this Reddit thread, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design is also worth a look. The…
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Peer bonuses
One thing I really liked about Google is its peer bonus system. What other companies have something similar? Laszlo Bock describes Google’s system in his book Work Rules: The other feature of gThanks is the peer bonus… Giving employees the freedom to recognize one another is important. Many companies allow employees to nominate an employee…
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Mandelbrot Set in Autoplot
My older brother Jeremy was the first person to help me with programming. (And I’ve never stopped asking him for programming advice since then!) My first computer was a Commodore 128 that my mom picked up at a garage sale (it turns out from one of Jeremy’s high school friends); it was quite ancient even…