For several reasons, I’ve decided to start blogging at StuffDavidSays.com. I’m not sure how I’ll bring this content forward, but it might just stay here. The format is a little lighter, with less to prove, and just me chatting about problems I think we can solve.

Hypothes.is is going to be a big deal. I’m very excited to follow and support their work.

I’ve used Backbone.js on several applications this year. My first attempts were a little awkward. I’m not promising that things are less awkward today, but I’d like to share what I’m discovering and hopefully get comments for things that people have found to be more useful.

I thought the best way to do this would be to give some idioms, or patterns for using Backbone.js. These would be common problems, and how I’ve solved them.

The first idiom I’ll tackle is the application structure. Since Backbone is a framework, it’s useful to keep that framework organized. So, the one-page JavaScript examples that have models, collections, routers, and views all in one file is too messy for my taste…

I’ve had some fun lately working a little with some basic Bayesian networks. It’s more about playing with the data a little, slowing down and paying attention to the world around me. I tend to use this a lot with the games that I play: dominoes, parcheesi.

I thought I’d put a simple example together to show what I’m talking about. I put together a network predicting whether or not I’ll finish a blog article that I start:

I attended the URUG meeting last night and really enjoyed myself. I’ve missed going to those meetings, very smart, entertaining, and helpful people show up to those. Charles Max Wood gave a great overview on Rack. Charles did a great job of covering this, and I thought I’d post my notes online.

So, Rack is a webserver interface for Ruby web services. It is useful when you want to compose a web service from various layers of responses. So, say you want to automatically log every call to your web server before it hits the application, Rack would make that easy. Other ideas for Rack include:

I love The Hudsucker Proxy. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Today. The main character, Norville, played by Tim Robins, is an enterprising young man in a big corporation. He invents the hoola hoop, or the “extruded plastic dingus” as he called it. His pitch became: “you know, for kids.”

Before all of that, though, was his orientation to Hudsucker:

You punch in at 8:30 every morning, except you punch in at 7:30 following a business holiday, unless it’s a Monday, then you punch in at 8 o'clock. Punch in late and they dock you. Incoming articles get a voucher, outgoing articles provide a voucher. Move any article without a voucher and they dock you. Letter size a green voucher, oversize a yellow voucher, parcel size a maroon voucher. Wrong color voucher and they dock you! 6787049A/6. That is your employee number. It will not be repeated! Without your employee number you cannot get your paycheck. Inter-office mail is code 37, intra-office mail 37-3, outside mail is 3-37. Code it wrong and they dock you! This has been your orientation. Is there anything you do not understand, is there anything you understand only partially? If you have not been fully oriented, you must file a complaint with personnel. File a faulty complaint and they dock you!

I’ve taken quite a bit of time getting creative with Fathom’s knowledge base. My requirements are to have knowledge bases that are easy to query, extend, and understand. A knowledge base has a context, so that it’s easy to create a new hypothesis or apply a model in a new way. The underlying infrastructure is often hidden because of views. Views make a knowledge base look like a spreadsheet, feed well into a chart, cache learned behavior, or supply data for a templated report…

I launched a new blog yesterday, statcasts.com. It won’t replace this blog, not at all. @griffpup and I and a bunch of other people will be doing some video podcasts about statistics and stuff. We’ve delayed our first video podcast until Wednesday because I want some time to play with the Sex Offender list I got from @dbrady and I get to handle some administrative tasks for Fleet Ventures.

This past weekend, I have been clarifying the business case for Vibrant, our medical practice management software. I realize that the things I’ve been thinking about are the things anyone who wants to make money in business thinks about. A short collection of these ideas may be useful, so I present them here.

I listened to a talk last Friday by Devlin Daley about his experiences with building a business case for Instructure and their learning management solution, Canvas. I was his and Brian Whitmer’s first employee at Instructure and watched them do the things that Devlin spoke about…

What an incredible night. It’s 12:15 at night, and I’m buzzing from Ignite Salt Lake. I hadn’t been before, so I couldn’t imagine how fun it was to get together, meet new people, and get outside of my comfort zone. We learned great things about running 100 miles, surviving life in the airport, and how to survive a bear attack.

There were many people there that I’d love to do projects with. New perspectives worth thinking about. Raichle Farrley spoke about building a school in Tansania, I think. She’s been working on her PhD, has finished her comprehensives, but still needs to defend her dissertation. That’s typically a time when students hunker down in a grind to the finish line. Instead, she’s changing the world in an incredibly agile and effective way. She may not have her PhD yet, she says, but she has her GSD—Get Shit Done. That was the note Andrew Shafer left as our theme for the event: The Ignite Salt Lake GSD conference. That, after a face-melting, guitar smashing finale by Jeremy Hanks and Wes Lapioli…