Jeffrey Jenkins

Recent Posts

In Audio Meet Strongbox On The Media A nice concise story about Strongbox, the anonymous communications software for journalists to communicate with sources without even the journalists being able to find where The Future History of the Newspaper Industry On The Media Many people have predicted what would happen with the newspaper industry many times in the past, some were more accurate than others. With IRS Scandal, Conservative Bloggers Feel Vindicated On The Media Conservative bloggers have been covering this scandal for over a year, but the rest of the media only just caught on. This story is about what...

This is the first in my hopefully weekly series on the stories I read and listened to over the course of the week. They won't necessarily be from this week. It's primarily non-fiction, although I might throw In Audio The Audacity of Louis Ortiz This American Life Louis Ortiz looks almost identical to Barack Obama. This is the story of his being an unemployed Bronx resident when Obama was in the primary in 2008 up until the present. It has all sorts of great anecdotes about what happens when it looks like Obama has just shown up somewhere randomly with...

Note: There are some graphic pictures of my teeth later on, so consider yourself warned if you don't like the insides of mouths! When I was in grade 6 I was playing a game with my friends and I ran out in the street to get a ball. On the way back I wasn't looking and I got hit by a minivan. I blacked out, but when I woke up I was on the ground off the street in pushup position. My mouth was gushing blood because one of my front teeth had come out. My mom and I made...

This post is going to detail my job search in NYC in late 2012. It has an eye towards giving people who might be considering getting into the job market hints on where to get started and what to expect. A Bit About Me: I've been a developer professionally for 7-8 years. My time was split about evenly between "full stack" development and backend development. The former was mostly in Java (with a bit of C++) and the latter was entirely in Python/HTML/JS/CSS. I'm a very good programmer and I do extremely well in the standard algorithms/data structures technical interviews....

Before I started working on my current startup, MetaInbox, I worked at a startup called ShopWiki. ShopWiki was founded in 2005 and exited in 2010, selling to Oversee.net. The premise of the site was that it paired a comparison shopping engine (CSE) with a wiki which anyone could use to write buying guides. The search engine was pretty novel at the time since it used a crawler rather than just accepting data feeds like basically every other site did. As it turned out, no one outside the company was really interested in writing wikis, so the company pivoted to focus...

While I don't think that I'm going to use it – my calendaring needs are extremely minimal – I think that this is a really interesting application from a user interaction perspective, and would encourage you to check it out. What really makes Caliander stand out as an application is what it calls a "Perceptual Log" view. The screen is broken into vertical bars representing a period of time. Depending on which view you're in (day, week, month) the bars will be as small as an hour or large as a day. When you click and drag one of the...

When I was born I had a variety of things wrong with my eye. I had an astigmatism, an condition where the shape of the lens of my eye is wrong. Lots of people have it, and it's pretty easily fixed with corrective lenses. My opthamologist explained that my eye was football shaped, and I was lucky in that the football was aligned vertically instead of horizontally, so the natural shape of my eyes would diminish the effect somewhat. Not a big deal. In addition to that I also had strabismus. Strabismus causes your eye to have a "turn" and...

My Normal Routine: I get up at about 6:30 when my girlfriend (a teacher) wakes up. I check email and feeds, and then start working. At about 8am I’ll have breakfast and then (weather allowing) bike to work from midtown east to Union Square. I eat lunches with my former coworkers from ShopWiki, except once a week when I meet up with someone I know to catch up (this is a new routine, I’m trying to be better at networking) I finish working between 5 and 6, then head home to eat (and possibly cook) dinner. The rest of the...

While working on Nexus, my current project, I ran into a really strange error. I had just finished rewriting all of the database models I was planning to use and wanted to do a basic consistency check. The structure of the package was as follows: nexus/ models/ db.py # SQLAlchemy Base and misc feeds.py # Models related to RSS feeds nexus.py # Generic models users.py # User-related models ... # lots of other models ui/ views/ subscribe.py # View for subscriptions I wrote the subscription code as a test of the models, since it had to touch most of them...

Recent Posts

This Week in Media: 20 May, 2013

This Week in Media: 5 May, 2013

My Experience as an Adult with Braces

My Job Search and the NY Tech Scene

The Powerful Hidden Product Search in ShopWiki

Caliander

Strabismus and Amblyopia

My Routine

The Python Import Name Game