Reid Burke

  • “Sorry, your coffee isn’t an artisanal ritual.”

    Marco Arment writes about coffee lovers who look down upon Keurig K-Cups:

    We’re the ones who keep creating, replacing, Kickstarting, and spending top dollar on ever-more-specialized equipment, even when it differs from established products only in arbitrary or purely decorative ways that have no discernable effect on the actual coffee (except maybe prolonging the process of making it).

    We’re the ones who obsess over every little detail of brewing technique as if they matter much more than they really do, making good coffee ever more alienating and confusing to casual coffee drinkers who don’t have time to study and fuss over it as much as we do. […]

    Maybe we’d get some of the Keurig fans to use our methods if we weren’t so pretentious, wasteful, expensive, and inaccessible ourselves. […]

    Our obsession with gear and “rituals” is only distracting them — and us — from the real problem: old, mediocre, or badly roasted beans.

  • The Invention of the AeroPress

    Zachary Crockett at Priceonomics brings us the story of Alen Alder’s company Aerobie and how a toy manufacturer started making coffee makers.

    The AeroPress was conceived at Alan Adler’s dinner table. The company was having a team meal, when the wife of Aerobie’s sales manager posed a question: “What do you guys do when you just want one cup of coffee?”

    A long-time coffee enthusiast and self-proclaimed “one cup kinda guy,” Adler had wondered this many times himself. He’d grown increasingly frustrated with his coffee maker, which yielded 6-8 cups per brew. In typical Adler fashion, he didn’t let the problem bother him long: he set out to invent a better way to brew single cup of coffee.

    I love my AeroPress. It really does make a great cup.

  • Cross-Browser Testing at DeveloperWeek

    The fine folks at Sauce Labs invited me to speak at DeveloperWeek San Francisco about browser testing at Yahoo scale. We test YUI on IE 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, & 11, iOS 6 & 7, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, which runs over 120,000 tests on every push.

    We’ve learned a lot about how to spend our time and the challenges of CI testing with multiple browsers. I began with a introduction to Yeti, the easy way to get started with web testing, which also drives over a million automated tests every week for YUI.

    Check out the slides from my talk. If you were there, thanks for being a great audience! There was a great turnout with smart questions.

    If you are interested in working on our unique frontend to CI testing with me at Yahoo, get in touch.

  • Infrastructure as force multiplier

    Steve Klabnik considers “Is npm worth 26MM?”:

    If you want to repeatably manufacture an open source ecosystem, you need capital to do so. And a firm that’s progressive enough to understand the indirect payoffs of investing in infrastructure is poised to have a huge advantage.

    npm’s CEO:

  • Yeti 0.2.27 — First-class code coverage

    Less than a week since the last release and as promised, Yeti 0.2.27 has shipped today with code coverage support.

    Yeti 0.2.27 provides first-class code coverage reporting provided by Istanbul.

    Simply use Yeti with the -c or --coverage option. By default, Yeti will instrument your code on-the-fly and show a brief summary.

    Yeti has ran 1,207,780 tests for YUI since Yeti 0.2.26 shipped 6 days ago.

    I’m very excited to bring code coverage to yo/tests.