I’m not afraid to say I found myself getting a little emotional… but emotional in the same way I got when I first saw Steve’s Stanford graduation speech. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.“

Over the past few years, I’ve constantly had this amazing side dish at Tex-Mex restaurants: Sweet baked masa, or Sweet Baked Corn. Think of it as corn bread, but ever-so-slightly-sweeter, and in more of a side-of-rice texture.

To pair with the sweet baked masa, I went with a Baked Parmesan Tilapia recipe I heavily modified to fit the Tex-mex theme.

A while back @mrgan tweeted the following:

When half of the duo responsible for Salt & Fat mentions food, listen.

Hmm, cream braising… Interesting. I filed this away for later exploration after first seeing it, but I found myself thinking about it more and more. Reading alone in a quiet room I’d hear a soft whisper, creeeam braaaising. I would wake in the middle of the night, feverishly yelling CREAM BRAISING. One or both of those stories are not true.

I finally got around to trying it the other day, the results were surprisingly good! The cream takes a bit of the bite off the sprouts, and gives them a rich, decadent texture. But, the earthiness and distinctive flavor of Brussels sprouts is still there and makes its way into the cream sauce. Oh yeah, that’s a bonus of making this dish: simmer the cream to thicken and it makes an amazing sauce.

I paired the sprouts with some fried chicken, and the result was the best down-home meal I’ve had in a while. I highly recommend giving it a try.

Ingredients

• 1 bag of Brussels sprouts
• 1 8-oz carton of Heavy Cream

I pan-seared the Brussels sprouts in olive oil until there was noticeable browning, seasoning it liberally with salt, pepper, and paprika. I then added the cream and stirred, digging into the bottom of the pan gently to get any tasty bits off the bottom. Finally, I covered and let simmer on low heat for about 35 minutes.

Be sure to use the excess cream sauce to dip whatever protein or baked flour product you’re going with that night — you won’t regret it!

Believe me, I understand his reluctancy because I felt it too. If you had asked me two months ago what I thought users think about these, I’d say they thought it was spammy, obtrusive, and just plain shady. But then I found myself implementing it in Key Ring in our latest update. Oh, how my feelings have changed.

The Vocal Minority

I’ve heard that review systems tend to expose the vocal minority, and I believe this. It doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon or iTunes, the vast majority of people who are satisfied, or heaven forbid happy, with a product will never take the time to write a review or leave a rating.

But, there’s a small and extremely motivated group of people that are willing, nay eager, to sling around 1-star reviews at the slightest hint of inconvenience. They have a forum, and by God they will use it. This affects the sleep patterns of app developers in ways I never fathomed until I became one.

The Lazy, Content Majority

The ratings solicitation is the app developers’ last bastion of defense against the Vocal Minority. Key Ring was a meh-inducing 3 stars for the first year of its existence, and our reviews were pretty evenly dispersed between 1 star and 5 stars. After implementing a very unobtrusive, one-time, opt-in ratings solicitation, magically Key Ring is now a sturdy 4.5 stars! The 5 star ratings are through the roof.

Oh how I wish I could attribute the dramatic change to the new UI, speed improvements, or something else I could brag about. Nope, if you look at the written reviews for Key Ring it becomes obvious that the users who are content with the app (who would never give a second thought to rating or reviewing it) are blurting a few words of praise and tapping that last star on the far right just because the app happened to remind them, in a moment of whimsical curiousity and boredom, that iTunes has this rating system and using it might be slightly less boring than whatever they are doing.

The surprising thing is, we have not once had a single complaint or mention about the ratings solicitation. Hell, we get notified by users when we mispell words in our Terms of Service!

The Bottom Line

There are people out there who are completely satisfied with whatever you’re producing, but you’ve probably never heard from them. In an ecosystem that values the coveted “rating” so very dearly, a tactful solicitation for a review is a great way to expose your fans and let potential users of your app know that it is worthwhile. Don’t be afraid to implement one, and don’t think less of apps that do.

I always thought it was kinda inconvenient that there’s a “DNS propagation” downtime. Looks like one of the things Google is doing is making DNS propagation fast and asynchronous to requests.

Google Public DNS independently resolves domain names and keeps the resolutions in the cache until their time-to-live (TTL) expires, at which point they are automatically refreshed. The cycle of caching and refreshing is performed offline, asynchronously with user requests, so that responses are almost always available directly from cache.

• CSS Gradient Tool; Build the Apple Navigation Bar
• Erlang Trick O’ The Day

start_link() ->
  supervisor:start_link({local, ?MODULE}, ?MODULE, []).

Which in turn calls the initialization callback:

init(_Args) ->
  %% do some stuff.

Notice that the initialization callback takes 1 argument event though the params list (the third parameter) is empty in your start_link func.

So, naturally (am I alone in this?) I assumed that when defining a Child Spec for a Supervisor, the {M, F, A} definition would follow the same pattern:

Childspec = {child1,
            {child1, start, []},
            permanent, brutal_kill, worker, dynamic},
%% ...

But the above definition does not call child1:start/1, where the one parameter is the emtpy list. Instead, the list items are extracted as individual parameters. So {child1, start, [p1, p2, p3]} would call child1:start/3, and {child1, start, []} calls child1:start/0. Just something to look out for if you’re new to erlang and the supervisor behavior like me.

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