Kurt Nelson Archive

A Fairer Way to Compensate

Having just moved from dirt cheap Atlanta to Sillycon Valley for a new job, compensation has been on my mind. I finagled a compensation “raise” but by the time the roughly 80% cost of living adjustment and cash/stock balance is taken into consideration, it’s a definite cut in my…

Serializing Ecto Changeset errors to JSONAPI in Phoenix

It took me a good while to figure out ecto’s format for changeset errors. It turns out that if you have certain types of validations, each error message returned is in the format %{"should be at least %{count} characters", [count…

Stop Stuffing The Web Into Mobile

I keep having people ask me questions about all the various SDKs-of-the-day that allow someone to write a mobile app without having to learn a mobile SDK. My answer hasn’t changed and will not change any time soon: If you want to write a mobile app, you must learn a…

The State of the Weariverse

Every day, it feels like there’s some new fitness tracker with a slightly different set of sensors and an entirely new app/API/website/life-changing-experience/yet-another-account-to-set-up. And fitness trackers are only the most popular bastion of wearable computing. Once you…

At the Stool on the End

A man just sits at the bar the whole night, at the stool on the end. People hover around him, never really stopping to talk. He drinks out of a distinct glass, the only one of its type in sight: a tall round glass with a handle sticking cleanly out of the side, not quite a mug, not…

33 things wrong with the 33 things you probably didn’t know about Disney

As someone who has actually worked at Walt Disney World in all 4 parks, I have some problems with the current BuzzFeed post going around.

The 10.11 things about BuzzFeed that will make you laugh yesterday

Someone actually has the job of deciding if the list should be 6, 7, 8, or 9 things, and how many memes to include.

This little city, so sparse, so young. But it has greatness yet to come. One day it will be in history with New York and London, one day far in the future. This little city, so dead, so sleepy. But on occasion, it comes alive. Why can’t it stay alive like others? Why must it sleep? For sleep and night is but a human derivation of nature, nature does…

Exploiting the QBOT Rewards System

I emailed multiple managers at Georgia Tech Dining about a month ago about this vulnerability to give them time to fix it. As of 9/12, they still have not fixed it so I am disclosing the vulnerability publically