An Interview about Coding Places on the Blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC)
April 15, 2014
An interview with Felipe Murillo about Coding Places.
Authentication and Authorization Architecture in Browser Applications
FITC MEAN Stack
March 29, 2014
I discuss the challenges of authentication and authorization in AngularJS and similar style applications. Topics include architecture, best practices for determining client and server responsibilities, and the importance of sharing authorization context with the client logic in order to build an effective user experience. Angular and Node code samples are used to illustrate.
(An earlier version of this talk was presented at the Toronto AngularJS Meetup on February 12, 2014.)
Bitcoin Goes Boom: Will the World's Favorite Cryptocurrency Explode or Implode?
with Mariana Mota Prado, foreignaffairs.com
January 30, 2014
Bitcoin presents regulating agencies with difficult questions: Should they try to control it? Can they? If that sounds familiar, it should. The world faced these same questions in the early days of the Internet. Whether Bitcoin is more like AOL or Google, of course, is yet to be seen. Still, how governments choose to respond to it could change global finance for good.
I started writing code sometime in the mid 1980s using MK-61 and rarely stopped since. I went on to get an M.S. in computer science from Stanford and worked in Silicon Valley software industry before starting a Ph.D. program at Berkeley. Over the years I've worked with C, Perl, Java, Python, Lua and other languages. Today I focus on JavaScript (AngularJS and NodeJS), as the Chief Technology Officer at rangle.io, a Toronto-based JavaScript engineering consulting firm.
When possible I like to contribute to open source. In 2004-2008 I wrote most of Python Markdown, a Python implementation of Markdown, which seems to still be widely used on the Internet. (Python Markdown is now maintained by Waylan Limberg.)
I later worked on Sputnik, a Lua-based wiki/CMS engine. I am now working on a front-end heavy content management system.
I am yuri on Github.
I've dedicated a large amount of my time to academic research, starting as a research assistant at Stanford (in psychology and computational linguistics), interning at FX Palo Alto Labs, then continuing to do a Ph.D. at the UC Berkeley School of Information. After finishing my Ph.D. I spent three years doing research as a faculty member at the University of Toronto, where I currently have a “status only” faculty appointment.
A book based on my Berkeley dissertation was published by the MIT Press in 2012. It presents an ethnographic study of software development in Brazil. You can see the first chapter here: Coding Places.
My most cited paper looks at georgraphy
of Twitter showing the extent to which Twitter links tend to be local. It also shows that where such links span longer distances, they tend to correlate with airline routes. In addition to academic publications, I have written for popular venues, such as foreignaffairs.com.
For a more complete list of papers see my academic CV. Or you can look at my Google Scholar profile. And for those who care, my Erdős number is 4: Paul Erdős with Frank Harary, Frank Harary with Ove Frank, Ove Frank with Barry Wellman, Barry Wellman with myself.
I've been teaching courses at the University of Toronto since 2009. Here are some of the more recent ones.
Last taught: Summer 2013
A course exploring production of open source software, which I have taught at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
Outlines:
Summer 2014,
Summer 2013,
Fall 2011,
Fall 2010
Last taught: Winter 2012
A graduate seminar approaching information and communication technologies from critical and historical perspectives.
Outlines:
Winter 2012
Last taught: Winter 2012
A data modeling and database design course taught in an undergraduate and graduate versions.
Outlines:
Winter 2012,
Fall 2011
Winter 2011,
Fall 2010
