Victor Quinn

Articles

Article

90 Days Isn't Lightning Speed: Why Most Energy Platforms Can't Do Real AI

While energy companies brag about 90-day analytics, the grid operates in milliseconds. Learn why AI-native architecture isn't a buzzword—it's the only way to build platforms that can sense, think, and act in real time.

7/29/2025
Article

The Hidden Data Risks in Utility Operations

Discover how emailing customer data via CSVs creates major security risks for utilities. Learn why this common practice threatens data privacy and how Texture's incremental approach provides secure data sharing without disrupting operations.

4/17/2025
Article

The Energy Industry's Point Solution Problem: Why Utilities Keep Reinventing the Wheel

Utilities waste resources creating disconnected point solutions. Texture provides a platform approach, acting as the central nervous system that enables real-time data flow between systems so utilities can focus on innovation.

4/3/2025
Article

Streamline Program Enrollment with Texture’s API

Simplify energy program enrollment with Texture’s API. Automate eligibility checks, reduce admin costs by 75%, and increase enrollments for VPPs, OEMs, utilities, and DERMS.

3/5/2025
Article

Why Texture Bets on Experience: Our Contrarian Approach to Startup Hiring

At Texture, we're challenging startup hiring norms by investing in experienced operators. Learn why we believe paying for experience accelerates success and how we're building differently in the energy sector.

2/25/2025
Article

Don't Let Sunk Costs Drag You Down: Focus on What You Do Best

Stuck in the past? The sunk cost fallacy holds many energy companies back from embracing modern, scalable solutions. Learn why shifting from in-house legacy systems to specialized platforms is key to thriving in the evolving energy landscape.

2/18/2025
Article

The Real Cost of Building It Yourself in Energy

The energy industry's default approach of building everything in-house is holding back innovation. Learn why the build-it-yourself mindset is unsustainable, what it really costs, and how Texture's energy data platform can accelerate the transition.

1/23/2025
Article

Explaining Texture to My Mom

Texture is a B2B platform for connecting batteries, solar, and more. I break down how homeowners can store solar power, sell it to the grid, and even form a virtual power plant—explained in plain English for my mom and aunt.

1/15/2025
Article

Why Cloud Infrastructure is the Future for Energy Companies

The energy landscape is transforming: bidirectional power flows, behind-the-meter assets, and real-time demands require new approaches to infrastructure. Learn why cloud isn't just an option for energy companies—it's essential for future success.

1/7/2025
Article

Why Texture Doesn't Reverse Engineer APIs - and Why That Matters

Texture powers the energy ecosystem with stable, OEM-backed device integrations—no guesswork, no hacky APIs—just reliable, secure, enterprise-grade solutions.

12/12/2024
coding

Knotel builds a better flexible workspace experience with Apollo

Using a federated Apollo data graph allowed Knotel to scale their GraphQL implementation, speed development, and deliver a better experience to all their users

10/29/2019
coding

Knotel GraphQL Apollo Federation Tweetstorm

Our engineering team at Knotel was one of the first companies to deploy Apollo Federation into production. This was originally an 18 Tweet Tweetstorm that I have reformatted as a blog post here for readability.

7/29/2019
coding

How Spring Prepares for the Black Friday Frenzy

Our engineering team generally spends a few months leading up to that day running drills, gathering metrics and tuning systems, prepping, pre-emptively scaling, and just generally ensuring everything is in tip top shape to handle traffic for that one day in which we will often see 20 or 30 times the volume that we’d see on a normal day. This article and the video tells the story about one such optimization

4/25/2018
locationkit

LocationKit: The Making of – Part 2

Even more details on how we made LocationKit, the problems it was meant to solve, how we ended up solving them

8/21/2015
locationkit

LocationKit: The Making of – Part 1

Details on how we made LocationKit, the problems it was meant to solve, how we ended up solving them

8/12/2015
locationkit

Smart Polygons: Shaping a More Intelligent Location

The power of using polygons over points to represent location data in the real-world

7/24/2015
locationkit

LocationKit is here

Introducing LocationKit, the most advanced mobile location framework

7/14/2015
writing

Writing "Getting Started with tmux"

I completed work on my first book, Getting Started with tmux, which was recently published. This is a recount of the background and history of writing that book.

10/13/2014
coding

nginx as a SPDY load balancer for Node.js

Recently we wanted to integrate SPDY into our stack at SocialRadar to make requests to our API a bit more speedy (hurr hurr). Particularly for multiple subsequent requests in rapid succession, avoiding that TCP handshake on every request would be quite nice. This article outlines how we did it with nginx

10/13/2014
coding

Full text search with Bookshelf.js

Bookshelf has no inbuilt method for performing such a query but it actually ended up being rather simple.

4/10/2014
random

Desired: Oculus Rift as a monitor replacement

An idea I haven't been able to shake since I first used an Oculus

1/28/2014
coding

JavaScript: Async Promise "while loop"

This is a solution to the situation where you have an asynchronous task you want to perform over and over again, in a non-blocking fashion, stopping when some condition is met.

12/19/2013
random

Thoughts on Opera Next

Opera made the call years ago to switch from its own rendering engine to Blink, the rendering engine underpinning Chrome

11/17/2013
coding

Emacs: Prevent autosave mess

Emacs is trying to be helpful by creating autosave files, but by default it stores them alongside the file you're editing creating a mess in active folders, repositories, etc. Follow this tutorial to fix that mess and ensure Emacs still stores those backups but puts them all in a single location to reduce clutter

11/6/2013
random

Accent Color

A tale in which one nerd spends far too long picking a Color for his blog with journeys into some fun bits of hexadecimal numbers, math, and programming.

10/26/2013
coding

Gobbledygook: a poem

A silly poem I wrote in Fall 2003 while studying quantum mechanics

10/25/2013
coding

JavaScript: arguments explained

A mini tutorial on the JavaScripts arguments pseudo-object

10/21/2013
coding

Want to Work for a Startup? Contribute to Open Source!

Some tips for getting a gig at a startup

8/18/2013
coding

Deploy Coffeescript Node App to Heroku

So you've got a cool node app written in Coffeescript and you want to deploy it to Heroku? Seems like it should be easy these days, right? Not so much. Well, let's be honest, we're in the future, you don't have to manually manage servers, etc. (Thank you Heroku!) but deploying a Coffeescript app is still no small task as there are a bunch of gotchas. Hopefully this will help.

8/10/2013
speculation

Multi-User iOS and the Fingerprint Scanner

I came across this article about Apple acquiring AuthenTec for their fingerprint scanning technology and had a lightbulb go off. What if, in addition to being used to enhance security, it was also used for a multi-user iOS experience?

8/7/2013
coding

Chance

I am often looking to generate random things in JavaScript. Whether in the browser or in Node, I often find myself looking to generate a random phone number or address or even number with some characteristics. So I created Chance

6/24/2013
coding

Alfred 2 and Emacs

Long story short, Alfred 2 and Emacs installed via Homebrew don't exactly play along nicely. Alfred 2 doesn't like to follow symlinks so it won't open Emacs. This is a solution.

3/15/2013
coding

Backbone CrossDomain Library

Open sourcing the Backbone.CrossDomain Library

3/11/2013
coding

Convert .png to .eps on Mac

This is one of those tips that seems almost too easy to be true.

3/13/2012
coding

Solved: git svn Broken in Mavericks

Struggling with git svn in Mavericks (or Mountain Lion)? This may be your answer

2/19/2012
coding

Solved: ZSH tab completion painfully slow

Struggling with slow tab completion in zsh? This may be your answer

12/22/2011
coding

Programmatically Creating Fielded Nodes in Drupal 7

Programmatically Creating Fielded Nodes in Drupal 7

8/8/2011
coding

tmux Tutorial

A tutorial on tmux, the terminal multiplexer along with my rationale for trying it out and some tips and tricks

6/20/2011
speculation

Concept Idea: Using client-side Javascript for distributed computing

Could we use client-side Javascript for distributed computing to solve the world's problems simply by having someone visit a webpage?

4/26/2011