Victor Quinn

Articles

40 entries

  1. Stop Being Afraid of Technical Debt

    Technical debt isn't the enemy—it's leverage. Learn when to take it on, when to pay it down, and why experienced engineers make all the difference at startups.

  2. 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.

  3. 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. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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. /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

  13. /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.

  14. /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

  15. /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

  16. /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

  17. /locationkit

    Smart Polygons: Shaping a More Intelligent Location

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

  18. /locationkit

    LocationKit is here

    Introducing LocationKit, the most advanced mobile location framework

  19. /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.

  20. /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

  21. /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.

  22. /random

    Desired: Oculus Rift as a monitor replacement

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

  23. /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.

  24. /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

  25. /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

  26. /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.

  27. /coding

    Gobbledygook: a poem

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

  28. /coding

    JavaScript: arguments explained

    A mini tutorial on the JavaScripts arguments pseudo-object

  29. /coding

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

    Some tips for getting a gig at a startup

  30. /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.

  31. /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?

  32. /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

  33. /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.

  34. /coding

    Backbone CrossDomain Library

    Open sourcing the Backbone.CrossDomain Library

  35. /coding

    Convert .png to .eps on Mac

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

  36. /coding

    Solved: git svn Broken in Mavericks

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

  37. /coding

    Solved: ZSH tab completion painfully slow

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

  38. /coding

    Programmatically Creating Fielded Nodes in Drupal 7

    Programmatically Creating Fielded Nodes in Drupal 7

  39. /coding

    tmux Tutorial

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

  40. /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?