May 2012
9 posts
Hackers
Why is it cool to be a hacker as a programmer? In what other profession is it considered a good thing to be a hacker? I don’t want to go to a doctor who is a hacker. I don’t want a tax attorney who is a hacker. I don’t want the guy who is building my house to be a hacker, either.
Posting a job listing that you’re hiring a “product hacker” or a “JavaScript...
Method Matters
I started Bloc.io a little over a week ago. The first “phase” was working my way through the Beginning Ruby book. I spent a total of about 25 hours reading, doing the exercises, and inspecting my code to figure out why I wasn’t getting the same results as the book’s code.
Then, on Monday, I talked to my Bloc.io mentor about why I wasn’t getting the result I wanted...
You only get one chance to be a beginner. →
As a beginner in Ruby programming, the timing of this post couldn’t be better for me.
Bloc Week 1: School and Work and Life
After one week of Bloc.io, I have a newfound respect for adults who work and go to school and still try to maintain some semblance of a life outside those two things. It’s hard.
This first week has been eye-opening. I have a little background in programming, but it’s turning out to be less than I thought. Really, it’s just enough to understand the vocabulary and for the syntax...
Hiring Is Broken and I Aim to Fix It
When I say that hiring is broken, I mean that it’s much harder than it should be to find the right person for any open position in a small or mid-sized business. News of the CEO of Yahoo! lying on his resume should be a red flag that even the processes for executive recruiting are inadequate.
Although the issue can be tracked to many causes, one issue is that technology has only mimicked a...
Becoming My Own Technical Cofounder
Programmers/hackers/coders (whatever you want to call them) don’t like “idea guys” seeking their services in exchange for pizza, coffee, and equity in a company that doesn’t exist. And I don’t blame them. The hacker has spent thousands of hours honing their skills, gaining knowledge, building prototypes that never saw the light of day, working on other people’s...
April 2012
23 posts
Why is Business Writing So Awful? →
Inc.com article from Jason Fried.
Cooking Pot Generates Electricity →
No, not “cooking marijuana”. It’s a pot used for cooking that employs heat to generate electricity. It’s cool. Chill.
Tigercatt →
If you like well-made bikes, especially of the cafè variety, this is the tumblr to follow.
Is it ok to WANT to make money? →
Thank you! Someone needs to say that it’s okay to make money. And it’s okay to want to make money. Social good can’t happen without people wanting to make money.
Pinterest’s Founding Designer Shares His... →
This article is more of a commentary on the tech industry’s broken approach to design than it is a deep insight into why the Pinterest design just works.
Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated....
These are excerpts from one of the best commencement speeches ever given. Read the whole thing if you’d like.
My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living.
And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.
You...
Google+ Numbers
Google is sharing interaction numbers about Google+ instead of engagement numbers. That means they’re telling everyone about how many people are interacting with a Google+ related products rather than people that are engaging with Google+ directly.
Newsies are really upset about it, too. They don’t understand, though, that Google+ is meant to be a social integration of all of...
“I have learned in life that people will forget what you said, will forget what...”
– Maya Angelou (via lauramae9)
Facebook is eating the Internet. →
Facebook just bought Instagram. I don’t use it, but users will lose on this acquisition. Facebook will swallow them and Instagram as you know it will be wastelanded. Thankfully, I don’t use Instagram or Facebook.
“I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write. There’s no great...”
– Bob Dylan
“There’s no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than...”
– Why I Hate Search
The Art of Launching an App →
If you’re in the app world, please read this article.
Why China is Killing Us in Manufacturing →
Hint, it’s not cheap labor…sort of.
Every Idea is Worth Testing →
This guy tested two ads against each other. One was well done and one was awful. Which one did better?
March 2012
48 posts
1 tag
Agile is Not a Sham →
The link above will take you to a blog post rant on the failure of agile development processes to solve efficiency and productivity problems in the software engineering world. His thesis is that agile is broken, but his supporting argument is based on the business of agile training and its inadequacy in creating better development teams.
Agile isn’t the problem with the monetization of...
1 tag
“…we must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us...”
– The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
A Telling Pantomime of Action
“Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds.”
This is a line from Moby Dick describing the chief mate of the Pequod, Starbuck (the namesake of the coffee chain). This...
Will the Colourlovers/Forrst Union Beat Dribbble? →
Colourlovers bought Forrst in what looks like a move to create the final word in creative communities. With the preeminence of Dribbble and the crucial role it plays in helping companies find designers (and designers find gigs), will the Colourlovers/Forrst combination be able to compete?
My take is that it will be competitive in its own right as a purely creative network for inspiration, but...
The Perfect Writer
Have you ever found someone who writes the same way you think? Most writers feel foreign, which is interesting in itself. It makes you read because of the newness of exploring someone else’s mind.
Then you find that writer who fills each line with a thought you’ve already conjured, in the order and meter and tone that you heard it float through your own mind. When you read this...
Iron and Air →
Like motorcycles? Follow Iron and Air.
How to Hit the Hacker News Front Page
Write something, anything, about Paul Graham. Call him a god or call him an idiot. You’ll hit the top ten, guaranteed.
Power →
parislemon:
My single biggest takeaway from SXSW was all the talk about battery life. Every single person. All the time. People changing plans because they needed to recharge their phones. People walking around with chargers. People who were chargers. Mophies galore. People uninstalling apps that would…
Battery life has been the number one differentiator for me in device selection for...
“…paper isn’t so much a single technology as a foundation for all of modern...”
– The Fall of Big Paper
3 Things I Hate About "Beginner" Programmer Books →
After three weeks of trying to learn JavaScript, I concur.
“There are a finite number of irreplaceable hours in a human life and it makes...”
– Read the whole article.
Apple's Search Engine Project
Ok, so I don’t know if Apple is actually working on their own search engine, but with Siri and the FTC getting antsy and with Apple’s vertically integrated approach it seems naive to think that they haven’t been working on a search product specifically for iOS and Mac already.
Deep integration with Siri and her learning algorithms and a better interface for displaying results...
How Vision-Shift Can Cost Your Company Its Best... →
James Whittaker left Google because the Google he loved became something he didn’t even respect.