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TV Zero
My family and I haven’t watched “TV” in weeks. Granted, we don’t have cable (we use rabbit ears and a digital-to-analog converter box), but that’s not really the reason we haven’t been watching. The...
View ArticleThis Piece of Technical Writing Has Been Written By Me
In my role as a business analyst at a software development shop I see a lot of technical writing, much of it terrible. For some reason, people whose job it is to be precise and logical often fail to do...
View ArticleThe 5 Worst Practices of the Mobile Web
My friend Michael McWatters tweeted his frustration today that there is no way change your Twitter password on their mobile site. I’ve butted up against this issue in the past, and the fact that you...
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No, Graphic Designers Aren’t Ruining The Web
I woke up today to this provocative article in The Guardian about how graphic designers are ruining the web. Naughton’s main argument seems to be that graphic design adds unnecessary bulk to websites,...
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Apple vs. Switzerland
Yesterday Apple’s market cap topped $500 billion. Staggering. Only 19 countries in the world have a bigger GDP than Apple’s market cap, possibly soon to be only 18:
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Just Say No to Feature Creep: Xcode Edition
One of the hardest things for any software designer to do is to decide not to implement a feature. Many software projects have been delayed or even derailed by feature creep, or the tendency to widen...
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Rediscovered Images from 9/11
On September 11, 2001, my wife and I were woken at about 9:00 by her mother, who told us to turn on CNN. We were newlyweds, living in a studio apartment on the Lower East Side. As soon as we saw the...
View ArticleGoogle Maps Bookmarklet Lets You Map Any Address on a Page
How often have you been on a site where you see an address but no map, and maybe not even a link to a map? I find this very annoying, so I created a little bookmarklet that solves the problem. To you...
View ArticleWe Need to Break More Rules
A recent episode of the Planet Money podcast profiled Thomas Peterffy, one of the first people to experiment and be successful with high-frequency trading. They told the story of how he was doing...
View ArticleFamous Last Tweets
About a year ago, my friend and colleague Michael McWatters tweeted, “Oh no, if I die at this moment, my last tweet will have been about Andrew Breitbart…must think of something else. Beauty, science,...
View ArticleWhy mobile web apps are slow
Drew Crawford, in a long but well-researched essay on mobile app performance: Think about iPhone 4S web development as [an]…environment that runs at 1/50th the speed of its desktop counterpart. Per...
View ArticleMassive Electronic Surveillance
ECHELON is a code word for an automated global interception system operated by the intelligence agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and led by the...
View ArticleIs the Apple Developer Site Up?
I was sick of having to click two times to answer this question, so I made this. Stack: Flask + Heroku
View ArticleEverything Sucks
ASSEMBLY SUCKS C Sucks C++ is a horrible language Why Java Sucks C# sucks are you people blind Perl sucks Why PHP Sucks Why JavaScript Still Sucks Why Python Sucks Why We Hate Ruby Five Things that...
View ArticleWhere Does Bitcoin Get Its Value?
Update: Based on some helpful comments on /r/bitcoin, I edited my original post to clarify that Bitcoin derives its value, only in part, from the costs required to produce it. However, without that it...
View ArticleJames Mickens on the sorry state of web technologies
People think that Web browsers are elegant computation platforms, and Web pages are light, fluffy things that you can edit in Notepad as you trade ironic comments with your friends in the coffee shop....
View ArticleIs Swift Ready for Prime Time?
To long-time Objective-C developers – especially those with an interest in modern programming languages – Swift is a very welcome and exciting step forward. At the same time, it can be frustrating at...
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