February 2012
21 posts
“WorldWideWeb is a hypertext browser/editor which allows one to read information...”
– Tim Berners-Lee in comp.sys.next.announce (via Horace Dediu)
“The whole web is built on one mistake after another. We have this big pile of...”
– Douglas Crockford in “Coders at Work”
“It’s not just temporary. Now that it works you’re not going to touch it because...”
– Chris Parker (Apple frameworks engineer): You Are Not Ruthless Enough
I’ve seen the kind of long term damage this sort of cruft can inflict on a code base many times, which is why, like Parker, I tend to believe strongly in investing the extra time necessary to design good class interfaces,...
“Fordlandia isn’t just the story of a plantation; it’s a story about...”
– Fordlandia: The Failure Of Ford’s Jungle Utopia : NPR (via Patrick Ewing)
The story of Henry Ford’s failed Brazilian rubber plantation is a great cautionary tale about the danger of blindly assuming that what made you successful in one domain will automatically make you successful...
High Scalability: Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion... →
If you’ve ever wondered what’s involved in keeping Tumblr humming along, here’s a great overview courtesy of Blake Matheney.
“It is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with...”
– A VC: The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky
Pretty much my sentiments exactly.
David Cole responds to my previous post about San Francisco:
California is gentle and tolerant, but to me that’s the more honest route. I don’t relate at all to the notion that one should be calling others out on their bullshit. Life is far too vast and one’s personal experiences are far too narrow for me to feel comfortable with the idea that anyone has it all figured out. To...
Jim Ray asks:
Honest question: have you found New York, center of the soul-less finance careerists and “new media” wankfest, to be different?
New York can certainly be a soulless place (just ask me about the time I ate at a sushi place in Midtown East and overheard a finance guy ask his date if she wanted to be with “the guy who has the villa on top of the hill or the guy who has the...
“These are the boys who suck up to the boss’s boss. They’re...”
– Some Advice for Young People | The Awl
I could have written this very article, and if I had, it would have been subtitled “Why I Left San Francisco.” The place is practically founded on an unwillingness to call bullshit.
“There is no stack [on the PDP-1]. For programmers used to working at a C level...”
– Owen Macindoe, GAMBIT: Investigating the Spacewar! Source
I don’t think I can convey to a non-programmer how frightening this is. It would be like trying to go through your day with Memento-style short-term memory loss. That these 1961 MIT hackers wrote a real video game under these constraints...
Bijan Sabet: Why Facebook Connect shouldn't be... →
bijan:
When I see startups that only offer FB Connect as the singular sign in option, I always get squeamish.
I tell founders they should support FB Connect but they also support Twitter sign-in as well as giving users an option to sign in the good old fashioned way : user id & password.
For me it’s as simple as this: when you require a Facebook sign-in, you are essentially...
A Plea for Better iOS Text Facilities
Awhile back, Jacqui Cheng from Ars Technica contacted a bunch of folks (including me) for a story she was putting together about what iOS devs would most like to see from Apple in 2012. Unfortunately I never got around to responding (sorry Jacqui—the holidays were crazy), but if I had, one item would have stood an order of magnitude above everything else on my list: better rich text...
January 2012
19 posts
Why are software development task estimations... →
(via eyepool)
This is probably the best, most accessible analogy for the difficulty of software project planning that I’ve ever come across.
“Path is pretty in the same designy way as our modern museums…These museums...”
– Sexpigeon
This is the best thing I’ve read about Path, and it perfectly articulates something I’ve thought not only about Path, but also a lot of other exemplars of the fussy, post-Apple wave of “high design” in tech products. Khoi Vinh has written about the same...
“And because, unlike Google, Baidu did not have objections to turning over the...”
– Steven Levy, “In the Plex”
I haven’t really been following the Twitter censorship drama this past week, mainly because I knew that what my friend Marc Hedlund calls “the magic 8 ball of Internet outrage” was about to select its next victim. But when Twitter announced...
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Things to worry about →
From a letter to his 11-year-old daughter.
“I still want to see an independent tech weblog that covers the many startups and...”
– notes on “backdoor deals”
The “Oh, we simply don’t get Washington/Wall Street/the Establishment because we’re such an enlightened, transparent meritocracy out here” narrative is one of the aspects of Silicon Valley’s self image I’ve always found...
“One of the things I love about the Momofuku restaurants is that I get the...”
– hello typepad: The Bo Ssam Miracle (via sippey)
I couldn’t agree with this more. What makes Momofuku special isn’t so much that they’re innovative, but rather that their enthusiasm for what they do is so infectious. David Chang is kind of like the Quentin Tarantino of cooking, in...
“Clever. Cheap. Lasting. Pick two.”
– soxiam: uxlog
December 2011
17 posts
“But there was something special about ‘w’ for me. In those days of shared...”
– Andre Torrez: notes on “i miss w”
This reminds me of a simple app I wrote when I worked for Apple. It was 2003-2004, the heyday of post-iPod but pre-music store iTunes, and the local subnet at 1 Infinite Loop was rife with hundreds of employee iTunes shares. I had my own, of course,...
“We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it!...”
– Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via implodr)
The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of...
“The trouble usually arises when, under the guise of efficiency, people stop...”
– BRYCE DOT VC: Early Warning Signs of Startup Trouble
In my experience, this is a very real problem. Culture and communication are difficult to retrofit into an organization once it’s grown to a certain size but most growing companies don’t take it seriously enough until it’s too...
“It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa told...”
– Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in “In The Plex” by Steven Levy
