19 May 2009 - San Francisco Git is a simple, but extremely powerful system. Most people try to teach Git bydemonstrating a few dozen commands and then yelling “tadaaaaa.” I believe thismethod is flawe
It’s the calm before the presentation storm. Over the next three months, I’ve got four different presentations at Webstock and SXSW. I’m also the best man at a wedding in Washington, all of which mean
You’ve taken some hits. Being taken apart by the execs because they could smell you weren’t prepared. The slide deck you loved that the audience ignored. That guy… snoring. In the front row. However,
Rands in Repose Archives About Books Slack Speaking Podcast Feed Twitter The Sandbox Thank you for scrolling to the bottom. If this is your first visit, I recommend starting by reading don’t skip this . Categories Apple Biking Buzz Design Excerpt Hollywood Management Media Photo Plugs Rands Surf…
Jason Fried on why you shouldn’t copy 37signals (or anyone else): Shouldn’t copying something be easier than creating it? Someoneelse already did the work, right? The problem is that the work onthe or
My instinct told me that to say an app was available “on the App Store” was wrong, that an app should be available “in the App Store”, the App Store being a destination where I could walk in, pick an app off a shelf, pay my money and leave. But I’ll be honest, in the process of writing all this…
If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many…
There are as many different styles of management as there are managers. I’ve identified three major styles: two easy, dysfunctional styles and one hard, functional style, but the truth is that many development shops manage in more of an ad-hoc, “whatever works” way that may change from day to day or…
The QA department should be independent and powerful, it must not report to the development team, in fact, the head of QA should have veto power over releasing any software that doesn't meet muster.
Monday May 11 Examined a new e-book reader that hooks up to Project Gutenberg as a content source. Doesn’t ship with any content, but has default suggestions for “classics” from F. Scott Fitzgerald an
Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work.It would work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myselfusing the Internet on my work computer. I'm trying otherstrategies now, b
Despite the fact that it was only a year or two ago that I was blubbering about how rich Windows GUI clients were the wave of the future, college students nonetheless do occasionally email me asking f
“I don’t know what’s wrong with my development team,” the CEO thinks to himself. “Things were going so well when we started this project. For the first couple of weeks, the team cranked like crazy and
Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated: “But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacked what they co
OK, buckle down, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. In our last episode, I introduced the tentative title “Great Design” for this series of articles. I have something very specific in mind when I use
For years and years, self-fashioned pundits, like, uh, me, have been nattering endlessly about usability, and how important it is to make software usable. Jakob Nielsen has a mathematical formula he’l
This is part three of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. Part one and part two already appeared. I despaired of finding a company to work for where pr
This is part two of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. Part one appeared yesterday . After a few years in Redmond, Washington, during which I complete
This is part one of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. The rest of the talk will be published tomorrow and Wednesday. I graduated with a B.S. in Compu
Every year around this time some large gadget or tech website makes a back to school post. Unfortunately, they are under the preposterous assumption that college students can afford very expensive gea
Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t. Charles Simonyi, the brilliant prog
It’s already all a blur. 26 cities. 6 weeks. 2913 attendees. $160,000. 23 hotels, one Cambridge college, one British library, and a “Sociëteit Het Meisjeshuis.” (“Gesundheit!”) Somewhere, I don’t know
Have you ever heard of SEMA ? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understand that stuff.
Ask any software CEO these days what their biggest problem is, and they’ll usually complain about how hard it is to find good programmers. “There’s just nobody out there,” they say. “I can’t hire anyo
It happens all the time: we get a resume that everyone thinks is really exciting. Terrific grades. All kinds of powerful-sounding jobs. Lots of experience. Speaks seventeen languages. And saved over 1
Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’re in, and gear
Clear just closed down. Here’s how it worked while it was in business. You paid $200 for a one-year membership. You underwent a big, complicated background check to prove that you were extra-super-tru
Remember the Bionic Office ? Fog Creek moved in there in 2003. After a couple of years we had outgrown the first office so we expanded to take over the whole floor. By the time our lease ran out in 20
Newspapers are dying. Print subscribers are down, print advertising revenue has declined precipitously, and there is no reason to think either of these trends will change. The newspaper’s current mode
There’s a counterpart to my post on technology journalism that I’ve been hesitant to write. Just as most professional journalism on high technology fails us today, so too does the online discussion amongst technologists as a community. Social media (blogs, community news sites like Reddit and Hacker…
Humorist John Hodgman was the entertainment headliner at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner. Mr. Hodgman roasted the president for being a "nerd", referencing his place in popular culture an
A great resume will get you not-rejected, a great cover letter will get you hired. That’s the conclusion I’m left with after going through the applications for our junior support programmer position .
May 31, 2009 Creating New Documents Ever since Apple first unveiled the Macintosh, there has been a weird gap in how the desktop metaphor works. All modern operating systems basically divide file oper
I was a complete nerd in high school. (I make no claims either way about my current status.) I always tried to fit in with the cool people because I...
My friend Merlin Mann and I had a session at SXSW Interactive about two weeks ago. It certainly wasn’t a panel, and it wasn’t really a presentation. It was more like an hour-long duet rant, the main g
I have a problem with Talent.
It began one night while flipping through my photography portfolio with a friend: “You’re so talented with a camera. Whenever you take a photo, it just … works.”
Just works? What? Do you realize how much work I put into those shots? I can only wish that as soon as a…
Matthew Bischoff