August 12, 2014 This is a grievous thing to say aloud, much less think, but I wish that the suicide of Robin Williams made less sense to me than it somehow does. I say that with very little real knowledge of the man, his inner being, or the whole of his life. I encountered him only once, twenty…

Followup to : Uncritical Supercriticality Early studiers of cults were surprised to discover than when cults receive a major shock—a prophecy fails to come true, a moral flaw of the founder is revealed—they often come back stronger than before, with increased belief and fanaticism. The Jehovah's…

This is the second of a weekly series of posts on various aspects of social software design I find interesting, here is the full list . Each of these posts are written over the course of a few hours in a straight shot. Contents may be mildly idiosyncratic. To vote on what I should write about next,…

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This post is all about the only thing that matters for a new startup. But first, some theory: If you look at a broad cross-section of startups — say, 30 or 40 or more; enough to screen out the pure flukes and look for patterns — two obvious facts will jump out at you. First obvious fact: there is an…

Putting Thought Into Things Essay 22 July 2014 To get a good perspective on our clients and their users, we start our projects with research . We go mobile first because it naturally gives prioritization , and we want all the content first so we can design in the browser . The process is so clear in…

Most businesses today believe that technology can dramatically improve the way they operate. But they embrace technology with varying levels of enthusiasm. The lowest level of enthusiasm is to adopt technologies made by other companies – email, customer services software, etc – and perhaps create an…

08.13. 2014 It was a dark day when Islam met the loudspeaker. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB. Hey, wake up. God is great.…

Andy Fletcher: National 100Gbps IP streaming “@bbcinternetblog: The network behind the R&D Commonwealth Games 2014 Showcase http://t.co/ZxsX3uyXPU @BBCRD”

07.04. 2014 لابد من صنعاء وان طال السفر- You must see Sana'a, however long the journey The scariest thing I'll see in Yemen looms up at me before the plane has even landed. I have dozed my way from Abu Dhabi across most of the Arabian Penninsula, including the Empty Quarter, that vast uninhabitable…

There’s a seductive dark side to The Builder’s High . The high afforded us by our brain when we are productive is delicious. For me, it’s comparable to the endorphin rush after a good workout. A foul mood vanishes, the weight of stress is lightened, and what was complex and difficult to fathom…

Mike Loukides: Amazing: Tesla Motors opens up its patents: All Our Patent Are Belong To You http://t.co/5Qw0DvA3E2

One of the most exciting parts of the culture we’ve developed at Buffer for me is our international retreats. It’s also potentially something we’ve not shared that much about and can be misunderstood, so I wanted to write a little about why we choose to do retreats. Three times a year we gather the…

Have you ever tried to explain your technical job to someone that isn’t technical? I hate doing that too, so to every question asking me what I do for a living, my first response is “ I telecommute from home “. I suppose that’s wrong, because they aren’t asking me how I get to work, but the whole…

CITY PERILS THE FIFTY-NINE-STORY CRISIS THE NEW YORKER, MAY 29, 1995, pp 45-53 What's an engineer's worst nightmare? To realize that the supports he designedfor a skyscraper like Citicorp Center are flawed---and hurricane seasonis approaching. BY JOE MORGENSTERN O N a warm June day in 1978,…

Idle Words > Talks > The Internet With A Human Face This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany. Marc [Thiele] emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I thought my talk would be appropriate to close the conference. "Marc," I told him, "my talk…

Venus of Urbino , Titian, 1538 There’s a lot to be said against sex. It causes us no end of trouble. We would probably be much better off without a sex drive. Goaded on by its demands, we do all manner of weird things with people we sometimes don’t even really like, only to feel a bit regretful,…

Matt Reiferson: word. listen to @peterbourgon: "Best Practices in Production Environments" http://t.co/SbCSbwGx4K #gophercon #golang

Last Tuesday [8 October] I was again at Pittleworth Manor talking to Sir Richard Fairey’s daughter and grand-daughter, and selecting photographs for the website, which is still under construction but now in an embryonic form. As well as photographs ranging across CRF’s life I handled a number of…

In the back of my head I always have that product manager view of accountability and so rather than “advise” I much prefer to have a dialog in context and make sure accountability stays with the person asking. It is difficult enough to be a manager and avoid the constant pull of “telling people what…

This is the text version of a talk I gave on February 14, 2014 , at Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand. There's some material here that I skipped over during the actual talk, for lack of time. You can read the thing straight through or just skip to the . OUR COMRADE THE ELECTRON In 1952, an…

Ian Davis: Something I've been practising this year: Write Code Every Day http://t.co/LrunlltkHM