Ostensibly, Panic makes Apple software, like the award-winning Transmit, Coda, and Status Board. But how many Apple software developers team up with the creator of Katamari Damacy to print and sell their official t-shirts, or manufacture a series of deadly accurate Atari 2600 boxes for non-existent…
You are directly responsible for what you put into the world. Yet every day designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or…
Ted Dziuba:
My friends and I wanted to talk about high end bourbon. Brody McBroderson wanted to get hammered.
The true master obliges both.
Ted doesn’t write as much as he used to , but he has always been one of my favorite writers making sense of this crazy, stupid tech world we all live and…
THE twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans’ phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not…
[June 19 update: David Simon has been kind enough to respond at length here . He points out that I falsely stated that collecting call records requires a warrant; I have corrected that statement in the post below.] I read with interest David Simon's recent blog post in which he responds to…
There’s this great moment in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) when the world’s most celebrated sushi chef turns to his son, who is leaving to start his own restaurant, and says: ‘You have no home to come back to.’ Which, when you think about it, isn’t harsh or discouraging but is in fact…
This is the second installment in our ongoing "Label Makers" series. See our profile of Jeffery Drag Records here . "I love music, I listen to it all the time, I love talking about it, collecting it, all the aspects of it. But I am not a musician, and I'm happy about it. Being a musician's the worst…
I have a serious problem with Google. This is a difficult statement to make, because I don’t think there is one Google. The company is so large, and spans so many interests, that to say something as vapid as “Google is evil” does not adequately portray how complex and sprawling the Google system is.…
GitHub Flow August 31, 2011 Issues with git-flow I travel all over the place teaching Git to people and nearly every class and workshop I’ve done recently has asked me what I think about git-flow . I always answer that I think that it’s great - it has taken a system (Git) that has a million possible…
They don’t prepare you for this in college or admit it in job interviews. The harsh reality is that if you are middle-aged, write computer code for a living, and earn a six-figure salary, you’re headed for the unemployment lines. Your market value declines as you age and it becomes harder and harder…
distributed systems, startups, semiotics, writing, culture, management April 17, 2013
You have to admire the insipid, dogged and naive devotion people have to believing they are going to get this huge of list of things done. Even when presented with releases that slip by weeks and months, objectives…
A Collection of quotes and paraphrases for developers from around the web. Use your own judgment in their application . Unix philosophy Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features. Expect the output of every program to…
Designing a programming system for understanding programs Bret Victor / September 2012 Here's a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming? Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and…
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What Zen was to the 70’s (most famously with motorcycle maintenance), the Tao Te Ching was to the 90’s. From Piglet and Pooh to Physics and back, many have sought sense in applying the Tao Te Ching to something (the Tao of Physics ), or something to the Tao Te Ching (the Tao of Pooh ). It can be a…
One afternoon in the early 1980s , Mitchell Medina and Robert Lech were hanging out in the dining room of Medina’s Essex Fells, New Jersey, home. The two friends got together about once a week. This time the conversation turned to the topic of invention. Lech, a chiropractor, was in the process of…
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Update: See this post for a free ePub eBook version of this long post. A very odd essay from a 1922 issue of The American Magazine that seems to go against the general grain of most of the articles published then. There is also no name attached to it. Why I Quit Being So Accommodating Yesterday was…
There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who’ve moved from the academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually…
When you see an automated music recommendation do you assume that some stupid computer program was trying to trick you into something? It’s often what it feels like – with what little context you get with a suggestion on top of the postmodern insanity of a computer understanding how should you feel…
We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. I've been truly gratified to watch the response to The Web We Lost over the last few days; It's become one of the most popular things I've ever written and has inspired great responses. But the most important…
Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard's Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you'll give it a look. The tech industry and its press have treated…
What Refactoring is, and what it isn’t - According to Kent Beck and Martin Fowler DZone's Guide to What Refactoring is, and what it isn’t - According to Kent Beck and Martin Fowler by Jim Bird · Dec. 16, 12 · Agile Zone Free Resource Like (0) Save {{ articles[0].views | formatCount}} Views Join the…
I do a lot of public speaking about our asynchronous workflow atGitHub. Our office is filled with chat rooms, email, and pull requests ratherthan development meetings and in-person code review. I think people understand why this may be a better way to work, overall. Wecan avoid distractions, work…
on Nov 28, 2012 Today I’m thrilled to present a guest post from my friend John Pignata. John isDirector of Engineering Operations at GroupMe andwrites a great blog on Ruby software engineering thatyou should absolutely check out. In 1964, Doug McIlroy, an engineer at Bell Labs, wrote an internal…
I’m not exactly sure who made being a “personal brand” a thing on the Internet, but I’d really like to sit down with them and ask them why they thought it was a good idea. You see, an entire ecosystem of people looking to make money has cropped up around this notion of helping people become a…
When Apple announced last year that all iPhones would come with a voice-activated assistant named Siri, capable of answering spoken questions, Michael Phillips’s heart sank. For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had…