Tag Archives: development

Why founders shouldn’t be the developers »

December 14th, 2012

Swizec explains why founders shouldn’t be the developers:

There’s no getting around that, no matter how good a programmer you are, no matter how experienced, it’s just hard. Programming doesn’t require a lot of attention, it requires all of attention.

I agreed. As much as the founder wants to be the developer they shouldn’t be. I don’t think it means that they can’t do any development. But the responsibility of this task should not rest solely on their shoulders. They can dabble. They can mess around with ideas. Maybe even help put together new prototypes. But leave the production stuff to professionals.

You are not your code »

December 14th, 2012

Sam Stephenson, creator of Prototype JavaScript framework and team member at 37Signals, explains why our self-worth should not stem from the longevity of our code.

He also puts forth this worthy nugget:

In order to advance the state of the art, we have to be willing not only to try new ideas, but to retreat when those ideas prove untenable or when something better comes along.

Boy do I believe this! Trying new ideas should be something that we, as builders, and even entire companies, should make a priority. Try. Try. Try. The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll learn.

App.net’s new API feature: Stream Marker »

November 14th, 2012

App.net has a new API feature called Stream Marker. Dalton Caldwell:

Multiple times a day, I switch between my laptop and my phone. It’s frustrating that I have to ask myself “have I seen this post?” as I scroll through My Stream. Today we’re adding support for Stream Markers to the API. This will allows clients to sync where you are in your stream, global, and even in individual threads between clients.

This is fantastic. Tweetbot for iPhone, iPad, and Mac have used either Tweet Marker (now called Watermark) or iCloud to do something very similar in syncing where you’ve left off in a stream between apps/devices. This is something that has never been built into Twitter’s API even though it seems like a no-brainer.

Great update to what is quickly becoming a far better API than Twitter’s.

Paul Haddad on Twitter’s limitations »

October 3rd, 2012

Paul Haddad about the new user token limit for third-party clients on Twitter:

“For iOS, there’s no danger of hitting that anytime soon,” he said “For Mac, it’s really hard to tell. It’s definitely a lower limit, but then there’s going to be fewer users as well. We’ve never really been keeping track of user tokens before this, so we know how many we had as part of the beta test, but we don’t know how many of those are going to buy the app, and we don’t know how many new users are going to buy the app. We’re a bit concerned but there’s not really much we can do about it at this point.”

Essentially, no matter how awesome Tweetbot for Mac is and no matter how many people love it even more than they like the official Twitter applications Tapbots has a ceiling on how successful Tweetbot for Mac can be because Twitter has changed their policies.

With Netbot’s debut I’m betting that Tapbots is hedging their bets. They are keeping a foot in the Twitter door (because surely they can bank at least a half-million dollars in revenue at the very least with Tweetbot for Mac) while simultaneously keeping their options and focus open to other services to support.

Mike Rundle on mobile apps for iOS »

June 27th, 2012

Mike Rundle on Twitter:

And to everyone trying to build great mobile-web-in-a-native-shell iPhone apps, give up. Facebook couldn’t do it, and neither can you.

I agree with Mike. Mobile web applications that perform as fast or faster than native / compiled applications on iOS is simply not on the horizon. Could it happen? Could Webkit or another engine get so fast and efficient to make it plausible to build entire applications for mobile devices like phones and tablets? I think so. I just don’t see it happening in the next few years. Native applications are simply the best bang for the current buck.

Side note: Man I miss working with Mike. Hi Mike!

Justin Kan’s first programming experience

May 22nd, 2012

Justin Kan about his first experience using programming on the job:

A couple more hours of applied effort and I had a macro that looped through all the images in a directory tree and laid them out in Excel. I spent the next four days surfing the web and handing out files.

The first time I did any programming it was more than likely a “Hello World” script in ASP. However, I do remember doing something very similar to what Kan did to automate a process which a fellow employee spent hours a day doing.

I worked for a brokerage and each and every day a fellow employee had to take about 100 stock ticker symbols and run reports on them and input that data into an Excel spreadsheet. This was circa 2000. This went on for nearly a year before I caught wind of what they were doing. On a break or at lunch I was talking to this person and they explained to me what they did nearly every morning for two hours. I was astounded.

When I got back to my desk I fired up my code editor (EditPlus I believe) and in about an hour I had built a very simple PHP script to pull the relevant information for all 100 stock tickers using Yahoo! Finance’s CSV creator. Then a simple Excel macro formatted the data the way that this person had been doing. In all it took the script and macro about 45 seconds to run and create an email with the new data as an attachment.

It wasn’t long after I shared this workflow with my boss that the person that had been doing that job needed to figure out something else to do or they’d probably be of little use to the company. Whoops. Not my intention.

Another co-worker and friend at the time bought me a sticker from Thinkgeek and stuck it to the side of my computer. It read “Go away or I’ll replace you with a very small Shell script.” (Now available in T-shirt form.)

There has been a lot of hoopla lately about the fact that people believe that everyone should learn to code. Some are taking that quite literally to mean that everyone should learn how to build applications or websites. I don’t take it that way. I think everyone should learn the “languages” that their applications speak so that they too can take advantage of working smarter rather than harder. If you are tasked with using Excel all day become the very best at it you can be. And that means being able to program macros. If you are asked to use multiple applications on a Mac learn how to use Services or Automator to do some of your reoccurring tasks for you.

This type of programming won’t put you out of the job. It will free you up to get more work done. To use your time to do other things rather than the same thing every single day. If you do the same task more than once a week you should seriously consider learning how to automate it.

Light Table, a new IDE concept

April 17th, 2012

Chris Granger about Light Table:

Light Table is based on a very simple idea: we need a real work surface to code on, not just an editor and a project explorer. We need to be able to move things around, keep clutter down, and bring information to the foreground in the places we need it most.

This project is inspired by Bret Victor’s presentation Inventing on Principal that I also mentioned Nilai is inspired by. Light Table makes for a very interesting demo. The most intriguing of the modes shown was the mode wherein you could see all of the related code while you were editing, say, a specific method in a class. This type of IDE wouldn’t just save time, it’d probably result in far better code.

Why I’m building Nilai

March 18th, 2012

 

I’ve got a new nights and weekends project and its name is Nilai. Nilai is a simple bookmarking service and over the last few weeks I’ve been having a lot of fun working on it in my spare time. In fact, I have found it so valuable to me that it is now my homepage on my Mac, my iPad, and my iPhone.

My father was born in Bandung, Java, Indonesia so I thought it’d be cool to name the service an Indonesian word. Nilai is pronounced (as best as I can tell) Nee’-lie. It is an Indonesian word meaning mark. I think the literal translation is something more akin to “logo” but I’m taking liberty with the word a bit.

I’m building Nilai for the same reason many developers begin working on something new; to scratch my own itch. I was a Delicious user back when the URL still had a few more dots in it. I was a Magnolia user back when OpenID was still a buzzword. I have always needed a place to keep some bookmarks and easily access them later. And, while those needs are slightly different today than they were then, those services would still be useful to me today. If only they were around.

But those services, or at least the services I knew and liked at the time, are gone now. And so are many, many others. Gowalla. Brightkite. Magnolia. Friendfeed. The list of services that I once used that are now gone seems endless. And the pile keeps getting bigger.

The tipping point for me, I suppose, was watching Bret Victor’s excellent presentation Inventing on Principal. If you are someone that builds things I wholeheartedly recommend that you watch his presentation. In it he suggests finding a principal to build by. Well, I’ve found mine.

I’m going to build valuable, reliable, sustainable web services that will last forever.

Nilai is the first service I’ll be building but it won’t be the last. I have several services that I would love to use on a daily basis that I’ve all but stopped using because I’m afraid they’ll be bought out, run into the ground, or shutdown. For now I’ll keep that list under my hat and – for at least the rest of this calendar year – I’ll be working on Nilai when I can find the time.

Yes, I’m charging for Nilai right from the start. I want Nilai to still be up, running, and useful in 2022 and beyond. I hope that others will too and be willing to support that effort. It won’t be a feature-bloated service with apps on every single platform or a few hundred employees – but I think that is actually a good thing. The features that I put into Nilai will have to be valuable enough for me to want to support them for the life of the service. I’ll get more into the features I plan Nilai having in an upcoming post.

One question that will inevitably arise is that of competition. Yes, there are going to be competitors to every single service I build. And some of them will be very good. However, my thoughts on competition are much different than many. For the last 5+ years I’ve been very happily employed by Viddler. Viddler is an online video platform with competition from YouTube, Brightcove and other services both free and paid yet we continue to hire people, make money, and grow. The Internet is not a single street in which competition is so fierce that two competing services can only compete on price. Software is so nuanced that any differentiator, no matter how small, is enough to carve out a niche that makes building the service worthwhile.

If you’re looking for a large community with a huge network effect, maybe you could use the new Delicious. If you’re looking for a much more full-featured bookmarking service from the start, perhaps you could try Pinboard. I’ve never used either of these services but both seem to come recommended by their respective communities.

But I’m not trying to build Delicious or Pinboard. I’m building a bookmarking service that I would use and that I plan to use forever. I’m hoping that a few people will want to use it too and make suggestions on how it can improve along the way. If you want to help out by supporting the project and by making suggestions; sign up to Nilai and tell someone else about it too.

Colourmod – A color picker Dashboard widget for Mac OS X

January 17th, 2012

This Dashboard widget post (see the others) is more for developers and designers than the average person.

Colourmod is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that you’ll end up using much more than you think you would. I’m not a designer but as someone who fiddles around on the web I find myself in need of a hexadecimal color code from time-to-time. And when I do, I use Colourmod.

There are a few ways that I find myself using Colourmod to find the color I’m looking for. The first, and perhaps most obvious way, is to drag the “blue dot” color picker around the main color well and find the color I want making subtle adjustments by using the slider. The second, is to manually enter in the hexadecimal color code that I’m currently tweaking and make small changes until I get exactly what I want.

One nice feature is the blue arrow that will quickly copy the current color code and place that value into your clipboard. This makes finding, selecting and copying a color code into your text editor very, very quick.

Feature suggestions? Sure. One thing I’d like to see is a single text area that gives the proper RGB color values for a color. Although Colourmod supplies these values they aren’t easily selected. I’d also like to see a much easier and more accurate way to use the color picker. It is very tough to make small changes especially to light gray colors.

Oh, and I’d ditch the ‘U’ in Colourmod. But that’s just me.

The Path menu in pure CSS3 and using CoreAnimation

December 5th, 2011

As I mentioned last week the new Path application for iPhone is arguably the best designed application on the iPhone currently. And when there is a great design, there are going to be those that begin to pick it apart and do neat things with it. The Path app is no different. People have begun breaking it down in various ways.

One of the distinct features in the Path app is the fly-out menu that allows you to share photos, comments, location, etc. Two developers took it upon themselves to build out that menu both in CSS3 and using CoreAnimation. Both open sourced their work and gave credit.

/via Mike Rundle on Twitter.

This site makes, at most, 39 connections

December 2nd, 2011

In a recent tirade against what some are calling Shit-ass Websites (pardon my french I try to keep it clean ’round here) there has been a bit of a backlash towards websites that make an overwhelming number of connections. Also, the size of the entire page load.

This site makes, at most, 39 connections and is, at most, 12Kb or so larger than the largest photo I post. Most of those 39 connections come from the WordPress plugin that I use to show the location in which I published the post. I’m thinking of disabling this plugin and if I did my site would go down to well under 12 connections.

This recent tirade is a good excuse to revisit the site(s) that you administer to see if you can cut some cruft.