Year: 2015
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100 words 009
The best days are filled with variety. Variety helps to break up the day and keep me moving and productive. Today started with some programming to finishing up a client project. Then, I drove to two client meetings where I was able to do a little training and a little fixing. Then, lunch watching Casey.…
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100 words 008
Yesterday I missed the opportunity to drop a James Bond joke. 🙁 For a over a year I’ve owned a GoPro Hero3. I love this little camera. However, for the passed 5 months or so it has sat in my home office doing little else than collecting dust. I took it out yesterday and shot…
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100 words 007
I washed the dishes this afternoon and when I got to my least favorite dish to wash, the silverware, I was reminded of this post I wrote in March 2011. Rather than saving the silverware to last I should have started with them and figured out a way to make it fun. Or, at least…
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100 words 006
For years, well over a decade and a half, I worked at night and on the weekend. Many people do this and they like to do it. However, several years ago — right around the time I started Plain — I decided not to work in the late evening or on weekends. I‘m willing to…
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100 words 005
Jurassic Park was the first book that I read because I wanted to rather than because I had to. I was 11 when I read the book and 12 when the movie was released 22 years ago. I remember going opening weekend with family who had read the book. Since then I’ve been a lifelong…
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Twitter’s Save Button
Chris Sacca’s infamous blog post on What Twitter Can Be ranged from topics about its apps, the platform itself, and what Wall Street thinks of the company. There are several bits I plan to write about but today I’m focusing on his idea of a “Twitter Save Button”. So much of the time, Twitter moves too…
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100 words 004
Yesterday Kyle and I had an outdoor lunch with a local entrepreneur who wanted to throw two ideas at us. The first idea was a throwaway. At least he thought so. When he began to describe the idea we provided our feedback, our ideas, and tried to lay out several paths that could help him…
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100 words 003
I feel like there is a groove being hit. At Plain, Kyle and I are getting better at our work every day. With every improvement of our business comes a little bit less stress and worry. Rather than feeling uneasy in “the seat” I feel at home. With Barley, we’re rebooting it and it feels…
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100 words 002
Isaac Newton’s third law of motion is: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body. Paul McCartney, of The Beatles, wrote in their song The End: “And, in the end The love you take is…
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100 words 001
What can be said in 100 words? I remember signing up for Twitter in November 2006 and wondering; what can be said in 140 characters? I had no idea tweets would be as versatile as they have become — especially when you combine those words with photos, hyperlinks, and hashtags. But this, this exercise of…
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Interviewed about Unmark
I was interviewed by Belle Cooper for the Zapier blog about Unmark — our open source bookmarking application: But, we decided to make it open source because we didn‘t want it to become like every other service we loved that ended up disappearing. If we built it in the open, it can live on forever…
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Random WWDC 2015 Notes
Random notes from Apple’s WWDC Keynote today: Apple Music Radio sounds exactly like Top 40 radio and that is terrible. I hope it doesn’t end up being just “radio online” because that isn’t something I want and I doubt that is something “the kids” want.
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Starting over with Barley
Kyle and I have decided we love Barley too much to let it die. So we’re starting over with it in hopes we can find the right fit for it in the market. That is why we are going to sharpen our product’s focus by starting over and we’re going to ask that you follow…
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Visual Studio Code 0.3.0
I’ve been using VS Code for a little over a month now. It is easily my favorite editor at the moment. Yesterday Microsoft released an update to the application but you’ll need to re-install it to get it. The auto-update feature in the app will not work. Check out the list of updates.
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Design to solve real problems
Paul Adams of Intercom on Medium: In the last year I’ve reviewed a lot of product design work from job applicants and I’ve noticed a worrying pattern. Too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than address real business problems. This has long been a problem in creative advertising (where creative work is…
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Why blog?
Deanna Mascle on her blog in February of this year: Blogging isn’t for everyone, but as I must write to think and process life, blogging is a gift (What Blogging Taught Me). I hope my blog benefits others, but I cannot measure the positive impact blogging has had on my life. Then, yesterday, in a follow-up…
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The Web of Alexandria
Bret Victor: We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that‘s worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that‘s led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in…
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Haughey introduces the Panoselfie
Matt Haughey on Medium: After seeing the first couple panoselfies Colin made, I became immediately enamored with the idea. You can see #panoselfies are picking up a bit.
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Courier
Joe Betz at Coursera: We’d like to try a bit of an experiment here at Coursera. Instead of building a project internally and waiting until we think it’s fully polished to open source it, we’re going to “throw it over the wall” before we’ve even gotten going on the coding. We did the same thing…
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Panoselfie hooplah
A little over a week ago I wrote: They aren’t new. You can find them if you dig. But they aren’t “a thing” and I think they should be. I was talking about panoselfies. Well, we’re getting somewhere with this new way of taking a selfie and I’m glad to report a few bits of…
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Web pages should load quickly
Facebook’s Instant Articles platform has us web people discussing the speed at which our pages load. It is excellent to see this discussion happening. Here are a few of my favorite tidbits from a few of the pieces I have read recently: Mark Llobrera on A List Apart: That’s my biggest takeaway from Instant Articles: we…
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Why Shopify is valued higher than Woo Commerce by a public market
I saw a discussion on Twitter while laying in bed last night. You can catch up right here. Essentially, it asks… why is Woo Commerce, which has a larger install base, valued so much lower than Shopify by the public market? A bit of background; Woo Themes, the company that built and maintains the Woo…
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Watch sales
In February Canalys estimated that there have been 720,000 Android Wear watches sold. Pretty good, I’d think, for a watch. Any watch maker would likely be proud of those numbers. Estimates for Apple Watch sales are all over the map. But recently KGI Research adjusted their figures and estimated that Apple will sell under 15…
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We’ve Made Web Development Complicated
Alex King: I’m working on a web app now and it recently struck me how much more complicated things have become. I agree. While some of the tools we’ve added onto the process of building for the web have some incredible value — we’ve made the barrier to entry much, much higher than it has…
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What is a Panoselfie?
They aren’t new. You can find them if you dig. But they aren’t “a thing” and I think they should be. So, yesterday I created a Flickr group called Panoselfies. I recommend giving it a try. How: Put your phone on pano mode Point it just over your right shoulder Slowly rotate your wrist as the…
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Today: May 7, 2015
A little something new. Another try at daily blogging. This is what I looked at most of the day. We’re putting in a fair bit of work on some new things for Barley this week and I’m pretty excited to get them out the door. Had lunch at Backyard Ale House and managed to stick…
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Casey Liss on Code
Casey Liss on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code: All told, Code may or may not be for you, but it’s working out really nicely for me so far. I definitely suggest giving it a shot. I too have been using Code as my primary editor since it debuted at Build. I’m enjoying it. It seems much…
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Stop calling businesses unicorns
Me, on Twitter early this morning from bed: Startup culture is such that the word unicorn is used to describe a successful business. Imagine if the culture fostered success more often. Then, Fred Wilson on his blog this morning: I hate the word unicorn. It’s using fantasy to describe something very much reality. But I…
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Microsoft’s Windows 10 Vision Isn’t Simple
Cade Metz for Wired on Microsoft’s vision for Windows 10 to be on a billion devices and for applications from Android, iOS, and Windows all running on them “easily”: But this kind of thing is never as easy as it seems. “I’m skeptical of anything that pretends to be the magic bullet,” says one coder, who…
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Brent Simmons deletes his tweets
Brent Simmons on his blog: But those aren’t my reasons for deleting my tweets. Instead, it’s because Twitter is a blogging (or micro-blogging, really) service that doesn’t meet my requirements […] Follow the link to read the rest of the post. This is very tempting. Ever since Jeremy Keith went Indie Web with his “notes” (read:…
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Windows Media Center finally shot in head
Ed Bott, of the Ed Bott Report, reporting on ZDNet that Microsoft is shooting Windows Media Center in the head: That decision shouldn‘t come as a surprise. Media Center, once a signature feature of Windows “premium“ editions, has been on life support for years. The team developing Media Center features was broken up in 2009,…
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Why I wouldn’t bet against Microsoft
If you follow me on Twitter you can probably tell that for the past 48 hours my brain is swirling around Microsoft’s Build conference and keynote. In a lot of ways my brain is swirling in the same way that it did in 2002 when I saw Steve Jobs debut the 17” iMac. This was…
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Microsoft’s Build Keynote
I just finished watching Microsoft’s Build Keynote from yesterday. If you haven’t seen it, and understand developer jargon, I recommend you watch it. My takeaways: Windows is about to get a lot more applications Office is now as big a platform for MSFT as Windows is Visual Studio Code is very good (I’ve been using…
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Draplin on Clinton
Aaron Draplin on the reaction of Hillary Clinton’s logo: Knee-jerk reactions. Cheap comparisons. Lazy remixes. Predictable reactions. So it goes. Unfortunately this is how it goes. A woman runs for President of the United States and the biggest news to come out of it is her choice of logo. I think people just like to…
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Zeldman on Medium
Jeffery Zeldman on whether or not Medium is a death knell of the open web: You may think I exaggerate, but I’ve heard more than one respected colleague opine that publishing in Medium invalidates everything we independent content producers care about and represent; that it destroys all our good works with but one stroke of…
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The full-stack employee
Chris Messina, inventor of #hashtags, on Medium: The conventional seams between disciplines are fraying, and the set of skills necessary to succeed are broader and more nebulous than they’ve been before. He waxes on about how the lines between nearly every single area inside a company are blurring more and more. His piece reminded me…
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The pull towards design
For the past several years our industry, the tech industry, has been pulling designers that work within it down the stack — so to speak — towards engineering. They’ve drilled into their heads that they need to learn to code or, at the very least, to be able to create functional prototypes of their designs so…
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Two needs for deep linking
What are Deep Links? Scott Rosenberg recently wrote a piece on Backchannel on Medium about Deep Links. He wrote: Deep linking means to bore a wormhole-tunnel that hops you directly from a specific spot in one app to a spot in another, no side trip to a browser or a home screen needed. You get…
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DuckDuckGo
Marco Arment on DuckDuckGo: In my experience so far, DuckDuckGo’s search is good enough the vast majority of the time. Sometimes, its results are even better than Google’s, and they’re rarely much worse. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine on all of my devices for several months. I’ve had some speed issues with…
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A whale of a distraction
Photographer Eric Smith in Going Viral on Medium: When I reviewed the pictures two weeks ago I was astounded by the juxtaposition of the young man immersed in his phone while this creature is feet away. Over the course of six shots showing the whale emerging and vanishing, he never looked up, even while the three…
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Beethoven
Noah Read on music: When I became a teenager this music fell by the wayside as my tastes followed those of most teenagers trying to be cool while not popular. Some of what I liked then has stood the test of time, but much of it has proven itself culturally and emotionally bankrupt. In recent…
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git turns 10
Linus Torvalds, creator of git: You can actually see how it all took shape in the git source code repository, except for the very first day or so. It took about a day to get to be “self-hosting“ so that I could start committing things into git using git itself, so the first day or…
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You don’t need a watch to be distraction free
In March 2013 I turned off all notifications on my phone, tablet, and computer. In May of that year I went one step further and closed most applications that would keep me distracted and only opened them when I wanted to. To this day the only notifications I get on my devices are for SMS…
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Bird nests
We have a number of bird nests throughout our 3 acre property. Some I’ve seen, most I haven’t laid eyes on yet. Last year we had a Woodcock (weird bird alert) nest under our spruce trees in the backyard. See blurry photo. Each morning we have turkeys roosting throughout the forest. I love it. Here are…
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Blanton tries Twitter blogging
Justin Blanton decides to muddy the waters on the definition of the word blogging even more by using textshots on Twitter to “blog”: With the advent of “textshots”—screenshots of text linked within tweets (and viewed inline on many Twitter clients)—I’ve decided to try something new with Twitter: “blogging”. Blanton is a blogging veteran so we’ll allow…