Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Remember when I said we need more ways to find good blogs and blog posts? Here's one… the always excellent Om Malik of GigaOm has a series on his personal blog called "What I am reading today". Here are a few of his recent lists. August 20th, 2013
The Zemanta Tech Circle: Tech Circle is a simple way to recommend highly related content from its members to the whole Circle. We’ve long been fans of a well curated blog roll, but with the shift to content streams and mobile consumption, often the blog roll simply never gets seen. This isn't really new and whether or not…
As a follow-up to yesterday's post, here is Jason Fried from this past July on Why we're doing things that don't scale on Signal vs. Noise: But automation can also lead to myopia. And premature-automation can lead to blindness. When you take human interaction out of a system, you’re removing key opportunities to see what really happens along…
Pasquale D’Silva on Medium in Starting your career as an Artist on the Internet: Your immediate goal should be getting a good foundation of work in your portfolio. You don’t have clients to report to yet. Learn as much as you can. Experiment. It’s freedom, embrace it. The same should be said for just about anyone doing anything…
Paul Graham in Do Things that Don't Scale: The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. The entire piece by Graham is a must-read for people starting…
Like Pamela Fox, speaking at conferences and meet ups has generally been part of my job description to help spread the word about the product or company that I'm working for. But also like Pamela I never really stopped to think about why I speak and whether or not I get anything out of it. This is what…
Fred Wilson, on _Android and iOS_: But I find myself rooting hard for Apple now. I sense the danger they are in and I don't want either smartphone OS to be so dominant that we lose the level playing field we have now. It's very important for startups, innovation, and an open mobile ecosystem for all. It is…
Related: I'd love to see Windows Phone become the third horse in the smartphone OS race. Marco Arment in Google Blindness: Developers aren’t fools. We aren’t swayed by charismatic figureheads who try to convince us to develop for their platforms. The formula is quite simple. We’ll develop for a platform if: We use it. A lot of other…
Bret Victor: The Future of Programming is a presentation he did for Dropbox's DBX conference earlier in July. Victor goes back-in-time to 1973 to give his presentation on what the future of programming could be. A perfect illustration for all of us that work on computers to know that we simply have not figured everything out yet. The…
I'm always on the lookout for new ways to deal with my ever-growing library of photos. It used to be that every time I upgraded my camera I had to worry about losing more and more space with each photo I captured. Each update to my camera created larger and larger filesizes making it very difficult for my…
Two months ago to-the-day I wrote about turning off Push Notifications on my phone, tablet and laptop. In this area I'm still doing really, really well. I recommend this for anyone. I still do not have any applications that send me any notifications. Only if my wife calls me does my phone even ring. And when not in silent…
Dave Winer in Solving problems sometimes requires work: I sent my ten steps to first post list to a VC friend. But clearly after the first step (which was go to fargo.io) he ditched the list, and made it up himself, and never got to first post. Now that would be fine if VCs weren't the gatekeepers, but…
Marco Arment finishes Lockdown, his piece on the war Facebook started and its latest casualty Google Reader, this way: We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability,…
Late last week we started looking to fill two positions at Plain and wrote a blog post explaining what we were looking for, who would be eligible, and how to apply. We've gotten some great responses so far from people all over the world; Europe, South America, and the rural US. It's great. Exactly what we were hoping for….
(I couldn't decide on the title. Sorry.) Jeremy Keith wrote a really great piece about how companies like Twitter and Facebook feel threatened by data interoperability and how this is setting a trend on the web: Once Facebook had proven that it was possible to be the one-stop-shop for your user’s every need, that became the model to…
Marco Arment paints a picture full of opportunity in what Apple has done with iOS 7. I appreciate that he kept his opinion of whether or not he liked the design of iOS 7 to himself and rather decided to focus on the opportunity this big of a change creates. This big of an opportunity doesn’t come often…
Jason Santa Maria, on a great piece on his not-updated-often-enough blog, on innovation: What people sometimes mean when they say innovation is actually iteration—continually building on good thinking and assumptions, then, most importantly, believing in the equity of those decisions enough to keep revising upon them. That is Barley. The next logical step. Not an innovation or something brand-new…
This past week Kyle Ruane and I drove to Greenville, South Carolina for the Greenville Grok – a half-week long string of events and activities put together by the great folks at The Iron Yard. Grok is unlike most conferences in a number of great ways. Most conferences focus on providing headline speakers to bring in a crowd. The crowd is…
I remember the first time I ran WordPress on my local computer. It was amazing. Within a few moments I was up and running with just a bit of PHP that could power hundreds of blog posts. Before I was using b2 (the name WordPress sort of had before that project became WordPress) I was copying and pasting HTML blocks to simulate…
On March 14th I turned off Push Notifications on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I no longer get interrupted by text messages, calendar notifications, tweets, email messages, or software updates. If I want to see if I have any new messages I have to check myself. At first this may seem like a recipe for missing very important notifications the moment they…
Starting a new business requires you to do many things that you may not enjoy doing. You may end up spending a lot of time focusing on tasks that you feel are mundane, unneeded, and downright archaic. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you but you'll have to do these things. You'll have to pay the…
Tonight I had the privilege of presenting Barley during the Lehigh Valley Tech Meetup. I thought I'd take a photo of the audience. Are you in the photo? Tweet about it!
Last year I linked to Inc.'s article about Dublin's apparent growth in successful start-ups, investments, and the general tech scene. In contrast to that post is Patrick Collison's post from October of last year showing the challenges that start-ups face in Ireland. The interesting question is probably “how hard is to start a successful start-up in Ireland compared to doing so in…
Matthew Smith in his interview with the always excellent The Great Discontent: Then people started asking me to build more things, like customer databases. I would nod in agreement as if to say, “Of course I can do that,” and then I’d get off the phone, crap my pants, and go do research on Google, ask questions on forums, and…