Blog

My friend Yaron direct messaged me: “You like Space?” Me: “Yes.” Almost one month to-the-day later we launched Spacebits together. If you like Space… you can subscribe via RSS or follow along at @SpaceBitsFeed.

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Brie Weiler Reynolds, writing on Medium about working from home: The salacious reality about what I really do when I work from home is that I…work. Interesting word use. She makes the point that so many people still do not understand how working from home can be a real, actual, job and how it has […]

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Matt D. Smith, whom I met at Greenville Grok and whose work I admire, recently held a Transform Athens event and asked John Saddington to present. And present he did. On blogging, of all things. Here is what Matt wrote afterwards about the event and blogging: The very fact that you are reading this right […]

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Fresh URL is a JavaScript library that strips away all of the extra cruft at the end of URLs but does so only after each service that uses that cruft gets the data they need. Brendan Schwartz, CTO of Wistia, writing on their company blog on how it works: Here‘s how it works. Fresh URL […]

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Stewart Butterfield, on Medium, regarding the “innovation” that Slack brings: But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity. We […]

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Chris Poole, founder of 4chan, remarks (on his personal blog) on the debate for and against anonymity on the web: The combination of anonymity and ephemerality has fostered experimentation and creativity rarely seen elsewhere. It’s incredible what people can make when they’re able to fail publicly without fear, since not only will those failures not […]

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David Sparks, on his blog MacSparky: I‘ve been sloppy about cleaning out my camera roll. I could do this on the phone but it isn‘t very fast. So I fired up my favorite Mac app for managing/copying/deleting lots of images at once, Image Capture. I‘m often surprised by how many Mac owners don‘t even know […]

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The people behind 1910 Design & Company took at stab at redesigning Wikipedia: While big parts of the internet have gone through an amazing journey in terms of typography these last years, Wikipedia’s reading experience is still stuck in the 90’s. We wanted to take a few days and propose a direction through which Wikipedia […]

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Conor McClure, on his personal blog: What is an RSS feed? I thought you’d never ask. No, really; the non-geek community is seriously missing out by not taking advantage of RSS in this online-media-dominated world we live in. I agree. And sometimes, on Twitter, I pretend to know the way out. Sometimes I think that […]

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The excellent Mandy Brown, CEO of Editorially, on Making remote teams work: One of the most unexpected things that I’ve learned from working remotely is that it isn’t just about accommodating different lifestyles or taking advantage of technology’s ability to compress long distances. Remote working encourages habits of communication and collaboration that can make a […]

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One of the most common misconceptions about Barley is that it helps you with page layout in some way. It does not. You can’t change anything about a page’s layout using Barley CMS, our editor, or our Barley for WordPress plugin. Barley is specifically designed to help you edit the content of a web page. […]

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Chris Poole, on his personal blog: Not every idea represents a venture-backed opportunity though. That isn’t to say the idea or opportunity lacks merit—it’s just that another vehicle may be more appropriate for pursuing it. Bootstrapping, borrowing from close friends and family, a traditional bank loan, et cetera can also help bring an idea to […]

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Rebecca Morelle has written a piece for the BBC explaining that scientists have figured out how snakes can glide through the jungle: Prof Socha said: “As it jumps, it flattens out from just behind the head to where the tail starts. What it is doing is taking its ribs and rotating them forwards toward the […]

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My friend Yaron Schoen, whom I met at Greenville Grok last year, has a new startup that he’s been working on for at least a year. It is called Kiddo and it is for parents. This is where Kiddo comes in. We want to help change that mindset by creating powerful and well designed software […]

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Rob Cockerham was determined to make clear ice in his home refrigerator. It took him well over a dozen different tries and methods. Until: Around this time, I spotted a crystal-clear ice sculpture of Optimus Prime on Reddit. I asked in the comments how they got the ice so clear and was sent a link […]

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The official ADN blog: The fourth #adnhackation was this past Saturday, and, as always, developers worked on some extremely creative and inventive projects, which open up new uses for an App.net account. Really hard to believe this was the fourth hackathon already. As in the past, some great projects seemed to have come from this […]

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Jared Sinclair, on his personal blog, on the new Dark Sky: The raw idea for the redesign is good; the three-panel view with a side panel for the globe is an interesting riff on two established navigation patterns. But the execution is sloppy. It lacks clarity. It fails to shape the data into visually coherent […]

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Not everyone understood Van Gogh’s work at first. Frances Spalding for The Gaurdian: The artist Henry de Groux threatened to remove his own work from the 1890 exhibition if he found it in the same room as “the laughable pot of sunflowers by Mr Vincent“. A recent trip to MoMA in New York City has […]

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Chad Fowler, CTO of 6Wunderkinder, has written a post on his personal blog about how our industry glorifies working long hours and how it is ironically counterproductive. I agree and in general Chad is spot on. I’ve helped lead and develop software products for 15 years of my career and this is the lesson that takes […]

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A friend of our team, Matthew Hiller, has a great letterpress shoppe in Scranton, PA and his little business got covered in our local newspaper: Each order begins with a client consultation, followed by a briefing at which Mr. Hiller presents ideas for the design either on his computer or with handset type. He shows […]

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We’ve come a long way in 30 years. Steven Levy, writing for Rolling Stone in 1984: On a pleasant, light background (you can later change the background to any of a number of patterns, if you like), little pictures called “icons“ appear, representing choices available to you. A word-processing program might be represented by a […]

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I’m not going to even pretend to fully grasp this, however, I simply had so link to it. Stephen Hawking has published a paper on arXiv.org titled Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes. He postulates, and somewhat contradicts his own theories from decades past, that black holes aren’t exactly as we think they are. […]

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Well, not yesterday. Since the Cigar Galaxy, or M82, is roughly 12 million lightyears from our little hometown planet this supernova likely occurred some, well, 12 million years ago. Mike Hankey, quoting Star Wars: A New Hope, on his personal blog:  Was yesterday one of those days when you felt a disturbance in the Force, as […]

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I do. MG Siegler does. But, as he writes, on his personal blog: Instagram is a service with hundreds of millions of users. And it seems that a large percentage of them are not aware of a key feature of the service. I frequently get the same question as MG does: “where was this photo taken?” […]

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Fun, neat thing Spark did. They built an open source Nest thermostat in a day: All in, we spent about $70 on components to put this together (including $39 for the Spark Core); the wood and acrylic were free. We started working at 10am and finished at 3am, with 3.5 engineers involved (one went to […]

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Dara Skolnick, who has a beautiful personal blog, writes a tip on Tuesdays for developers. She has a two-part series on developing locally. As you’ve probably already figured out, WordPress is written in PHP, which is a server-side language. This means that the website has to communicate with a server in order to display the […]

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Brian Otis and Babak Parvis on the Official Google Blog: We’re now testing a smart contact lens that’s built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material. Whatever we think about Google these days this sort of […]

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Fred Wilson, on his personal blog, on the doomsday scenario that is likely being created by the ruling on Net Neutrality: Telcos will pick their preferred partners, subsidize the data costs for those apps, and make it much harder for new entrants to compete with the incumbents. I hope not. Oy.

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Chris Gonzales has started an excellent Artifacts series on his personal blog Unretrofied. His first in the series is with Ben Brooks and, well, I suppose you learn something new every day. There‘s only like a two-month span of the year where my nose isn‘t runny. These little packs of tissues are crucial. I only […]

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Jason Del Ray & Mike Isaac, reporting for re/code, say Twitter and Stripe are near a deal to allow Twitter to accept credit cards in some fashion. I think they hit the nail on the head with their last paragraph: Or another likely scenario: Twitter could integrate Stripe’s payment processing into its “Cards” technology, allowing […]

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Jason Santa Maria, on The Pastry Box Project: We talk all the time on our personal and periodical sites about the latest techniques for design, but how often do we break down new designs? I mean really discuss them, not just add them to a gallery of notable sites. Jason was moved to rethink about […]

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I had written a much longer draft of this post called “Greed and ignorance in the stock market” but after writing what became a very long, whiny post about how I used to work at a stock brokerage and have thus learned how completely broken and stupid the entire system is — I realized it sounded […]

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Derek Sivers, on his newly rejuvenated personal blog, on Quality, quoting Benjamin Joffe: In Japan, if I ask almost anyone what quality means, they’ll say, ‘it’s perfect – zero defects’. Japanese culture emphasizes the importance of striving for perfection. Fascinating yet strangely unsurprising yet still a great reminder of a read.

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Timeline: In March 2012 I decided to hack away on a side project called Nilai.

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John Siracusa, on his personal blog, The Road to Geekdom: You don’t have to be a geek about everything in your life—or anything, for that matter. But if geekdom is your goal, don’t let anyone tell you it’s unattainable. You don’t have to be there “from the beginning” (whatever that means). You don’t have to […]

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No one can say his name correctly, but Brett Terpstra has pumped out a slew of amazing projects over the years — most of which were offered for free. Brett has decided to part ways with Aol Tech and strike out on his own. Now is the time to open your wallet and show your […]

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Shadoe Huard, on his personal blog: I‘m officially coming out in favour of iPads as cameras. Brave man. Loosely related: Craig Mod’s piece in The New Yorker, and Apple’s new iPad ad.

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Dave Winer, on why comments on a blog post turned bad: What bloggers are guilty of — always — is telling their story imperfectly. It’s the imperfections that make it interesting, and human — and worth it. I have an opinion on many things. Typically I have a rather strong opinion on many things. And […]

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Yesterday The Verge revealed that Google “made it really easy for strangers to email you”. Google being Google. No one can out-Google Google. Anyway, TUAW shows how to turn it off.

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These works by Zaria Forman are simply amazing. /via Marco Suarez on Twitter.

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Tim Bray on the state of Software in 2014. I agree with him on many things including: Browsers suck too. […] JavaScript is horrible. […] CSS sucks too. […] /via John “I can use whatever extension for Markdown I want” Gruber.

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If you’re even remotely geeky you’ll have noticed countless instances of code showing up in television shows and movies. And, usually, you can see that the code is total junk. In comes this tumblog which showcases code in TV and films and goes the extra mile to detail what the code is actually designed to […]

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Jared Sinclair, on his personal blog, on the potential for indie devs to up their game. My finger-to-the-wind says that apps and services aiming for mainstream consumer appeal, which were already impossibly hard, are only going to get harder in the coming years. There’s too much noise, and attention is fleeting. Any company that hasn’t […]

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