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
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 work, of course,…
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 fast. If we…
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 Michael Crichton fan…
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 make this idea…
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 like exactly the…
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 equal to the…
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 along with us…
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.
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 for anyone that…
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 writing 100 words…
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.
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 post she wrote:…
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 often more aligned…
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 history? See also,…
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.
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 Commerce WordPress plugin,…
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 (designers and our…
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 the hooplah here….
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 with Unmark and we…
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 million Apple Watches…
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 ever been to…
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 phone takes the…
A few images from the weekend.
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 to salad. Go…