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
Yesterday I missed the opportunity to drop a James Bond joke. š For a over a year Iāve 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 a few photos…
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 more fun. Perhaps…
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 ā right around the time I started Plain ā I decided not to work in the late evening or on weekends. Iām willing to work, of course,…
Chris Saccaās 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 Iām focusing on his idea of aĀ āTwitter Save Buttonā. 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 Iāve 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 āthe seatā I feel at home. With Barley, weāre rebooting it and it feels like exactly the…
Isaac Newtonās 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: āAnd, 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 weāre 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 productās focus by starting over and weāre going to ask that you follow along with us…
Random notes from Appleās WWDC Keynote today: Apple Music Radio sounds exactly like Top 40 radio and that is terrible. I hope it doesnāt end up being justĀ āradio onlineā because that isnāt something I want and I doubt that is somethingĀ āthe kidsā want.
I was interviewed by Belle Cooper for the Zapier blog about Unmark ā our open source bookmarking application: But, we decided to make it open source because we didnāt 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 ā especially when you combine those words with photos, hyperlinks, and hashtags. But this, this exercise of writing 100 words…
Iāve 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 youāll 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 blogĀ in February of this year: Blogging isnāt 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 Iāve reviewed a lot of product design work from job applicants and Iāve 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 thatās worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one thatās 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 asksā¦ 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,…
Facebookās 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 LlobreraĀ on A List Apart: Thatās my biggest takeaway from Instant Articles: we (designers and our…
A little over a week ago I wrote: They arenāt new. You can find them if you dig. But they arenāt āa thingā and I think they should be. I was talking about panoselfies. Well, weāre getting somewhere with this new way of taking a selfie and Iām glad to report a few bits of the hooplah here….
Joe Betz at Coursera: Weād like to try a bit of an experiment here at Coursera. Instead of building a project internally and waiting until we think itās fully polished to open source it, weāre going to āthrow it over the wallā before weāve even gotten going on the coding. We did the same thing with UnmarkĀ and we…
In February Canalys estimated that there have been 720,000 Android Wear watches sold. Pretty good, Iād 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: Iām 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 weāve added onto the process of building for the web have some incredible value ā weāve made the barrier to entry much, much higher than it has ever been to…
They arenāt new. You can find them if you dig. But they arenātĀ āa thingā 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…