Greg Pollack, of the incredibly awesome RailsEnvy (you have to watch these funny videos), cornered me briefly in the speaker’s lounge at RailsConf and asked what I’d rant about. The answer, apparently, is “excellence.” Amy Hoy at Railsconf 2008 from Gregg Pollack on Vimeo. This whole thing reminds me that I want to see a […]
Be meta. Try to become a meta designer, or meta whatever area you are in. What being meta means is to look not just at the details of what you are doing, be it design or business or whatever, but take the big picture view, the ‘meta’ view, and see how every action you take […]
There is an inherent problem with the definition of design as “solving problems”: There isn’t a problem to solve. There is only the assumption that things present themselves, walk up to you and say “Hi! I’m a problem. Solve me.” Life doesn’t announce itself. Problems don’t self-identify. Neither do their best-seller-management-book alternate, opportunities. In fact, […]
Twistori, as implemented, was a whim—I woke up that morning with the desire to ship something. I picked something I’d been thinking about a while, but had never committed pen to paper or pixels to Photoshop, and stripped it down to its bare essentials, something that could be achieved in a day. The challenge was […]
This is one side of the story of twistori. I will tell the other later. Anyone who knows me knows about my rants. I like to rant. I rant about a lot of things, and always have—but as the years have accumulated in me and changed me, so have the topics of my rants shifted […]
The below article should appear in the July issue of the UK internet mag, .net (unrelated to the Microsoft framework, ewww). Since I know few of you will have access to the issue, I thought I’d post it here, too. But in case you are so geographically inclined, it never hurts to support a decent […]
You’ve probably heard of Ze Frank (if not, shame on you!). If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably heard of ColorWars, a sort of Twitter-based prank-experiment created by Ze Frank. You probably found out about ColorWars the same way I did: logging into Twitter one afternoon and going “Holy crap! What the hell is all this… […]
Somewhere on planet earth, a dude named Shimon Schocken teaches a pretty revolutionary university class called From Nand to Tetris in 12 Steps. The course starts off with little else but the idea that “God gave us NAND” (a particular kind of logic gate). From this humble beginning, students build a small computer from the […]
It’s taken a longass time, but Slash7 Interviews are soooo totally back. My first willing victi—I mean, guest—is Ryan Norbauer. Ryan’s a hard person to peg in one sentence: he’s got an academic background in the social sciences, became a web application developer for himself out of frustration, started a company trying to change the […]
To (very) long-term readers, this might look familiar. It’s from 2 and a half years ago, originally. It had 1 non-spam comment and even I had forgotten I’d written it… I found it by accident looking for another article that went missing. (Mephisto’s design makes it very easy to delete articles rather than deleting their […]
