Participating in ColorWars has been a really cool experience. It’s taught me a lot. But the #1 thing I would say is it’s taught me to JUST SHIP, YOU FUCKING IDIOT. (And by YOU FUCKING IDIOT, I mean me, not you. You are not a fucking idiot. You are my reader! And clearly you are […]
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 […]
Sometimes it’s the little coincidences that seem to be telling you you’re on the right path, stick to it. The setup… In this case, driving back from Baltimore yesterday I had a long discussion with Thomas about why programming sucks, why programmer’s tools aren’t as good as we tend to think they are, why programmers […]
A couple days ago, my friend Courtenay was able to accurately utter the lovely clichéd phrase “you heard it here first” in a certain online community of which I am a part. Heard what here first? This: Webkit’s getting off-line storage. And it’s accessible through SQL. Say what? It’s true. Apparently (or presumably) powered by […]
Owning an expensive camera does not a photographer make. Knowing how to annotate music does not a composer make. Having a fancy journal does not a writer make. Being good at CSS does not a designer make (nor does CSS make anything beautiful). Being able to write HTML does not a user interface expert make […]
Another experiment. I dug up yet another scribbly half-baked essay and decided to turn it into an audio entry. I have a nice mic that I bought for this purpose and I’m learning a bit about audio production here and there (thanks Geoff!). The final result, not edited except to remove 3 “ums” (which I […]
Wow, what a week. I just got back from Portland, where I hung out with tons of great Ruby folks, said and did lots of potentially embarrassing things, and gave a talk on designers and developers, working together. (“You got designer in my developer!” “You got developer in my designer!”) Downloads Grab the goods: Slide […]
Guess all that free publicity must be good for something! Miles Forrest of CoderPath and I sat down last weekend and talked for about 3 hours about application design, the process of application invention, and all that good stuff. He trimmed it heavily and turned it into a screencast. Which you can watch here. For […]
