Category: Commentary

Delayed Liveblog on the WWDC 2014 Keynote

I was stuck in meetings most of the day but I was able to download the keynote for the train ride home :) Here are some thoughts. If I live tweeted, it probably would have gone something like this. Maybe a few more here.. The dev intro video was awesome. It’s like Apple saying “We love you, we’ve heard you” That’s a lot of Apple engineers present It’s a shame I can’t risk my laptop. I want to play with Yosemite! I dig the new look Ooo dark mode Mail drop is huge for work Airdrop from phone to laptop…

The Most Dangerous Word In Software Development

“Just put it up on a server somewhere.” “Just add a favorite button to the right side of the item.” “Just add [insert complex option here] to the settings screen.” If any of these sentences rings true or makes you cringe, read this article.

Twitter or RSS

If you had to choose between only reading Twitter or only reading weblogs, which would you choose? Losing Twitter would be a bummer for a lot people, but losing weblogs would decimate the web. We should do more to strengthen weblogs and RSS because they are the foundation for so much of the most important writing on the web. #RSS4LIFE Joking aside, I do get a lot of my news from twitter these days. I would say half the articles that I'd be interested in reading (dumping to Instapaper from Reeder or Mr…

Don't Skimp on Coffee: A CTO's Plea

My friend Matt, CTO of DoSomething.org, posted a great article on the importance of coffee, ritual, and how they relate to the happiness, productivity, and health of your company If you’re looking for an office Rosetta Stone, a way to assess company culture across industries, coffee is it.

The Rise and Fall of Communication Mediums

Brent Simmons: My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here. The things that will last on the internet are not owned. Plain old websites, blogs, RSS, irc, email. Marco Arment: This is why I’m still championing blogs, RSS, and using your own domain even though supposedly “everyone” has moved…

These are the apps you want to try on your new iPhone

iOS 8 offers a whole range of features that let apps extend themselves — into other apps, and even into widgets inside notification center. This is a great writeup of how exciting things are getting in the ecosystem for both new and old apps alike

Meet Magento 2014 New York – a Personal Summary

Alan Kent, Chief Architect of Magento 2 has a great write up of Meet Magento NY Tim Broder of Alexander Interactive talked about his use of Vagrant to build standard images, ensuring more consistent development environments for all users. He pointed out you can have a Vagrant container mount a file system from your local laptop so you can use a local IDE while having the files run in a standard Vagrant environment image. In development you may mount it read/write and in production read-only. The idea was to…

Twitter is not a replacement for blogs

Too much of my writing in the last few years has gone exclusively into Twitter. I need to find a better balance.

Facebook, you creepy piece of sh*t

I debated posting this for a few days. I’m deciding to because when I was googling for something. I found nothing. I hope this helps someone: A lot of people don't talk about this. Some do. Most don't. I'm not sure why. Maybe embarrassment. Maybe fear. Maybe they think they are alone. You aren't. It happens. It's real. I've talked to some people and we aren't alone. Laura and I have been trying to conceive for a bit. I won't go into how long, at least not right now, so don't ask. Talking to some people has…

Integrated Automation for iOS 8

I can't wait to play with Workflow more over the holidays “Workflow – first teased by Ari Weinstein and team in January 2014 – takes another approach: instead of relying heavily on a specific functionality (such as text editing) or third-party apps and services (like IFTTT and Dropbox), Workflow is primarily aimed at automating native iOS apps and features. Workflow can automate Calendar events and Reminders, it can parse and extract data from webpages in Safari, and it has full support for Photos and…

My $2375 Amazon EC2 Mistake

A word of warning: Know what your modules/extensions/pods/plugins are doing, especially if they use any of your credentials. I’m actually surprised that this actually was up that long. I accidentally did this once and Amazon was on the phone with me 10 mins later. Turns out through the S3 API you can actually spin up EC2 instances, and my key had been spotted by a bot that continually searches GitHub for API keys. Amazon AWS customer support informed me this happens a lot recently, hackers have created an…

Beyond UXKit - Robert Böhnke

Robert Böhnke wrote a good [piece](http://robb.is/thinking-about/beyond- uxkit/) on what UXKit could mean for the future of iOS/Mac UI Engineering The new Photos for Mac is based on a new private framework in 10.10.3, UXKit. It is essentially a replica of UIKit, based on top of AppKit. He also comments on what something like react native could mean for engineers, and the attitude the community has had around other “non-native” in the past

Open-Sourcing Jewelbots

I’ve always wondered why companies (and individuals) don’t put more of their source code out there

Apple Music Followup: Part 1

A few new articles popped up in my RSS feed since I mentioned Apple Music I got my music back. At least most of it At this point, I’m just glad to have most of music back, but I still have no idea what happened to the other songs, for sure. Jim was able to meet with Apple privately and investigate a lot of his issues. Check out his post for the full story Dave Mark: Why I’m not done with Apple Music My Mac and iOS devices might as well be on different planets. When I search for a song on my iPhone, I can…