Fasctimidating
Chris Baus laments that developers are rarely impressed by other developers. It’s often true...
Alerts as spam
I went to a talk last night by John Allspaw at Etsy, about alerts and how they are hard to get right...
What if ‘source code’ were a serialized syntax tree?
At the risk of revealing my lack of a CompSci degree: what if ‘source code’ were replaced by serialized syntax trees?..
Debugging is debugging
I use CoffeeScript here and there. And JavaScript everywhere else. Depending on the scenario, and this is a matter of taste, CoffeeScript is more elegant, readable, and usable...
Your phone is faster than Amtrak’s wifi
Amtrak is improving its wifi, it claims. Fine. The problem is, it’ll never be faster than your phone’s 4G connection...
Ad blocking, like piracy, is a market phenomenon
A French ISP has started blocking ads at the router level for its customers, enabled by default...
Labor costs make way for Maslow
That Apple, and other companies, are deciding to move manufacturing back to the United States is evidence of the diminishing importance of labor costs in decision-making...
A political approach to hiring creatives
This article offers a lot of sound advice on hiring a designer. As techies, we’re often out of our depth in knowing what a good designer is — often, we hire a decorator instead (or as the article calls it, a stylist)...
Microsoft’s political privacy game
I’ve suggested many times that Microsoft should disable third-party cookies by default in IE10 (and Safari does currently)...
The good might be the enemy of the perfect with software patents
I have a few concerns, relating to unintended consequences, with a proposed loser-pays bill on software patents...