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Brad Rembielak
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Lately I've been pondering the similarities between mobile app development of today and shareware back in the day. What I think about is how shareware was really pretty big and many individual developers where putting out all kinds of little programs. I think that's what mobile app development is like right now.
I also think that you had a few shareware developers who really hit it big, but by far most shareware developers just making a little extra scratch. I suspect the same is true in mobile development.
Ultimately, I think we'll move past this preoccupation with the sheer number of mobile apps available (I think we've already rounded the bend actually) and the focus on crazy amounts of mobile apps will level off.
I think that shareware developers, who cut their teeth programming their own software, eventually transitioned into jobs where they wrote software for corporate overlords will also happen for mobile developers. All the skills developed writing personal mobile apps will transition into job skills for companies looking for programmers to move their LOB apps into the mobile space.
You Don't Need Millions of Dollars
Masters of Doom is the story of John Carmack and John Romero creating the seminal games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. It's an amazing work on so many levels – but primarily because of the exhaustive research the author undertook to tell this story. To re-create the story of the Two ...
Two things:
I agree with others that have pointed out that you run all kinds of computer electronics and probably work at home like many of us while many of your neighbors aren't home during the day. I wouldn't factor in the kids because many of the comparable homes probably have kids,too.
But, what I would really love to see is a graph that shows when all those upgrades you made -- the $200 thermostat, the $25 LED light bulbs, etc. -- will eventually pay off!
For a Bit of Colored Ribbon
For the last year or so, I've been getting these two page energy assessment reports in the mail from Pacific Gas & Electric, our California utility company, comparing our household's energy use to those of the houses around us. Here's the relevant excerpts from the latest report; click throug...
As other commenters have pointed out, touch and/or keyboard exists on other devices and in some cases have existed for a long time, but the point is that Microsoft has pulled a trick from Apple's playbook:
They've used their influence and position combined with actually doing something very well to make it popular.
The Surface hardware combined with the Win8 Modern UI has shown us that even though these things are first generation, there's a bright future for this style of computing AND Microsoft's muscle has given it a huge boost.
Do You Wanna Touch
Traditional laptops may have reached an evolutionary dead-end (or, more charitably, a plateau), but it is an amazing time for things that … aren't quite traditional laptops. The Nexus 7 is excellent, the Nexus 10 looks fantastic, I can't wait to get my hands on the twice-as-fast iPad 4, the n...
I like to think that in some cosmic sort of way each one of us that listens and cries along with Anthony or the family in Jeff's court case, that we lessen their pain in some way just by sharing.
Somebody is to Blame for This
This is not a post about programming, or being a geek. In all likelihood, this is not a post you will enjoy reading. Consider yourselves warned. I don't remember how I found this Moth video of comedian Anthony Griffith. It is not a fun thing to watch, especially as a parent. Even though I ...
@James: "It is a people error because the system did not decide to display L*ss*y on its own; people made that decision. The system did not decide to allow users to add credit card information to an account without proper authentication; people made that decision."
The distinction is between how the system functions and prevents intrusion on its own, versus actions that people take that unwittingly give hackers access.
In this example, the system was designed in a vulnerable way. An attack like that is made possible because a hacker can make a frontline assault on the system instead of calling a customer service person or sending the user an email bomb to open.
Computer Crime, Then and Now
I've already documented my brief, youthful dalliance with the illegal side of computing as it existed in the late 1980s. But was it crime? Was I truly a criminal? I don't think so. To be perfectly blunt, I wasn't talented enough to be any kind of threat. I'm still not. There are two classic b...
My take-away from this story is that I'm old because that era was a simpler, gentler time. The biggest crime in hacking was generally the phreaking side of things by using services without paying for them and hacking was mostly just snooping around systems without permission.
Today, hacking is a significant crime that usually involves stolen credit cards or bringing down massive systems and causing real damage.
I Was a Teenage Hacker
Twenty-four years ago today, I had a very bad day. On August 8, 1988, I was a senior in high school. I was working my after school and weekend job at Safeway as a cashier, when the store manager suddenly walked over and said I better stop ringing up customers and talk to my mother on the stor...
Speaking of Egyption Brackets, I recently wanted to post a SO question (but don't have the nerve) asking why people still use Egyption Brackets because I thought that style died out years and years ago especially after Code Complete.
New Programming Jargon
Stack Overflow – like most online communities I've studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It's primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sne...
Best part of Win8 is that we can deliver line-of-business apps to corporate clients so it will be much, much, much more than just-another-Facebook-machine.
Betting the Company on Windows 8
I'd argue that the last truly revolutionary version of Windows was Windows 95. In the subsequent 17 years, we've seen a stream of mostly minor and often inconsequential design changes in Windows – at its core, you've got the same old stuff: a start menu, a desktop with icons, taskbar at the bot...
@Tony, I hear you want to unsubscribe because you fell this post is maudlin?
How to Talk to Human Beings
I hesitate to say everyone should have a child, because becoming a parent is an intensely personal choice. I try my best to avoid evangelizing the experience, but the deeper in I get, the more I believe that nothing captures the continued absurdity of the human condition better than having a ch...
I'm far from a Steve Jobs fanatic, but he gave an excellent commencement address years back that talks about failures and complements very well what Jeff has just said.
I encourage all of you to read it (even people like me who are normally turned off by the cult of Jobs):
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead
I've been fortunate to have some measure of success in my life, primarily through this very blog over the last eight years, and in creating Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange over the last four years. With the birth of our twin girls, I've had a few months to pause and reflect on those experienc...
The misunderstanding we're having stems from us thinking the skills we have are more important than they are and also, at the same time, selling ourselves short. It's the analogy with plumbers that bears this out.
We are not like plumbers. What plumbers do is more like what the Geek Squad does (and both trades are very important):
- Pulling a dropped ring out of a P-Trap is like restoring lost desktop icons.
- Unclogging a drain is like removing a virus from a computer.
- Fixing a leaky faucet is like setting up a VPN.
- Even running copper pipes to a new bathroom is more like setting up a router and running CAT5 than it is to anything coders do.
What we do -- trying to stick to plumbing -- is more like the guys who build dishwashers or hot water tanks or come up with new piping systems. Coders are more like the engineers that create machines.
So, should everybody learn how to empty a P-Trap or unclog a drain? Yes, in the same way they should know how to remove a virus or setup a connection to their router. Those are skills that everybody should know.
Should a normal person learn how to create a garbage disposal, which is more like the kind of things coders do? If they are interested and want to, sure, but that's not the point of Atwood's blog post, which was saying that coding is not a skill that is as important as reading and writing.
Building a garbage disposal might give you insight on how plumbing works and would make you more of a well-rounded person, but it certainly doesn't rank up there with a must-have skill, and neither does programming.
Nobody is dissuading people from programming or arguing that knowing how to program would be beneficial, but let's not oversell the importance and say it's as necessary as reading and writing.
Please Don't Learn to Code
The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012. A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript co...
@macmnc said it best above:
"Programming is a *very* inefficient method of learning how computers work, or learning how problem solving works. Knowing how to write FizzBuzz won't help you understand why streaming is taking up bandwidth."
Also, the analogy is not between programming and plumbing, but probably programming and electrical engineering. Shouldn't all of use coders learn how circuit boards works and gates and transistors and all that shiny stuff on the motherboard? Wouldn't knowing all of those things help us write better code?
The answer is that it would help marginally and there are far better ways we could devote ourselves to become better coders; much in the same way that normal people would better their own computer literacy through other means than coding.
One final point: Jeff is not dissuading people who want to learn coding for a hobby or out of interest; he's attacking the notion that coding is a necessary skill that everybody needs to learn.
Please Don't Learn to Code
The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012. A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript co...
learning to code != becoming a better analytical thinker
And, whatever the skills that coding conveys, there are probably far easier and more efficient ways to attain them. It's far more important if people spend their time learning general computer literacy.
Also, having people learn how to code just so they can deal with us professional coders better -- while personally compelling -- isn't a good enough reason either and I question whether toying with some JavaScript really provides enough insight in what we do for a living.
Please Don't Learn to Code
The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012. A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript co...
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May 15, 2012
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