programming

A collection of 44 posts

software

Dear Mobile App Developers

Obviously Apple and Google have done a good job building out the IP stack for mobile devices (I still can't believe Steve Jobs tricked AT&T into allowing them access to the data pipe back in the day), but, I thought things would have evolved further than

protocols

The Three Mobile Notification Tiers

Mobile device notifications have probably become the primary UI I use to engage with my mobile device. I'm constantly amazed at how poorly mobile app developers implement them. Here's an awesome post by Stan Otrovskiy (iOS engineer at AMEX) that gets into how to do the

email

Google Inbox: I Tried

I was in the first wave of Google Inbox users when they started leaking it out into the world. I can't remember when that was, but I've been using Inbox exclusively now for at least a few months. I'm done using it now and

programming

My Daughter's First Software Creation

This weekend my eight-year-old daughter built her first program using an iOS app called Hopscotch [https://www.gethopscotch.com/] which uses the Hopscotch programming language (kind of like Scratch). It's not a static or compiled language like C or Java (her dad's background :) ), but, variables (values)

programming

Should I Do This?

I've had a recent influx of conversations that have driven me back to a few tenants I live by. Thought I'd write briefly about them. If you're ever faced with a decision around whether or not you should invest time, money or energy in

urls

Unspeakable URLs: Y! Japan's Stronghold

While in Japan a couple of weeks ago I had a fascinating conversation with a local software/web person about URLs, Japan, and the mystery (to me) that has always been Y! Japan (Y! Japan is a joint venture between Y! US and Softbank). Now I get it. Imagine a

programming

Radioactive App Store Updates & User State

This whole post applies to desktop browsers and cookies too, but the use case is underscored on a mobile device because user input is relatively more difficult. > As a mobile app user (e.g. iOS apps) I want to tell an app as little about myself and my preferences/

technology

Modern Software Labor Challenges: The Perfect Storm

Many moons ago when I graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in "Computer Science Applications" (the University's attempt at hybridizing Computer Science with a School of Arts theme (Political Science for me); think "double major"), two things were obvious: software engineers

programming

Minimally Viable Products & Native vs. Web Apps

This is unfortunately two blog posts poorly mashed into one. I couldn't reign in my stream of consciousness into something more coherent. I usually don't publish under that circumstance, but I want to get these thoughts out so I can creatively move forward with the thoughts.

apple

Twitter, Apple & The Most Profound Namespace Network Effect Since The Dawn Of Man

I've blogged about my feelings regarding the utterly dismal state of authentication on the network, and client-side, today [/2010_11_01_archive]. It's a pain we've all, sadly, just accept. It's also a pain that will soon, partially, go away on iOS

search

Greplin: I so want this to work

This is a quick post to the Greplin [https://www.greplin.com/] crew. If you follow this recipe you will win and win big. This is a huge problem plaguing all of us. Go forth and conquer. While I don't necessarily like it, the fact is that search

company

Business & Technology; Yin & Yang?

This conversation (errr spirited debate) has come up too many times in my world over the past week to not blog about it. It's the age-old discussion around what is the most critical component when building a software product/company; the "business" end of things, or

location

Location Labs & Non-GPS API based LBS

I'm a heavy FourSquare user and am intrigued by Location Based Services at large. LBS related stuff will lead to the most significant behavioral changes on Earth since the network came online 15 years ago. Just The Beginning While we're all basking in what feels like

programming

Can Google's Native Client SDK Fix The Web?

Modern life owes much to the Internet. Many proverbial thanks are due to the inventors at CERN (incl. Tim Burner's Lee) and to Netscape (Jim Clark; the money. Founding engineers; the know-how) for making it accessible to all of us. A recent visit to Google's Boulder,

programming

Development Process

Tonight I was asked some high-level questions about development process. I wound up responding w/ enough material that I thought I'd share the thoughts here for broader consumption. > Hey guys,Please  feel free to ignore this email but I'd extremely appreciate some advice  if you

programming

Take 2: Amazon S3 file deletion FAIL

The S3 bucket key deletion saga continues. I had two Ec2 XL instances running 24/7 for about a month, running ~150 parallelized DELETE requests on s3 bucket keys (each machine), and dented my S3 usage by only 10%. I spent ~$1,500 (money went to Amazon obviously) on those

programming

Amazon S3 file deletion FAIL

I'm a huge fan of Ec2 and S3 offerings from Amazon; they're the future. However, there's a severe deficiency in the S3 API; when you need to delete billions of files, the API breaks down. While there are batch operations, they don't

rails

Multi-level Single Table Inheritance (STI) in Rails

This took me more than one attempt to get right, so I thought I'd blat it out in a blog post in case anyone else has been struggling with it. In the end, the implementation matches your intuition, but getting the sub-classing syntax right took a few tries

ip-address

IP Address Brokers; Please Stand Up

I've been trying to formulate some clear thinking for awhile now regarding a major challenge on the network today. It's been brewing for years, and the proliferation of API usage is boiling it over. The power of open discussion is giving the topic some structure and

techstars

TechStars Pain Pattern

Image courtesy of Colin Sackett | Book design & publishing [http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/]. I recognize patterns; large and small; over short periods, and long. Remember those SAT questions to find patterns in obscure information? I owned those. After my 2nd year involved in TechStars [http://www.techstars.org/], a

programming

Can't scale? Be Sure To Blame Your Code.

Web app scale bottlenecks (software & hardware) have leapfrogged themselves a few times over the past 15 years, and I just came across a concise view of how software had to react once hardware/bandwidth reached a new speed/throughput tier back around the year 2000; http://www.kegel.com/

ip-address

Fatal Flaw in Cloud Based Social Media Apps?

For the purposes of this post I'm going to define "cloud computing" as a service that allows you to easily run your application on someone elses' infrastructure, and importantly, within their IP address block range. As "web app" web API usage continues to

programming

Dirty Data, Python & Gnip

I've been tinkering with Python (2.5) over the past few months; both in Google App Engine, and in free-running apps/processes. My initial free-running apps ingested "structured" content from a variety of web APIs, and would crash roughly every 12 hours, and would need to

programming

"Mommamacations" & Perfect Software

My 6.5 year old son and I built a Lego Mindstorm vehicle yesterday. After constructing it, we wrote the software for it. After watching version 1.0 of our software run for about 5 seconds, we noticed a bug so we iterated, fixed the bug, and ran v2 of

programming

Google I/O: My Impressions

Photo from Matthias Schicker's post. [http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/fileadmin/mimuc/mmi_ws0405/uebung/essays/matthias.schicker/Devices_for_text_input.htm] [http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/fileadmin/mimuc/mmi_ws0405/uebung/essays/matthias.schicker/Devices_for_text_input.htm] I attended last week'