software

A collection of 43 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

email

Blogger: New Post Email Notifications

It turns out blog migration is hard. I wanted to move from my 2nd generation platform, Blogger, where this blog has been hosted for fifteen years or so, over to Ghost, in order to gain email notification support when I made a new post. However, the export format from Blogger

machine learning

Machine Play: Again

I updated my system for sending SMS notifications when my deck furniture’s covers get blown off in the wind. My original post [/machine-play] talked about version one of the system. I’ve since made a handful of refinements to simplify things. * I ditched the Amcrest camera in favor of

machine learning

Machine Play

Preamble The only really cool software things that have come along in the past several years have been a rise of the machines in the form of Machine Learning, and serverless/microservice/Kubernetes clouds. The former is a complete framework game changer for humans, and the latter just a really

honey

Honey in Boulder

Our Boulder office foyer.Earlier this year I joined Honey [https://www.joinhoney.com/] in order to help them scale product and development beyond their headquarters in Los Angeles. The company is growing rapidly and in a look toward the future, it wanted to distribute and diversify its ability to

browser

The Connectivity Fallacy & $(window).load(function())

While the Network as a whole is borderline miraculous, the reality of its connection quality is far from it. Connectivity sucks, even in private-industry led first-world connection environments. Fiber backhauls are generally pretty good, but "last-mile" services suck. The issue is usually around latency, but bandwidth throughput is

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

browser

The Independent Web; Pocket, Highly & Mozilla?

At a recent dinner I sat next to an exec from a large adtech company. I tend to avoid adtech discussions, but this one was fascinating. He described his, successful, platform as increasingly fighting a silo'd/walled-garden web where advertisers were hunkering down with specific platforms (e.g.

technology

Virtual Reality (VR) Observations

Google and Facebook have popup stores splattered around technology influencer cities this holiday season; both include their Virtual Reality goggle setups. After trying out the Google Daydream version with my son in NYC, I opted to buy one to play around with it a little more. A few weeks later,

fbi

I Helped The F.B.I. Get Into Someone's DB

It was back in 1997 at my first job out of college. I was a networking stack engineer on the Netscape Browser. At that time, the email client, news reader, and browser were essentially rolled into one (I'm sure I'm pissing some lawyer off by making

techstars

jud@techstars.com

I'm getting back into the mix. It's been a creative, fun, enlightening, educational, expanding, and relaxing couple of years "off," but I want to re-engage with something operational again; I've joined Techstars [http://www.techstars.com/] as its CTO. I'm

software

Spending Capital

The Joker burning "his half" of the cash in The Dark Knight.Enough data points now to write this post without giving anyone in my portfolio away, and enough that I feel like I see a pattern. I'm seeing a lot of first-round/seed stage capital

news

Journalist Rank (jRank) & News Feeds

I just got back from a run and wanted to flesh this notion out a bit. I was listening to a This Week In Startups "news" roundtable [http://thisweekinstartups.com/news-roundtable-ben-parr-declan-mccullagh/] in which Declan McCullagh [https://twitter.com/declanm] was talking about his new "news" app

hardware

"Editing" Hardware

Yesterday I found myself "modding" one of my 12-yr old son's Nerf guns. One of his buddies had done it, and now he wanted to. We grabbed a bunch of tools/gear and sat down to hack away. I've built physical things from 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

hardware

Dear Hardware'ish Entrepreneurs: Some Questions

With the explosion of all the affordable Consumer Electronics crap pouring into the world, I'm curious as to how the engineering end of it all is happening. I'm a s/w guy through and through. I have a grasp of physical, EE, materials, chemistry, and such,

handset

Android: I Tried

A couple of months ago I shelved Apple/iOS (iPhone 6) for Android (Sony Xperia Z3 Compact) [/ios-to-android-migration-complete]. I'd been a rabid Apple/iOS fan since the first iPhone. I switched because the iPhone 6 industrial design sucks, and iOS 8 was buggy. A few days ago I

security

Secure Communications

Like you, I was devastated to learn of the NSA (and associated services) finding there way into protocols and toolchains and algorithms that I've trusted for years. I was recently pointed to an open source project that gives me hope around securing my wire communications again; Streisand [https:

movies

Science on Screen: The Social Network

When the Dairy Center for the Arts [http://www.thedairy.org/] asked me if I'd host one of the Science on Screen shows I was intrigued. Once I found out what it actually meant, I was ecstatic! I've always had a penchant for dissecting the scientific

company

Your Startup's Identity Crisis

photo by Hans Richard Pedersen [http://hansrichardpedersen.deviantart.com/]Don't think about the following question; just answer it. Is your startup a Product company, or a Services company? If you answered "kind of both," you answered wrong. Only mature firms can handle both. If you'

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)

photography

big backups

photo, music, and video libraries can get very big (in my personal scenario, photos alone push 1TB). they're also the kinds of libraries of content you never want to lose. they tend to contain content that took a long time to produce, was expensive to obtain (music), or

http

My 15 yr. Anniversary with Mozilla

about:mozilla Seeing everyone else's mentions/posts about Mozilla's 15 yr. anniversary got me thinking about my own experience with it. The software has had a huge impact on my life, my view of software, my view of the network, my view on security and privacy,

design

My 3 Steps To Software

I had three distinct moments that committed me to a life of being up close and personal with software. April and I were just lying in bed talking about when we first met, and how she "had no idea what I was going to be when I grew up.

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/