Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the idea of simply trying harder with everything I choose to spend my time on. It seems like an elusive thing, the idea of optimal focus and maximum effort. However, I think there is something to be gained from stopping for a moment and considering how focused we are when we do our daily activities.I think two things apply here: single-mindedness and massive effort. To truly excel at something, we need to be very focused. We can have different things we are striving to succeed with, but when we are working on one thing, we should be c...

WHEN I first started as a freelance writer, I was eager to sell myself — but not eager to have to discuss money. So I more or less took whatever was offered. Then I read somewhere that no matter what price a new client states, you always say in a polite but firm tone, “I expected more.” The first time I tried it, I was sweating and I doubt my tone was firm — it probably sounded more like pleading — but to my great surprise, it worked. With that one sentence, I made an extra few hundred dollars. Negotiating a salary when you have a job can be...

I've always considered myself a bit of a software junkie. Nothing excites me more than a great piece of new software.Some of my best childhood memories are our trips to Grandma's house, where I'd have access to a computer with a dial-up connection that I'd use to obtain freeware and shareware.I'd bring 4 or 5 floppies with me and try to cram all the games, waveform editors, and utilities that I could sneaker-net home.Luckily today, excellent software written with passion oozes out of the app ecosystem. OS X and the App Store really fuel an economy of software built for humans by people tha...

Editor’s note: This is Part III of a guest post written by legendary Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures. In Part I, he laid the groundwork by describing how artificial intelligence is a combination of human and computer capabilities In Part II, he discussed how software and mobile technologies can augment and even replace doctors. Now, in Part III, he talks about how technology will sweep through education.In my last post, I argued that software will take over many of the tasks doctors do today. And what of education? ...

Over the years, I’ve come to hold some strong. opinions on testing, testers and the entire business of quality assurance. Inspired by this post on Facebook’s testing, I wanted to write this down so I can point people to it. Some of this is controversial. In fact, even mentioning some of this in conversation has caused people to flip the bozo bit on me.Most product teams don’t need a separate testing role. And even if they do, the ratio of full time dev:full time test should be in the order of >20:1. For evidence, look no further than some of the most successful engineer...

I am by no means an Apple fan. For one thing, I find Windows (and Linux) stable and fast, so you are not going to hear me argue that my computing life was transformed once I made that Switch (with a capital letter). Admittedly that is partly because I am familiar with how to fix and tune Windows and remove foistware, but it is not that hard. For another, I am not an admirer of Apple’s secretive approach, or the fact that most requests for comment from journalists are responded to with silence. For a third, I dislike the notion that all apps for its popular mobile platform must be distri...

If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of organizations which don’t employ them.  There are many, many shops that do big bang testi...

Machine learning algorithms have a much better chance of being widely adopted if they are implemented in some easy-to-use code. There are several important concerns associated with machine learning which stress programming languages on the ease-of-use vs. speed frontier.Speed The rate at which data sources are growing seems to be outstripping the rate at which computational power is growing, so it is important that we be able to eak out every bit of computational power. Garbage collected languages (java, ocaml, perl and python) often have several issues here.Garbage co...