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  Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

I got a call from a friend of a friend the other night. It was a fellow with whom I’d talked 11 months ago about a project he and his partner were looking to start. We established then that I wasn’t the guy for him, that I was likely too expensive for their big-dreams, small-means budget. Fast forward to present day: their project is still not launched, it’s still not right. They’ve paid for something between 600-700 hours of development with a firm in India, an...

   Indian programmer,Outsourcing,Poor quality,Low cost     2011-12-05 12:58:26

  Discovery kills distribution: why the web needs a new leader

[Apple and Google have locked application discovery and distribution within their app stores. VisionMobile's Andreas Constantinou explains how Facebook is using the web to disintermediate Apple/Google and why the web needs a new leader].The platform duopoly.In just the space of 3 years, the mobile platforms landscape has changed from an election race to an oligarchy. The network effects at the heart of the Apple and Google business models have created formidable barriers to entry. The growth in ...

   Web,Leader,New era,Google,Apple,Mobile     2011-10-18 02:53:29

  A Few Lessons I Learned After Having Failed

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.- Michael JordanIt was mid 2008 and Younique was doing reasonably well. However, I had an itch that I needed to scratch. I wanted to build a mobile advertising platform – think DoubleClickmeets AdMob. At the time the mobile adverti...

   Lesson,Career,Success,Failure,Mobile advertising     2011-10-17 11:21:55

  Why would a developer invest time in your startup’s platform?

The notion of developing a platform is highly addictive for technology founders. It ticks every “this is awesome” box and its drawbacks do not become evident until after you’ve already overcommitted.When you’re sunk deep in your idea, you start seeing the infinite number of directions it might go. It could be used for creativity or education or advertising or television or personal productivity or anything.Possibilities are exciting.You soon realise you can’...

   Platform,Invest,Attraction,Sell point,Developer     2011-10-31 10:49:37

  What It’s Really Like to Work at Google

Google. It’s one of the most common household words in today’s modern society, and yet for a company that is used by most of us essentially as an algorithm, it tends to trigger a highly emotional response when overheard. It’s a dream job for college students nearing graduation, a highly coveted invitation to lunch by friends and colleagues who work near campus, and the bane of existence for those who produce content for the Internet. For several years, most of the publ...

   Google,Work,Life,Workplace     2012-01-18 08:19:00

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

  Functional Programming in C++

Probably everyone reading this has heard “functional programming” put forth as something that is supposed to bring benefits to software development, or even heard it touted as a silver bullet.  However, a trip to Wikipedia for some more information can be initially off-putting, with early references to lambda calculus and formal systems.  It isn’t immediately clear what that has to do with writing better software. My pragmatic summary:  A large fraction of th...

   C++,Functional programming     2012-04-28 06:16:37

  Bionic Office

Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a replacement for my grandmother's old brownstone where we spent our first few years, working from bedrooms and the garden. Most software managers know what good office space would be like, and they know they don't have it, and can't have it. Office space seems to be the one thing that nobody can get rig...

   Work place,Life,Office,Confortable     2012-01-18 09:00:55

  Inspiration vs. Imitation

Every now and then I get a really lovely email from an aspiring letterer that is about to publish a passion project of his or her own. They tell me my work was an inspiration and that they can’t wait to share their creation with the world. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside for a moment…until I click on their link and realize that much of what they intend to publish is nearly a direct tracing of my work. A lot of established illustrators and designers deal with the same ...

   Designer,Copy,Divisify,Classification,Judgement,History     2011-12-05 12:26:38

  Wow: Intel unveils 1 teraflop chip with 50-plus cores

I thought the prospect of quad-core tablet computers was exciting.Then I saw Intel's latest -- a 1 teraflop chip, with more than 50 cores, that Intel unveiled today, running it on a test machine at the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle.That means my kids may take a teraflop laptop to college -- if their grades don't suffer too much having access to 50-core video game consoles.It wasn't that long ago that Intel was boasting about the first supercomputer with sustained 1 teraflop performan...

   Intel,Chip,Multi-core,teraflop     2011-11-16 08:15:39

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