Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the General category.
What’s wrong with making money from advertising?
Filed in General, 4th August, 2011, 2:22 CETAny hardcore developer must be dying to work at Google, Twitter, or Facebook, right? Well, no; see this post by Dave Copeland, “Why I’d never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook”. I generally agree with his points; if your core business (where the money comes from) is advertising, your customers are the businesses who pay [...]
My music doesn’t come in “genres”
Filed in General, 30th May, 2011, 20:41 CETI had an odd realization the other day; I ran across a new music streaming site – promising “interactive radio that will blow your mind” – but while scanning through the list of 50 or so categories of music to choose one matching my tastes, my interest rapidly waned. ALL of them looked bad to [...]
Why Don’t Developers Like to Estimate Time Accurately?
Filed in General,Technical, 9th April, 2011, 18:50 CETI was reading this just now – Why Can’t Developers Estimate Time? – and realized the discussion leaves out some fairly important psychological factors that influence time estimates significantly. As the developer, you focus on the risky bits — the parts that are technically difficult & complex, that use new APIs or new libraries you [...]
Your codebase is a user interface
Filed in General, 26th March, 2011, 19:29 CETEvery developer has spent time working on at least one project that was rife with poorly or bizarrely-named variables/methods/types, dead code, impossibly long code blocks, misleading comments, contorted logic, ancient libraries and dependencies that are never upgraded, and worse. “Someday,” of course, “we’ll clean that up” — but there are urgent features already promised to [...]
Long shadows of colonialism
Filed in General,Political, 12th December, 2010, 18:02 CETFirst: an brief, animated guided tour of health and wealth statistics over the past 200 years, from Hans Rosling (this is far more interesting then it sounds at first blush). If you haven’t seen this video already, you may still know Rosling from his TED.com talks, also excellent and worth looking up. Share this
Creative procrastination
Filed in General,Mrs. Bella Bang,Technical, 10th July, 2010, 2:22 CETI was taking Mrs. Bang for a walk last night, at 2am or so, and mulling over my ideas for a dauntingly large new feature I want to add to my music theory site. One idea spun from another, and I started thinking about mad libs — you know, the game where you fill in [...]
Eye surgery
Filed in General, 9th March, 2010, 15:22 CETThank you to all of the friends, and friends of friends, and contacts of friends of friends (!) who shared their advice, thoughts, warm wishes and professional opinions with me when I was deciding how to proceed with the slipped IOL (artificial lens) in my right eye. I’m documenting discussions I had with my ophthalmologist [...]
