screencasting
If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a single screencast equal to a thousand word blog post? There’s a lot to be said for lightweight, embedded screencasts. I’m particularly fond of animated GIF screencasts for small demonstrations. You can see examples in these posts: one, two,
history
I read Robert X Cringley’s book Accidental Empires shortly after it was published in 1992. It’s a gripping worm’s eye view of Silicon Valley’s formative years. It’s also Doc Searls’ favorite book about the computer industry. Highly recommended. I didn’t realize that the book
programming languages
Ian Landsman’s 10 tips for moving from programmer to entrepreneur is excellent advice. Even if you have no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. One of the biggest issues I see is developers getting caught up in the code. Spending countless hours making a function perfect or building features which
software development concepts
We have a tendency to fetishize audience metrics in the IT industry. Presenters stress out about about their feedback ratings and measure themselves by how many attendees they can attract for a presentation. Bloggers obsessively track their backlinks, pagerank, and traffic numbers. I see it a lot, and it’s
agile
We’ve adopted Scrum for all of our software development at Vertigo. Although I’m totally in favor of Anything But Waterfall, Scrum is an unfortunate name: 1. It’s two additional characters away from a term for male genitalia. 2. The term is derived from rugby, an extraordinarily violent
storage
I recently upgraded my home system with one of the 750 gigabyte Seagate perpendicular drives in order to consolidate a number of hard drives I had on my server. 750 gigabytes is a tremendous amount of storage space in a single drive – but it doesn’t quite get us across
programming languages
O’Reilly’s History of Programming Languages poster is fascinating reading. If you trace programming languages back to their origins, you’ll find that we’ve been at this programming stuff a long, long time. * Fortran (1954) * Cobol (1959) * Lisp (1958) * Basic (1964) * Forth (1970) * Pascal (1970) * SmallTalk (1971) * C
software development concepts
Laptop magazine’s Attack of the 20-inch Notebook is a tongue-in-cheek look at using the Dell XPS M2010 as a portable system in a few different locations. Hilarity ensued. For context, here are the relevant specs of this semi-portable concept system: * 20" LCD * full-size bluetooth keyboard (with numeric pad)
programming languages
When you’re starting out as a technical blogger, you’ll inevitably stumble across Joel on Software. He’s been blogging since the year 2000, when computers were hand-carved of wood and the internet transmitted data via carrier pigeon. He has his own software development company, a few books under
programming languages
Brian Kuhn recently described the real risk of technocentrism. [. . .] people use (or have rejected) particular operating systems, tools, and software that has in turn shaped their perceptions when it comes to making judgments on the various merits of particular technologies. People tend to categorize or identify themselves with particular “technological
software development
Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, is also a bona-fide physicist. He holds physics degrees from UCAL and Princeton. He even had a postdoctoral fellowship under the famous Stephen Hawking. Thus, as you might expect, his 1997 ACM keynote presentation, The Next Fifty Years of Software is full of
game development
Greg Costikyan’s essay Welcome Comrade! is a call to arms for hobbyist game programmers: Back in the day, it took a couple of man days to create a Doom level. Creating a Doom III level took multiple man-weeks. Thus budgets spiral every upward; as late as 1992, a typical