We make mobile apps! / Tiny Piano / @squarepoet
I recently came across this post on reddit: Why Aren’t High Schoolers Taught How to File Taxes . It made me think about what American children are taught in school, and whether that education actually prepares them to become adults. (I grew up in Los Angeles, so your K-12 education may have been different than mine.) One of the most important things that Americans need to deal with –…
Interview with Temple Run’s Keith Shepherd : I’m a big fan of the Temple Run team. They are a huge inspiration for indie developers like me! Check out the interview here: http://allthingsd.com/20130117/interview-temple-runs-keith-shepherd-on-freemium-staying-small-and-new-games
As a first-time entrepreneur, I love reading about successful business people. There’s always something to learn. You can be inspired and hopefully avoid mistakes as you start up your own business. One of my inspirations is Mark Cuban. He made his fortune by selling his company to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in 1999. If you follow sports, you’ll know him as the owner of the Dallas…
I spend most days sitting in front of my laptop, writing software. This means LOTS of typing. Here are some Mac OS X utilities that make me much more efficient and happy. (I’m sure there are similar tools for Windows users.) BetterTouchTool: http://blog.boastr.net This allows you to create custom swipe/tap gestures for your trackpad. Here are some I use to help me quickly manage open…
via Jeff Bezos, 2001 . Reblogged from bijan : I went to my boss and said to him, “You know, I’m going to go do this crazy thing and I’m going to start this company selling books online.” This was something that I had already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context, but then he said, “Let’s go on a walk.” And, we went on a two hour walk in Central Park in New York City and the…
Last weekend, I attended Startup School , hosted by Y Combinator on the Stanford University campus. It was an entertaining and educational event. I got to hear talks by folks such as Mark Zuckerberg, Joel Spolsky, and Ron Conway. (photo credit: Hung Phan) You can check out the videos and slides for yourself. But here’s my twitter-sized takeaway from each talk: Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO…
I have to believe that “iOS Maps” is now a running joke in the tech world. I heard from a friend in Tokyo that up until recently, her iPhone 5 was showing a subway stop in the middle of the Tokyo Imperial Palace! I didn’t really believe that it was that terrible until I got iOS 6 and tried it out myself. Here’s just one simple example. I searched for “gates…
Kurt Varner recently answered a question on Quora about whether it would be a good idea to become “homeless” to bootstrap a startup. This summer, he lived out of his car in Mountain View to save money while working on his company. The stunt was great publicity, but is living out of your car a legitimate method of increasing your startup’s runway? I would never go to such an…
Recently, John Resig of Khan Academy described their new platform for introducing people to the concepts of computer programming. I played with it a bit tonight, and am really excited about what I saw. It really reminds me of when I first experienced computer programming, with LOGO on the Apple IIe. With their javascript code editor and live preview pane, you can experiment and draw cool images…
Originally posted on April 20, 2011 on my Posterous blog: http://vimeo.com/22670388 I’ve always loved listening to Will Wright’s lectures. Here he talks about how playing games affects education. With play, you can fail and try again, while you build a mental model of what works and what doesn’t work. This is related to apprenticeship, an older model of learning a trade (e.g.,…