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Have you ever completed a LEGO set with lots of instructions? Or orchestrated a particularly complex recipe? Or even put together a piece of IKEA furniture? Looking at the big picture, it can seem daunting. This is why there are detailed instructions for one to follow. After studying each step, and then working through it, the task becomes doable. This is the value of well-written instructions. It…
One under-levereged form of learning programming is through reading others’ code, and especially full working applications. Unlike tutorials or examples projects, these include all the imperfections actual working software has. They serve as a fully-formed implementation of an architectural idea (or often lack of one). Investigating “popular” application architectures on iOS, I came across a sea…
Facebook holds substantial control over peer communication channels the world over. This is due to the nature of information in the digital age, which has winner-takes-all characteristics. In print media, many independent newspapers would constitute a diversity of opinion. As physical goods, they all have roughly equal orders-of-magnitude distribution. In the digital world, we have many fewer…
As a sole contributor to a project, you need to be able to rely on your abstractions. Often the key abstractions in an app come from third parties. This may present a knowledge problem, because you likely don’t understand how that abstraction really works, which means when it breaks, you’re on the hook to investigate and hopefully come up with a fix. I’ve shifted over the years on my feelings…
When you build a system that serves up artifacts as a stand-in for anticipatory dialogue , you create a stream. Streams exist in droves today: email, Twitter feeds, Facebook, BuzzFeed, Instagram, Pinterest, and Vine, to a certain extent. In the end, they all are facsimiles of the discontinuous, ever changing set of real-world streams of social interaction in the world at large. That is why using…
The following is a loose transcription of Horace Dediu’s High Density podcast , a spinoff of his excellent Critical Path series. The conversation is between Horace and Tim Bajarin, a technology analyst of many years. Tim offers a compelling summary of the history of the PC industry, one which I find increasingly relevant, as Horace points out, for its parallels to the mobile OS landscape,…
The following is an interpretive transcription of Ryan Singer’s UX / UI PeepCode sessions in the style of Paul Arden’s It’s Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be . You have a design problem. Ask: How did they get there? What's going to happen when they're done? Before, now, after. Constrain the domain so the problem is simpler. Think of the real-world analogy. Draw information flows:…
2005 M.I.A Pitchfork interview , describing the circumstances of her first album: M.I.A.: The thing that I got exposed to when I met Justine was a lot of middle-class kids making music in England who had everything at their disposal and nothing to say. They didn’t rep anything! Yet everybody was having soul-searching issues going, “Oh my Goooooood, who am I, what am I doing? I might have to go to…
Even with the proliferation of open source software on the web, relatively few developers take the time to study the source code of the software they might use everyday. I believe this can largely be traced back to a lack of culture around code reading, which I will hopefully talk about in a later post. To combat this for now, however, the answer is simple: we just need to practice looking at and…
Steve Yegge, best known for his long-winded and colorful articles on software engineering (and for the fairly recent “public” posting lamenting the state of internal tools at Google , posted another today as a thought experiment around conservatism and liberalism in programming language design . All thoughts aside, I found the debate to be an enlightening one in that it’s a topic the software…