I’ve been a programmer for a long time. I consider myself pretty good at it. Perhaps you’ve even used something I’ve done in the past, maybe a keyboard or a web browser . Well, over the last year or so, I’ve made the biggest-ever change to the way I write software. I now code with AI assistance all the time. Here’s why. Here’s how. Why I’m more productive with AI assistance. Today, I…
I read Founder Mode , by Paul Graham, with great interest. I’m lucky in that I’ve seen both Steve Jobs and Brian Chesky work up close. A few caveats. I wish that my experiences with them had lasted longer, been closer, and involved more projects. Also, I saw more of Steve than of Brian. Even with these qualifications, I think it worthwhile to offer a distillation of ten things I did see. There are…
Do you trust a tweet? Well, here’s what’s in one: a display name , the “human readable” name. Historically, this has been freeform text. I’ve always used my true name, Ken Kocienda. Others are more creative and change their display name often. an avatar , an image. Again, a freeform field. Use a portrait, a logo, whatever. Another chance to express yourself. an account name , the @handle. This…
After I finished my morning coffee with my wife, I looked at Twitter. I found a link to this essay by Craig Mod : Walking Venice . Venice is cursed. It’s also beautiful and astounding and I walked up and down its alleyways. https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/144/ I made a mental note to look it later in the day. Now the admission. My cerebral reading list is a leaky bucket. So many articles and…
Some of you may know that I’ve taken an interest in mechanical watches, and I have been putting together a collection of pieces I like to wear. I also like to think about them as products, design objects, and examples of human ingenuity. It’s easy to find watches for any budget, including budgets far exceeding mine. For example, this morning, I was browsing a couple of my favorite watch dealer…
There’s something charmingly unmodern about correspondence describing a lunch with a new acquaintance. It’s a throwback to the age before mass media, when life moved at a slower pace—or at least it seemed to from today’s perspective—and when penning and posting letters was the way the cognoscenti kept in touch with each other. I woke up this morning to read that Om Malik had written about our…
I woke up and looked at the clock. 3:15 AM. I had a clear picture in my mind to make something new. It took me the next six months to make that drowsy vision real. The result was Up Spell, a word game for iOS. But that’s the end of the story. On that morning, it was April 2020. We were still in the first few weeks of the pandemic. When I had closed my eyes to go to sleep hours earlier, I already…
In the story of writing and literacy, numeracy came first. People wanted to count and track things—but perhaps it’s more accurate to say that politically powerful people wanted things counted and tracked in the areas they controlled. Things like sheep, goats, and cattle. Some clever folks had the idea that lumps of clay could stand for the things they wanted to count. Eleven sheep? Eleven…
A virtual tightrope walk while wearing blinders. That characterizes my experience using software much of the time. It’s like I’m standing up on a platform high in the air, and I can see another platform I want to cross over to, but I need software to help me bridge the gap. So often, the connection turns out to be a thin wire, hastily strung, less than fully taut, without a safety net underneath,…