Recent content on Miguel Rochefort
Shutter Button: Capture Photos and Videos Apple is introducing the iPhone 16 on September 9th. Rumors suggest a new “capture button”, dedicated to photography, will be a key feature. Here’s what we know: Light press to autofocus Harder press to take a photo or record a video Swipe left and right to zoom in and out This isn’t entirely new. Many Sony Xperia and Windows Phone…
In my previous post, I introduced the Big Tech Spreadsheet in which I classified over 1000 projects from the world’s top tech companies into over 100 distinct categories. Big Tech Spreadsheet Today, I will take you through the 80 project categories that are the most common among tech giants. We’ll define “tech giants” as the top 20 companies from the Big Tech Spreadsheet…
The most comprehensive catalog of Big Tech projects you’ll find online. Over the past 2 months, I compiled a list of over 1000 projects in which Big Tech companies are involved. They span over 100 distinct categories, ranging from ML frameworks and smart speakers to emojis and self-driving cars. I call it the Big Tech Spreadsheet and it’s now publicly available on Google Sheets. Your…
This is the story of how I prepared for a decade to graduate in 3 months. In 2012, I dropped out of college, where I was studying computer science, after just one semester. I already knew how to program and I thought I’d never need a degree. Over the years, I found myself complaining a lot about it. I saw many opportunities, especially abroad, that were out of reach because I didn’t…
This is my calendar: I put everything on it (mostly automatically): Calendar Source Main Manual input (every 15 minute, not shown) Weather Google Calendar Holidays Google Calendar Birthdays Google Contacts Sleeping Google Fit Walking Google Fit Running Google Fit In vehicle Google Fit Steps Google Fit Kitchen Home Assistant + ESPHome + ESP32 Living room Home Assistant + ESPHome + ESP32 Away Home…
In my previous post, I explored the topic of COVID-19 immunity passports. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do. In this post, I will propose a technical specification for building a digital immunity passport. The anatomy of an ICVP The International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) is an official document issued by the World Health Organization that serves as…
Everyone is talking about them. Some claim they will save the economy, others fear they might divide the world into two classes: the immunes and the non-immunes. In this post, we’ll explore the topic of immunity passports in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. What’s an immunity passport? An immunity passport is a document that indicates whether a person is immune or not to a…
This weekend, I attended Pioneer’s first Hackathon. Their call to action: Help upload the real world to the Internet. Work on something to make the experience of working on the web more fun for the billions staying at home. Overlay heart-rate on Zoom calls. Improve video conferencing quality. Build a Tandem competitor, one for friends rather than coworkers. The stage is yours. My team of 1…
I’ve been using Nomie for the past few months to track things in my life. For example, I can tap Coffee to record a cup of coffe (#coffee), select Mood and 3 to record my mood (#mood(3)), or type I have a #headache to record a headache. Recently, I tried to track my water intake. Whenever I drank some water, I counted the number of sips and logged them into Nomie (#water(5)).
How many times did you ever tell someone your name? If the answer is more than zero, you’re doing it wrong. When you’re born, your name is given to you. It’s written on your birth certificate. At that point, the world knows your name. Why would you ever utter or write it again? Wouldn’t that be a huge waste of time? Now, you might be frantically digging through your junk…
Let’s think of ~100 scenarios where a resource is underused: I have a spare couch that nobody sleeps on. I have a spare bedroom that nobody sleeps in. I have a spare apartment that nobody lives in. I have a cottage that nobody lives in during the week. I have a house that nobody lives in while I’m on vacation.
The best interface is no interface. In his Don’t Make Me Click talk, Aza Raskin (the son of famous human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin) eloquently explains that the best shovel is a hole. Although we still haven’t found a way to make completely invisible apps (hopefully AI will get us there), a good guideline is to only prompt the user as a last resort. For example, if an…
How many apps are you willing to install on your phone? 20? 50? 100? How about 1,000? If this trend of building apps for every single thing continues, it won’t take long before installing 1,000 apps on a phone becomes the norm. Nowadays, it seems like every city, festival, mall, school, movie theater, pharmacy, grocery, taxi company, airline, public transit, restaurant, bank, insurance…
For thousands of years, communication has been done almost exclusively through natural languages. Today, a lot of communication is done through apps. Apps are like mini-languages designed to communicate a very specific set of ideas. They’re interactive and force you to express coherent and unambiguous thoughts. Because apps are working with unambiguous data, a part of the communication…
Hey, I’m Miguel – a software developer based in Sunnyvale, CA. Feel free to reach out at miguelrochefort@gmail.com