October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
1 post
March 2010
23 posts
Letting your users make your product
Services like Twitter are interesting to think about because from an engineering perspective, the goals around what users would initially accomplish are not so clear. Yet, at the end of the day, the service was flexible enough to accommodate the user scenarios that eventually manifested themselves, given the ability to broadcast updates (see this post for some interesting scenarios that Twitter...
Steel-cut oatmeal in a plain white bowl
Breakfast: The single most important meal of the day. Luckily, I’m onto a foodie’s delight with my steel-cut oatmeal in a plain white bowl:
Subtle yet complex flavors AND moist, chewy texture are qualities that few foods can qualify as having, yet oatmeal delivers on all with aplomb. However, before all of this delightful tastiness can be appreciated, a true...
1 tag
My friend Karen has a real food blog that, even if I read right after a huge meal, still makes me salivate with hunger. She’s that good! Out of jealousy & spite, I decided to start my own competing food blog, and I’ll start by reviewing one of my favorite drinks ever:
Kirkland Signature Premium Drinking Water (not to be confused with Kirkland Premium Drinking Water) holds a...
1 tag
Programming: Higher level languages vs. CPU...
The instructions that the computer understands are very primitive: mostly arithmetic operations such as add, subtract, divide, and multiply, some operations that aren’t arithmetic operations, and others. Because the instructions understood by processors generally operate only on numbers, it’s a time-consuming and complex process to take operations we normally think of doing, and boil...
Analogies for programming
Often, I get asked by nontechnical people what exactly programming is, but it’s a somewhat difficult thing to answer concisely. When I’m thinking about this, most of my comparisons are to: running a team at work that consists entirely of toddlers.
Just like a manager might distribute a memo to his/her team indicating a process to follow in certain situations, a programmer can be...
Cognitive Dissonance
If you’ve ever thought about why first impressions matter so much, it’s probably because of cognitive dissonance, something that Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, writes about quite a bit (you might have surmised that he’s one of my favorite writers from the fact that this is the 3rd or 4th mention of him on my blog :-)).
Unless someone takes the time to limit the impressions...
Mobile ads
I went to Patxi Chicago Pizza with a friend not too long ago, and we split a one of their signature deep dish pizzas. In between shoving down slices of pure heaven, we checked in via FourSquare and received notice that we’d get a free fountain drink for checking in. Too bad our mouths were too full for us to say anything to the waitress.
Some of the other deals available on FourSquare...
Reading between the lines
When I started my first job after grad school, I was starry-eyed, young, eager, and ready to change the world through kick-ass software that would set a new bar. I still am, but I’m also a little less impatient for it to happen yesterday :-)
There were some pretty high and some pretty low times in my first job. But, none of it was bad experience. At times, I felt like I was in the wrong...
Being born on 3rd base
My friend Robert has a saying: “Some people are born on 3rd base and think they hit a triple.”
The saying applies to people who might not recognize the opportunities they had growing up. Sure, someone might have slaved away to get a 4.0 at an Ivy league school, but, if their parents paid for it, the circumstances they faced growing up still nurtured them at least partly into that...
Startup Advice →
I found Mark Suster via Fred Wilson; in particular his series on startup advice (linked above) is very worthwhile reading!
Dodgeball
I was chatting with a co-worker and Dodgeball came up; it was unfortunate that the service was more or less killed after the acquisition.
However, alternatives like FourSquare have popped up, and that’s awesome, because now I can find out who might be a “competitive customer” at Mo’s Grill, where I’ve been the mayor for several months now :-)
For any potential...
Evolving into a Platform, part Tres
When I was thinking about this last night, I went down the path of whether a company can create a platform that made it competitive for other application developers to build on that platform.
This is necessary but I think it was a bit of a roundabout approach; if your platform speeds building features that the end-user needs, then companies will come to build on you. I think that’s pretty...
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/knowledge_that_matter... →
Scott Adams talks about what kind of knowledge is important.
LOL
I used to dislike the acronym LOL. So I never wrote it. I always thought I was the only one who had an active dislike for it.
Then I started writing it. And I’ve discovered how many people dislike it. We could have formed a support group.
But, alas, no one ever told me, “Neal, I really like how you never write LOL”
Evolving into a platform, Part Deux
I think my last post tried to say too much and failed so I’d like to explore a few more things related to being a platform vs. building an app.
The first was the bit about “building a platform to for others to innovate on, rather than providing those innovations…themselves” This of course does not mean that providing a platform is not innovating; in fact, innovating by...
music nostalgia
Bivouac - Jawbreaker
I was given a copy of this album when I was 14, and to this day, I can’t really listen to it while I’m working, because I just stop working…and listen :-)
Evolving into a platform
Every tech company eventually becomes a platform-provider.
Well, not really, but it’s a viable strategy of growth (cue Ballmer jumping up and down and screaming “Developers, Developers, Developers”). It’s easy to see how a company can get a slice of a bigger market by building a platform for others to innovate on, rather than providing those innovations in a specific...
Twitter
I’m trying Twitter again to capture some random thoughts that I mean to write down but aren’t really blog-worthy.
I’m finding a browser extension for Chrome to be handy, since I spend a great deal of time with a browser open already for email, calendar, and work communications already.
Scott Adams on being an entrepreneur (or,... →
“The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.”
:-)
Public Transit Aficianados
I live in San Francisco, which is not known for the efficiency of its public transportation system. Every deficiency can be looked at as an opportunity, though, which explains the plethora of apps that enable me to find real-time information about transit lines from my smartphone.
They do pretty well; in most cases, GPS is leveraged to find nearby stops. They take advantage of the native...
Browser Choice
Whether or not you agree with the mandate that Microsoft provide a screen for users to pick which browser to use, it’s interesting to think about how much of a precedent this could set, at least in the E.U. countries.
Granted, Microsoft has faced a great deal of antitrust scrutiny, so it’s not clear that the putative measures leveraged by the E.U. would apply to other companies that...
February 2010
5 posts
iPad thoughts
I have no idea how successful the iPad will be(but I wonder if unveiling a device for which the use cases are not super clear so ahead of time could amount to premature death-by-media). I know, though, that I would love to have a couple of them around the house up on the wall. I constantly have my computer in the kitchen to read recipes while I’m pretending to cook master meals, and having...
DRM Madness
When Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on Music letter, it generated a lot of noise. But I think that businesspeople like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Meg Whitman, Eric Schmidt, Carly Fiorina, and many others have a ton of experience and things that come as a shock to the industry are probably things they could predict a couple years before those things happened.
Give me that last point...
A thought or two on Apple
I think Steve Jobs knows the fickle consumer market quite well. Think back to the iPhone’s introduction. Given the wealth of possibilities that the “phone as a platform” has enabled, beyond traditional tasks such as voice communication, why call it a phone? Because he knows how fickle consumers can be when adopting new technology. A PR campaign for a new device that has...