Crash Course: Design for Startups
A detailed brain dump about how to go about starting web design for startups. Including design process, inspiration and required reading.
Accounting for Computer Scientists
Every educated person really ought to have a basic understanding of accounting. Just like maths, science, programming, music, literature, history, etc., it’s one of those things which helps you make sense of the world. Although dealing with money is not much fun, it’s an unavoidable part of life, so you might as well…
I am nothing
On a scale of one to ten, how good of a cog are you? How well do you function in your assigned role? How much of a man or woman are you? How...
User testing in the wild: he has never used a computer
This past Friday, I went to Westfield Mall in San Francisco to conduct user tests on how people browse the web, and especially how (or if) they use tabs. This was part of a larger investigation som…
STFU About What Women Want
In a recent post on TechCrunch , Penelope Trunk tells us (again) that most women don’t want to do startups. First, I’d like to extend that...
Time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation
Today (2011-10-06), the time-zone database was closed down . It is perhaps easy to read that line, think it doesn't affect you, and then ...
Why Arabic is Terrific
I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute…
How I Made $19,000 on the App Store While Learning to Code
The past year and a half has been quite a journey. I’ve gone from starting to learn iPhone design, to quitting my full time job and focusing on an application full-time. All while teaching myself to program in Objective-C with no prior programming experience. OneVoice is a iPhone/iPad application that gives a voice to…
Solarized - Color scheme for vim, mutt, terminal emulators
Precision colors for machines and people
Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter
Dear Dr. Stallman, Thank you for coming to Penn and giving a talk on A Free Digital Society; it was an honor meeting you. You mentioned that what you expected of us was to help the Free Software Foundation however we could; I'd like to take you up on that and offer both yourself and the FSF the following advice: Stop…
Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)
Let me preface this post by saying that no programmer should feel compelled to read any of these papers. I list them because I think that they provide a breadth of information that is generally useful and interesting from a computer science perspective. What you do with that information is your prerogative, including…
I want to pay for TextMate 2
I’m sorry I doubted TextMate 2’s future. With your announcement that it is indeed tangibly progressing, it’s a good time to revisit your former statement that it would be a free upgrade to all TextMate 1 customers, which I think you regret .
Signs that you are a bad programmer
Reasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path (“running the program in your head”) while knowing what the goal of the code is.