Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – It’s not a promise, it’s a guess: „Since nobody likes to be a failure, they’ll indulge in risky behavior to avoid it, like burning the midnight oil and checking in bad code with shanty or no tests. Rushing to meet your estimate promise once or twice might…

Stephen Fry – iPad About: „Like iPhone 1.0 […] iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company. […] And being Apple it hasn’t been released without (you…

Wilson Rothman at Gizmodo – The iPad Is The Gadget We Never Knew We Needed: „The iPad has shortcomings, but they only betray Apple’s caution, just like what happened with iPhone No. 1. Now every 15-year-old kid asks for an iPhone, and the ones that don’t get them get iPod Touches. We can sit here…

TWEAK Digital – The 6 hidden costs of running a DAM system: „For some reason, desktop applications are just accepted as-is. DAM software is expected to do everything imaginable and be easily customizable.“

Joel Johnson at Gizmodo – Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple’s Magic: „Consumer audiences have grown wary of nearly a century of predictable sleight-of-hand. We’ve seen too many companies promise us the future, then fail to deliver it. I believe that there are dozens of companies out there with the talent to pull the…

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – You can always do less: „Most software has a tiny essence that justifies its existence, everything after that is wants and desires mistaken for needs and necessities. The easiest way to force the insight of what can be lived without is by playing a game of constraints:…

Chris Dixon – The next big thing will start out looking like a toy: „To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes. Obviously, products get better inasmuch as the designer adds features, but this is a relatively weak force. Much more powerful…

Tim Bray – Doing It Wrong: „What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less…

Luke Welling at PHP Advent 2009 – Managing Bob: „Bob notices uptime, how long seemingly minor change requests take to implement, consistency in the UI, crashes, revenue, and conversion rates. He will notice the symptoms of bad code, even if he does not have the knowledge to diagnose the root cause, or the vocabulary to…

James Turner at O’Reilly Radar – The Best and the Worst Tech of the Decade: „SOAP was a particularly egregious failure, because it was sold so heavily as the final solution to the interoperatibility problem. The catch, of course, was that no two vendors implemented the stack quite the same way, with the result that…