Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Hi my name is Shackleford, Rusty Shackleford. I run a successful web service with millions of active users. It is a one man show but through sheer luck I designed it in a highly scalable way from the very beginning. I am a programmer so it is very important for me to make my service very secure and user privacy is treated with utmost importance. I write today for one reason. Tomorrow, I am shutting down my very profitable business because it is the only way I can hold my end of the privacy contract I promised my customers.
When Google announced that Google reader will be shutting down, every tech news site or tech blog went crazy. "if Google can shut down a popular service just like that what is going to be next Gmail?", this was the mantra every one was saying on those sites. Well here is something people forgot to take into consideration, most people don't even know what Rss is.
If it wasn't for Ubuntu I would never be a regular linux user. From all the linux flavors I tried, it is the most user friendly and there is less fighting the OS and more work getting done. Recently I did notice that other flavors are finally looking out for the user (I'm sure they are following Ubuntu steps). I have been closely following ubuntu phone experience http://www.ubuntu.com/phone it looks very interesting. Today Ubuntu started a campaign on indiegogo with the very ambitious goal of $32 Million for the new Ubuntu Edge: the next generation of personal computing: smartphone and desktop PC in one state-of-the-art device.
Hands on the Surface tablet, Microsoft built a pretty good device. But recent news shows that it was not it was not as successful as expected. Price slashes may boost sale but its clear that the surface will not be taking over the world.
You have probably seen Google glass amazing plane jump by now. I know i was impressed too, I was wondering how in the world are they getting fast internet all the way up there. All google glass videos are pretty well made and show how it is used in every day life. The same goes for GlassUp which shows a more affordable alternative but still impressive. After the fad of how cool it is goes away though you realize one thing: Smart Glasses are not solving any problem really.
My current development machine is a dell inspiron laptop. I enjoy using it more than my desktop. I added an SSD and installed Ubuntu 12.04 on it and it is blazing fast. Boots under 15 seconds (from the moment I press the power button). It is an old computer and I thought it is time to upgrade. I wanted something affordable and went for the Asus K55N, it has Windows 8 64bit by default, gesture touch pad, 8gb of Ram, and an AMD 8 processor. After playing with it for a while, I found out that I cannot have any other OS installed on it.
The more experience I get, the less code I write. I am not saying this because now I write better quality code, but because I find it less necessary to write code. The deeper I get into it I realize that most programming is less about coding and more about solving a problem. You may be thinking well you need to write code to solve a problem but bear with me for a moment.
I am sure by now you have seen website footers that say "proudly made with <insert technology here>". It is a reminder that the developer care mostly about the tools he used then the solution he provides. But the new buzzword I am starting to hear even more often is Beautiful. I think this word is taking us back to the dot-com bubble, where the visual experience is the only thing we care about.
It all started as a simple challenge to create an alternative to the current tools we were using at work. Boredom can be a good motivator. I talked about it in a previous post and I finally have something to show. Bare in mind that the tool is still primitive. I have decided to make a break down on what happened in the past month or so.
Do you know how much the people you work with make? When I got my first job, like any teenager, I was bragging and telling everyone about it. I was excited to tell that I made $7.50 an hour. But no one wanted to tell me how much they made. Their answers were always : I made good money, around that amount, that's rude you don't ask that, and none of your business. I used to find it weird until my younger sister asked me the same question recently and I found myself reluctant to answer.
