You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
~ Jony Ive on Steve Jobs and fragility of ideas
Easily one of my favorite quotes about Steve Jobs.
Keep moving forward.
~ Walt Disney
I’ve always found this quote underwhelming. “Moving” is a poor choice for my taste. Moving forward roughly translates to accepting whatever comes. That is so not inspirational.
I’ve recently achieved a significant albeit small milestone for my team. I can’t help but to romanticise the moment. When I look back, the things that we’ve been through to get here is just too much to accept that “moving” forward is enough. It is not. Not even close. You don’t win by moving forward. You win by overcoming insurmountable obstacle even in your weakest moment. You win by pouring an unrelenting conviction and dedication to get what you want. You win by pushing forward. So today, I feel smug that, in my own right, I get to correct one of the geniuses of modern times.
Don’t just move forward, push forward.
~ Jose Capistrano
There, Walt, FIFY.
TechCrunch (emphasis mine):
Technical debt is not always a bad thing, but if you accrue too much of it, it will kill you. When under schedule pressure, or when new devs keep coming onto and going off a project, people tend to build new software subsystems and connect them to the old ones Rube-Goldberg style, instead of doing it right.
It’s very important to define how to do it right for your team because it varies from developer to developer, project to project. If you do not define it, each one of your developers could end up doing different “right” things. Here’s another story from the same author about technical debt. This time he offered how to get out of it:
What can you do if you’ve already run up a load of technical debt? First, get your head out of the sand and accept that you have a major problem. Second, stop digging. Stop adding new features, and get things into a semi-stable state so that you can see what you do and don’t have.
Hiring the right people does not completely mitigate technical debt. You have to complement it by adapting a framework and strictly following it. Make sure to put some teeth in your framework by getting managers on board and engaged. Penalise the offenders and reward consistent developers.
If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for.
Nick Bradburry on every programmer’s dream:
I used to assume there were people in charge who knew what they were doing, who planned how things in society should work. As I got a little older I got more cynical, believing these people were trying to keep the rest of us dumb with shoddy schooling and mind-numbing entertainment, in the hopes they could get away with whatever it is powerful people are always trying to get away with.
Then as I got even older I realized that the people in charge are as clueless as the rest of us. Like our software, our society just kind of happened over the years and it’s always on the verge of coming tumbling down. Nobody really knows what they’re doing or what they’re talking about.
If you can get over the sheer terror of that thought, it’s actually quite liberating.
Holy shit. For some reason, I feel relieved and unburdened.
The video is chockfull of history nostalgia and quote-worthy lines. Some of my favorite lines are:
We’ve been combatting this with design. We’ve been entering into this battle and our only weapon has been design, “we can build a really awesome product”. But it’s not gonna do it. Design alone wasn’t enough to get Apple into the upper echelon of where it is. It’s not enough for us either.
And
We don’t design beautiful things hoping that people would notice. We design beautiful things knowing that they probably won’t.
If you’re into product development or design, if you’re part of a startup or just a coding enthusiast, you should watch this video.
The hacktivists identified themselves as “Blood Security Hackers” and posted a message that said “Dear Globe, your service on your internet connection is not worthy what we pay for. Do something or expect the consequence. This is just the beginning. Expect Us!”
Ouch.
Yoly Crisanto, Head of Globe Corporate Communications, said in a statement that no customer data was comprised in the alleged breach of their website.
However:
The four websites that were offline are: mybusiness.globe.com.ph, payroll.globe-csme.com, duointernational.globe-csme.com, and update.globe-csme.com.
This does not look like a simple defacing which makes Globe’s official statement sounds like a knee-jerk reaction.
UPDATE: More from Inquirer.net:
The same hactivists who broke into Globe Telecom’s website on Friday attacked more Philippine-based websites the day after.
The true measure of a developer can ultimately be broken down into two things: 1) elegance in writing new codes and 2) endurance in putting up with other developer’s crap.
True story.
Microsoft today announced plans to open source .NET, the company’s software framework that primarily runs on Windows, and release it on GitHub. Furthermore, Microsoft also unveiled plans to take .NET cross-platform by targeting both Mac OS X and Linux.
As a person who proudly uses his Mac with Windows, this couldn’t be more exciting. Although Mono has been exposing .NET outside Windows for years, this move is a firm validation that cross-platform .NET is here to stay. Additionally, Microsoft released a free, full-pledge version of Visual Studio:
“The simple way to think about this is that we are broadening up access to Visual Studio,” Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me in an interview late last month. Somasegar told me that the Community Edition will allow you to build any kind of application for the Web, mobile devices, desktop and the cloud. “It’s a full features version of Visual Studio,” he noted. “It includes the full richness of the Visual Studio extensions and ecosystem.”
Visual Studio is the best development IDE out there hands down. However, it is crippled by two things: pricing and Windows lock in. Today, Microsoft potentially removed these barriers.
“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”
— Paula Scher