752 karma · joined July 5, 2013
http://twitter.com/drb
Engineers alive in the fast rise period assume this fast improvement goes on for ever. But it doesn't. Once a technology gets good enough the innovation shifts to lowering costs, not improving the product.
Do check out the link above, it's one of the most thought provoking tech pieces I've ever read.
"Poets love their handwriting, it’s like smelling your own farts."
Don't I love to read my own Hacker News comments?
And I bet Stephen Fry loves to read his own essays.
Brutalism means letting a functional concrete building look concrete and functional -- revealing its function and materials in the design.
A brutalist web site should LOOK like a web site, and build its appearance around its function, not some fancy science-fi fantasy.
Here's some text. Here's an image. Here's a heading. Here's a link. They all do different things, they are all in different places.
By that reckoning a few of the examples are brutalist. Hacker News, craigslist, Daniel Eatock. They are not minimalist, because they do not hide their functional complexity. They reveal the functional complexity in their design.
These are popular, powerful, ugly sites and I'd love to see more of them.
I will.
Perhaps the difficulty is marketing the range of skills you have in a way that other employers will value?
Web sites get replaced with point and click page creators, in or outside of a platform walled garden.
Web apps have React-based front ends that don't need a lot of custom skinning.
Just because it's obvious to us doesn't mean its filtered through to the tech departments of older, non-tech organizations.
We want to empower all developers to do amazing things and help build the future.
The biggest danger for us isn't wrongly predicting something that doesn't happen, but missing something that DOES happen. I've been in Packt almost since the start. We were among the first to really spot Open Source CMSs and development frameworks. But I still have nightmares about how long it took us to appreciate the full implications of iOS and Android. :S
But of course this is also just a bit of fun. I hope it's just plain interesting for everyone.
Reminds me of the Guide MkII. We'll never quite know who it's working for.
Do you see AI and ML as core skills for developers in the future or will it remain a specialism? What % of developers will have some AI/ML related skill on their CV in 2025?
(Funny how in all this tech the CV refuses to go away.)
What do you think we'll have instead of custom CSS?
The new approach as a Slack bot addresses that issue precisely. Lots of useful things aren't a compelling standalone solution. Slack bots and other in-messenger apps mean this kind of software can become part of a larger overall experience.
Don't know if Birdly will make it but their argument here is onto something.
I didn't expect more than a few people to read the story. I hope He wouldn't be pissed if he read it.
The best bit of this essay is the last 5 paragraphs, how to work on big things:
1. Break it down into fun small goals and experiments that get you in the right direction but offer their own reward.
2. Let desire and interest pull you to certain activities at certain times. You're not a computer working through a todo list. Let serendipity happen.
I find having a to do list pushes me to do nothing. The thought of working through it is just too depressing. Letting desire and interest lead me means I'm usually doing SOMETHING. Often quite useful things it turns out.
When I look back over the first 15 years of my career I did my best work when I had no to do list at all.
What's the best way to get smart? Watching? Reading? Or something else?
I've stayed in some really basic hotels in India. You get to choose between cheap and awful or expensive and decent. The bad places aren't always bad to keep costs low. Often the proprietors don't have the skills to run it any other way.
A lot of mom & pop businesses could benefit from this sort of approach.
"You See What You Are Doing All The Time".
If you have to write copy for any kind of ad, make sure to use the words "you" and "your" a lot. It worked for Underwood and it will work for you.
Even with a miraculous product like the Underwood 1, the customer cares most about THEIR work, THEIR speed, and THEIR efficiency. Underwood wisely focuses the ads around that.
Ben Horowitz is an authority on management and I bet a17z investments get as much focus on sustainability and fundamentals as anyone.
I recommend his blog http://www.bhorowitz.com/, and there's a book based on it too. It's a level headed management blog with far less future gazing than you'd expect.
1. Force yourself to sit here and do nothing else until the task is done. The Chandler method, which requires a great deal of discipline.
2. Keep telling yourself "I'll start just after I check Hacker News / Twitter / watch one more episode on Casualty". This means you never achieve anything and feel forever guilty and worthless.
3. Put the task to one side for now and do something else enjoyable and marginally useful. You make progress in other tasks, feel valuable, and only a little guilty.
Structured Procrastination is the third option. If you can't manage Option 1 -- and who can? -- it's better than Option 2.
"If you want something done ask a busy person."
Busy people always come through for you. I used to think this was because they were super efficient, super disciplined.
But maybe your task is a welcome distraction from something even worse?
And besides, everything we do is a distraction from the most looming, vaguest, most intractable deadline of all.
The End.