I’m 25 today. Here’s a list of things I wish I had learned earlier:
Take care,
Kevin
ps: Stop riding your BMX with no hands, it’s going to end badly.
Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? -
Excellent analogy by Michael Wolfe on Quora:
We can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we’ll be there in 10 days. We call our friends and book dinner for next Sunday night. They can’t wait to see us!
We get up early the next day giddy with the excitement of fresh adventure. We strap on our backpacks, whip out our map, and plan day one. We take a look at the map. Uh oh.
Two great posts I read today:
I recently heard somebody say he didn’t care about crosswalks because cities belong to pedestrians. It made me realize how the two cities I lived in, Paris and New York, are completely planned for cars.
Kanban is a software development method that requires to lay out the tasks on a board to better visualize the workflow. I find it very inconvenient to rely on a physical board so I spent a few days building a web application.
It’s just a prototype, but I think it already does a good job at giving an overview of the next tasks in the backlog, who is currently working on what, what are the open tasks, and what has recently been deployed.
The task completion level is easy to see with the green/yellow/red progress indicator, and the title of a stage gets highlighted in red when there are more active tasks than the limit the team set (that’s a Kanban thing for focusing on getting things done).
Users can add a new task by clicking the “+” in the backlog where a new card will appear. Then, just type some text and press enter. They can drag and drop stacks of cards from one stage to another or people from one stack to another.
Clicking on a card gets the user to the task’s page where he can:
It also syncs in the background to receive changes made by other people in real time, but it’s not applying changes yet.
The benefit of such app over an out of the box alternative like Trello or an actual cork board is integration and customization: it could automatically run tests and move the cards accordingly, deploy a stack of cards to a staging or production server based on the stage they are in and notify the project stakeholders when needed, all while computing the team velocity for continuous improvement. Such an application can adapt to an existing workflow instead of forcing the opposite.
I’m not sure where this project is going but let me know what you think.
Joel Spolsky:
The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.
Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recall.
Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.
PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.
This is a picture my dad took from his office in Paris after I told him to try Instagram. He loves this app.
Steve Jobs Owes Us All An Apology -
Dinosaur Trader:
The older table made up of my uncles and aunts was the liveliest. They were trading stories, old and new, and laughing. My table consisted mainly of my immediate family. My brother in law stared down at his “smart phone” for the entirety of the Jets game without saying a word. I looked over at the table containing my cousins who are all about 20 years older than me. A few of them were on smart phones as well.
Yes, traditional manners are being pushed by smartphones. I don’t like watching a movie with friends who constantly look at their phone or laptop.
But family dinners were also ruined by television in the sixties. I bet everybody as a child also had a favorite book they couldn’t stop reading. “Hey, we’re having dinner, you’ll finish your book later.”
Get over it. Just give people the time to adapt to this new lifestyle.
A short video explanation on the end of the world. Funny and interesting as always with C. G. P. Grey:
Anyway. After this NASA became so inundated with questions that they had to take time away from their busy robot building, frontier pushing, knowledge expanding, civilization inspiring schedule, to write a webpage explaining that no, a human-sacrificing, stone-age society with neither wheels to pull carts nor glass to make telescopes, didn’t know more about science at the dawn of history than real scientists do today.
People wonder who between Apple and Google is winning at the smartphone war. Some say Google is, others argue it’s Apple. If you were to build a company, how would you define a success? And what is winning after all?
You can learn in business school that, for a company, winning is maximizing shareholder value. Winning at business is about money.
Apple is making shitloads of money by selling iPhones, iPads and iPods. They sell iOS devices and make money. Google is not making profit in the smartphone market directly by selling devices. When people buy a Samsung Bionic Optimus II X 3D, Samsung gets the money, and Google gets the user.
Google’s strategy is to capture a lot of user information to charge more for ads they serve to the users. The more Android devices are used (not shipped, not sold, not activated: used), the more information Google is going to capture and the more ads they are going to display.
While Apple is silently failing at using the iOS platform to serve iAds, Google wins at being the default search engine in nearly all desktop browsers and mobile devices but Microsoft products. They know what people want, what people say, where people are and want to go. They win at the advertising game.
For people who actually make products, winning is about having people use and love their products. Nobody thinks about customer satisfaction when their only goal is to make more money, but people who actually care about the user experience can be the ones who get the profits. Apple wins at the customer satisfaction game.
Now, you can look at the smartphone market and see the companies sharing the Android profits as one Apple competitor. Then yes, Android is winning. The vendors share the money, but Google gets all the users. If you think about Map and Search, Google even gets iOS users. Yes, two thirds of Google’s mobile search comes from iOS devices, but the remaining third is still for Google.
Or you can look at the market in terms of what I would personally call a success: people loving your products so much that they line up in front of your stores, recommend your products to everybody, and still get you twice as much profit on phones as everybody else combined.
It all depends on what your goal is.
2011 was the year I:
Let’s beat that in 2012. I want to:
I hope you too set high goals for yourself.
Today, my dad turned 56. Like every year, he took the day off. But this year, he also rode his bike 56 miles1. He’s the best.
This is a picture of him I took a few years ago in Brooklyn.
It’s just a coincidence, he uses the metric system like normal people and rode 90 kilometers. ↩
“You remember those Magic Eye books from the 1990s? The ones where you’d look at them, relax your eyes, and a 3D picture would pop out? Saying that 3D movies are the future of cinema is like saying that Magic Eye books were the future of literature.” — Why 3D movies need to die - The Oatmeal
Arch bridge in Central Park by Rémi.