We don't need roads

Remember that Kanban app I started a few months ago? I...

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:46:37 -0400

Remember that Kanban app I started a few months ago? I open-sourced it because I don’t have time to keep working on it. Feel free to contribute or steal it. Just let me know when it’s done.

Last time my parents took a flight from Paris to New York, the...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:14:00 -0500

Last time my parents took a flight from Paris to New York, the pilot woke the passengers up and told them to look out the window: that was the best view of Greenland he’d ever seen.

(Taken with my father’s iPhone 4.)

musicforyourcoffee: Penny & The Quarters – You and Me As...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:34:18 -0500

musicforyourcoffee:

Penny & The Quarters – You and Me

As heard in Blue Valentine. Thanks Francis.

According to Wikipedia, this song was recorded in the seventies then archived. Thirty years later, a musicologist discovers the tapes and gives them to a record company, The Numero Group. Superhuman Ryan Gosling then hears it and recommends it to director Derek Cianfrance for the soundtrack of Blue Valentine.

This is amazing.

Just give it a few years and then maybe

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:38:00 -0500

Just give it a few years and then maybe:

Wired’s Steven Levy in an otherwise interesting post about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:

Yes, the Fire lacks the industrial-design pyrotechnics that make fanboys foam at the mouth like the iPad does. But who cares? Like a lizard shedding its skin, next year there will be another Fire and in three years the original will look as antiquated as the bizarre-looking Kindle 1 appears today.

Right. Since the iPad is nothing but fun animations and 50 millions of customers are just stupid fanboys, Apple is probably going to remove the iPad 2, cancel the iPad 3 and only keep the original iPad for the next few years to give Amazon some time to develop a better Kindle Fire.

Old subway musician, of whom I wish I knew more - Baby Can I...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:25:00 -0500

Old subway musician, of whom I wish I knew more - Baby Can I Hold You (1988 / 2012)

Last night, a man entered the Brooklyn-bound G train with a 12-string guitar. I immediately remembered him covering the same Tracy Chapman song a few months ago and started recording with my iPhone. Sorry for the bad quality.

Dear Young Me,

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:46:00 -0500

I’m 25 today. Here’s a list of things I wish I had learned earlier:

Time is the most important resource you have. Don’t waste it.
If you don’t ask for what you want, you won’t get it. Asking for it isn’t enough either.
Music is important. Listen to what has gone through centuries and inspired generations, forget about the rest.
Instead of watching TV, watch the world you live in: the touristic places will tell you about a country’s history, the local pubs about its people.
You’re not unique. Everybody is just like you, except they don’t tell you.
Do never spend the money you don’t have yet.
Write down every single thing you have to do, you’ll sleep better. GTD is a good way to do it.
Love is just a chemical phenomenon, but it’s still awesome.
Stuff you buy and services you pay are supposed to just work and for a long time. Choose wisely instead of spending your time and money on crap.
Stop complaining about free healthcare and free education.
Back up your data.
Family will always be there for you. Be there for them too.
Running is easy and good for you. The hardest part is to start: Couch to 5k will help you reach 5 kilometers and the RunKeeper platform will make you go further.
Learn to forgive: everybody can make a mistake as long as they learn from it.
Wikipedia is one of the most useful things we built. Think about how often you use it and give a few bucks to the creepy guy already.
Guitar is easy to learn and a great way to express yourself. Start with the Beatles, don’t stop at the F chord and skip Oasis.
Don’t force people to change their habits. Make them want to do it.
You won’t be able to watch every good movie. Focus on the great ones.
Be nice to most people and just ignore the assholes.
Watch Friends.
You have a lot to learn from your grandparents. Call them once a week.
Find out what the teacher expects from you and prove him you understood. The key to success in school is to never be surprised.
Don’t panic: if you can’t fix the issue, just wait until you have more information.
Technology is not perfect yet, but it still does more than you could imagine five years ago. Give it a second while it’s going to space.
Know how to order a beer wherever you go, and you’ll be safe.

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?

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:31:39 -0500

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.

Cars

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:05:01 -0500

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...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:19:00 -0500

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:

Attach all sort of assets to the task such as images or elements of copy
Comment on the task to discuss implementation or ask for more information
Add subtasks to split the work into smaller units and check them off (the progress indicator is based on the number of completed subtasks)

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.

Update: I open-sourced it because I don’t have time to keep working on it. Feel free to contribute or steal it. Just let me know when it’s done.

Galt MacDermot - Coffee Cold (1968)

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 12:57:06 -0500

Galt MacDermot - Coffee Cold (1968)

How Trello is different

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:36:00 -0500

How Trello is different:

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...

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:42:56 -0500

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

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:53:59 -0500

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.

2012 & The End of the World

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:15:00 -0500

2012 & The End of the World:

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.

What is winning, after all?

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 08:58:28 -0500

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.

2012

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:20:23 -0500

2011 was the year I:

left Paris for New York
got my first real job and joined the awesome ChallengePost team
took evening classes for a master in Information Systems Management
started the Couch-to-5k program and ran a half–marathon
attended a Fatboy Slim gig on a beach of Governors Island and saw Pink Martini in Central Park
went to Asia for the first time when traveling across China

Let’s beat that in 2012. I want to:

Reboot WatchThis
Run a marathon
Learn piano
Apply for American citizenship

I hope you too set high goals for yourself.

Today, my dad turned 56. Like every year, he took the day off....

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:10:00 -0500

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..."

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:43:50 -0500

“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.

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 19:48:51 -0500

Arch bridge in Central Park by Rémi.

Tech reviews by people

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:45:00 -0500

It’s becoming more obvious that specs don’t matter these days, or at least that what really matters is harder to compare. People who need product recommendations will only find experts writing for other experts. Nobody knows what RAM is or what 802.11n means. They care about ease of use, time-to-Facebook and how long will the battery last.

I asked some regular people to tell me about their favorite or least-favorite device and explain me why.

My father on its iPhone 4:

The iPhone is a Swiss army knife that amazes me everyday with its intuitive features.

My sister Sarah on her Sony Xperia mini:

I chose it instead of an iPhone because it’s smaller and thus fits well in my pocket. I don’t know how to start a new paragraph when writing an email but for texting, making calls and Google things, it’s fine. It also takes great pictures.

My sister Sarah on her 7.1 megapixel Olympus camera (that’s actually how she refers to it):

My phone takes better pictures. Don’t buy it.

My sister Sarah on her MacBook Pro:

Just like any other Mac, it doesn’t crash and doesn’t get viruses.

My mom on her iPhone:

I been using it for a few years. It replaced the huge mess in my purse. If you run all day, just get one.

My friend Louis on his Eee PC:

Don’t buy that. After only a month, the battery is dead, it’s extremely slow, event while editing text. Yes, it’s lightweight and pretty cheap, but you should spend a little more to get a laptop that does the bare minimum.

I remember clearly my father recommending the iPad to his sister:

It’s easy to use, you don’t need to charge it very often, it’s light and small and you can do everything with it and it’s always connected to the Internet. Perfect for when you go on vacation.

Now, look how Best Buy describes a top-selling laptop to regular people. Below are the main product features:

VISION Technology by AMD / AMD Quad-Core A8-3500M Accelerated Processor with AMD Radeon HD 6620G discrete-class graphics / 8GB DDR3 SDRAM / Multiformat DVD±RW/CD-RW drive / 15.6” LED high-definition display / 640GB hard drive (5400 rpm) / AMD Radeon HD 6620G graphics / Built-in high-speed wireless LAN (802.11b/g/n) / Built-in 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN

Nobody talks about how how open their operating system is or the lack of Flash support. I’m stating the obvious here, but we’ll get there eventually. People needs tech reviews by people.