The One-Person Product
Marco Arment, writing about David Karp, founder of Tumblr, in The One-Person Product. Not only is this piece well written, it is an amazing perspective of Tumblr from the inside. But, for me, the salient point and the highest praise in the piece goes to David Karp, the founder and visionary: David has an impeccable sense of what’s best for Tumblr, and he doesn’t need anyone else telling him what’s best for the product.
Is it time to change tools?
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. Winston Churchill Every once in a while I wonder if my programming tools, languages and platforms need to be changed. Maybe, just maybe, the software mix I use every day needs to be shaken up. And then my mind starts spinning in circles. As we all do, I find myself using the same languages and tools over and over again.
Every 'The Best Programmers Editor' Review
I read a lot of programmer’s editor reviews and see a lot of arguments about which is best. Yet, essentially, they all do the same thing, help you program the way you want to. So here is my review of your favorite programmer’s editor for the Mac. Choose your Editor: TextMate 2 | Sublime Text 2 | BBEdit | Chocolat | Vim | Emacs My EDITOR Review EDITOR is by far the best programmer’s editor ever.
My Next Product
My next product is going to be the best product I ever made. Of this I am certain. It is going to have an absolutely beautiful design inside and out. The internal architecture is going to be sublime, the code and classes readable and maintainable. The functionality in the first version will hit all the high marks and the UI is going to stand out. My next product is going to solve a problem that lots of other people face every day.
A Coda 2 Use Case
I upgraded to Panic’s Coda 2 when it came out, and never used it. Unless it was to trigger a software update. That was until last week. Last week I was working on an odd project to create a set of web pages that would be hosted on a payment processor’s site, but must look and feel like they are running on the actual site. This was for some non-profits to enable them to accept credit-card donations and electronic payment of member fees.
Octopress now has Footnotes
If you update to the latest Octopress and you still use the rdiscount markdown processor, you now get footnotes like this 1. I was previously using a CSS workaround because I prefer the speed of rdiscount for my growing site2 and still wanted footnotes. To create a footnote, use the standard MultiMarkdown [^1] anchor to create the footnote reference link, and add [^1]: The footnote content. to the bottom of the file3.
Avoiding the Blogger Trap
I totally agree with Marco in Avoiding the blogger trap: People aren’t so one-sided. Everyone has a life that goes much deeper than the topics on their blogs. and This site represents me, and I’m random and eccentric and interested in a wide variety of subjects. This site is me, with a hodge podge of posts ranging from opinion pieces, news, geeky ideas, advice, links, jokes, setups and productivity. I write what I find interesting.
Reading the Archives
Most people when they click on a link to a new blog, read the linked article and move on elsewhere. Google Analytics records this as a bounce - a visitor comes in, reads a single page and leaves. One of my habits when I come across a new blog is to read the archives. Almost every blogging platform has archives and almost every blogger makes these available. But why read the archives?
Hedge Fund Systems
I have started a new series of articles on Hedge Fund Systems on my company, Noverse LLC blog. I did not post them here (yet) because I am not sure my readers will be interested – and I am using them to promote my skills and services. Let me know in comments you think I should post them here too. But just in case you are interested in Hedge Fund systems (or my professional skills), the first post is called The Opportunity where I describe the opportunity I got starting in 2004 to design, develop and grow a brand new end-to-end Hedge Fund system for a completely fresh new business.
Fix the Mac Function Keys with Palua
By default, the function keys on Apple keyboards are mapped to the Apple functions on them, like brightness, volume and Mission Control. To access them as F1 - F12 requires you to hit the fn key as well. You could always reverse this in Preferences / Keyboard by checking Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys. But this change is system-wide. What if you want the default Apple behavior most of the time, but Function key behavior in certain applications, for example, in virtual machines?