When people say that Twitter is a cesspool of conspiracy and abuse, I don’t recognise it based on my experience. My Twitter timeline is all jokes and geeky chat1, and that’s where this post takes its cue:
When I started learning assembler, no site ever mentioned what registers were good for. Wish it had said:
CPU talking to a RAM chip is slow, registers are a bit of memory built into the CPU in which you load numbers from RAM, do several calculations, and only THEN write back.
After university, when I first started working, I jealously noticed people leaving their desks and attending meetings. I was left sitting at my desk, bashing out code. What was going on? What exciting things were being discussed without me? Sometimes they’d come back from the meeting and ask a random question. It was all very mysterious.
A while later I started getting invited to these meetings. I found what was being discussed. I discovered the mystery.
Here’s something I’ve seen a few times recently: a startup issues a patch for a critical issue seen by one of their large customers. The “enterprise,” however, takes a week to install and test it. Clearly, the startup concludes, if it takes a week to try a patch it can’t be that urgent or the staff are dumb, or, quite likely, both.
Separately, we all know that a big difference between a startup and an enterprise is process. So why do people suddenly get angry and start to lack empathy when that difference is exposed?
A few years ago we got an Amazon Fire tablet and I could almost copy and paste that review for the ninth generation unit [affiliate link].
My biggest complaint this time around is the battery life. It feels like it’s always in need of recharging. Almost everything else from last time is improved. It’s slightly smaller. The build quality is much better. It’s faster.
Having said that it’s still no iPad. While faster it still feels sluggish compared with Apple’s tablet, the screen is a lot worse and the software library is laughable by comparison. But, as before, it’s also a tenth of the price. As an almost disposable consumption device, I have few complaints.
When I see a company that has an “innovation team” or a “chief innovation officer” I immediately understand that it’s not the kind of company I want to work for.
Innovation isn’t found in a particular team, person or department. It’s your culture.
If you need a special team outside the normal management structure to innovate, what does that say?
As I normally do at this time of year, here are a few thoughts about Apple’s new mobile operating system. However, this year has been different in a few ways.
Betas are, well, betas. You don’t use them on devices that you actually need1. My normal pattern is put them on my iPad around the start of August. This is often the third or forth beta. Most of the worst glitches have been resolved by this point. Then, depending on how it goes on the iPad, I’ll probably put it on my phone towards the end of August, earlier if everything is going well.
Like Spotify’s complaint before it, yesterday’s “App Store Principles and Practices” document from Apple got me thinking.
Apple talks a lot about free apps not paying anything (which isn’t entirely true of course), and it’s always pitched as a feature.
But the more I think about it, the more I think it might be a bug.
This effectively means that all paid apps have to subsidise all free apps. Is this what’s preventing Apple from reducing the 30% fee?
The problem with “agile development” is that it is both a methodology and a buzzword. What this means in practice is that people who do not understand it implement parts of it without appreciating the whole. This usually results in more overhead but without the benefits.
I’ve come across this multiple times in my career. The usual refrain is “we’re agile so we don’t need documentation.” The “agile” aspect is more often than not, merely the assertion that the project is agile. Or someone says that the code is the documentation.
As I’ve done for the past few years, here are a few thoughts on the new version of iOS that will be heading to your phone in a few days. Usual caveats: my usage patterns are probably different to yours, I have a 6s and iPad mini, not whatever weird and wonderful hardware you have. I’ve been using the beta on my iPad since early August and on my iPhone since late August.
Here is goes again. Apple announces new MacBook Pros (or there are rumours about a new Mac mini pro) and the hoards pile on it saying it’s not a “Pro” machine. But what does that actually mean?
Traditionally the label “pro” is short for professional and is used to describe people who make their living using the tool. Sadly that definition is so ridiculously broad that it’s not terribly useful. What does a video editor, a writer, a 3D modeller and a software developer have in common?