May 2012
1 post
April 2012
1 post
The police officer who learned to code: one of a...
In the press on the launch of a new shopping app called Smoopa, you might have noticed a remarkable fact: one of the developers, Derek Langton, only learned to code a year and a half ago, and before that he was an 18-year veteran of the Massachusetts State Police.
I met Derek and his business partner (and husband), Mendel Chuang, the other day, and heard Derek’s story – perfectly reported since...
March 2012
1 post
BD is the new SEO
Or, the return of the human.
There was (once upon a time, in the early 2000’s) a generation of Internet products built on the premise that if you mastered Google’s search rankings, you could grow traffic. Services like IMDb, About.com, Wikipedia, etc. provided value to their users, but were also able to accelerate their growth by playing the SEO game. Making your Internet service findable was, in...
January 2012
1 post
Could coding be the next mass profession?
Like farming was in the 17th century, factory work during the industrial revolution, construction during the Great Depression, and manufacturing after World War II. Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value.
Most young people start in jobs that don’t have much of...
November 2011
1 post
Why Minecraft Matters
Spent today at Minecon, the live event for the game phenomenon Minecraft.
If you don’t know it yet, Minecraft is an open, world-building game. Built, initially, by one guy — goes by Notch. Sixteen million people have registered for it, even though it was technically only released today. You download the game, a standalone client, from the Minecraft website. (It is coming to Xbox, and...
October 2011
4 posts
Want a faster web? Speed up the ads.
Pageload times are a problem for some online media companies – for good reason — heavy content, with video, high-res images, and features jammed in. (Let’s set aside the separate problem of content/feature bloat, and assume for a second that it’s a good thing to have all that content and all those features.)
IGN sites need to load much faster — and we’re down to 6 seconds or so...
Why I'm learning to code
I run a company whose product is written in code, and I don’t yet speak the language. I sometimes feel like a newspaper publisher who has to take his editor’s word for it that the articles are good. You trust your people, you know you could never write the way they do, but it would still be good to be able to read.
Coding, no surprise, is also a different kind of thought from what I do all day...
What Siri means for TV
Steve Jobs claimed Apple TV was always a side project, because there was no way to get people to buy a separate set-top box. (Ignoring all the Xboxes and PlayStations folks have bought, natch.)
There’s one other obstacle to making a great Internet set-top box: the user controls stink. It’s really hard to get at all the content available on the open Internet (or even on Netflix or iTunes) while...
Learning to code might become a basic job...
My first job was an internship at New York’s old Chemical Bank in 1994, that I got as a prize for winning a debate tournament – don’t ask. I was surprised because one of the top guys didn’t know how to use a computer, and we’d had one in our house for 10 years (my dad was an early adopter before they had a name for it). This Mr. So-and-so thought he didn’t have to use a computer, because he had...
September 2011
2 posts
High school should be vocational
I’ve heard a few speakers in the last couple days talk about the state of education. The usual litany: failing grades on basic skills, and how college is necessary for an upwardly-mobile career yet only a third finish college.
But I’ve been wondering lately, hang on a second, is college really necessary for an upwardly-mobile career?
I learned a lot in college. Mostly from my...
Late to the party
I’m going retro today, starting a blog. Very 1999 of me. But now that everyone is wise to the Tumblr thing, I figured no better way to know it than to use it. (I’m already a WordPress man on my family blog, and IGN uses it for a CMS for a few services.)
I’ll write here mostly about the world of work. Our family’s blog has the best privacy filter I know, robots.txt.
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