Juixe Techknow

From time to time I blast tweets on software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else I’m working through. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Programming is more about problem solving than coding, just like being an author is more about storytelling than writing.
• Next time your significant other starts nagging, throw an IllegalArgumentException!
• I want the web to evolve to a stage where flash is not required! It’s 2010 for God’s sake, why we still using plugins in browsers!?
• why do I have to tether gadgets and string along services just to catch a call?
• Patents? We don’t need no stinking patents.
• When life gives you users, make customers.
• For programmers everything is as easy as alpha, beta, and gold master.
• Good debugging techniques go a log way in and out of the debugger!
• Like the Free Masons, I am part of a secret society of digitari and conspiracy theorists and computer repairmen known as the Free Hackers.
• I am so WYSIWYG!
• If privacy settings are difficult to edit they are hard to implement, enact, and enable correctly.
• Privacy setting should be transparent not secretive and misleading.

Team Leadership

• You always get further faster with less effort if you work with what you got.
• The next big thing usually sneaks up on those waiting in line to ride the current thing.
• Mo money mo ways to solve mo problems.
• Bad apples introduce bad seeds.
• Litigation stifles innovation.
• Technology is changing so fast that I have obsolete gadgets the unopened packages I bought them.
• I’m coming up so you better get this project started.
• As companies grow, they lose acceleration and focus, but depend on momentum and size.
• I have to call into our all hands meeting tomorrow. Since I have to call in, I’ll be all ears at the all hands meeting.
• A great idea in the mind of someone that can’t or won’t do anything about it is like an orphan.
• When companies can’t create engaging products and new markets they create bogus patents.

Product Placement

• Twitter needs a reliable picture service, as reliable as Twitter, but Twitpic just needs to go away.
• The #newtwitter is like the the #oldtwitter plus HTML crack.
• I wish Twitter was like survivor and we can kick some twits of the service.
• This is how much AT&T sucks, I’m tethering my T-Mobile Nexus One with my AT&T iPhone to tweet this!
• Apple press events are as large as sporting events! Apple should televise them in Pay-Per-View.
• Steve Jobs is a mad genius, you gotta buy his hardware so that you can buy his software and along the way pay for a horrible service plan.
• The new iPod mini is one gadget closer to the Dick Tracy wrist watch phone.
• Apple cares more about design than market share, and that’s why users pay a premium.
• Steve Jobs would make a great James Bond villain.
• And the Grammy for the Album of the Year goes to… Autotune!
• AT&T should rebrand itself as FU&U!
• In addition to Document, Presentation, Spreadsheet, and Form document types, @google Docs should add a Gantt Chart!

Quote

• We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like. – Eric Schmidt
• Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. – Steve Jobs
• Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. – Steve Jobs
• Get into jiggle mode. – Steve Jobs
• So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. – Bill Gates

Cash Angels

• School experience is not in tune with the current job opportunities. College should be more like a series of Y Combinator funding cycles.
• If there is a angel investment bubble, everybody should cash in before they can cash out.
• When you see startup accelerators with names like 500 ACME Startup Founders Camp you can be sure that there is an angel investment bubble.
• Zuckerborg has dropped out of college and he is pledging $100,000,000 for kids to stay in school.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Craftsmanship is not a computer algorithm.
• If models can be super, what can programmers be? Leet?
• Just like you’re not supposed to go to a book by its cover don’t judge an application by its installer
• Some people call it cheating, I call it romantic A/B testing.
• Eric Schmidt’s tie is selected by a computer algorithm that tests over 80 different hues of blue based on his current location and weather.
• I’m not implemented yet.

Team Leadership

• If you don’t remember when you took a vacation last, you need a vacation!
• Money buys opportunities and experiences but not talent or happiness.
• Sometimes work/life balance feels like juggling eggs and frying pans on a tight rope as the audience throws carnival rings at your head.
• Perfection is a deception.
• Be scrappy, not crappy!
• Most people don’t search beyond the first page of the search engine results’ page anymore.
• Thoughts can’t be stolen, only forgotten!
• The truth is never complete.
• Some cover up mistake by making a bigger mistake.
• Facts are nether negative or positive but they are often interpreted as such.
• People can find offense in anything.

Product Placement

• If you want you iPhone 4 to get better reception just don’t touch it or use it.
• And then Steve Jobs said, “Let there be multi-touch.”
• Eating Cheetos and tweeting on an iPad/iPhone is not a good idea. Finger food and finger computing don’t mix.
• If Steve Jobs was president and the BP Oil Spill happened in his watch he would say, “Not that big of a deal. Steve Sent from my iPhone.”
• Steve Jobs should run NASA.
• If Steve Jobs always wears a black t-shirt, does he always wear tidy whities?
• I wish iTunes could organize songs by mood in addition to genre or album.
• Can’t wait until there is a Face Time Roulette service for the iPhone 4!
• AT&T and Apple are using the police as PR enforcers.
• Twitter feels like it was programmed by state programmers in Soviet Russia in the 70’s, it has constant disruptions, is not reliable, etc.
• Mr. Zuckerborg, tear down this walled garden.
• Bill Gates should come out of retirement and run Facebook.
• Scientists should invent self cleaning toilets like they have done for self cleaning oven.

Quote

• Not that big of a deal. Non issue. You are holding it wrong. – Steve Jobs
• Privacy means people know what they are signing up for in plain English. Some people want to share more data. Ask them. – Steve Jobs
• No one single answer is ever the answer to everything. – South Park
• Our Science is great. – South Park
• The devil is in the implementation. – Leo Laporte
• Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand – Kurt Vonnegut
• I hate BP, but I admire them too, in the same way I respect the work ethic of serial killers. – Scott Adams
• I have a theory that you should invest in the companies that you hate the most – Scott Adams

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Tests? We ain’t got no tests. We don’t need no tests! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ tests!
• Test. Code. Debug. Refactor. Repeat.
• Party like a rock star, code like a _why.
• Code has a center of gravity.
• There are features that become products, products that become companies, and companies that become revolutions.
• To increase productivity when working with buggy software tools, don’t focus on how it should be done but the work around to get it done.
• Can you imagine only getting paid if there is no bugs in your ode?
• One developer’s bug is another user’s loss of faith in technology.
• Delivery dates for feature sets that there are no specs is a death wish list.
• Running software trumps unwritten specifications.
• I drop fools like I drop database tables, with one SQL statement.
• Memories are backward compatible.
• I dream in quantum bits.
• My dreams are hosted on the cloud.

Team Leadership

• 80% required in swimming is just to have your head above water, the rest is about moving forward.
• I know Google offers employees 20% time, that must be why 80% of their products feel like 80% done.
• Having your head in the clouds is better than your head in the sand! Hold up your head up high and you will see further.
• Make your own path, build your own bridge, be your own light.
• Make work be more wow!
• Future proof your thinking.
• Meeting don’t generate momentum.
• It only takes a single dash to turn a minus into a plus.
• Some set out to follow a leader, others follow his vision, and still others his path. Why not triangulate his geolocation based on all of these?
• A high IQ does not equate with success. I developed a new algo to measure likelihood of success, Kick-ass Quotient, or KQ instead of IQ!!!
• Sweep me off my feet, not under the rug.

Product Placement

• If Zuckerberg would not have created Facebook, he would have been just another picture collector on Craigslist.
• If Facebook would had been invented in the time of Hitler, Zuckerborg might had been a collaborator, aka Little Fuhrer, and would have geolocated Ann Frank
• Facebook is said to release geolocation check-in feature soon, default setting is to notify your parole officer or ex your current location.
• Why isn’t common sense the default at Facebook when it comes to users’ privacy rights.
• BP handling of the oil spill is what I called fail whale, I mean if you kill a whale it is an automatic #failwhale.
• Two guys walk into an Apple store to buy an iPad… This is not a joke, this is a tragedy, they walk empty handed because they are sold out
• Happy Quit Facebook Day!!!
• Flash, there is no app for that.
• Can you imagine a 20 inch iPad? This shall come to pass.
• The iPad is the iPC.
• At Home Depot, just came from Office Depot. Are these stores like related? Can’t wait for Gansta Depot!
• Disney wants to kill your creativity!
• People used to clock-in to work, now they check-in.
• Which is the most hated tech company, Apple, Google, Facebook, Abode???

Quote

• I love the smell of napalm in the morning! – Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore
• You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. – Rahm Emanuel
• Billionaires rule supreme. – P. Sainath
• We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them. – Steve Jobs
• I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products. – Steve Jobs
• Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere… and I thought I saw a two. – Bender
• A documented bug is not a bug; it is a feature. – James P. MacLennan
• The invisible hand of the market is actually a very visible bunch of grubby paws if you really look. – P. Sainath
• Languages shape the way we think, or don’t. – Erik Naggum
• Shawty is a eenie meenie mo lova – Sean Kingston
• If at first you don’t succeed – call an airstrike. – Banksy
• Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales. – Larry Ellison
• Baby there is a shark in the water. – VV Brown
• The market is no longer driven by shareholders. The market is driven by formulas. – @mcuban

It took me some twenty-plus years to really learn how to program.
DHH

Before you know it, you’re half-way done with your idea and you’ve accidentally learned how to do it too. In short, you start with little bit of something real and make it tick. Then you make it tock.
DHH

Facebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can’t figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re unlikely to ever do.
DHH

A fool and his money will soon be departed applies equally to venture capitalists as it does to everyone else.
DHH

The most important technique, the most important competitive advantage we have at 37Signals is good human writing.
DHH

Planning is not just guessing, it is harmful guessing, because it is a waste of time. All the time you spend doing your five year plan you can use to worry about tomorrow.
DHH

Fear is ugly because it makes you irrational. Fear makes you jump to conclusions. Fear makes you reactionary.
DHH

The first and most important thing about a product is making it easy to use and easy to get value right “out of the box.”
Fred Wilson

Our most interesting profits will come from capitalizing on huge opportunities, not from micromanaging costs. 
Philip Su

What would you do if you hit the lottery?  How can you do some of that right now?
Philip Su

Don’t fear process.  Fear bad people dictating process.  Fear process trying to make up for bad people.
Philip Su

Jobs don’t scale. Whatever you do on your job, it will never bring you 4x or 8x or more money. Switching jobs might help, but I guess you will agree there’s a limit.
Roman Snitko

Programmers aren’t born, they’re compiled.
deadapostle

Advertising is mind pollution.
John Leach

Google Buzz is the new bright shiny spinning object destined to destroy my productivity. I don’t need any more of those. That’s the difference between Microsoft and Google in destroying productivity of able and willing people: Google uses carrots, Microsoft uses sticks.
Randal L. Schwartz

Every time an engineer joins Google, a startup dies.
Chris Dixon

There is no movement without the first follower. See, we are told that we all need to be leaders but that would be ineffective. The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.
Derek Siver

Google is a threat to everybody in the web space, to some extent. I supposed anyone can dream up some sort of a nightmare scenario where the whole might of Google pursues you as a individual business and it is game over but every entrepreneur lives under that threat.
Alex Algard

Hate marketing is a very strong and powerful thing, especially in the internet, You can try as much as you want to get positive press but negative press is so much easier and so much more viral.
Timothy Sykes

If I could make the same amount of money but wake up until when I can’t hold in my pee any longer, I will be a success.
Phil Kaplan

When you have a company name that is to descriptive about what you do, you don’t stand out.
Phil Kaplan

Don’t turn on monitization, typically, until it’s going to be significant.
Phil Kaplan

The answer to the question “where do good ideas come from” is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.
Seth Godin

So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation you’d have with a human being in your entire life. You just can’t talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory.
Anonymous Facebook Engineer

Lawyers can’t tell you you can’t do something. They can warn you about risks, and in extreme cases tell you that something is such a bad idea you’ll need to get someone other than them to do it but the judgment call of whether the risk is worth it is the entrepreneur’s.
Bram Cohen

From pitch perspective, the more you wear your idea, the more it fits you and your comfortable with it, the easier it is for somebody like me to say tell me more.
Brad Feld

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
Steve Jobs

Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.
Larry Ellison

The next time someone asks us for a favor, we’re less likely to do it given how this turned out. Hopefully, if you’re the one asking, you’ll understand. I want to help you, really, but you may just be too stupid to accept it without threatening to sue me later. You’ll understand, I’m sure. Right?
Michael Arrington

I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.
Mark Zuckerberg

Every application will be designed from the ground up to use real identity and friends.
Mark Zuckerberg

We are working hard to build a service that everyone, everywhere can use, whether they are a person, a company, a president or an organisation working for change
Mark Zuckerberg

By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
Steve Jobs

The iPad makes using a computer less of a commitment and that has important implications for the way I compute.
Fred Wilson

A good enough first version will take longer to produce with $170K than it would have with $0K.
Jason Fried

You want attention after you’re good, not before. Obscurity is your friend when you’re just starting — especially when you don’t even have a product yet.
Jason Fried

[I]n the history of computing, we know that its not the number of apps that make a platform, but the existence of “killer apps.” Whether it was VisiCalc, or Lotus 123, or PageMaker, or Microsoft Office, the truth is users don’t really want hundreds of apps, they want one or a small number that are really meaningful.
Hank Williams

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
Edward V Berard

Linux is only free if your time has no value
Jamie Zawinski

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.”
Seymour Cray

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Any software feature request should be broken down to 90% thinking and 10% coding.
• Multiple-touch is the greatest things since buttons.
• If a developer fools you once, shame on you, because they are usually fooling themselves when it comes to giving accurate estimates.
• Don’t take developers estimate at face value.
• Recommend The Rubyist for the Developers Directory on Tumblr: http://www.tumblr.com/directory/recommend/developers/rubyist
• Many non-programming software users don’t understand the meaning of concatenated or null so don’t use these in labels in your UI.
• I like to provide solutions that don’t involve complaining.
• If Heraclitus is right and you never step in the same river twice, then you never write the same program twice.
• Bugs keep my code humble.
• A bug’s ingenuity is proportional to a developer’s ego and self importance.
• Bugs like to in build nests out of spaghetti code in untested corner cases.
• Working running code is just one corner case.
• I use dead laptop drives as coasters.
• My emotions are user generated.
• I om nom nom nom on memes.
• The interweb is my inspiration.
• I CAN HAZ DREAMS OF INTERWEB MEMES

Team Leadership

• When life gives you lemons, you may make lemonade. When life gives me lemons, I make myself some limoncello.
• New motto/slogan: Don’t be a robot, unless you are 20 feet tall and can transform into a fighter jet.
• Dream big or wake up.
• The Law of Big Consequences: Large consequences are often the effect of making considerable decisions in a big rush.
• Laughter is the duct tape equivalent of emotions, it can be used to patch up bad feelings or misunderstandings.
• Manual, Error Prone, Time Consuming. Pick none!
• When people dig their own hole they can’t get out of it by digging deeper.
• Fight the power, and fight the hype.
• A key skill in life is to know when to end a conversation.
• Nothing is how you thought of it originally, it is up to you to make it better.
• If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.

Product Placement

• Amazon knows what books you bought for the Kindle, how often and for how long you read, can add and remove books, and read your bookmarks, notes, and highlights…
• FaceBook, Inc = F.B.I.
• Apple wants to design multiple-touch devices, Google wants to crawl content, Facebook wants to own your social graph and associated data.
• Facebook is really dumbing down the web with the like button.
• Facebook’s Open Graph is not really open. If you don’t own the platform, can look through the source, can own the data it is not open!
• Did someone just unlocked the Foursquare Sellout Badge at Yahoo HQ!
• I’ve had enough Lifetime movies for one lifetime.
• The world according Ronald McDonald is made out of corn meal.
• The McChicken nugget is the worst thing since sliced bread.
• Peeps are the most disgusting artificial food product.

Qoute

• One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain. – Bob Marley
• I don’t like negotiating with people I can’t beat up. – Goldberg
• We live in an amazing world and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation. – Louis C.K.
• Beware of artists they mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous. – Queen Victoria
• He eyes are the nipples of the face. -The House Bunny

In a typical day, software engineers, use diagrams, charts, and a ideograms to represent the software systems we work on. The biggest problems with software can also be described visually, such as the following image which tries to explain problems of software engineering.

Software Engineering Explained

When software engineering is that complicated, just imagine how the software application produced in such an environment looks like.

How Software Looks Like

Creating a clean, simply to use, functional application is harder than you think. Only a few companies have been successful with simplicity. Most enterprise applications look like a mosaic of buttons and text fields.

Stuff That Happens UI

Here is a screen shot showing the complexity of a software application.

FileMatrix UI Complexity

If you have any images, graphics, diagrams, or charts that illustrate the complexity of software engineering feel free to share in the comments.