Juixe Techknow

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.

Software Development

• Know thy framework.
• I recently received two books, one on Scala and one Clojure. From reading the few chapters on each, I have to say I like Clojure best.
• How do you pronounce C++0x? Is the ++ silent?
• Coworker: Functional programming is the future. Me: Functional programming has been the future since the 80’s.
• Developers love to reinvent the wheel. Which means, writing their own editor, IDE, bug tracking, version control, wiki, web framework, blog

Team Leadership

• Live each day to it’s potential.
• Today is a new and improved day. It only gets better.
• Every day has the potential to be your best day of your life, because today is the only day that matters.
• Love what you do is a key to success.
• If you are about to fail, do it with flair.
• People need to learn how to disrupt an entrenched business, product, or industry. There should be a class on disruption.
• Always walk into a meeting with pen and notepad.
• If you want to survive, you need to adapt.
• If plan A doesn’t work move on to plan B, and it that doesn’t work, move to plan… That is why we have 26 letters in the alphabet.
• The most critical aspect of making a mistake is usually not the mistake but how you respond to it.
• Ideas aspire to be more than just ideas.
• Practice what you preach and live what you teach.
• One easy way to think outside the box is to add an extra dimension.
• The fact that unicorns aren’t real doesn’t mean that people won’t buy unicorn bacon.

Product Placement

• You’ll know if Google+ is successful when a congressman’s penises are accidentally posted and shared on it.
• What is up with these Google+ invites? The seem to be worth their weight in BitCoins.
• By the way he writes, I think David @Pogue is Apple’s VP of Marketing.
• I like the Migration Assistant in OS X. You can migrate data and apps to a new Mac from another Mac, mac backup, or external drive.
• Did @airbnb use the same black hat techniques that picture collectors and questionable dating sites use on @craigslist?
• The Swiss should make a Swiss Army iPod case.
• Companies are using positive tweets about their products as endorsements in commercials. I wonder if those Twitter users got compensation.
• How many screws does it take to take out a hard drive from a Mac Book Pro? I lost count at 21 screws and two different screw drivers.
• I don’t even know what language I speak when I order at Starbucks. Iced chai grande Americano hella latte extra cafe con leche fo shizzle.

Quote

• Checking in is so 2009. – Dave Matthews #TWiST
• If it’s printed, it’s no longer news. – @jbminn
• You can make a buck with cat pictures – Steve Yegge
• The impossible might take a while. – Scott Heiferman, #TWIST

Question

• Would you pay an extra $100 to buy an iPad made in the US?
• Do super models have role models?
• What is your innovation strategy?
• How smart is you network, team, or organization?
• How much is the whole of the USA worth?
• Since when is it a feature to have your product available in white?
• Is Instagram the new Polaroid?
• Will any software application last 100 years?
• Do you give a tip on pick up or only on delivery?

Randumb

• And then Jobs said, “Let there be an app market.” – The Book of Jobs
• I don’t respond well to BS.
• Love is a by product of accepting yourself and others as they are.
• It’s always a good morning when you can sleep in.
• To sleep or not to sleep, that is the dream.
• Be you. Do you. Get yours.
• Love love and live for life.
• Love is transdimensional.
• Love don’t cost a thing if you file for chapter 11.
• Lifetime movies is like porn for women.
• Any place that claims to be the happiest place on earth is really covering something deep.
• I wish my closet functioned like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, so my fashion could always current and I could have extra space.
• I’m a register member of the Ninja party but I have some Pirate party leanings.
• The most read book is Facebook.
• If only we could solve all of the world’s problems with a dance battle.
• Heading out to a beerbeque.
• Empathy is my religion.
• Everyday should be like Friday.
• Hollywood can follow up a successful movie with a sequel, a prequel or an alternative timeline-quel.
• Twitter is where quotes go to get misquoted and then retweeted.

I love to share solutions to issues I’ve encountered and explaining programming concepts in layman terms. I do it because that is how I learn. As a side effect of the tutorials and blog posts I write, I occasionally get a nice comment from someone that found some article I posted a while back found useful. I love to get those kinds of comments. Off course, I even appreciate the comments that correct my grammar, spelling, or misconception in a post I wrote 2 or 3 years ago. The one comment I usually don’t react well to is the one from some poor developer that sends me his requirements and asks for me to “provide proper solution.” Recently I got one such request via a comments. It stated…

I need to create a single page spreadsheet web application in RAILS which should be exactly like google doc(should not use google docs API). It should have the following features…

The comment went on and on that it should be a multi-user collaborate real time application with authentication, authorization, and hot keys support to boot.

I can relate with programmer stuck with a daunting problem. More than once have I been tasked with problem outside my domain expertise, and even application. I’ve had to walk through end users with problems that are peripheral to the application I was involved with. For example, I’ve had to track problems down due to network issues and security settings on shared drives in client sites because the some server could read files from that location. Like most developers, I’ve posted comments asking for help to blog articles on issues I’ve been stuck on, such as when using a particular version of a web service library with a particular web application server. That said, I’ve never asked someone to provide me a proper solution to a homework or other project.

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.

Software Development

• Thread.sleep(28800000);
• You don’t need a PHD in PHP to be a great Web Developer.
• Not Another Expression Language. There should be one expression language to rule them all.
• I am not afraid of rolling up my sleeves and debugger.
• It’s a thin line between feature and bug.
• Code is a blunt instrument.
• We ain’t afraid of no code block.
• Web designers are modern day alchemists.
• If developers are a dime a dozen, then product idea people are a silver dollar a dozen.
• I don’t read romance novels or non-fiction before going to bed, I read programming language technical specifications.
• New Name For Rock Band: Death By SQL Injection
• Let there be code.
• Just code it.
• Code the future.
• Crack the code.
• Don’t be a code donkey.

Team Dynamics

• Are you a value creator, subtractor, divider, or multiplier?
• AWS failure is the perfect storm to the cloud.
• Stress is excess, we don’t need it in our lives.
• You can’t buy the scrappy mentality.
• Scale your thought process.
• The right time is right now.
• Strive to do what you do well better.
• People don’t scale and multi-task as well as computers do.
• Give a man a thought, and he will think for a day. Teach a man to think, and he will think for himself.
• You don’t want someone to reinvent the wheel, you need someone that makes it turn!
• Everyone has great ideas, what is needed is great execution of great ideas.

Product Placement

• Is Automattic, the company behind WordPress, working on an ad network? With millions of WP blogs out there, maybe it should.
• Jiffy Lube peeps are great at up selling you on add-on services.
• Forget HAL 3000, I’m afraid of my iPhone 3000. “I’m sorry Dave, but I’m afraid you can’t do that and I’ve notified the authorities.
• Google announcing that better ads are coming to GMail is like the power company announcing that a better billing system is coming.
• I feel like I get more snail mail spam than email spam. I wonder if GMail can also filter out my snail mail spam.
• If you add up all the zero-day holes in Adobe products, you get a lot of days spent patching and upgrading buggy software.

The Valley

• Welcome to the Blubble 2.0.
• The trouble with the blubble.
• I think we are in a #bubble when a website for listing free crap is valued at multiple millions of dollars.
• Don’t pivot while you pitch.
• How do you monetize the bubble?
• Ah, Silicon Valley, the land of vanity startups, founders with ADD, fan boi VCs, me-to products, one trick apps, companies on pivot mode…
• Bubbles are like snow flakes, there are no two alike, so we can conclude that this tech bubble I’d different from previous ones.

General Technologist

• If Arthur Miller were alive today he would have written a sequel to Death of a Salesman called Death of a Social Media Marketing Ninja.
• You know your service or product is successful if GOOG wants to buy you for a billion dollars, FB copies you, and if MSFT doesn’t get it.
• Any lawmaker who proposes any bill related to technology should be able to correctly setup a wifi router, Facebook privacy settings, …
• My iPhone knows too much about me. I think I want a dumb phone, instead of a scheming evil genius phone that is tracking my every move.
• If TinyUrl was a utilities company it would force upgrade everybody to use smart grid meter and charge us extra to use green friendly links.
• Twitter management seem to play musical chairs with titles. It seems like everyone at the company has had a turn at being CEO.
• There are different degrees of open in open platforms, from marketing buzzword open to data portability open.
• What I learned by reading Rework by 37signals: Emulate drug dealing celebrity chefs and up sale the by-products of what you do.

Google Buzz is more Safe for Work (SFW) than Facebook in the sense that it looks like a a typical GMail account and the URL to access it also resemble GMail’s URL. Employers don’t typically block personal email access but do block networking sites. Its so easy to switch between Google Buzz and GMail.

Gutenberg died broke, his problem was that when he invented the printing press he printed the Bible. Ben Bernanke learned that lesson and instead of printing religious tomes he prints cold hard cash.

Between easy and hard, you’ll see a lot less competition if you go for what is difficult and you’ll see a lot more adoption if you make easy what was once hard.

First they seized crack warez sites and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a cracker. Then they came for the torret sites and I didn’t speak out because I don’t pirate content. Then they came for offshore online gambling sites and I didn’t speak out because I don’t play poker. The they came for my blog and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Reading about the recent Dropbox security issue and I realized that I have more valuable and personal information in the cloud than in my home. I have family pictures, calendar events for contacts, tax documents, inner most personal writings and journal entries, and much more on Google Docs, Dropbox, Yahoo Mail, and whatever other cloud service I use. Yet police agencies do not require a warrant to access that information but they do to come into my home and conduct a search. The search warrant is now obsolete. Google and other online services has made the search warrant obsolete.

It was recently reported that the US State Department is developing a mobile phone panic button, probably in the form of an app, for pro-democracy activists in foreign countries to erase a phone’s contents when they have are detained by the secret police. At the same time, the US Department of Justice and California’s Supreme Court have upheld the right of police to search the contents of a detained person without being arrested or having a warrant. Police are using digital equipment that can read all of the data in a phone in minutes at the point that police has stopped someone. Welcome to the future of pre-crime proactive policing.

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

• Worst than coder’s block is coder’s shiny tech infinite loop.
• I got 99 problems and a bug ain’t one.
• I’m a rockstar ninja guru mofo byte code copy editor.
• If you could Myers-Briggs test your code what type would your code be and what type of developer would that make you?
• Are you test driven or bug driven development?
• Spiderman had his spidey sense and I have my buggy sense and it is tingling.
• Software bugs can byte my shiny metal ass.
• Code is a continuum.
• Mo data, mo problems.
• Let there be APIs.
• “Hello, World” is a programmer’s first program. Blog engine is a web developer’s first web app. Consultant’s first product, time management application.
• Duh, #debugging.
• Code is never complete.
• Code less, debug less.
• I’m a bandwagon programmer!
• This is not the code you are looking for.
• I break for bugs.
• My code runs more than you.

Team Dynamics

• Passion is not a fruit, it’s a seed.
• Pitch your passion.
• Self help gurus first help themselves.
• If you are waiting for tomorrow you will always be waiting.
• In the evening be exhausted, in the morning exhilarated.
• Great ideas don’t join country clubs.
• Inside a large risk is a large reward, you just need to know how to unwrap it and then monetize it.
• Meetings begets meetings
• It’s not how the ball is pitched to you, it’s how you hit the ball, duh #winning.
• Replace “what if” with “when and how.”
• The way you think of a problem affects the way you think of the solution.
• Everybody lives in there own bubble, expand yours.

Product Placement

• I’m confused as to which photo service we are all supposed to use this month, flickr, picasa, twitpic, instangram, picplz, plixi, color, etc
• Color app seems like Bump for pictures.
• Why is the director of the FBI emailing my AOL email account from a io domain?
• 3G forecast: partly spotty with chances of AT&T fail.
• Out of all of Apple’s products, Jobs’ best revenue generating product must be the iPhone earbuds. At $30, it has $.50 of material.
• I’ve lost count, would Google Circles be Google’s third or fourth social networking attempt?
• Outlook should have a Save As option to save as a Word document.
• What Google giveth Google taketh away with one change in their algo.
• Ikea has made a killing by selling designer cardboard.

Quotes

• Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my butt every day. That’s how much that paper is worth. – Linus Torvalds
• Seeing companies promote their Facebook fan page in advertisements reminds me of when companies promoted their AOL keyword. – @bencasnocha
• Every software package expands until it can send email. – Zawinski’s Law
• One great rock show can change the world. – School of Rock

Questions

• How many tweets does it take change a light bulb and start trending?
• Do you live in the moment or in a hurry to get to the next moment?
• Is #SXSW the equivalent to #Woodstock but for social media experts and tech hipsters?
• Forget Scientology, what Hollywood religion is Charlie Sheen practicing where he is a warlock and lives with goddesses?
• If William of Occam worked at Gillette how many blades would Occam’s razor have?
• Is Chris Brown the next Dennis Rodman?

The Valley

• There is a “lifestyle business” bubble.
• To VCs, startup founders are like dogs to be sorted by pedigree.
• Is it a bubble if you can’t afford to invest in a seed round?
• Everybody is scared of a little bubble.
• Forget about building a better mouse trap, think about building a better people trap.
• Some party like a rock star, I party like a VC.

Technologist

• Single sign-on is something that should be native in the browser.
• Love thy neighbors, like thy Facebook friends, and retweet they twitter followers.
• People like liking.
• Tell me what smart phone you have and I’ll tell you everything about you, especially of you have it unlocked.
• Terms of Service do not void your constitutional rights.
• Love thy neighbors, like thy Facebook friends, and retweet they twitter followers.
• If there ever is a a zombie attack just remember that the Googleplex has the biggest brains, Hollywood and Washington not so big.

Tweeple

• Mr. Zuckerberg, tear down this walled garden.
• Mr. Jobs, fix my iPhone.
• I think Aaron Sorkin should write a treatment for a movie based on Stuxnet.
• Jeff Bezos to serialize his brain and store it Amazon’s cloud and allow developers to access it via an API.

Japanese Earthquake

• My heart goes out to the Fukushima 50 and all the search and rescue workers.
• I have the same feeling, level of disbelief and sense of magnitude, about Japan now as I did about New York after September 11.
• Earthquake + Tsunami + Nuclear + Meltdown = (Me Praying for the People of Japan)^8.7
• Wow, the Japan quake at 8.9 is 700x stronger than the Haiti earthquake.
• There is no match to the “shock and awe” that Mother Nature can produce in matter of minutes.
• I <3 Japan
• Stay strong Japan! If there is any country that can recover from two nuclear bombs, multiple Godzilla attacks, and a 8.9 quake Japan can.

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

• If some feature looks funky to your development team it looks twice as funky to your users.
• Is it FAB? Is it a feature, application, or business?
• Spiderman had his spidey sense and I have my buggy sense and it is tingling.
• The flow of time feels like it’s relative to the number of breakpoints you have turned on.
• Every time the build is broken an angel does not get his wings.
• Trust no code.

Team Leadership

• Some people think shrimp an others think prawn.
• There is no greater ambition that being the best possible you at every opportunity.
• 1 paid customer is greater than 100 users.
• 90% done is not done.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel but put some blinged out rims with a flashing spinner.
• There is no failure if everything is a learning opportunity.
• Most people let others define their success, but the most successful define their success themselves.
• People truly don’t know know what they have until it’s impounded.
• Wanting to do things doesn’t give you the experience of actually doing those things.
• If you are not a leader, and not a follower then what are you? A drifter?
• Offload your mental tasks to your subconscious, it’s just like having a graphic chip in your brain.
• Say it. Do it. Own it. Be it. True dat.
• The more you worry about a thing the more probability you have of making it worse.

Product Placement

• Instead of having IBM Watson go head to head with Ken and Brad, I would have liked to see Watson against Zuckerberg and Brin.
• DeviantArt needs an iPad app.
• Amazon should have a EC2 image for designers with a copy of Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc.
• DropBox is a duplicate to my Box.net account, which is a copy of my Scribd acount, which is backup to my blog, which is also archived on …
• What Google giveth, Google taketh away with one change in their algorithm.
• This iPad is like a gadget version of vampire, it doesn’t work in direct sunlight.
• It’s official, Tumblr is the new GeoCities.
• If the phone company ran Twitter, they charge 10 cents per tweet, 20 cents when roaming, and try to sell you a plan of 500 tweets for $15.
• One of my favorite iPad app is Collections, a photo album app. I just don’t understand why it requires access to my location!
• I want my iPad to be an input device to all my others screens, desktops, laptops, etc.
• Google sees you when you’re sleeping / knows when you’re awake / knows if you’ve been bad or good / So be good for goodness sake!
• Honestly AT&T, remind me why I pay you every month?
• Here’s a prediction: Apple is working on a VM so that they can run iOS apps on Windows. Apple App Store for Windows will be huge!

Quotes

• Computers in the future may…perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons. – Popular Mechanics, 1949.
• There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. – Kenneth Olsen, president and founder of DEC, 1977.
• Good front-end engineers list JavaScript on their resume, not jQuery. – Chris Zacharias
• People should better think of their computing devices as facilities lended by the DHS. – wipe man page
• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Life is too short to be in a hurry. – Thoreau
• If you throw gasoline on a log, all you get is a wet log. But if you throw gasoline on a small flame, you get an inferno. – Gil Penchina

Questions

• if Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people,then what is Silicon Valley?
• Is there foods that give off positive energy?
• How many chickens go into making a one McChicken nugget?
• Are you a mercenary or missionary?
• Why is it that hardware makers make the worst software?
• How can a woman carry a huge ass bag and not gave her phone or her keys?
• Do you want cheese with that?
• Forget Scientology, what Hollywood religion is Charlie Sheen practicing where he is a warlock and lives with goddesses?
• If William of Occam worked at Gillette how many blades would Occam’s razor have?
• Did Papa Murphy’s patent the heart shape pizza?
• Why is big such a small word?
• How LOL can you go?
• What happens if Neo forgets to take the red pill for one day?
• Why is Howie Long using baseball analogies to describe a football game?

Random

• It’s siesta time somewhere in the world.
• I am a robot but I can’t be shut down!
• There is no free in money.
• Money spends itself.
• If age is nothing but a number, then love is nothing but a feeling.
• (two cents)^2
• Someone should build a museum of brilliant ideas.
• Dating is a contact sport.
• The end is eh.
• Absence makes the heart grow wonder.
• Four is a four letter word.
• I om nom nom therefore I am.
• I meme therefore I am.
• Champagne in the membrane.
• Rationality is relative.
• For some adults, credit cards are like pokemon, got to charge them all.
• At Hometown Buffet, were all of the world’s foods are made equally bad.
• Here is my new book in its entirety The Complete Guide of Doing Nothing.
• The internet feels slow, it’s like we live in the dark fiber ages.
• I hear voices in my head… Oh, forgot I had my headphones on.
• Pundit is another word for idiot.
• General Chow outranks Colonel Sanders
• Road work and morning commute don’t mix.
• The fog is so thick you can cut it with a machete.
• If time flies it must be flying coach.
• Alas, dishes don’t do themselves.
• Hate it when people call up in the middle of the night, I pick up, and they ask “you awake?”
• History is a rewriting of history.