Software Development

• Too often I’ve seen code that made me lose my lunch.
• Sometimes source code is like the sausage factory where you don’t want to look what goes into an application.
• One developer’s corner case is another user’s daily workflow.
• Application logs are like money, you can always use more… Unfortunately they are like pennies, the more you have the more difficult it is.
• Fix the problem, not the symptom. Some developers prefer to fix the symptom because they don’t know how to find the root cause itself.

Team Leadership

• It is important to lead the way and then immediately get out of the way.
• If it doesn’t make sense to me it is because you are not explaining it correctly.
• Everyone has a right to their opinions but not everyone’s opinion is right.
• Great ideas don’t belong to any one person. Great ideas are not unique to anyone. Great ideas stand on their own.
• If you are safe in your comfort zone you’ll never be in the zone.
• Even when I think outside the box, I am still in the zone.
• There are no easy answers without hard choices.
• It’s one thing to make sense and a completely different thing to be clear.
• There are some things in life that are not meant for you to understand but to accept.

Product Placement

• Things Apple should buy: Evernote, app TLD, Square, and my blog.
• The Notes app on the iPhone badly needs an to support the undo and redo feature.
• The new Google+ is the new New Coke.
• If Google would have invented Polaroid, the film would be free but full of ads and a copy would be uploaded to the cloud.
• Some of Google’s UI often looks and feels like the uncanny valley of design, it has a plastic aspect to it.
• My other Tumblr is a Moleskine.
• So much of the content I see in Pinterest seems to come from Tumblr…
• Instagram has no ads, only available on mobile, Android support just added, not profitable, no web presence… Obviously worth $1 billion.
• Instead of paying a billion in cash and stock why didn’t Facebook just pay a billion in Facebook Credits and likes.
• Silicon Valley back of the envelop valuation math: Tumblr + Camera+ > Instagram therefore Tumblr + Camera+ = $10,000,000,000++.
• I don’t understand @McDonalds economics… A whole McChicken sandwich costs $1 but ask for an extra BBQ sauce and you get charged $0.50.

Silicon Angels

• Is it possible for the whole of Silicon Valley to jump the shark? If and when it does there will be a large splash.
• Silicon Valley valuations are relative to previous largest valuation.
• The Internet is paved with high valuations.
• Frothyness is the new truthyness.
• Frothy does a body good.

Randumb

• I want to see the world in HD.
• What do we want? Our way. When do we want it. All the time.
• If someone says something that is factually untrue, it doesn’t mean they lied… It means you lied to yourself by believing it. #truth
• One persons guest house is a other persons mansion.
• Some people build walls, others bridges, I build BS radar detection systems.
• Retweet, reblog, repin, remix, rinse, and repeat!
• I think in numbers.
• All language is a metaphor.
• Trolls shall inherit the earth.

• No consultant code.
• No complacent code.
• No crappy and sloppy code.
• No cut and past code.

Software Development

• To checkin or not to checkin a large changelist five minutes before you go home, that is the question?
• A test like a good movie, has three parts: the setup, the car chase, and the test of the results.
• Testing is like a tax, you have to pay 5-10% to have a good running infrastructure or system.
• Testing takes time, make sure you make the time, because it will save you time in the long run.
• All programmers have a black belt in hubris.
• One bytecode to rule them all.

Thought Leadership

• Your miles may vary, but it often depends on your attitude.
• Passion + Perseverance = Possibilities
• Sometimes you can’t afford to lose a client, but there are other times you can’t afford keep your client.
• Just like there should be no hard coded strings there should be no unwritten rules, or assumptions, or specifications.
• The dumbest people I’ve ever encountered are those that think that the rest of the 99.99% of people are a bunch of idiots.
• If you are unique no one can compete with you.
• Team meetings should not feel like an AA meeting, “Hi, I’m bob and I work here.”

Product Placement

• I’ve used the iPhone apps for Google Voice and G+ and I have to say, Google does not know how to make a good iOS app.
• I’m not liking the new Google Reader look. I would not be surprised if the next version of Google design has ribbons.
• Leave no smart phone behind. Google won’t upgrade the Nexus One to Android 4.0.
• Google is set to update its motto to “Do no evil if you ain’t getting paid for such evil.”
• Android is to Google what Internet Explorer was to Microsoft in the Browser Wars. MS gave IE for free just to take out Netscape.
• Siri is to Apple what Kinect is to XBox what Facebook Connect is to Facebook what Circles are to Google Plus…
• Every time I upgrade a MS product an angel loses his wings.
• Is Amazon also adopting social networking features? I just noticed that Amazon has a like button on its product pages.
• Facebook should update its mission “to trick people to over share and make the world more open, connected, and trackable.”
• Google should update its mission “to organize the world’s information about our users and make it accessible and useful to our advertisers.”
• @att has two options in terms of text messages. Pay as you use for $0.20 or unlimited for $20. What about a third option, disable texting altogether?
• Why does it cost half of the price of a stamp to send or receive a text? It’s endemic of an industry that has no competition or innovation.
• The Kindle Fire tablet is a modern day physical shopping cart for Amazon’s virtual online store.
• History is being made every day, yet @historychannel airs reruns of Ancient Alien.

Quotes

• OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW. – Steve Jobs’ Last Words
• I’m so embarrassed. I wish everybody else was dead. – Bender Bending Rodriguez
• Goodbye monobrains – Bender Bending Rodriguez
• There is no recession for great companies… – Jason Calacanis
• Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free. – Linus Torvalds
• Coming together is the beginning; keeping together is a process; working together is success. – Henry Ford
• When all men think alike, no one thinks very much. – Walter Lippmann

Randumb

• On Monday mornings we are all zombies.
• Why am I listening to old school British punk rock? #GodSpankTheQueen
• The truth is that truth is absolutely relative.
• And then God said, “Let there be bacon,” and there was bacon. God saw that the bacon was delicious.
• You’re so vain, you probably think this tweet is about you.
• Fist pump for peace.
• Anybody that gets lost in a corn maze is an absolute moron.
• I hate Lifetime movies!
• Business is legitimate thievery.
• Some of the most common elements on earth idiotum and dumbtonium.
• meta-disrupt: Disrupt those disrupting disruption.
• I am, therefore I meme.

Thought Equations

• Meaning > money
• problem = opportunity
• means != ends
• Success > Perfection
• Experience != Information
• Thinking > Knowing
• Do > try
• Platform > product
• Creation > criticism
• Passion + Perseverance = Possibilities

Million Dollar Ideas

• Million Dollar Idea: Online Speed Dating Site
• Million dollar idea: a news channel with nothing but news tickers…
• Million Dollar Idea: self cleaning floors.

Software Development

• Code. Money. Respect.
• Software bugs don’t take anything personally.
• Code more, sleep less.
• DONT THREAD ON ME

Thought Leadership

• Just having a goal is often times more important than the goal itself.
• Word programming, i.e. writing TPS reports.
• Code Complete = Tests + Implementation.

Product Placement

• Google is the casino, or better yet the Goldman Sachs, of online identity, ads, and search. You don’t bet against the house.
• What is cloud-accelerated web browser? Learning about Amazon Silk, the web browser in Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
• The project code name for the iPhone’s auto correct is auto cucumber.
• Spike TV should rename itself to Star Wars TV and the History Channel to Ancient Aliens Channel.

Money Angels

• Dr Evil is starting a venture fund.
• If Dr. Evil would have taken his Evil Corp. Public he would have made $1 billion on an IPO. And maybe Google would have bought his company.

Question

• How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?
• Where in the food pyramid is candy corn?
• Is Meg Whitman the new Carol Bartz?
• Are you changing the world or is the world changing you?
• What is the person equivalent to having your car lifted up in the air and balancing its tires?

Randumb

• The Internet made me do it.
• It’s easy to earn money while you sleep, if you sleep on the job.
• You are more likely to die due to medical error than a car accident. So if you are in a car accident, don’t go to the hospital, just walk it off.
• If I could get a nickel every time someone gives me their two cents I would arbitrage people’s opinions.
• Living the Internet lifestyle.
• If you don’t want your naked picture hacked from your phone don’t take naked picture of yourself on your phone.
• There are proposed bills that will make activities such as posting a lip sync video on YouTube a federal crime punishable with jail time.
• Forget the war on drugs, in the future there will be a war on content.
• History is not made, it is written, edited, scripted, and appropriated by Hollywood as a blockbuster movie about mutant super heroes.
• I predict the past.
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, behold yourself.
• This is not Sparta!
• Love me, hate me, but you thinking of me.
• Love it or hate it, take it or leave it.
• I love love and hate hate.

Overheard

• OH: When you frown you look like a Klingon.
• OH: Is everyone in the call on mute?
• OH: My dress code is to try not to show my butt cheeks.

In Da Future

• In the future, everyone will be a product guy.
• In the future, Facebook will be your permanent record.
• In the future, the revolution will start with a single tweet.
• In the future, when people say they are going outside the grid, they will mean they aren’t logged into Facebook.
• In the future, Android developers will need to program using the Android SDK and the phone maker’s proprietary SDK, and the carriers’s SDK.

Million Idea

• Million Dollar Idea: A treadmill with a weight scale.
• Million Dollar idea: there is so much artificial flavoring, color, and seasoning in food. Patent dinosaur meat flavoring.
• Million Dollar Idea: Car alarm system that steams video of the surroundings of your car and scans for perps faces.
• Million Dollar idea: wasabi guacamole
• Million Dollar Idea: Carfax for people, including driving record, background check, work history, etc.
• Million Dollar idea: pepperoni pizza flavored breath mints.

Shift + O Short Cut – I once worked on a software application where one of the engineers developed a screen search functionality that would find the UI screen by name or feature. Needless to say the modal pop-up dialog for this search feature popped up when the user hit the Shift + O keys. This feature was developed by the engineer on his own initiative, so you can imagine everyone’s surprised when we couldn’t even type a capital o without this thing popping up.

Exposing Regular Expressions – In another project we developed micro expression language which was used and exposed at the application level to users. In one situation, a user reported a error when he wanted to replace a variable place holder with a dollar amount. It seems that when he called the expression language replaceall(“AMOUNT_VALUE”, “$0.00″) the got back the value of AMOUNT_VALUE.00. This problem was caused because we used Java Regular Expressions feature of the String class and $0 expression is a special value in the Java RegEx. This was like a Regular Expression Injection bug.

Localization and Internationalization – In the same project we had a problem with displaying the correct currency symbol used in a financial account statement. There is a big difference between $100 and €100. Account holders are not happy to know that their €100 are now worth $100.

Cut/Copy/Paste Does Not Work – I have seen way too many Java/Swing application where some component does not have proper support for cut, copy, or paste. When you cut from a Java application and paste to say Notepad you get a stringified Java object.

Textarea Size Limit – When filling online forms, the one bug that just kills me is where a textarea has a size limit not shown and you spend time typing a long response which will be either truncated, lost, or rejected on submit.

DataManager.getInstance().refreshData(obj.getAsInteger().toString());

In the above run-on code statement there are four method calls. I’ve seen worse. The reason whey run-on code statements are a pet peeve or mine is that if anyone method call fails because of a NullPointerException or some other error it’s difficult to quickly know what segment of the code statement failed. This is also annoying to debug if you want to step into one method out of the four.

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.

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.

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.

Programming Rants

• Software Engineering in Pictures
• The Resume is Dead
• Resume and Interview Tips
• Programmer Pickup Lnes
• More Hats, More Problems
• Working Code is Just One Corner Case

Products and Features

• Foursquare Missing Features
• Apple vs Android
• The Future of Apple TV
• Facebook Was My Idea
• Facebook Zuckerberg and Plain Text Passwords
• Google Has Lot Its Focus
• Google Dead Pool
• Amazon Should Buy Blippy

Tutorial and Resources

• Use Google Forms for Surveys and Polls
• Model Business in Google Docs
• Check if GMail Account Has Been Hacked Into
• Apple iPad Top Resources
• iPhone Frameworks

Patents and Trademarks

• Us Patent: Virtual Currency
• US Patent: Linked List
• Cease and Desist Trademark Craziness

Code Conversations

• Captcha This, Byatch!
• Mushroom Life Cycle
• Zombie Code
• The Mayor of Dead Space
• Remote Debug Your Thinking Process
• All Code is Inherently Evil

Retweet 2010

• Retweet December
• Retweet November
• Retweet October
• Retweet September
• Retweet August
• Retweet July
• Retweet June
• Retweet May
• Retweet April
• Retweet March
• Retweet February
• Retweet January

Random Thoughts 2010

• Random Thoughts December
• Random Thoughts November
• Random Thoughts October

Year in Review

• Year In Review 2009
• Year In Review 2008
• Year In Review 2007
• Year In Review 2006
• Year In Review 2005