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

• The future is written in code, probably in JavaScript.
• Remember when the best way to debug JavaScript was to use alerts and document.write?
• Software is the new alchemy.
• When fixing a bug, the coding of the solution is the easiest part, but not necessarily the most import.
• TLDs I would like to see: .app, .js, .rb, .py, .twt, .lol, .anon, .beer, .bit, .woot
• If you would see this code I’ve working with you would think it had dyslexia.
• Just Do It: Refactor it. Abstract it. Centralize it. Generalize it.
• Software development is a team sport for people that were most likely not good at sports.
• Working Code > Perfect Code
• Never assume, always test.
• Trust no cloud.
• Don’t be eval().

Thought Leadership

• Seek out silver bullets instead of reaching out to golden hammers.
• Quality is something you engineer for.
• The first thing you create should be quality itself.
• When you have no QA, everyone does QA.
• When you feel like there are no options, there are still options.
• Inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes.
• Simple ideas can go a long way.
• There is often no quick solutions to deep problems.
• If you are going to dream, might as well dream big.
• I eat top priorities for breakfast.
• When you get new top priorities that displace the top priorities you received hours prior and didn’t get to because of previous priorities.
• Sometimes you have to up your game, other times you have to up your competition. If you don’t lose much you might be in the minor leagues.

Product Placement

• I remember that about two years ago I tweeted that RIM should have been renamed RIP. I got a lot of flack then, I don’t thin I will now.
• What does it mean when 7 out or the top 10 free apps from the Play marketplace are from Google?
• Posted in my iPhone: iPhone is a blood gadget. #rareearth #minerals
• I would like Apple to make a dual touch screen phone… Where on screen slides out to give you double the screen real estate.
• The way I described the recent partial eclipse.. Like the world had a giant Instagram filter on.
• Transformers, GI Joe, Snurfs, and now Battleship… What other 80′s toy/cartoon will be renamed as a movie? Hungry Hungry Hippos?
• VMware is hilarious, they sent me email for a Mother’s Day sale on VMware Fusion. Yes, that’s exactly what my mom wants for Mother’s Day!
• The Angry Birds franchise has been so successful that I’ve thought about creating a mobile game, how about Mildly Irritated Donkeys?
• Everyone should be Photoshop literate.
• I can’t wait until American Idol relaunches with a more appropriate name, Auto-tune Idol.
• I don’t do anything against the ToS but I’m so paranoid about Google disabling my account, I have a separate accounts for each service I use

Randumb

• NASA has found a space lake that has “140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans.” Imagine, deep space/ocean fishing.
• Water is a key ingredient of life, imagine the space tuna that can be found in this space lake, trillions of times larger than our oceans.
• You are not a battery of negative energy, don’t store, hold, or consume bad energy.
• If I am going to have an imaginary friend I am going to sleep with it.. Imaginary friend with benefits.
• Truth is simple, peoples reasoning for the truth is what is complicated.
• When I’m constipated, instead of taking a laxative I eat McDonald’s food.
• We have the technology to make everything dead simple.
• Warning in allergy medication: Do not use if you have an allergic reaction to this product or any of its ingredients.
• As a futurist I am disappointed with what the future has become.
• You got to find yourself by doing something rather waiting for something.
• By definition, anything that is viral is a fad.
• Too much of nothing is never enough.

FB IPO

• Zuckerborg may go down in history as having scammed everyone he met… She scammed his classmates, co-founder, users, and now investors…
• In Zuck we don’t trust.
• Zuck really fooled everyone, the Winklevii, Saverin, users, competitors, wall street bankers, institutional investors, …
• Classic FB/Zuck… Days after the IPO there are already lawsuits regarding impropriety, irregular, and illegal activities.
• Facebook wants to make organ donation social. I Like your new liver.
• When Zuckerborg dies, he wants to be buried with a hoodie.
• Will Zuck have a second act? Facebook wont last 5 years on likes alone.
• I’ve never paid for sex or likes. #facebook #IPO
• I’m unfriending Facebook.

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.

People are by nature social, they have always been so. Prehistoric people were social, Neolithic people were social, the Mesopotamians where social, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Barbarians, the Elizabethans, and even web 1.0 developers where social. By design, our technology has also been designed to be social, from written language to books to email to instant messaging. In fact, everything is social. Just about every physical object can be used in a social setting, rocks, bullets, and flowers.

Blogs too are social, it allows one group of individuals to share information and knowledge with a whole set of people, who in turn can comment, share, and add to that information. But since Facebook, social is sometimes meant to mean something different. Most features in Facebook have a element of social spam that forces a response. I people that first discovered Facebook because they received a spammy email from Facebook saying that someone they might have known, most likely some one they had an email correspondence, had joined Facebook. Facebook’s first spam social behavior was to email everyone in every of their users contact list, this behavior is the same as the Melissa virus. Facebook’s first element of social spam is borrowed a mass-mailing macro virus.

Everything is social and if everything is social, everything that is connected has a social graph. Facebook has managed to capture people and their relations to their friends, family, coworkers, church members, etc. Facebook has coined the pseudo geek speak social graph to describe a persons relationship to their friends and family. If everything is social, then everything has a so called social graph.

For example, since blogs are social it has a social graph of all the people have have posted comments. If Mark Zuckerberg would have designed WordPress, the blog platform I use for my blog, then each person who left me a comment would receive email telling them that if they wanted to participate in recent blog posts and even unsubscribe to the email they would need to sign up. WordPress.com and Discuss, the hosted commenting service, has millions of emails of people that have commented on blogs! If they choose to exploit and zuckerpunch all those people they can.

Everything and everyone is inherently social, technology like Facebook is not making users any more social it just simplifies how we interact with each to the like button.

Just like opinions, at the end of the year everyone has their own predictions for the new year. I came to these predictions by reading the back of caps of green tea bottles. If you like to see my accuracy with past predictions see the predictions for 2009 and 2010.

• Mark Zuckerborg will be summoned by congress for a congressional hearing to clarify privacy settings and violations when some White House intern force checks in the President at a Hooters.
• Digg will buy Reddit from Conde Nast and rebrand the merged organization as Reddigg.
• DVDs and Blu Rays sales will slow as users switch to on demand streaming service such as Netflix and Apple iTunes.
• Groupon will be purchased by Yahoo for $1.5 billion dollars.
• Facebook will have a major privacy and security flaw but non of its users will notice because they all found a pony in their stream.
• Google will allow its developers to only use cheap commodity Linux machines. Google employees will no longer be allowed to program in Macs.
• Google will start to aggressively push and market the Go programming language as an replacement of the Java programming language in the enterprise.
• Google will buy PostreSQL.
• Google will buy the Library of Congress.
• Quora will buy the domain ask.com.
• Ticket Master will buy Eventbrite.
• Rupert Murdoch will sell MySpace for $35 million.
• Mashable will be sold to Rupert Murdoch for an undisclosed $50 million dollars.
• Michael Bay will write, Steven Spielberg will direct, and Johnny Deep will star in Zynga: The Movie.
• Zynga and Rock Star Games will co-develop a crossover game called Grand Theft Auto: Farmville.

Jason Calacanis is an outspoken and unfiltered entrepreneur. Calacanis founded Mahalo, co-founded Weblogs, Inc. which later sold to AOL, co-founded The LAUNCH conference, host of This Week in Startups, founder of Open Angel Forum. Calacanis is famous for his industry rants on Jason’s List mailing list, most recently ranting about Facebook privacy mishap, the lack of commitment from Generation Y, and pay to pitch outfits. Over the last year I have collected a few choice quotes from Jason Calacanis blog posts, mailing list, and podcast. If you want more Jason Calacanis quotes be sure to take a look at the Quotable Calacanis 2009.

These people come here, they are brilliant. they want to start companies here and we kick them out after college. Or we don’t let them come to college to begin with because they might be terrorist. You know what, I take one terrorist for every 10,000 brilliant entrepreneurs that come to the country, I’ll literary will. I’ll take that risk. And if they are in this country they are more easy to catch than if they are in that country.
This Week in Startups #88

Patents are like nuclear weapons, you never use them but they are nice to have because if you have them people tend to not invade into your country because they are scared of those being dropped on them.
This Week in Startups #88

If you can afford to have the unjustifiable, then you’ve made it. It’s unjustifiable to have a jet. There is no reason to have it unless you are a president or CEO of a very large corporation.
This Week in Startups #72

Wining is altruism. Wining is the best thing you can do for the world. When you win then you can do exciting things to change humanity
the most greatest influences in our society, ultimate when history books are written, are going to be the billionaires that are going to give their net worth to solve very big problems.
This Week in Startups #72

Facebook and Twitter have users. Apple has customers. The difference? Customers give you their credit card number.
Yojimbo!

Winning is altruism, that’s the most beautiful thing you can do for somebody in the world is win!
This Week in Startups #65 Global Meetup

Power never stops shifting, and technology is making it shift faster.
Jason’s List: A Quick Sumner Update July 12, 2010

Look up smarmy in the Web 2.0 dictionary and it redirects to Zuck’s Wikipedia page.
Jason’s List for March 6, 2010

Zuckberg is everything that is wrong with the second generation of the internet: greed and a lack of empathy for internet users.
Jason’s List for March 6, 2010

Participation means nothing, your fulfillment means nothing, nobody care if you are fulfilled, nobody cares if you participated.  You were lied to.  There is no trophy in life for participation, except your tombstone.
This Week in Startups #47

If you don’t get your shit together Generation Y, it’s over for you. Your standard of living is going to suck cause you know what, your mom and dad are going to die and you know what you are going to have left, nothing, because they mortgaged their houses and they got a bunch of cars and went on  big fancy vacations and you get no inheritance Generation Y and you are not hirable.  So you are going to fail and you’ll have nothing in life.
This Week in Startups #47

I think Mark Zuckerborg is everything that is wrong with technology today.
TWiST #43 with Andy Smith

This is the the thing that people don’t realize about events, doing good events is as much about how is there as who is not there.
TWiST #43 with Andy Smith

VCs do me a favor if you are working with an entrepreneur, the three most annoying things you can do: number one is to ask about China, number two is to ask about Google, and number three is ask for the deck and the documents for the board meeting two weeks before hand.
TWiST #37 with Phil Kaplan

If you are not annoying some people, you are probably not doing a good job as an entreprenuer.
TWiST #37 with Phil Kaplan

The biggest mistake most new players make at poker is overplaying their hand. They spend so much time thinking of the ways they can win that they forget all the ways they can lose.
The Big Game, Zuckerberg and Overplaying your Hand

Zuckerberg is clearly the worst thing that’s happened to our industry since, well, spam.
The Big Game, Zuckerberg and Overplaying your Hand

People are creating fan pages on Facebook and then paying Facebook to send them traffic. Let me explain this one more time: You’re PAYING Mark Zuckerberg money to send traffic to HIS SITE.
The Big Game, Zuckerberg and Overplaying your Hand

I feel that the law is a way for stupid people getting education about reality it’s the lowest form of education we have you can go to college or the cops can pick you up.
TWiT 248: Drowning In Connectivity

The most frustrating part is not losing a great person–which happens–but rather watching someone with promise set their career back five years in order to have their salary jump ahead by three years.
Red, Jackson, Gen Y & Loyalty

It’s not easy being me. I’ve got a version of tourette’s where instead of yelling obscenities at inappropriate times, I say something brutally honest without regard to my reputation or the other person’s feelings.
Red, Jackson, Gen Y & Loyalty

If you put yourself above the team, you’re out. If you think your “get” is more important than the team’s, you’re out. If you leave after a year, you don’t get a ticker-tape parade and you don’t get celebrated.
Red, Jackson, Gen Y & Loyalty

Facebook wasn’t my idea necessarily, I’m just borrowing Microsoft’s Windows 7 ad campaign to make the point that most of Facebook’s features are not original to Facebook. And as such, most features in Facebook are borrowed, lifted, cut and pasted, inspired, and based on features from other sites. Flash-based games, image sharing, status updates, location-based check-ins, friending, etc. are all features that have made other social oriented sites successful, such as Pogo with Flash-based games, Flicker with image sharing, Twitter with status updates, and Foursquare with location-based check-ins, and on and on. Facebook is a hybrid of every successful feature developed, tried, and tested by other successful websites and web applications. Facebook is the Frankenstein of social networking sites, put together from the features of others sites.

Facemash, A website created by Zuckerberg prior to Facebook, was a clone of Hot-Or-Not specifically for Harvard students. But using his trademark of abusively, forcefully, and willfully opting user into options that they would not otherwise choose, Facebook used unauthorized pictures of Harvard students to seed his Facemash site.

Mark Zuckerberg’s true genius is that he has no ethics, in a another dimension or another time he could have easily been a Nigerian scammer or a Russian spammer. It is clear, from previous settled lawsuits and poorly planned privacy controls, Mark Zuckerberg can easily backstab a former founder and throw under the bus his whole user base.

Because Mark Zuckerberg has a skewed moral compass and as allegations of his character have been settled in court, it’s clear that it’s as easy for him to cheat a partner, hack into users accounts, sell out his users, obfuscate privacy settings, copy features, as it is for him to throw out code and re-execute on an idea. This is what Mark Zuckerberg is great at, to throw out a feature or code and try again and again and again even if users complain about backward compatibility, loss of privacy, excessive rights over user’s data.

So, the question that we can try to answer is, what feature will Facebook focus on next? To answer this, we need to survey the web application landscape and see what has been successful over the past year. Web search is an obvious space for Facebook to move into next. Facebook Credits and apps can lead to a healthy paid app market. Facebook has had a great success with it’s photo service, I could see them moving toward support for movies and videos. Facebook has also acknowledged that they are moving to provide a mobile platform, I can see them providing the social glue for mobile application as they have done for web applications. I the long run, I see Facebook as being as one of a few companies that can threaten Apple’s dominance over digital music. Groupon has been one of the hottest startups over this past year, maybe Facebook will get into social location base group coupons.

Most, if not all, of Facebook’s core features have been borrowed from other successful websites or services. Mark Zuckerberg has always taken a back seat to innovation but a driver seat into ramming features into users via opt-in settings. Mark Zuckerberg’s earliest website was a clone of a website popular at the time. As Facebook continues to evolve, what features do you think will be implemented in the social network?