May 23 2011

Retweet April 2011

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.

Oct 22 2010

Favorite iPad Apps

It’s really hard to find really great iPad apps from the hundreds of thousands of apps available from the Apple iTunes appstore. I’ve bought a few apps that I’ve later regretted. In this post I’ll list the top five iPad apps, other than Twitter apps, that I love using on the iPad. I’m always looking for new apps to try out, if you have any suggestions, please feel free to list them in the comments sections.

Autodesk SketchBook Pro – My go to app for drawing a quick sketch for an idea, logo, or design is the Autodesk SketchBook Pro. It’s easy to use, has a nice selection of different brushes and patterns. One of my favorite features is the mirror, drawing one a line will produce a mirrored image of that line. I also like that the produced images can easily be exported at a high resolution. SketchBook Pro also supports multiple layers. There are few features I would like to add to this app. I’ve used images generated from this app in my Tumblr on many occasions.

Penultimate – Another favorite sketch app is Penultimate. This sketch app is a lot simpler and easier to use. Penultimate only has three pen widths and six colors to choose so I used this for rough sketches for ideas. The look of Penultimate feels like a Molskine notepad. Penultimate allows you to have multiple notebooks, each for a different project. You can export a page as an image or a notebook as a PDF document.

Amazon Kindle – I’ve had a Kindle since it was originally released and I have a lot of notes, highlights, and bookmarks for the Kindle ebooks that I’ve read. Even though I have a Kindle, the most common way I read Kindle books is through my iPad via the Kindle for iPad application.

Adobe PS Express – The Adobe PS Express is my favorite app when it comes to cropping pictures on the iPad. PS Express comes with a few commonly used photo manipulations such as cropping, straightening, rotating, and flipping images. It also has a predefined set of borders and filters to apply on your photos or image files.

Strip Design – Strip Design is a very simple iPhone and iPad app that allows you to create comic strip like panels. You can create a strip of one, two, three, or four panels. In each panel you can drop a different image. You can also add thought balloons and different stickers such as crazy looking mustaches or action effects.

Dragon Dictation – Dragon Dictation helps to transcribe to text what you say. This is really useful to record a thought and have it transcribed to text quickly. Dragon has good recognition, at least it has worked for me. I used Dragon Dictation when I want to jot down a idea quickly, then I emailed me the dictated text for final editing.