Shenanigans – Page 3 – Software and Other Shenanigans

Revisiting my thoughts on social networks

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Oct 222017

So a while back I had a fondness for ranting about social networks on this blog. Lately, I’ve had the urge to revisit that trend and spend some more time ranting about social networks on this blog. Why? Well, I’ve been using Mastodon some recently, and that’s got me thinking about my whole concept of what social networks (and the apps built on top of them) should be. And while I’m not going to try to claim that a relatively minor (compared to the other social networking apps out there) app is the future of social networking, looking past the app to some of the design decisions show a lot of things that make me happy about the trend in how some of these newer apps are getting built.

The future of journalism won’t look anything like today’s journalism

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Jul 292017

I’ve noticed several new blog posts on journalism and its future over the last couple of months. Couple this with listening to This Week In Google regularly along with following Jeff Jarvis’s blog, and the question of what journalism is going to evolve into (and the journalism that makes it to several years from now will have changed dramatically from how they operate today) has been on my mind of late. The more I consider it, the less I think journalism’s ultimate destination will be recognizable as what we have available today.

A Suggestion For Campaign Finance Reform

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May 242017

Not too long ago, my friend Warren wrote an article proposing some campaign finance reforms. This got me thinking about whether or not there’s a reliable to way of dealing with monetary donations to political candidates that both encourages integrity once a candidate reaches office, and can stand up to legal challenges. Personally, I think there is, but to do so we’re going to have to approach the situation from a different angle.

Welcome to the Cantina

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May 012016

I mentioned in a previous blog post that we had used DynamoDB on an internal project at Bronto (my employer, but I don’t speak for them – they have people for that). That project is the Bronto Cantina – which launched to the whole Durham office a couple of weeks ago. It was a pretty neat little application, most of which was written over the course of a couple of days, followed by bits and pieces of cleanup afterwards to get a test setup up and running. Now we’re live, and I wanted to say a few words about it.

Campus Navigator updated

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Jan 012016

So I hadn’t touched Campus Navigator since it was first released in February 2013. Elon University, which I used for my sample implementation, has changed a lot in the nearly 3 years since I published that example, so I spent a little time during the Christmas down period updating that reference implementation, which is now live.

The ups and downs of social voting

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Oct 232015

My friend Warren Myers had an interesting blog post on voting mechanics on various websites, along with “like” mechanic various social networks use (like buttons, +1 buttons, tweet favorites, etc.). I’ve made my feelings on things such as “like” buttons known, so I’m not going to go into those here. Warren raises some good points about the issues with voting on a lot of sites, but there are some places where I think works well that I think are worth noting, along with why they seem to work well. It’s important to note these reasons if you want to make sure your voting mechanic improves your site.

Titansgrave – proof that RPGs can make good television

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Aug 312015

Wil Wheaton’s RPG show, Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana, recently finished its first season, and it’s been a lot of fun, not to mention a very well-done story. Normally, you wouldn’t think that an RPG show would make for particularly good television (even if the “television” is airing on YouTube), but it’s a testament to the world-building, story, characters, and players that it worked as well as it did. Continue reading »

You are not a stakeholder

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Jun 202015

If you’ve worked long enough, you’ve hit on something that involves multiple people. At that point, the common line is to “get all the stakeholders” together so everyone’s on the same page and actually working together. It’s a good philosophy, that works when you’re getting just the people involved in something together – and nobody else. The problem is that that’s rarely how these situations play out. Continue reading »

Social networks should be like email

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Mar 252015

In 1 of my posts about social networks, I harped on the idea of the social network itself being an open platform, with apps running on that platform. What I should have pointed out is that email has been operating as apps on a platform, and they’re a perfect example of what I was talking about. Continue reading »

It’s secret sauce, not nuclear deployments

General Commentary, Shenanigans 2 Responses »

Sep 212014

A while back, my friend Warren answered somebody’s question on Quora about a name for their startup. Another college friend and I saw this and had some fun with it, but it does bring up an important point that needs to be pointed out – not everything you’re doing is some type of magical secret sauce.

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