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. (more…)
Category: Shenanigans
Anything not software-related
-
Social networks should be like email
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. (more…)
-
It’s secret sauce, not nuclear deployments
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.
-
Coursera’s introductory Scala course
For the first half of the summer, I took the online Functional Programming Principles in Scala course on Coursera. I should probably point out that I didn’t take the $50 official I’d heard good things about the language, mostly from Dick Wall on Java Posse podcasts, and it seemed like a good way to try functional programming again after a brief, rather unpleasant, introduction to Lisp in college. Overall, my main goals were to a) re-acquaint myself with functional programming and b) get a basic, can-start-on-some-code-now understanding of Scala.
-
It’s not the money
A couple of months ago, Mayday.us launched a big crowdfunding push to raise a crapton of money to form their own Super PAC, meant to fund and support candidates who would run on campaign platforms of reducing the influence of Super PAC money in elections. The overall goal, reduce corruption in federal politics, is a great agenda, but a SuperPAC built around limiting how much money people can spend in elections isn’t actually solving problems with American democracy. (more…)
-
A new kind of social network revisited
After a lot of thinking a blogging aloud about what I think social networks are and what I think a social network (and social applications) should be, it’s time to revisit my original thoughts about a next-generation social network and see how well they stand up, as well as flesh out just what features a social network should support. After trying to get myself to separate the social network itself from the application people may be using to tap into their particular social networks, I wanted to re-visit how my original app idea and see what features should be moved to the actual network itself.
-
Down with 1 social app to rule them all!
I wasn’t very happy with where my last post ended. It all boiled down to “I wish Facebook was open source” or “I wish App.net had worked out better”. Part of that was that I spent the whole post operating on the assumption that underneath any application using this social network would be, well, 1 central model that everything would use. I think that assumption may be flawed. What if there wasn’t a central model behind all of these applications, but rather just a single protocol creating multiple models of people we connect to and how.
-
What is a social network anyways?
When my friend Warren posted his issues with commenting on posts shared across social networks, it got me wondering how commenting would work in my hypothetical “next-gen” social network. My initial write-up on the idea focused mainly on the idea of the main content itself, so it got me wondering how to integrate things like comments into a feed-based social network. As I thought about how comments might fit into this new concept, I also started wondering about just what purpose comments served in a social network. I don’t mean in a “don’t read the comments” sense, but rather what role are comments serving in a social network? (more…)
-
A new kind of social network?
My friend Warren Myers posted a question about the viability of a subscription-based social network not too long ago, and the concept kind of stuck with me. I’ve thought about the idea off and on since I’ve read it and initially commented on it, and it’s led to the point where I’m thinking about the concept less as a “Google+/Twitter/Facebook with a monthly fee” but more of a thought experiment of what if I were to design an all-new social network from the ground up, what would it look like? Now, all the social networks we know and use exist, and I’m not going to pretend we’ve never had such things. Also, this is all really based around how I use social networks, which is primarily content consumption, not content creation. That said, here’s where I see social networks going. (more…)
-
Halls or Hall and Greens or Green?
Rather than let people live with the running disagreement that’s been rampant in my house, here’s a simple little script to tell you if you should deck the hall or halls before the hanging of the green or greens service at church. (more…)