ageism and creativity in programming

“I am 57 and I am a programmer, the same way Martin Scorcese is 70 and is a movie director. Or Ron Howard is 59, and Rob Reiner is 66. And that’s just film.”
– Dave Winer

GREAT POST!!!

Blogroll – Programmers on programming

Dave Winer – Scripting News
e.g. Why don’t programmers speak for programming?

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/march/whyArentProgrammersSpeakingForProgramming

The soul of the new developer

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/march/theSoulOfTheNewEngineer

Why you should learn to code

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/february/whyYouShouldLearnToCode

Educating the journo-programmer

http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/21/theJournoprogrammer.html

Joel Spolsky – Joel on Software
e.g. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html

Dan Bricklin

http://www.bricklin.com/writings.htm

Paul Graham
e.g. http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html

Imran on Tech
e.g. Programming Knowledge versus Programming Ability

http://imranontech.com/2007/05/16/programming-knowledge-versus-programming-ability/

Patrick McKenzie -

http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

James Hague – http://prog21.dadgum.com/
e.g. Expertise, the Death of Fun, and What to Do About It

http://prog21.dadgum.com/169.html

Rys McCusker – doesn’t write much anymore. old stuff not visible

http://www.ythorn.com/etc.html

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See also…

http://techbyproducts.com/programming-is-not-a-glamorous-job/

http://dannorth.net/2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/

Jaron Lanier

Older
- Microserfs (a novel)
- Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, 2001 Ellen Ullman
- Computer Power and Human Reason, 1984 Joseph Weizenbaum

Computer Power and Human Reason

Not a programmer, but…
Malcolm McCullough
Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, 1998

Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand

Facebook Home

Facebook was clever to do Facebook Home as they did. As Zuckerberg said in an interview, doing an entire phone would have meant they would have reached much much fewer people than they can with the Android approach.

Here are some related blog posts/articles related to Facebook Home (and the bigger picture battle between Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook)

Matt Drance

http://www.appleoutsider.com/2013/04/05/home-turf/

I Like It, but I Don’t Like It Like It
The Facebook phone is not as dumb as I thought it was going to be.
By Farhad Manjoo

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/04/facebook_home_the_facebook_phone_is_not_as_dumb_as_i_thought_it_was_going.html

The problem with twitter (and facebook (and wordpress))

The problem with twitter is that it isn’t more like facebook.
And the problem with facebook is that it isn’t more like twitter.
And the problem with wordpress is that it isn’t more like facebook and twitter.

By which I mean:

Facebook is annoying because:
- images are big now and everyone has figured out that the clever way to advertise their website is to put a clever saying in an image which is now huge and I have to scroll like mad now to read anything. I mean, I am guilty of sharing these sometimes, but will resist now I think. I usually hide article previews too.
- It’s not open

Twitter is annoying because:
- It’s a river (vs folders like is an option in RSS reader) so you can’t easily do things like group feeds, click to read one person (or one cluster) when you want to, etc. I know you can click (TWICE!) to read more from a person, but come on!
- It’s suggesting celebs to subscribe to. Uh, no.
- I pretty much totally hate URL compressor things since I can’t tell if I am interested cause the website name is hidden
- I am sorry but I am not conversing with you there
- hashtags are ugly and painful and useless unless it is a niche.
- It’s not open

WordPress is annoying because:
- It’s slow
- It doesn’t do nice/automatic previews of articles when you paste them in
- It’s slow
- All my friends aren’t there
- I can’t easily protect posts by friendship

The future:
- Might bring some open way of doing things like all of the above but in an open “internet standards” sort of way.
- simpler but also maybe more modular/programmable
— examples of tiny evidence of hope:
—– RSS
—– Dave Winer’s littleoutliner.com (see http://scripting.com/) is a sign (I hope) of things to come.
—– https://ifttt.com/
—– flickr.com API and APIs in general
—– bootstrap, and responsive design / HTML5
—– some google tools (books, forms) seem hopeful, but I won’t count on them now that I see that Google just close things down (ala Google Reader)

Is Facebook a private blog?

What is keeping blogs from becoming an “open-source” replacement for Twitter and Facebook? It’s not much, but they are important usability issues.

To me it is sorta like Apple/Steve Jobs and the iPhone. What did he/they do that was different from what had been done before? Not much, but important stuff. They obsessed over a million little things and put it together in a precise, perfect way that made the experience great vs the other blah stuff.

The comment thread here has a few suggestions
- subscriptions to other blogs should be easier
- the default view for one’s blog should be the aggregator/river view of all the people you are following with the slot for writing a new post at the top

Other things Facebook improvements:
- no subjects (in both posts and private messages/FB emails) Most blogs still use subjects, though they don’t need to.
And a big one they don’t mention in the link above:
- Privacy. Sharing with just friends or friends of friends.
- Drag and drop media sharing. Maybe it’s this easy with some blogs but not in my current WordPress one…

Someone will think of a clever way to improve blog interfaces and do the privacy thing in an open internet-y way outside of Facebook I bet. But on the other hand, Facebook is now a huge company like Microsoft and Google, etc. and so it will adapt quickly to any competition.

Just say IPad Mini? (2012 Holiday / XMas Tablet Shopping Guide)

When the IPad Mini was released, the first review I read was negative, but it seems like many prefer the Mini to the fullsize. I think it really depends on your needs. I already have a 10″ Android tablet that gets used around the house primarily for Youtube and Netflix and games. No need for another tablet here. But if I commuted daily on the train, I could see it being useful to have an LTE IPad Mini or Nexus 7.

Preference: Apple IPad Mini (Pros – LTE available, Price, weight, size=>easier to fit in purses, jacket pockets, etc) Businessweek ZDNET The Wirecutter NY Times

Preference: Apple IPad “3″ (and current “4″ w/ faster A6X Graphics) (Pros — LTE and Retina Screen) Dave Winer/Scripting News/Gizmodo, article 2

Background on the Apple IPad Mini

Marco.org

Vs Androd / Nexus 7 / Amazon Fire HD (Pros – price!)

Apple displays are better color wise but the Android 7″ displays hae higher resolution

Bottom line

Overall? IPad Mini or Android 7″ tablet (Google Nexus 7, Amazon Fire HD). I think this really comes down to whether you know there are Apple/iOS only apps or games you want/need. If not, you might be happier with Android because of price and screen resolution.

Price? Android 7″ tablet (Google Nexus 7, Amazon Fire HD)

Games? Apps? IPad Mini

Eyesight/reading? IPad 4 or 7″ Android tablets (all are “Retina”)

Second iPad: IPad Mini

School/Work: Apple Macbook Air / Thinkpad T430 or Dell Laptop!

Wait for Retina IPad Mini? This will take quite a while. Don’t wait.

Loseit / fitbit / keas.com ideas

Today after reading about a local teenager who drove recklessly and killed himself and 3 others in the car got me thinking about tracking. Some use cases/scenarios:

1. In a car – I don’t care about location generally (unless there is an emergency) but it would be nice to get alerts if speeds or excessive acceleration or ??? happened. I have a few years to think about this. Kid A is 7. I think the problem is that the teenage brain makes misjudgements about risk. There are programs at PBS.org about this. Including one about how it sometimes (in different situations from this car scenario) leads to suicide out of nowhere. Anyway, back to the car…. Having an alarm going off in the car (the alarm being a more rational judgement of the risk in a situation — like a backup monitor beeping in a minivan — I would think could help. Or what?)

I think one could get this to work via a $20 bluetooth dongle plugged into the OBD-II port in any car (connected to an android phone/tablet or ipod touch). Soliport OBD-II dongle “Bluetooth ELM 327 Diagnostics USB Cable”

2. At my desk – It would be nice if an egg-timer rang every (hour?) if I hadn’t gotten up from my desk recently. I keep reading about DVT from airplaines. Deep venous thrombosis/Deep vein thrombosis http://www.cdc.gov/features/thrombosis/ says 60-100k USAians die each year from it?!?!

3. Kids – One idea Kid A might think is neat is to wear a pedometer. I would give one to him and one to me and compare their steps for a week. There is a fancy one call fitbit which also has an altimeter so it could record if he went up and down stairs. And view activity by time. Hmmm, interesting I guess, but not sure what the purpose would be really.
FITBIT I guess for the person who chooses to use it (key word: chooses), it can be like keas.com or the loseit app — a motivational tool.

OK entrepreneurs, go to it.

“Enough with the apps already”

I think Dave Winer will be proven right on this. Apps will die. The web will live. Why? Because of linking. LINK

And perhaps the ease of making mobile-friendly web pages and “responsive web design”, even websites which act just like a native app on the iPhones or Androids of the world — have you seen nytimes.com/chrome/ in a Chrome browser?

Just about the only thing which will stay apps are video games since linking is not (or at least, less) important in a game since games are usually self-contained universes. And even there I might be a little wrong.

Watch as Erik predits the future!

1. big 10″ ipad and “samsung galaxy tab 10.1″ sized tablets are a temporary/transition technology because…

– 1.1 no decent input. Note taking apps like Dan Bricklin’s Note Taker HD will work on this but can’t beat a keyboard and mouse. I think Bill Gates was right about that.

– 1.2 too big too carry around and not that great for watching movies in lap (laptop way more comfortable)

– 1.3 not that great for gaming since no controller! multiple kids I’ve spoken to have fully admitted this is a problem. In their words… “the games on the iPod Touch are not “rageable” — meaning I think that you can’t really get very worked up about them one way or the other because well… they are not very good. At least in a Mario Brothers sort of way. Angry Birds ok. Puzzles ok. But to really get into a game, i think one needs a controller or a keyboard and mouse. touching alone is not right. Not the right feel.

– 1.4 while it might be acceptable to pull out an iPhone and glance at it while with friends somewhere, the size of the tablets will mean that this will probably never feel quite as acceptable.
Maybe I am wrong. ala a shifting baseline of culturally acceptable things…

2. ultrapads like the MacBook Air and other windows based SSD laptops will become more popular (many of the advantages of a tablet with fewer downsides)

3. And smaller 7″ tablets will get higher-res more readable screens and

4. also android will be market leader vs ipad so all the apps that are “iPad only” right now will get fewer and fewer. Yes, I know some will remain like BBEdit, etc. But most will be available on both.

5. small phone-sized smart devices will continue to be very important. The size is right. Not too big so it fits in a pocket VERY easily. Even a little bigger than an iPhone is too big.

6. those ultrapad computers will get:

– 6.1 touch screens (there are tablet computers I’ve seen from dell and lenovo)

– 6.2 computers will also get better about having different “views” I will call them for a lack of a better word. You might have an “office” view, a “media center” view. And an “app” view.
In other words, I want to keep all the power of the platform and input devices, but I want to customize things at the “OS” level more. I shouldn’t have to install “Easy Peasy” to get a simplified laptop. It should just be another “view”. I think Microsoft and Apple know this. MacOS will probably merge (at least design wise) with iOS. I have read that it is happening already with Lion with the default behavior of the mouse in some apps. Scrolling vs Swiping…

When I want to use a computer to read a newspaper or watch youtube, it doesn’t mean it has to look like a normal newspaper website. For instance, the NY Times Chrome App is great. http://nytimes.com/chrome/

7. Meanwhile, it would be nice if we didn’t have to thow out so many electronic gadgets to “evolve”. Got that “Palm V” still? That “iPod Classic”? That’s another advantage to good-ole computers. I can have a quite old piece of Windows- or Mac-based computer hardware running pretty much brand new software. Sweet.

8. A lot more people should be telecommuting given the technology we have!

We shall see… we shall see… Wake me up in 20 years!

More interesting Steve Jobs quotes

I will collect them here as I find them.

“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. … That didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That’s what a computer is to me: The computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact. And that is: everything around that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” (at 3:30 in the PBS program)

See also:

- In the PBS program aired 11/3/2011 (Steve Jobs: One Last Thing), David Sheff states that Jobs described a book-sized device just like the iPad 30 years ago (at around 24 minutes into the 55min program) “…he really envisioned the iPad almost 30 years ago”

- Steve Jobs predicts the Future in 1990