This post has been growling away at me for a while now. I turned another year older today and that’s spurred me on to finally get my old man of web development rant out into the wild. When I studied Computer Science years back, we’d repeatedly have the message that some high percentage of software [...]
Author Archives: Dan
UXLondon
June 19, 2009 – 9:57 am
I started my week at a three day user experience conference called UXLondon organised by the nice people over at Clearleft. What an inspirational few days. Monday was a whole set of keynotes from some of the big names in user experience – the rock stars if you will. Eric Reiss from fatDUX (and author [...]
Great work for charidee
May 19, 2009 – 2:23 pm
Several of us are involved in charities / community projects of one kind or another. I’m a member of Camel Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). CSA is about building a mutual relationship between food growers and food consumers so that the risks and responsibilities of food production are shared. There’s loads more info on this on [...]
Customer service: a bit of thought always helps
March 4, 2009 – 10:42 am
I’m in two minds about posting a customer service rant here, it tends to feel as if someone is venting their spleen. Ah well, maybe that’s what I’m doing. But there’s a point relevant to working in web development here somewhere. Probably. My phone stopped sending texts last week, giving a fairly terse error. My [...]
Thanks Steven
February 10, 2009 – 10:17 am
I love this quote from Steven Kessel who is Amazon’s “Senior Vice President of Digital Media” about non-US availablility of the Kindle (which I am almost entirely disinterested in): “We have lots of inbound requests from customers around the world. “We have no announcements for them today, but we continue to get those requests.” Brilliant. [...]
Programming for fun when you’re a programmer
January 28, 2009 – 3:39 pm
The excellent Stack Overflow developer forum site (brough to you by Joel Spolksy amongst others) is chock full of highly technical questions such as: Why Does This Pointer-Pointer Initialization Seg Fault? Query Strings & Mod ReWrite How many constructors should a class have? But some of the questions are a little more philosophical. And here’s [...]
On developer office space
January 2, 2009 – 3:42 pm
Surely most people have seen the somewhat hyped pics from that Google office in Zurich. Well slides, cable cars and baths full foam cubes are all well and good but I think Joel Spolsky does things better over at Fog Creek. There, the cash is spent (rather than Google-splurged) on private offices for programmers, the [...]
Frustration free packaging
November 6, 2008 – 6:08 pm
Another post picked up from 37 signals here. Amazon have launched (I’d guess in the US only?) some new ‘frustration free packaging’ for certain products – toys and electronics stuff. When I first read the 37 signals post, I instantly thought that they were discarding the big bulky plastic boxes and putting them in new [...]