I wanted to talk about how you can only "save" a child once. After that, it's called parenting, and it is hard work. I wanted to emphasis that while I think adoption is a piece in solving the orphan crisis, it should not be a considered a rescue effort at the familial level. And furthermore, adopted children have the same right to be ungrateful and bitter towards their parents as biological children.
The good news is that fewer good ideas get killed for feeling too risky.
The bad news is that sometimes we trade in the important for the trivial.
The punchline is that some artificial pop might be required. Just because it's easy to ship doesn't mean you shouldn't push yourself. The art is in ignoring the fear that pushes you to polish too much...
I really resonated with Seth's take on this. Shipping early and often has proven to be effective in many cases. However, it is not an excuse for shipping crap. And it does not remove the need for authentic marketing.
Instead, part of every entrepreneurs job is to invent the future. I also call it “kicking your own ass”. Someone is out there looking to put you out of business. Someone is always out there who thinks they have a better idea than you have. A better solution than you have. A better or more efficient product than you have. If there is someone out there who can “kick your ass” by doing it better, its part of your job as the owner of the company to stay ahead of them and “kick your own ass” before someone else does.
As with kaizen manufacturing principles, open source encourages participation and continuous improvement. It can shrink defects to a negligible number. Since 2006, the Coverity Scan Open Source Report has analyzed more than 60 million unique lines of code from more than 280 popular open-source projects, including Firefox, Linux, and PHP. In 2009, states the report, open source code had roughly one defect per 4,000 lines of code, a marked contrast with the stats for proprietary code.
An interesting writeup by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst -- the core of which makes a case for open-source software principles as a potential solution to issues with software quality in the automotive industry. I think it's pretty safe to say that Whitehurst's viewpoint is strongly biased towards open source. However, the analogy he uses for Moore's Law applied to software and the direct impact on software quality is compelling and applicable beyond the automotive industry and open source.
If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?
True as it may be in the context of todays web technologies, this statement made me jump when I first read it. Step back in time about 20 years. Could you ever imagine the day when a consumer devices visionary would say HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are modern technologies in 2010?
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is among the greatest innovators of our time. And yet his genius for understanding business is rarely explained in any public way. Rarer still is to hear the advice he would give to the CEO of another hugely successful company: Nike. But that's exactly what you'll learn from this video, in which Nike president and CEO Mark Parker tells about the advice that Jobs gave him shortly after the release of the Nike+ product line. It's a simple bit of wisdom that any entrepreneur can relate to: "Get rid of the crappy stuff."
Easy to say, hard to do.
The core concept of a well written multi-tenant application is that you should have a single code base, and a number of configurations - where each configuration tells the runtime what functionality should be available and what the look/feel should be.
Interested to follow this series by Rob Ashton on how multi-tenancy can be enabled via ASP.NET MVC specifically.
The bet is roughly that the future of computing:
- has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
- completely hides the filesystem from the user
- favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
- favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
- lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps
All in all, it sounds like a pretty feasible outcome, and really not a bad one at that.
Steven does a good job stepping back from all the hype and mumbling surrounding Apple's iPad to provide a viewpoint in the context of computer evolution.
The most obvious application for SQL Azure Data Sync is automatically maintaining an on-premises backup of an SQL Azure database. Another common use is synchronizing databases stored in multiple data centers for disaster protection.
Thorough tutorial on an essential task for any production application using SQL Azure.
Great to see a project applying modern technology to add value to a transportation vehicle that really hasn't changed all that much since invention. Some brilliant ideas and inspiration.
