Theres been lots of buzz on the topic of whether or not you should learn to code. As an engineer, I dont have unbiased thoughts on the matter. I tweeted Jeff Atwoods piece because, well, I agree that...
You wake up in a small, enclosed glass cube. Theres a bed, a toilet, a radio playing music, and other bare essentials, but no door. You have no idea why you are here or whats going on. After a few mi...
April 2012 represents the 10th anniversary of Rands in Repose. I dont normally celebrate these occasions, but serendipity has given me something to talk about. As you might have noticed, Ive recently...
Back in the early 90s, Borland International was the place to be an engineer. Coming off the purchase of Ashton-Tate, Borland was the third largest software company, but, more importantly, it was a l...
Apple is maintaining a difficult balance with the iPhone and the iPad. On one end, they appear to want to release each product yearly. The first four iPhones were either announced or arrived in early...
I am told that the manner by which others understand that I am busy is when my writing coherence suffers. This primarily occurs in email when whole words are dropped, sentences become jumbled, and lo...
My introduction to Scott Berkun was his amazing talk at Webstock 2008 on the Myths of Innovation, based on one of the three books hes published in the last decade. I remember his talk not only becaus...
A few years ago I wrote a piece that romanticized the state of the sky falling. The article is not about fixing disasters, its about preventing them, but no matter how much you prepare, disasters hap...
For a word that can so vastly change the fortunes of a company, its worth noting that no generally accepted definition of the word design exists. This means when your boss stands up in front of the t...
Over a half a million unique visitors stumbled on Rands this year and as the year winds down, I wanted to take a look back at the year in articles. These are articles that turned out to be popular or...
The fundamental goal I have for a wallet via its design is that it prevents me from randomly collecting crap. Years of folding leather wallets with myriad pockets and flaps all yielded precisely the ...
Being computer literate means getting asked to help. Im happy to help. I believe the less you fear your computer, phone, or tablet, the more youll get out of it, so, absolutely, How I can help you? H...
Early in the design discussion for the logo for the latest Rands in Repose charity t-shirt, Robert Padbury responded to my early design feedback: "You know, I realized something when I was thinki...
When Im presenting to a large audience, I have three internal states: "Im screwed." I have not yet begun the presentation, but Im imminently starting. This phase sucks. Every possible screw-u...
Its hard to pick a single best work by Joel Spolsky, but if I was forced to, Id pick The Joel Test. Its his own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of software, and when anyone ask...
I do this talk called "The Engineer, The Designer, and The Dictator", and its a talk about the things I love. Its a little bit about the nature of engineers and why I think we might have more...
Blake looks tired. Hes sitting in the food court at OHare Terminal 1. Hes halfway through a beer and the jokes are coming out, but theyre a little labored. Blake is tired. Blakes tired because Blake ...
Management has a set of power words that its appropriated as a means of giving it a sense of identity. This list is endless and entertaining. When these words are spoken, they are said in such a way ...
When it comes to working at your computer, there is only one rule: context switches are horrifically expensive. Lets talk about the Zone once more. Youre either sitting down with your computer to fut...
Hands up if you use Dashboard on Mac OS X. I said hands up. Hello? As for me, I installed Mac OS X Lion, discovered where they shoved Dashboard, and immediately turned it off. Good riddance. Like iCh...
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. Its written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally dont have a clue about the daily necessity of ke...
Flat. Its an organizational meme in rapidly growing teams in the Valley and it contains a couple of noble ideas. Simply put: a flat organization is one with as little hierarchy as possible to encoura...
In an otherwise elegant and well-integrated operating system, the notifications user interface in iOS 4.x feels like a wart -- a tacked-on afterthought that offers a bare minimum of usefulness. Compe...
Early on in your mastery of a complex thing you are going to catastrophically overestimate your ability. Your confidence is going to be artificially high. This new job, hobby, or sport is going to ap...
Dear Summer Interns: Your stock is up -- like way up. Ten years ago when I was hiring interns at the mothership, my incredibly flawed and shortsighted policy was to hire as many as theyd let me, dole...
The fifth version of Rands in Repose has been a long time coming, but its close. The design is done and the migration of content is mostly complete. The process of learning an entirely new publishing...
Phils team is adrift. Phil is smart and meeting-friendly, but hes a crap people manager and that crappiness is slowly poisoning his team. You know how bad it is because the star of Phils team finds w...
It started that morning when you actually had time to go to your favorite coffee shop on that Wednesday morning. You, like many of us, had a bunch of time off for Christmas, so you decided, "I ne...
On my list of horrendously bungled acquisitions, I put Delicious near the top. Since its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, the biggest user-facing change to the site was a visual refresh in 2008. Even wi...
Ten years ago, the world was collectively freaked out by the Y2K bug. The idea was that when innumerable software-driven clocks flipped at midnight from 1999 to 2000 that the digital shit was going t...
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