Writing helps me think. on warpedvisions.org

Some of my most productive business tools are the simplest.

“A common example is process as proxy.

Sometime over the last year I stopped paying attention to Twitter.

I made a quick print this weekend based on a few drawings I was working on last week.

I had a realization last week: How can it be more me?

There’s a lot to like about our beloved task management tools.

I don’t like the term technical debt.

Last week I was talking about how it’s easy to conflate debt and regret when it comes to technical decisions.

The New Year came and went without much of a fuss.

I’ve noticed an interesting shift in computing over the last few years.

I’m not old yet, but I’m becoming a curmudgeon.

I have tried to love podcasts for a few years now.

We tried something new on art day recently: printing with Lego.

I find that software developers struggle to sketch diagrams of their software.

As designers, software developers, and business geeks we thrive on a few things.

As a software designer, I love to design software.

I wrote my first computer program when I was 8.

I review a lot of code these days.

You can pass data between the client and server in a number of ways.

PHP is a great language.

A developer asked me a seemingly obvious question today: I have an API GET request that requires a JSON body.

I’ve been busy working on visual design bits for work projects this summer.

Friction works against you.

One of my favourite JavaScript features is its literal object notation.

Somehow I missed the recent larger EC2 unit sizes: When I saw this, I immediately thought: these numbers will have K, M, and G suffixes within the next 5 years.

You start the day finding consciousness.

While writing a spec earlier today the last few years of progress in server land hit me: uptime is a facade.

I’m a bit surprised that the argument over tables versus semantic layout is still floating around.

I had an epiphany early this year: getting good at something isn’t about finding a groove or being especially clever, it’s about honing a method of doing something.

It’s not that these tools and techniques are bad in themselves, but our use of each should be fit into a well tuned approach to building software.

So you can’t write.

I’ve become passionate about design.

If you want to get better at something, do a lot of it.

I know a few generations of developers.

Merlin Mann asks us why we’re waiting to be awesome, as he remembers Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford address.

2010 has come and gone.

When you describe a design to a group of people, each person imagines something different.

Boost’s Filesystem library is an incredible resource: it abstracts paths, directories, and stat results.