Posts by John Tornow

Matt Mullenweg with some exciting news about the future of Wordpress.com:

So we asked ourselves a big question. What would we build if we were starting from scratch today, knowing all we’ve learned over the past 13 years of building WordPress? At the beginning of last year, we decided to start experimenting and see.

Today we’re announcing something brand new, a new approach to WordPress, and open sourcing the code behind it. The project, codenamed Calypso, is the culmination of more than 20 months of work by dozens of the most talented engineers and designers I’ve had the pleasure of working with (127 contributors with over 26,000 commits!).

The new wordpress.com is based on Node, React, and other cool open source toys. Looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

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Sad news this week from Rdio:

Pandora (NYSE: P), the world’s most powerful music discovery platform, today announced an agreement to acquire several key assets from Rdio, a pioneer in streaming music technology. This will accelerate the company’s plan to offer fans greater control over the music they love, strengthening Pandora’s position as the definitive source of music.

Rdio has been my go-to music streaming service for over 4 years now. It’ll be weird not to have it as a part of my daily life. Sad news, yes, but it wasn’t entirely a surprise. The service and once beautiful user-interface have been obviously neglected over the past year and it has struggled to evolve compared to Spotify and Apple Music.

Rdio, you’ll be missed.

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Some signs of a late fall in Oklahoma.

Beaver’s Bend State Park is one of my new favorite places.

DHH on Signal v. Noise:

What’s good for platform makers is often not good for those who build upon it. That’s where the whole picking up pennies in front of a steamroller comes from. Yes, a few may be quick enough to pickup enough pennies to fill a jar, but for most, it’s not a wise trade of risk vs reward.

Forget the paid app.

There are a few examples of companies breaking the mold and creating great app-based businesses on mobile, but unfortunately they are the exception, not the rule.

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Ryan Nystrom on the Instagram Engineering Blog:

We had the opportunity to integrate this new technology into Instagram early on and were excited by how natural the shortcuts and peeking on photos and videos felt. The API for adding 3D interactions was seamless to use, and along the way we collected pointers for how to add them to your apps.

Cool writeup. This is one of my favorite new hardware features.

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Mike Isaac and David Gelles in the New York Times:

Many technology start-ups aim to become “unicorns,” the companies that get valued at $1 billion or more on their way to probable vast riches. Yancey Strickler and Perry Chen have no interest in that.

As co-founders of Kickstarter, the popular online crowdfunding website that lets people raise money to help fund all manner of projects, including cooking gadgets and movies, Mr. Strickler and Mr. Chen could have tried to take their company public or sell it, earning millions of dollars for themselves and other shareholders.

Instead, they announced on Sunday that Kickstarter was reincorporating as a “public benefit corporation,” a legal change they said would ensure that money — or the promise of it — would not corrupt their company’s mission of enabling creative projects to be funded.

“We don’t ever want to sell or go public,” said Mr. Strickler, Kickstarter’s chief executive. “That would push the company to make choices that we don’t think are in the best interest of the company.”

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Paul Ford, on his new company:

Over the last few months I’ve learned a lot about what it means to be a partner in a business. In practice, partnership means that we talk. Rich and I talk to the Postlight team, in small meetings and all-hands meetings, and over drinks or coffee. We talk to lawyers. We talk, over breakfast, about signage, recruiting, bookkeeping, taxation, legal fees, cashflow, and lead generation.

We ask ourselves, “What are the most important things we can do as an agency, as a company that ships big things?” We think the most important thing we can do is: Build a self-sufficient team and do absolutely everything we can to keep it together. Which sounds incredibly obvious in theory but is not obvious in practice. So we talk even more: About loyalty, and how to build loyalty, how to create trust, and how trust can help you ship good software fast. There’s a lot that is new. It takes time. We’ll get there.

Sounds like a familiar story.

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Jocelyn Goldfein on First Round Review:

In a profession where we carry out decade-spanning holy wars over tab widths and capitalization, it’s no surprise that people get attached to their development and release habits. But if shipping so much software has taught me one thing, it’s to be an agnostic. Different methodologies optimize for different goals, and all of them have downsides. If you maximize for schedule predictability, you’ll lose on engineer productivity (as this turns out to be a classic time/space tradeoff). Even when you aren’t dealing with textbook tradeoffs, all investments of effort trade against something else you could be spending the time on, whether it’s building an automated test suite or triaging bugs.

Goldfein’s perspective is refreshingly honest. Most successful engineers will tell you they’ve found the ‘one true way’ to ship great work. But in reality, it seems that there are many different ways to attack these problems depending on your situation.

To determine “the right way to develop software,” you’ve got to understand what matters for your product and how to optimize for that. This isn’t based on personal preference. Ultimately it stems from your company’s mission, and the way you make money is a reasonable proxy for that.

Such a great look at how to approach shipping software.

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Ever since Susan Kare’s 8-bit designs graced the first Macintosh screens in 1984, icon design, like digital typography, has been an important if unglamorous niche in the software business.

Via Daring Fireball

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Marco Arment, on Wednesday:

Today, I’m launching my own iOS 9 content blocker, called Peace, to bring peace, quiet, privacy, and — as a nice side benefit — ludicrous speed to iOS web browsing.

There are a lot of content blockers being released today, but Peace strikes the best balance I’ve seen between effectiveness, compatibility, simplicity, and speed, powered by what I’ve found to be the best database in the business after months of testing.

Marco Arment, on Friday:

I’ve pulled Peace from the App Store. I’m sorry to all of my fans and customers who bought this on my name, expecting it to be supported for longer than two days. It’ll keep working for a long time if you already have it, but with no updates.

As I write this, Peace has been the number one paid app in the U.S. App Store for about 36 hours. It’s a massive achievement that should be the highlight of my professional career. If Overcast even broke the top 100, I’d be over the moon.

Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate, but probably should have. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.

The App business is really hard. It’s easy for people on the outside to judge Marco for his decision, and criticize the week he’s just had. Good on him for sticking to his morals and doing what he feels is right.

For what it’s worth, the app is great and I’ll be keeping it installed.

Benedict Evans:

Mobile is not a subset of the internet anymore, that you use only if you’re waiting for a coffee or don’t have a PC in front of you - it’s becoming the main way that people use the internet. It’s not mobile that’s limited to a certain set of locations and use cases - it’s the PC, that can only do the web (and yes, legacy desktop apps, if you care, and consumers don’t) and only be used sitting down. It’s time to invert that mental model - there is not the ‘mobile internet’ and the internet. Rather, if anything, it’s the internet and the ‘desktop internet’

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Steve Smith on retiring from the NFL after this season (emphasis mine):

My name is Steve Smith Sr., and you might know me as an undersized wide receiver who played 14 NFL seasons. You’ve seen a lot of me on TV, some of it unflattering. And as I step away from the fame and the media and a life captured on SportsCenter, there are a few things I’d like you to know about who I really am.

I’ll start with this: I’ve always been a big reader. I encourage young players to find something that moves their needle in the same way football does. Find something that can challenge you and make you think. Our game is so consuming and you can fall into the trap of being a one-dimensional human being. Don’t let that be you.

[…] In 2008, I began reading The Last Lecture, the best-seller by Randy Pausch, a professor who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told he had only months to live. Pausch’s last lecture is about achieving your childhood fantasy. He asks if you are spending time on the right things, because time is all you have. He talks about overcoming obstacles, seizing every moment and doing everything you can to live life to the fullest. The book speaks to everyone, but really, it is the lessons he wanted to impart on his children.

Focus on what matters.

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This past weekend, Jerome Bettis was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Normally, I wouldn’t associate with anything Steelers-related, but his acceptance speech was particularly good. Semil Shah of Haystack also enjoyed it, and took the time to transcript the last bit:

Greatness is not a sports term — it’s a life term. I believe there are four things that get you to greatness. One, you gotta have the ability to sacrifice. A lot of times that means sacrificing the relationships that mean the most to you. The second thing is pain. You’re gonna have to go through some type of pain in your life — either physical or mental — and you’ve got to find a way to endure. The third one is failure. You’ve got to have the ability to understand that you’re going to fail, but it’s how you recover that makes you a better person. And the last, the fourth one, is love, because if you love it, then, it’s not a job — it’s a passion. And if you love it, you’re willing to sacrifice for it, you’re willing to go through all types of pain for it, and you are willing to go through that failure and understand that ‘I will be successful.’ If you go through those four things and understand [them], … then success is in your path. Greatness is available to you.

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Nick Bilton in yesterday’s New York Times:

Mr. Jobs said he wanted freshly squeezed orange juice.

After a few minutes, the waitress returned with a large glass of juice. Mr. Jobs took a tiny sip and told her tersely that the drink was not freshly squeezed. He sent the beverage back, demanding another.

A few minutes later, the waitress returned with another large glass of juice, this time freshly squeezed. When he took a sip he told her in an aggressive tone that the drink had pulp along the top. He sent that one back, too.

My friend said he looked at Mr. Jobs and asked, “Steve, why are you being such a jerk?”

Mr. Jobs replied that if the woman had chosen waitressing as her vocation, “then she should be the best.”

Cool story, read the whole thing to see why.

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App Camp For Girls is on a mission: we encourage girls to pursue app development as a career by teaching them how to make iPhone apps in a fun, creative summer camp program under the mentorship of women developers. We are shifting the gender balance in our industry. App Camp 3.0 is the next stage in bringing the program to more girls in more locations!

There’s a few days left in this wonderful campaign. I’ve supported them, and I hope you do too.

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