Posts by John Tornow

Tim Cook:

Rather than asking for legislative action through Congress, the FBI is proposing an unprecedented use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to justify an expansion of its authority.

The government would have us remove security features and add new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by “brute force,” trying thousands or millions of combinations with the speed of a modern computer.

The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.

Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government.

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Along with a much-needed re-branding of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson published a very thorough doctrine covering the  major tenets of the framework.

I love Rails and have used it almost exclusively for the past 8 years, so there is a lot I agree with here. There’s also a few things I strongly disagree with, but that’s ok. A framework doesn’t have to be everything to everyone. But, if you’re going to use a framework, you should understand why it exists.

One of my favorite points is the ability for everyone to disagree and yet still move the framework forward:

We need disagreement. We need dialects. We need diversity of thought and people. It’s in this melting pot of ideas we’ll get the best commons for all to share. Lots of people chipping in their two cents, in code or considered argument.

So while this doctrine has described an idealized form, the everyday reality is much more nuanced (and interesting). Rails is capable of supporting such a large community under one tent exactly because there are so few if any litmus tests.

The continued success of RSpec, a DSL for testing I’ve often expressed grave discontent with, is perfect proof. I can rant until I’m blue in the face of why I don’t think it’s the way to go, and it can still blossom and prosper. That point is the far more important one!

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Emily Kaplan in the MMQB:

After 14 years together, Buck and Aikman communicate almost entirely non-verbally. Between plays, Aikman scrolls back to plays on his monitor, sometimes zoning out of Buck’s play-by-play, or listening to Zyontz, the producer, in his ear.

Before Buck tees up Aikman, he’ll often tug at his arm to make sure he’s ready. When Aikman speaks, he has a tendency to shift the weight from his left foot to his right foot. He clears his throat nearly a dozen times a quarter, each time pressing a “cough” button that mutes his microphone.

Buck rarely stands still, leaning against the table in front of him, nursing a cup of tea and grabbing for more Halls.

During timeouts, both men often grab their phones and text their daughters (they each have two) about schoolwork and what time they’ll land back home. “It’s incredible to me,” says Mike Pereira, the former NFL VP of Officiating and FOX rules expert, who joins them in the booth through the playoffs. “The ease in which they operate, their calmness. I would be freaking out.”

It’s incredible how much work goes into each NFL broadcast, and they make it look easy on TV.

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Seth Godin:

Most professionals ought to charge by the project, because it’s a project the customer wants, not an hour.

Surgery, for example. I don’t want it to last a long time, I just want it to work. Same with a logo or website design.

Charging by the hour protects the professional. Charging by the project sets expectations up front and is a much better way to align both parties.

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In this morning’s paper, The New York Times is running an editorial on its front page for the first time since 1920.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

What better time than during a presidential election to show, at long last, that our nation has retained its sense of decency?

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Today Apple kept its promise to open source Swift:

Swift is now open source!

We are excited by this new chapter in the story of Swift. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it quickly became one of the fastest growing languages in history. Swift makes it easy to write software that is incredibly fast and safe by design. Now that Swift is open source, you can help make the best general purpose programming language available everywhere.

It includes an in-progress complete rewrite of Foundation in Swift. Incredible.

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‘Rubber Soul’ was released 50 years ago today.

Happy 50th birthday to Rubber Soul, the album where the Beatles became the Beatles. It was the most out-there music they’d ever made, but also their warmest, friendliest and most emotionally direct. As soon as it dropped in December, 1965, Rubber Soul cut the story of pop music in half — we’re all living in the future this album invented. Now as then, every pop artist wants to make a Rubber Soul of their own. “Finally we took over the studio,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone’s Jann S. Wenner in 1970. “In the early days, we had to take what we were given, we didn’t know how you could get more bass. We were learning the technique on Rubber Soul. We were more precise about making the album, that’s all, and we took over the cover and everything.”

One of my all-time favorites.

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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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