John’s Blog

Happy New Year. Well sort of. It's February and I'm still kicking off the holiday dust and getting back into high gear. It's time to turn my attention to something I've wanted to do differently this year.

I've published something to this website for nearly two decades now. At first it was just a simple home page, hand edited in HTML and CSS like we did everything in the good ole days. For the better part of the past decade it has been a personal site with some occasional shots on my photos blog.

Later I tried posting links, articles, and thoughts about tech and more work-related topics. That was tough for me to keep up. I spend my entire week focused on work and the last thing I want to do in my spare time is think more about work stuff and post it here. So I stopped.

But I still love the idea of a blog here. I love the idea of posting thoughts and having some sort of a digital record throughout the years. I follow dozens of others' blogs and have kept up with some of them for many years. It's a joy to look back on past events and compare to the present.

I'm trying something new. Occasionally, I'm going to post some thoughts here. I'm calling it a journal. A journal to me is more personal than just a blog about work stuff. Sure, I have many thoughts on tech and products and work-y things. But there is more to life than just tech and work. If it feels right, I'll post about what's going on in life and my thoughts around it. It's not going to be a complete record, but it's a start. This should be fun. It shouldn't feel like work. I'm not going to feel guilty if I go months without posting. I'm not going to hold back if I have a lot to say in a short period of time. This isn't my job, it's just an outlet. It's my tiny little corner of the web.

I'd like to share more online this year. This is a start. I don't care about an audience. There are no analytics or tracking on this website. I'm posting this for me and if anyone finds it interesting, then that's wonderful.

Here's to sharing more in 2020, and hopefully beyond. Cheers.

Brian X. Chen:

The social network's long-stated mission has been to connect people so that we can live in a more open world. But after being off Facebook since October, I found that I did not feel less connected and that my social life didn't suffer, even though I was no longer seeing status updates and pictures on my News Feed.

Over the 14 years that I used Facebook, I accrued about 500 friends. Most were former classmates whom I had lost touch with.

In my real life, I have about 20 friends I talk to on a regular basis. So when I finally deleted Facebook, the fallout was underwhelming.

Those same friends kept in touch over iMessage, Signal or email. We still get dinner or go to the movies together. I can think of one friend who exclusively used Facebook Messenger to communicate — we email now and talk less than we used to, but when we meet in person we are as close as we always were. And I can't remember the last time I attended an event that I was invited to via Facebook, so I never had a case of FOMO.

I'm glad to see this type of article begin to surface. I still have a Facebook account reluctantly in order to the developer tools I need for my job, but that's it. If I didn't need it, I'd delete it today. I wish I could delete it today.

I've never understood the idea that we have to keep up with everyone we've ever encountered in life on social media. Moving on from past connections and acquaintances is normal and healthy.

David Heinemeier Hansson sums up my feelings exactly in a post he wrote last year:

I'm not the same person I was in high school. Not the same person I was at university. Not the same person I was with friends at age 15 as I was with a different group of friends at 21. I'm still not the same person with friends in programming as I am with friends in racing or with family or old mates from Denmark.

What allowed me to change and prosper was the freedom to grow apart and lose touch with people. It's hard to change yourself if you're stuck in the same social orbit. There's a gravitational force that pulls you into repeating the same circular pattern over and over again. Breaking out of that takes tremendous force.

Related:

• How to Delete Facebook

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Amy X. Wang for Rolling Stone:

In the first media visit Apple has ever allowed to its under-the-radar Music Apps studio, the team of engineers showed Rolling Stone how the creation process for Garageband's two types of sounds – synthetic and "real" – can span weeks or sometimes months per instrument, with new hurdles at every turn. Synthesized sounds (i.e. the type of obviously artificial notes often heard in EDM) are made from code and tweaked by code; "real" sounds have to be recorded in a drop-dead-silent studio setting, dozens of times, then pieced together like patchwork to form single perfect notes, one by one.

Some instruments are extra excruciating. In the digital reproduction of an American upright bass, a player in the studio plucks a string, holds his breath for seven seconds to ensure there's no extra noise on the recording whatsoever as the note shivers into the air (engineers have custom-coded an app to time the duration precisely), and repeats the endeavor at different finger positions, volumes and pressures, day in and day out. After wheeling each of the cavalcade of instruments out of the studio, the team pores over the hundreds of recordings to pick out the best. When adding a suite of East Asian instruments in a recent product update, the engineers consulted with designers across the world to pick out the specific color of wood and font of a poem that would make a Chinese guzheng appear the most authentic. Engineers also constantly browse music-making forums for complaints, suggestions and thoughts on what to tweak next.

It's truly amazing that Apple spends so much time and effort on a free app.

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Warren Buffett's annual letter to shareholders (PDF) of Berkshire Hathaway was published this weekend. It's always a great read and a fascinating look at one of the world's most successful companies. More importantly it gives some insight into how the company thinks and how the leadership views the larger financial world.

Here are some of my favorite lines:

Berkshire will forever remain a financial fortress. In managing, I will make expensive mistakes of commission and will also miss many opportunities, some of which should have been obvious to me. At times, our stock will tumble as investors flee from equities. But I will never risk getting caught short of cash.

On debt (emphasis mine):

We use debt sparingly. Many managers, it should be noted, will disagree with this policy, arguing that significant debt juices the returns for equity owners. And these more venturesome CEOs will be right most of the time.

At rare and unpredictable intervals, however, credit vanishes and debt becomes financially fatal. A Russian- roulette equation – usually win, occasionally die – may make financial sense for someone who gets a piece of a company's upside but does not share in its downside. But that strategy would be madness for Berkshire. Rational people don't risk what they have and need for what they don't have and don't need.

Sounds like some great personal advice as well.

On long-term optimism and belief in the American economy and prosperity:

Our country's almost unbelievable prosperity has been gained in a bipartisan manner. Since 1942, we have had seven Republican presidents and seven Democrats. In the years they served, the country contended at various times with a long period of viral inflation, a 21% prime rate, several controversial and costly wars, the resignation of a president, a pervasive collapse in home values, a paralyzing financial panic and a host of other problems. All engendered scary headlines; all are now history.

There are also many other countries around the world that have bright futures. About that, we should rejoice: Americans will be both more prosperous and safer if all nations thrive. At Berkshire, we hope to invest significant sums across borders.

All of the annual letters starting from 1977 are available online as well.

I’m thrilled to announce a new venture I have been working on for a good part of the past year: It’s called Air Mail. Air Mail is a weekly publication covering the world of politics, business, arts, travel, and much more. Each Saturday we’ll be sending out an email newsletter at precisely 6am Eastern Time with highlights of the week’s stories. Behind the newsletter is a website containing the full complement of articles and shorter pieces for the week.

We’ve published a few beta issues internally thus far and the goal is to launch to the public starting this summer. The writing and editorial work that is going into this is phenomenal. My friends Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley are two of the most wonderful people you will ever meet and their work is second to none.

Air Mail’s branding and style pays homage to a bygone era of postal service design with strong reds, blues, and imagery from when air travel was considered new and thrilling.

On the technology side we have created a publishing platform that is designed for the modern web and the world of mobile devices. This technology will allow our small team to manage everything that goes into publishing a weekly issue including copy editing, photo rights management, editorial approvals, and the layout of the issue itself. We’ll also begin taking subscriptions later this year so a full suite of billing features is also in place. I’ll go into some more detail in future posts about this platform. I’m very excited about it.

Air Mail was officially announced in The New York Times a few weeks ago and we’ve started taking signups on our website. There is a lot to be done before we’re ready to start publishing, but we’re well on our way. I’m looking forward to sharing more about the work soon, but for now, it’s just a ‘coming soon’ announcement. If you’re interested, you can sign up to receive the first few issues for free once they are ready for the world to see.

Craig Mod, with an excellent piece about email newsletters:

Newsletters and newsletter startups these days are like mushrooms in an open field after a good spring rain. I don’t know a single writer who isn’t newslettering or newsletter-curious, and for many, the newsletter is where they’re doing their finest public work.

His new newsletter is called Ridgeline and it’s wonderful.

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Benjamin Mullin, Lukas I. Alpert and Tripp Mickle, for The Wall Street Journal:

In its pitch to some news organizations, the Cupertino, Calif., company has said it would keep about half of the subscription revenue from the service, the people said. The service, described by industry executives as a "Netflix for news," would allow users to read an unlimited amount of content from participating publishers for a monthly fee. It is expected to launch later this year as a paid tier of the Apple News app, the people said.

The rest of the revenue would go into a pool that would be divided among publishers according to the amount of time users spend engaged with their articles, the people said. Representatives from Apple have told publishers that the subscription service could be priced at about $10 a month, similar to Apple's streaming music service, but the final price could change, some of the people said.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately working in and around the publishing industry. As a whole the industry's concerns are almost always tied to declining revenue, legacy high-costs, and therefore reduced or non-existent profits. I find it difficult to believe that any publisher is willing to take a 50% cut on revenue. Apple would need to deliver a massive upswing in subscribers for this to even be a conversation.

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Frank Bruni, with a nice piece about Tony Romo ahead of tonight's Super Bowl:

Romo, 38, previously spent more than a decade as a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. He was great but he wasn't great, and with him as its leader, the team never went all the way. In a twist that's testament to second acts in American lives, he's doing something as a star for CBS that he never did as a star for the Cowboys: going to the Super Bowl. I suppose that's fitting, because he's more than great in his current gig. He's peerless. And he's a sensation.

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Speaking of Jack Dorsey, it looks like he is making the PR rounds this week. He’s also featured in a nice piece at Rolling Stone.

I liked this bit where he responds to Seth Rogen’s concern that racists were being verified on Twitter:

That was heartbreaking. I DM’d him, and we got on the phone together. He said to me, “I’m surprised at myself for not hanging up…But I think you have the right intent. But you all are terrible communicators.” I agree, we have been bad at communication, we haven’t been as forthright as we need to, we certainly haven’t been as transparent. We do care deeply. But we need to do it in scalable ways. This work doesn’t happen overnight.

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I really enjoyed this interview with Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, by Bill Simmons. Twitter is still a fascinating company to me despite its problems. Bill Simmons pulls no punches asking tough questions about harassment, Twitter’s role in politics, Trump, and controversial features like editing tweets.

There’s also a nice trip down memory lane with discussion of Twitter’s early days and how it came to be. (I remember vividly using the text message version of Twitter at SXSW in 2007. A simpler time.)

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Slack:

Today we’re launching a new logo, as we start to refresh our look in general. We loved our old logo, and look, and know many felt the same. And yet, here we are to explain why we decided to evolve it.

The design work was done by Pentagram.

Change is hard, and I’ve been so used to seeing the familiar Slack icon for years that this will take some getting used to. The logo itself doesn’t bother me near as much as the awful dark purple background behind it.

Related:

• Pentagram’s ‘Range of Possibilities’ for Slack by John Gruber

Original Link →

Great new update to the app I spend more time using than anything else.

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It has been an interesting couple of months in the open source software licensing world. A few weeks ago, there was some controversy over Facebook’s use of a BSD + Patents license on its open source contributions. While this patent grant was not new, it has gained some publicity over its use as applied to React.

Adam Wolff at Facebook tried to clarify the issue a few weeks ago:

As our business has become successful, we’ve become a larger target for meritless patent litigation. This type of litigation can be extremely costly in terms of both resources and attention. It would have been easy for us to stop contributing to open source, or to do what some other large companies do and only release software that isn’t used in our most successful products, but we decided to take a different approach. We decided to add a clear patent grant when we release software under the 3-clause BSD license, creating what has come to be known as the BSD + Patents license. The patent grant says that if you’re going to use the software we’ve released under it, you lose the patent license from us if you sue us for patent infringement. We believe that if this license were widely adopted, it could actually reduce meritless litigation for all adopters, and we want to work with others to explore this possibility.

It seems reasonable when explained this way, but that didn’t stop many organizations from removing React from their future product development roadmaps.

Matt Mullenweg wrote about how the Wordpress team would no longer use React for its new ventures:

We had a many-thousand word announcement talking about how great React is and how we’re officially adopting it for WordPress, and encouraging plugins to do the same. I’ve been sitting on that post, hoping that the patent issue would be resolved in a way we were comfortable passing down to our users.

That post won’t be published, and instead I’m here to say that the Gutenberg team is going to take a step back and rewrite Gutenberg using a different library. It will likely delay Gutenberg at least a few weeks, and may push the release into next year.

Then, last week Facebook released another update changing the license for React and other projects to the MIT license starting this week:

Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We’re relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don’t want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons.

This is great news. I think the entire community was very surprised to see this change. This is a credit to the way the open source community should work, and it’s wonderful to see that Facebook is willing to be open minded and participate in what’s best for the community.

I spend a lot of time working on React-based projects for startups and larger companies so I’m happy to see that this should no longer be an issue.

Dan Frommer of Recode took some photos from the first keynote at Apple Park this week. Beautiful.

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After yesterday’s announcement of the new iPhone X, Apple posted some new Fall “WWDC” videos about how to design and build apps for the new phone.

The Human Interface Guidelines have also been updated:

Avoid explicitly placing interactive controls at the very bottom of the screen and in corners. People use swipe gestures at the bottom edge of the display to access the Home screen and app switcher, and these gestures may cancel custom gestures you implement in this area. The far corners of the screen can be difficult areas for people to reach comfortably.

Don’t mask or call special attention to key display features. Don’t attempt to hide the device’s rounded corners, sensor housing, or indicator for accessing the Home screen by placing black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Don’t use visual adornments like brackets, bezels, shapes, or instructional text to call special attention to these areas either.

Allow auto-hiding of the indicator for accessing the Home screen sparingly. When auto-hiding is enabled, the indicator fades out if the user hasn’t touched the screen for a few seconds. It reappears when the user touches the screen again. This behavior should be enabled only for passive viewing experiences like playing videos or photo slideshows.

The UI Design Resources have also been updated to include a Sketch file (or Photoshop if that’s your thing) with all of the new UI components for iPhone X.