Avoiding managed services, using Docker and running eight Mongo and twelve Kafka nodes does not make an application cloud neutral — it makes it costly to develop, Kafkaesque to architect, and impossible to maintain in production. You end up losing your weekends and quality time with family to DR exercises and production support. Continue reading Let’s talk cloud neutrality
It is worth reiterating that none of the big tech companies owe anybody anything with regards to the type of content they are willing to host. Continue reading A conservative version of Facebook?
When the service is free, the provider of such service owes nothing to consumers and everything to the sponsors. Continue reading Fixing the Information Marketplace
In the spring of 2017, I borrowed a Series 1 Apple Watch from our lab at work to see if I’d like it. I didn’t. I hated it. Now I have a Series 3 Apple Watch, and I love it. What’s different? Fitness and health tracking is my primary use case I started running in the fall of 2015, and I’ve been using Fitbit as … Continue reading Apple Watch Series 3 is a gem worth waiting for
I downloaded my Facebook data. For the most part, I didn’t find anything there that I didn’t voluntarily provide to Facebook. It’s worth noting a few things that people should pay attention to. Contacts When you install Facebook, it asks you for access to your Contacts. This is so it can help you find more friends to connect with and so you can use your … Continue reading I downloaded my Facebook data. Nothing there surprised me.
You have a product. You have a service. You have a business plan. Now you want to leverage technology and build a relationship with your customers by offering them an app. I am here to talk you out of it. Nobody wants an app You may feel like you are extending your brand to your customers' smartphones by giving them an app. In reality, however, … Continue reading Nobody wants your app
As a software engineer, I learned that one measure of my success is whether or not the code I’ve written is in production and maintainable by others years after I moved on to other things. Self-documentation features of the programming language play a crucial role. The rapid adoption of JavaScript and Node.js in the enterprise revealed some flaws in the platform. While it is possible … Continue reading TypeScript starts where JavaScript leaves off
