- jfdi.asia — Singaporean version of TechStars, with 100-day program (“the bootcamp”) Jan-Apr 2012. Startups from anywhere in the world can apply, and will want to because Singapore is the gateway to Asia. They’ll also have mentors from around the world.
- Oracle NoSQLdb — Oracle want to sell you a distributed key-value store. It’s called “Oracle NoSQL” (as opposed to PostgreSQL, which is SQL No-Oracle). (via Edd Dumbill)
- Facebook Browser — interesting thoughts about why the browser might be a good play for Facebook. I’m not so sure: browsers don’t lend themselves to small teams, and search advertising doesn’t feel like a good fit with Facebook’s existing work. Still, making me grumpy again to see browsers become weapons again.
- Bitbucket — a competitor to Github, from the folks behind the widely-respected Jira and Confluence tools. I’m a little puzzled, to be honest: Github doesn’t seem to have weak spots (the way, for example, that Sourceforge did).
ENTRIES TAGGED "github"
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau shares code built for the people with the people
The CFPB's open source policy focuses on mission and code sharing.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as the nation's "startup federal agency," has the opportunity to start with blank slate. In this guest post, its deputy CIO explains the thinking behind its new open source software policy and strategy.
Four short links: 4 October 2011
Singaporean Incubator, Oracle NoSQL, Should Facebook have a Browser?, and GitHub has Competition
Four short links: 7 July 2011
C64 Presales, Coding Lessons Learned, Feedback Loops, and Continuous Integration
- Commodore 64 PC — gorgeous retro look with fairly zippy modern internals. (via Rob Passarella)
- Designing Github for Mac — a retrospective from the author of the excellent Mac client for github. He talks about what he learned and its origins, design, and development. Remember web development in 2004? When you had to create pixel-perfect comps because every element on screen was an image? That’s what developing for Cocoa is. Drawing in code is slow and painful. Images are easier to work with and result in more performant code. Remember these days? This meant my Photoshop files had to be a lot more fleshed out than I’ve been accustomed to in recent years. I usually get about 80% complete in Photoshop (using tons of screenshotting & layer flattening), then jump into code and tweak to completion. But with Cocoa, I ended up fleshing out that last 20% in Photoshop.
- Feedback Loops (Wired) — covers startups and products that use feedback loops to help us change our behaviour. The best sort of delivery device “isn’t cognitively loading at all,” he says. “It uses colors, patterns, angles, speed—visual cues that don’t distract us but remind us.” This creates what Rose calls “enchantment.” Enchanted objects, he says, don’t register as gadgets or even as technology at all, but rather as friendly tools that beguile us into action. In short, they’re magical. (via Joshua Porter)
- continuous.io — hosted continuous integration. (via Jacob Kaplan-Moss)
Four short links: 18 April 2011
Community, Metrics, Sensors, and Unicode
- Your Community is Your Best Feature — Gina Trapani’s CodeConf talk: useful, true, and moving. There’s not much in this world that has all three of those attributes.
- Metrics Everywhere — another CodeConf talk, this time explaining Yammer’s use of metrics to quantify the actual state of their operations. Nice philosophical guide to the different ways you want to measure things (gauges, counters, meters, histograms, and timers). I agree with the first half, but must say that it will always be an uphill battle to craft a panegyric that will make hearts and minds soar at the mention of “business value”. Such an ugly phrase for such an important idea. (via Bryce Roberts)
- On Earthquakes in Tokyo (Bunnie Huang) — Personal earthquake alarms are quite popular in Tokyo. Just as lightning precedes thunder, these alarms give you a few seconds warning to an incoming tremor. The alarm has a distinct sound, and this leads to a kind of pavlovian conditioning. All conversation stops, and everyone just waits in a state of heightened awareness, since the alarm can’t tell you how big it is—it just tells you one is coming. You can see the fight or flight gears turning in everyone’s heads. Some people cry; some people laugh; some people start texting furiously; others just sit and wait. Information won’t provoke the same reaction in everyone: for some it’s impending doom, for others another day at the office. Data is not neutral; it requires interpretation and context.
- AccentuateUs — Firefox plugin to Unicodify text (so if you type “cafe”, the software turns it into “café”). The math behind it is explained on the dataists blog. There’s an API and other interfaces, even a vim plugin.
Four short links: 7 April 2011
Android Strategy, Fad Books, Ubiquitous Product Design, and Android Headers Apology
- The Freight Train That is Android — Google’s aim is defensive not offensive. They are not trying to make a profit on Android or Chrome. They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free). [...] In essence, they are not just building a moat; Google is also scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it. (via Fred Wilson)
- Group Think (New York Magazine) — Big Idea tomes typically pull promiscuously from behavioral economics, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology. They coin phrases the way Zimbabwe prints bills. They relish upending conventional wisdom: Not thinking becomes thinking, everything bad turns out to be good, and the world is—go figure—flat. (With Gladwell’s Blink, this mania for the counterintuitive runs top-speed into a wall, crumples to the ground, and stares dizzily at the little birds circling overhead. This is, let me remind you, a best-selling book about the counterintuitive importance of thinking intuitively.) A piercing take on pop science/fad management books.
- Product Design at GitHub — Every employee at GitHub is a product designer. We only hire smart people we trust to make our product better. We don’t have managers dictating what to work on. We don’t require executive signoff to ship features. Executives, system administrators, developers, and designers concieve, ship, and remove features alike. (via Simon Willison)
- Linus on Android Headers Claims — “seems totally bogus”. I blogged the Android headers claim earlier, have been meaning to run this rather definitive “ignore it, it was noise” note. Apologies for showing you crap that was wrong: that’s why I try not to show weather-report “news”, but to find projects that illustrate trends.
Four short links: 30 March 2011
Android Firefox, CloudPlayer Licenses, Github Lessons, and Data Structures
- Firefox for Android — faster than stock browser, apparently.
- Amazon CloudPlayer Needs No Licenses (Ars Technica) — that’s what Amazon claim, anyway. Because users upload the files (rather than accessing a central single copy of the ripped music), Amazon think they need no license. If this holds, expect Google and Amazon to follow suit.
- Ten Lessons from Github’s First Year — Your customers are most likely early adopters and love to see new features roll out every few weeks. If this results in a little bit of downtime, they’ll easily forgive you, as long as those features are sweet. In the early days of GitHub, we’d deploy up to ten times in one afternoon, always inching closer to that target. Make good use of that first year, because once the big important customers start rolling in, you have to be a lot more careful about hitting one of them with a stray bullet. Later in the game, downtime and botched deploys are money lost and you have to rely more on building instruments to predict where you should aim. Thoughtful take on agile and continuous deployment, among other things.
- What Are The Lesser-Known But Cool Data Structures? (Stack Overflow) — I have no joke here, I just like to say “cool data structures”. (via Joshua Schachter)
Four short links: 22 November 2010
Syntax Highlighting, Forkability, Product Invention, Science Animations
- Snippet — JQuery syntax highlighter built on Syntax Highlighting in JavaScript. Snippet is MIT-licensed, SJHS is GPLv3.
- Fear of Forking — (Brian Aker) GitHub has begun to feel like the Sourceforge of the distributed revision control world. It feels like it is littered with half started, never completed, or just never merged trees. If you can easily takes changes from the main tree, the incentive to have your tree merged back into the canonical tree is low.
- Product Invention Workshops (BERG London) — Matt Webb explains what they do with customers. Output takes the form, generally, of these microbriefs. A microbrief is how we encapsulate recommendations: it’s a sketch and short description of a new product or effort that will easily test out some hypothesis or concept arrived at in the workshop. It’s sketched enough that people outside the workshop can understand it. And it’s a hook to communicate the more abstract principles which have emerged in the days. Their process isn’t their secret weapon, it’s their creativity, empathy, and communication skills that make them so valuable.
- OneMicron — Janet Isawa’s beautiful animations of biological science. (via BoingBoing who linked to this NYTimes piece)
Four short links: 15 February 2010
Android and Earthquakes, Microsoft Income, SVG Editing, Crawling GitHub for Fun and Profit
- Tale of Android Phone in Earthquake in Haiti — guy in Haiti with working unlocked Android phone and Internet connection used it to channel Facebook “save me” requests to rescuers. (via Andy Linton)
- Microsoft Operating Income by Division — the title says “income”, the graph says “profit”, but either way the online division of Microsoft isn’t healthy. (Love the small Vista tick and large Windows 7 tick).
- SVG Editor in the Browser (via kevinmarks on Twitter)
- Algorithmic Recruitment with Github — crawling GitHub, building in-memory graph of developers, selecting for connectedness and influence.
Github: Making Code More Social
Github launched less than a year ago, but it's already making an impact on how open-source software is being created. Rails was there from day one, kick-starting the social software repository's traffic. It has taken off though it still doesn't compare to Sourceforge's traffic. Github combines "standard" features of social networking sites with distributed source-control Git. You can follow…
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