I just found out about Alex St. John’s ridiculous article on VentureBeat claiming that developers who object to working uncompensated overtime have “a wage-slave attitude”. Ummm, what? It sounds like he’s trying to use emotional terms and “snarl words” to make people think that “whatever a ‘wage slave attitude’ is, it must be bad!” But look […]
Tag Archives: the world-wide conversation
Reasons to Use Ad-Blockers
Monday, March 14th, 2016 – 9:37 am
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the rise in use of ad-blockers, and the various strategies publishers and the online ad industry are using to try to convince people to turn off their blockers. But almost all of this has been framed as a case of people wanting to be freeloaders, wanting to […]
The Implications of “No Local Storage” Computing
Sunday, April 28th, 2013 – 2:48 pm
At http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/, Rob Pike talks about how computing should be everywhere, part of the infrastructure. He says storage “should be someone else’s problem, one I’m happy to pay to have them solve”. But the problem is, when you abstract away a problem like that, it will come around and bite you later. The people using Megaupload […]
Can jQuery Put Pressure On WebKit to Fix Bugs?
Sunday, February 17th, 2013 – 12:45 pm
If you didn’t already know that Opera Software decided to toss its Presto rendering engine in favor of WebKit, just stop reading this post right now and go catch up on the past week of news in the world of web development and browsers. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Assuming you did already know that, you should […]
The Problem With “Objectify A Man In Tech Day”
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013 – 8:46 am
Update: While putting the finishing touches on this post, I found out that its creator is cancelling Objectify Day, for a host of very good reasons. I think much of what I wrote here can still be useful, so I’m posting this piece anyway. I’m glad to see that the purpose I had in mind […]
“Fast” Is the Enemy of “Good” — And “Accurate”, and “Deep”, And…
Sunday, August 26th, 2012 – 9:24 pm
Wanna see a perfect encapsulation of what’s wrong with journalism, and particularly online journalism, these days? Just take a look at this piece by TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler. Pay particular attention to the parts where he says: I would be following someone else’s story half a day later, and no one wants to do that. I wrote […]
Is It Getting Better? Or Do You Feel the Same?
Monday, April 9th, 2012 – 8:23 pm
I don’t normally want to “harp on” gender issues in tech by doing two posts about them in a row, but I’ve gotta write about this while the news is still kind of current. In my last post, I wrote about the Geeklist fail and the Sqoot/Boston API Jam fail. At the end of my […]
What to Do When the Tech Failboat Sails
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 – 7:51 pm
The tech world is no stranger to occasional outbreaks of Sexism!Fail, but the past two weeks have seen a rare double instance of it. Naturally, I’ve got to speak up. By the way, for anyone who missed the events, here are a pair of quick recaps: Boston API Jam’s Marketing Problem Oh Hai Sexism And now, […]
A Single Context for All Social Interaction: Merely Quixotic, or Dangerously Misguided?
Thursday, January 12th, 2012 – 8:31 pm
I recently read a blog post by Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, entitled “Why do we have so many lives?” In it, Mr. Widrich says: We have a private life, a public life. We have a work life, a school life, a party life, a love life and I am sure you can name lots […]
A Failed Goal
Saturday, December 31st, 2011 – 2:26 pm
Near the beginning of this year, I published a piece called “Ada Lovelace Day Is Not Enough“. In it, I noted that only 8.69% of my 2010 posts had been marked with the “gender” tag, and it would be nice to increase that percentage. (But it was still an improvement over 2009’s 4.76%.) I said: So […]