Alex Obenauer

Learn to make custom maps

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:01:00 -0800

I love his sample custom map: dark, with huge light fonts. I've played with Tile Mill before, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who has a map in their app, or anyone who just wants to play with making their own maps.

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What Happens When You Swear At Your Users

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:08:00 -0800

via blog.fetchnotes.com

This is hysterical. Swearing can convert well, apparently.

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How dare you give me free stuff in exchange for a partnership

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:12:00 -0800

Apple was heavily criticized for its obsessive attempt at control, and many people feared the company was getting too big for its proverbial britches.

via macobserver.com

What is it with people and this criticism? From the sounds of it, Apple revolutionized digital textbook creation. They made a piece of software that blows out of the water any previous digital textbook creators, all of which cost large sums of money. Instead of charging for it up front, they made the application completely free. Free. No charge. They give away access to this revolutionary software in exchange for a partnership. If someone agrees to it, they get to use the software, and cut Apple in on the sale of their books.

If you don't want to enter the partnership, don't. But don't complain that you want their free software, and all of your sales, too. You don't get an investment without paying it back; Apple is going in on your ebook business for a 30% cut. Either take the package deal, or leave it. Simple.

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What if email actually worked? We just launched this idea on Kickstarter.

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:19:00 -0800

via kickstarter.com

What if email actually worked? We just launched this idea on Kickstarter. Be sure to check it out, and feel free to share it with anyone that might be interested!

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Mail Pilot

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:03:00 -0800

Get your email done, and get back to your day.

Your inbox is now a to-do list...

Today's email apps mark your email as "read" as soon as you open it, even though you still have to act on it. All messages require further action: deleting, replying, or some other activity.

In Mail Pilot, reading an email doesn't change its status. Each message has a complete / incomplete control button. All new messages arrive as incomplete and remain that way even after you've read them.

Click the complete / incomplete control button to mark a message as complete only after you finish any further action associated with that email. Messages marked as complete are then archived, and can be accessed later by searching or browsing.

Your inbox is now your assistant…

Today's email apps limit your organizational tools to folders, labels, tags, and marking messages as unread. Many messages require further action, later: on a specific date, upon completion of a task, when related messages arrive, or simply when you have more time. Today's email apps leave these messages cluttering your inbox.

In Mail Pilot, you control when you review messages. When you don't have time for a message, click the "Mark for Review" button. This message disappears from your inbox. Later, when you have more time, you can enter a "Review Mode" session to fly through these messages.

Mail Pilot can do even more for you. When marking for later review, tell Mail Pilot the date on which you wish to review a message. On that date, it will reappear in your inbox. Mail Pilot also allows you to group similar messages into custom review lists to be acted on as a group. Review these lists once you're ready.

via mail-pilot.com

We've finished the website for my new startup. We've just been accepted in to Kickstarter, so expect to hear about the campaign soon!

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Scrollorama

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:26:00 -0800

Check out Scrollorama from John Polacek. He's done a really nice job here. See Scrolldeck too, and the incredible parallax example which is styled after Nike's Better World site.

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TileMill - Make your own maps

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:21:00 -0800

TileMill is an application for making beautiful maps. Whether you're a journalist, web designer, researcher, or seasoned cartographer, TileMill is the design studio you need to create compelling, interactive maps.

via mapbox.com

TileMill is a beautiful application that helps you make your own useful and beautiful maps. Great for products, web sites, newspapers, or anything else. I hear TileMill is a breath of fresh air compared to any other map making software. It's a free download, so see if you can make next year's greatest map of the United States.

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College bowl system loots universities

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 07:27:00 -0800

Yet none of this was ever considered. Thanks to an alliance of unblushing incompetence and corruption, college football long ago decided to outsource its most valuable asset—its post-season earnings.

via citypages.com

Great article on the problems with the BCS. It brings up an interesting perspective.

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Ideate, Simplify, Execute

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:39:00 -0800

Success requires all three.

Ideas are fantastic things. As a software developer, I love them. My mind lives in the space of ideas. Ideas are endless. Nothing is impossible. Your mind can shape all of the innovative and revolutionary ideas that you come up with from thin air. Every idea branches out in to an entire forest of concepts.

This forest is exciting, but it is also dangerous. While the ideation phase technically never ends, there comes a point in time when you are ready to start creating. It is at this point that many proceed to the execute phase. Unfortunately, they skipped over a big one: Simplify.

Your forest of ideas that came from one seed, one image, or one thought, is not ready to be executed on. If you did execute on it, you would worry too much about scaling way too soon, you would chase ideas or features that won’t really matter anyway because you sidetracked the more fundamental ones, and you would decrease your likelihood of creating a great, successful product. Between ideation and execution, there is a very important phase, “Simplify.”

Take your forest of ideas, and don’t forget it. There’s some great stuff in there. But for your first iteration of execution, pull it back to that first idea. What was it about this seed of an idea that grew all of these others? What is the essence of this idea? What do you want this project to accomplish?

Answer those questions, then go for it. Execute.

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Stop writing good code; start writing good software

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 07:46:00 -0800

Hello, Hacker News! Thanks for the discussion going on now. To clarify, the definition of 'good code' for this article is good code as seen by those who I will talk about, but certainly not the definition that should be held (which is why I wrote this post!) The definition of 'good code' in this article strictly pertains to those people who view code with a super-OOP methodology. By the title, I meant if you think tons of objects and extra stuff is 'good code', then stop writing 'good code', and focus on the software, the end result for the user. I've updated the article to reflect this needed definition. Now, on to the article...

Focus on the product, not on your code

Good software trumps elaborate code. And unfortunately, you can’t usually have both. The real world has deadlines and ship dates. It’s a game of pick two:

Ship on time
Ship with elaborate code
Ship with a fantastic product

Almost always, you should pick the first and the last when you’re building software applications for users (if you’re building API’s or open source libraries for other developers, then it’s a different story).

Too often I have seen developers, when struck with a brilliant idea, no matter how small, plunk away at building an elaborate object-oriented API for the idea. They construct a slew of objects, the objects interact with each other, and they have public facing methods to make calling them simple, even though the only person that'll likely ever need to use it is themselves. That’s really great. They just wasted a lot of time. During this time, their momentum for this brilliant idea has totally deflated, and they have spent days of work where only hours are required.

Instead of focusing on what many think of as 'good code', flesh out your brilliant idea as a fantastic product. Focus on developing it with only what’s necessary to make your idea work well. That’s not to say make a shoddy job of it, instead do without things you don’t necessarily need. Do you really need a full objet-oriented API right now? Do you really need to make a dozen interwoven classes, when it’s possible just a hundred or so lines in one class will do fine? Can you do all the same error checking and unit tests in a much smaller code base?

If you can, you will build a much more maintainable piece of software. Instead of 3,000 lines of code, you have 1,000. Instead of a ton of object dependencies where one change means having to find the references to it in all of your objects, you simply change what needs to be changed, knowing there’s no extra dependencies in your code for the sake of having elaborate code.

I am working on a software project where I came up with an idea for an interpreter that would translate the public GIS data in to our own specification that our applications expect. Instead of importing and running tons of our own data, we could expand the reach of our applications to a dozen neighboring counties by the time I finished writing the translator. I sat down for 3 hours and wrote 100 lines of code, and was finished. It was all in one class, and it worked beautifully. The product was rock-solid.

One of my co-workers, upon seeing no objects and only 100 lines of code, declared, “Oh this is a prototype - you still need to build the feed object API , but that’s OK, I can just rewrite some parts of the current one in no time.”

Four days later he was finished. He had spent time tackling all of these problems that came up. Every time there was a problem and he needed to make a change, that change had to be reflected in multiple files. And in the end, the product did the same exact thing. The product was no more stable than my 100-line version, it was an absolute bear to maintain, and it wasted a lot of time and momentum.

Good code is not elaborate code. Good code is what makes a good product. Good code for a simple plugin can be 100 lines. Just because you wrote only 100 lines of code in three hours doesn’t make you a lazy prototyper, that makes you a smart developer. If you sit back a look at all your code and say “beautiful,” you’ve done it wrong. If you sit back and look at the beautifully running product, you’ve got it right, and you’ve probably finished a couple of days before your co-workers, with the same product. So go and move on to the next thing, you know you want to.

Thanks for reading! If you're interested in my most recent projects, check out Mail Pilot deck or the launch page!

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COMEFROM

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:59:00 -0800

In computer programming, COMEFROM (or COME FROM) is an obscure control flow structure used in some programming languages, originally as a joke.

COMEFROM is roughly the opposite of GOTO in that it can take the execution state from any arbitrary point in code to a COMEFROM statement. The point in code where the state transfer happens is usually given as a parameter to COMEFROM. Whether the transfer happens before or after the instruction at the specified transfer point depends on the language used. Depending on the language used, multiple COMEFROMs referencing the same departure point may be invalid, be non-deterministic, be executed in some sort of defined priority, or even induce parallel or otherwise concurrent execution as seen in Threaded Intercal.

via en.wikipedia.org

Other programming language jokes, that actually made it in to existence: The blink tag.

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Wantful

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 06:14:00 -0800

via wantful.com

Bloody brilliant. Answer some questions about the recipient of your gift, and get 16 choices per price you're looking to spend. Beautiful interface, to boot.

This seems weird to me, but you can even order a printed color book with the 16 items in it for the recipient to choose their favorite, which is then shipped to them.

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Sencha Touch 2 Developer Preview

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:18:00 -0800

via sencha.com

Sencha (formerly Ext JS) released the Sencha Touch 2.0 Developer Preview in October, and I'm just getting around to checking out the changes now. So far, it sounds really intriguing, as they hit the big ticket items: faster in Android, smarter layouts, compile for native (bonus: without need for the native SDK), and more. I'm whipping together an app in it tonight, hopefully I'll have some further reactions, and maybe something fun, to post soon.

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Bootstrapping a Software Product

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:44:00 -0800

via speakerdeck.com

A great presentation by Garrett Dimon.

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The Crazy Ones (at Virginia Tech)

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 06:52:00 -0700

via youtube.com

A talk I gave here at Virginia Tech.

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Perhaps the best tales to come out of today

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:04:00 -0700

via allthingsd.com

A sad day for the world, yet Walt sums it up in an incredibly positive light.

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First Ride In The Tesla Model S

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 07:13:00 -0700

Check out this website I found at translogic.aolautos.com

It's hard to put in to words how much I want this car. Check out more at the original post.

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Mou

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:44:00 -0700

via mouapp.com

Fantastic markdown editor. If you're on Mac, try out the beta now, it's great.

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How much money do you really need to start your company?

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:42:00 -0700

My advice to entrepreneurs is simple; burn the ships, bootstrap your business to an MVP, tweak until you find a formula people will pay for and THEN go fundraise. It’ll be a lot easier than you think when you have traction, revenue and a clear path. While it might not be the right path, it will show potential investors you know how to find-your-way through the toughest situations and build a product people want to pay for.

via blog.kveton.com

THe entire article is a good read. Advice I wish I would have heard a year ago, and absolutely support.

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You tattooed code on your arm?

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:36:00 -0700

The eagle eyed will notice that I have not included a safety check here so that if i is undefined, the code will error out and the recursion of j will fail. This is intentional. The variable i represents input from other people, and I want to remember that I should always seek the advice and opinions of those around me.

via sangwine.net

This may be the classiest explanation for a tattoo I've heard yet. Also, it may be the deepest use of code structures as metaphors to how you should live your life I've ever heard.

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