Posts tagged with Thoughts
The Hardest Problems
Recently my friend and colleague Jack Danger tweeted this question: We engineers say we want to work on "hard problems." Know what's the hardest problem, though? Building a product that's worth a damn. Jack…
Flowers for Algernon
I just finished reading Flowers for Algernon, a sci-fi novel written in the 60s about a mentally retarded man who undergoes a surgical procedure to become a genius. I never got the chance to read this book while I was…
Rediscovering the Joy of Reading
My love of reading comes in phases. Like most knowledge workers, a big chunk of it in the day comes in the form of email and wikis and tweets and looking for things online; at night, I get to go…
Reflecting on the Absence of Privilege
I had written about privilege previously, but this article by Philip Guo on his experience in college really tells of how powerful silent privilege can be and how utterly unnoticeable and indeed unremarkable its recipients can feel. As someone who…
Building a Friendlier Moving Train
I've been reading Tyler Cowen's Average is Over, in which he argues that as computing takes on more and more aspects of modern society, those who use technology to complement human intuition and skill will race…
Refactor the World
Ever look at a piece of code and think, Hey, waitaminute, I've seen this before. It was cargo-culted from this module... And the way this class inherits from this other class, well, that doesn't make any…
