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I wrote a short novel about Silicon Valley, startups, and, well, dragons. It's a little different to the kind of thing I normally share here, but bear with me. From a review on Amazon UK: This book is a bit hard to categorise. It has elements of fairy
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I'm using the term respectful software to describe software products and services that: * Maintain your ownership and control over your data. * Allow you to export anything you've entered or imported into it. * Allow you to extend their functionality with other software, without having to ask them
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I've worked in startups for almost my entire career - sometimes my own, sometimes companies started by other people. I'm good at what I do, and I love it: I get to create tools that empower people to do things they previously couldn't, or
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I love this post by Shanley Kane: Let’s examine popular startup trends that are being called “culture” and look beneath the surface to find the real culture that may be playing out beneath it. This is not a critique of the practices themselves, which often contribute value to an
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I posted this the other day, blissfully unaware of how contentious it would be: "Learning to code is non-optional in the 21st century." It's a piece of hyperbole, of course; learning to code is perfectly optional. Nobody's pointing a gun at your head and
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"Mainstream culture," as a concept, needs to die. A little pre-history. The Diamond Sutra, a sacred Buddhist text and the world's oldest surviving printed book, was produced in China in 868 AD. It took another couple of hundred years before moveable type was invented, and another
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I grew up in a culture of counterculture politics. My parents met in Berkeley during the early seventies, which should tell you pretty much everything you need to know; they were, separately and together, involved in Vietnam protests, equal economic and political rights and liberties, tenants' rights, and the
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The Spectator explains why 2012 was the best year in the history of the world: It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there
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I'm sometimes asked who I recommend buying web infrastructure from. Here's my list based on my personal experience: Domains | SSL | DNS | Shared hosting | Dedicated hosting | Transactional email | Virtual servers Domain names: Namecheap Almost all of my domains are hosted with Namecheap. They're simple, have
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I was trying to find a simple, brief guide to picking great passwords, and came up short. Hopefully this simple advice is useful: 1. Don't pick a password; pick a pass phrase. 2. Include letters of both cases, numbers, and punctuation characters. For bonus points, use "special&
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Paul Graham's essay, How to Get Startup Ideas, is long but very much worth reading. Normally I'd pull a quote, but it's a valuable piece from start to finish, and it's hard to know what to choose. Go read it, then come
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I know these things: The mass market will be obsolete. New kinds of enabling technology - including, but not limited to, the Internet - are changing the way people make things, the way they sell them, and the entire mechanics of how marketplaces work. We've been able to