Month: August 2012

Ten years ago today, I bought myself a birthday present. It was a Brenthaven Backpack.

At the tender age of 18, I coveted few things. But among the web designers and programmers whose blogs I read regularly and whom I looked up to, this backpack was the ultimate in durability and functionality.

It featured a padded, hardened laptop sleeve that could sustain even a dead drop from ten or fifteen feet. It had padded, adjustable shoulder straps. It was made from a seemingly indestructible material. It had hidden pockets everywhere.

At the time, I didn’t have a laptop — just a desktop computer. It ran Windows and Linux, and I used it mostly for web design and Macromedia Flash programming. Adobe hadn’t bought Macromedia yet.

Notebook computers were generally clunky and underpowered devices — not meant for doing “real work”. But my Dad purchased me a used MacBook Titanium from a friend of his — and I knew this was a true luxury.

Continue reading My old backpack

I realize that for about 10 years now, I’ve been doing project-oriented work — generally, writing software with working software taking shape over the course of months and even years.

I have developed a theory of “progress tiers” in how this work is optimally managed.

Epics are high-level themes of functionality that manifests in software. For example, “E-mail Notifications”. This is too vague to express a specific user feature, but does express an area of strategic importance to the product. For example, it may be that the product is used primarily via the web, that it lacks engagement from some users, and that all users of the system are also active e-mail users. Therefore, it makes sense that the application would generate some e-mail notifications — but, it’s not yet clear which ones are the right ones, how they should look, how frequently they should arrive, etc.

Understanding the priority of Epics helps the team understand its product roadmap and vision, and the strategic context for the functionality they deliver.

Continue reading Progress Tiers: Epic, Story, Task, Step

This continues an article I wrote nearly three years ago, Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed.

In the three years since I wrote that original piece, Linux has grown — albeit slowly — in desktop usage. After nearly 2 years of no growth (2008-2010, lingering around 1% of market), in 2011 Linux saw a significant uptick in desktop adoption (+64% from May 2011 to January 2012). However, Linux’s desktop share still about 1/5 of the share of Apple OS X and 1/50 the share of Microsoft Windows. This despite the fact that Linux continues to dominate Microsoft in the server market.

The proprietary software industry may be filled with vaporware, mediocre software, and heavyweight kludges, but there is certainly also a lot of good stuff that keeps users coming back.

However, I believe the 2011/2012 up-tick in Linux desktop usage reflects a different trend: the increasingly commoditized role that desktop operating systems (and by extension, desktop software) play in an omni-connected world of cloud software.

Why doesn’t Linux run software application X or Y?

For end users, the above was a core complaint for many years (approx. 2000-2009) when evaluating Linux. However, this complaint has faded in the last two years. Let’s reflect on the most common and useful pieces of software on desktop operating systems these days:

Continue reading Cloud GNU: where are you?

The Debian design process is open to ensure that the system is of the highest quality and that it reflects the needs of the user community. By involving others with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds, Debian is able to be developed in a modular fashion. Its components are of high quality because those with expertise in a certain area are given the opportunity to construct or maintain the individual components of Debian involving that area. Involving others also ensures that valuable suggestions for improvement can be incorporated into the distribution during its development; thus, a distribution is created based on the needs and wants of the users rather than the needs and wants of the constructor. It is very difficult for one individual or small group to anticipate these needs and wants in advance without direct input from others.

This amazing quote from 1994 (!!!) actually models the way I think about software engineering at Parse.ly.

A nice piece of nostalgia on Debian’s 19th birthday.

See also: A Brief History of Debian, The Debian Policy Manual, & The Debian Developers Map.