What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
I use my knitr package to generate reports directly from code (literate programming); the "reports" may include homework, blog posts, websites, papers and books.
Finally I came to Jekyll, a blog engine for hackers. I'm pretty happy with it since I will never worry about databases; I just write simple Markdown posts and push them to Github via Git.
I am trying out Arch Linux on my MacBook as I wanted to see how that distro was due to hearing good things about it. So far I'm impressed with it, and given that openSUSE doesn't work on the MacBook Pro yet, I'm sticking with it for now.
Combined with git, the best source code control tool I've ever used (and I've used them all), I can set up a bare machine in a matter of minutes and have full access to all of my kernel trees, emails, and development tools.
I've gradually became a big fan of Haskell; I feel it makes me write much more solid code that is much easier to maintain and refactor. But the best part is there are seemingly no end of things to learn in the Haskell space.
Computer: My only machine is a 13" MacBook Air. I switched my daily partner from Linux boxes to Mac laptops 5 years ago. I love Macs since they work well with both UNIX tools and Adobe software.
I would like to use 3D software in my toolchain, but I've tried just about everything and every piece of software is either too sadistic (Blender), too expensive (Maya) or too powerless (SketchUp).
After years of Firefox loyalism, I ditched it to find a browser that would actually remember passwords when I want it to, and eventually settled on the excellent Chrome over Safari.
I use Flixel and NAPE to make web games, and I use Cocos2D and Box2D to make iPhone games, and in both cases I can just implement my ideas without worrying about the boring, arcane aspects of programming.
I use Flixel and NAPE to make web games, and I use Cocos2D and Box2D to make iPhone games, and in both cases I can just implement my ideas without worrying about the boring, arcane aspects of programming.
At home on the Mac, I use a nice program called Arq, which also backs up to S3. It is not open-source, but all of the data is stored on your own S3 buckets, and there is an open-source program for retrieving it, so you aren't locked in.
I also have a dedicated Arch Linux laptop, currently a Lenovo x220 Tablet PC with capacitive & pen touch screen. I run a lot of customizations to take advantage of the hardware.
AutoHotkey - I used to use a program called Winkey, but that got discontinued, so now I use this. It's free software that lets you map all sorts of actions to the keyboard.
Textpad - text editing software that I do most of my writing and development in. It gets out of the way when you need it but has great features like regular expression search/replace (so handy!) and search-in-files, which I use quite a bit too.
I use Arq for backups, LastPass for passwords, Chrome for my browser and have four users set up inside Chrome to handle business and personal account separation.
I spend a lot of my time in a browser; usually Safari. Chrome is arguably a better browser, but I seem to be sticking with Safari out of inertia and appreciation for its stronger visual polish.
Things remains my to-do app, especially now that the cloud sync is in public beta. I like the way it lets me organize to-dos into different projects; when you have a lot of projects, that bit of separation is key.
I really like the fullscreen text editor Dark Room for taking notes, and I've found I find it a lot easier to get to sleep since I started using F.lux.
There are still a few things that aren't feasible to be implemented in Emacs Lisp yet, but Conkeror lets me maintain the runtime-modifiable paradigm in the browser.
I do as much as I can in GNU Emacs since it pains me to use monolithic software that can't be modified at runtime. Emacs is the closest you can get on a modern OS (except maybe for Smalltalk) to the dream of the fully-dynamic Lisp Machines of the 80s - you can alter nearly any aspect at runtime without recompiling or even restarting.
Other software I use almost daily: Dropbox for commonly accessed files. Git for my work and personal projects. Audacity for quick clean up of audio files. 1password for password management.
My only regret in switching from Linux to OS X is giving up the raw efficiency of tiling window managers like ion. ShiftIt makes up some of the difference.
My main desktop at home is 2005 Mac Mini running Linux. I upgraded the RAM and added an Intel SSD to it. It's very old and slow but it's pretty quiet and I'm too lazy to replace it.
When I was at Vertigo Software I was quite tied to Visio, but at Geoloqi I'm predominately on a Mac, so I've switched over to Omnigraffle for wireframing.
GitHub is an amazing place, product and breeding ground for ideas revolving around software development, created by the ever so humble Chris Wanstrath (and Tom Preston-Werner).
TextMate has been my companion in all weathers during many years, but when I quit Spotify to join Facebook and had a long vacation in between, I decided to put some effort into writing a "better" programmer's text editor which I call Kod, released in December 2010.
Adobe Photoshop gets some use, mostly when my business partner sends me designs and buttons and such to turn into markup and CSS, but also when I want to goof around a bit with images or process screenshots for my writing.
I use Lynx for moment-to-moment browsing. It's all-text, fixed font, black-on-white, no JavaScript or Flash or blinking or borders… it's just more comfortable to read blogs and news articles this way.
I also spend a lot of time in Notepad++, which I use both as a code editor and my note-taking application; my file of ideas is literally just a text file that remains permanently open in a background tab.
My home and work setups are identical: early-2008 octocore Mac Pros, each with two 24" Dell monitors, 6 GB of RAM, two-disk software RAID-0 with a third disk as an internal Time Machine, the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, and the Magic Mouse.
The sequel, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, is a terrific, short, concise, fun guide to running simple "hallway" usability tests to improve the usability of your software and websites. Highly recommended.
I am using a Lemote Yeelong, a netbook with a Loongson chip and a 9-inch display. This is my only computer, and I use it all the time. I chose it because I can run it with 100% free software even at the BIOS level.
I've tried LaunchBar and a few others, but I always come back to Quicksilver. I want my launcher to appear, react to my input, and disappear instantly. Quicksilver has always felt the snappiest to me.
I do all of my programming and writing in BBEdit, which I've been using since version 2.1 (despite a brief dalliance with emacs when I was in college).
I use a 3.2ghz 8-core Mac Pro with two 30" cinema displays. I can't say enough good things about having two 30" cinema displays. I use every pixel of each when I am programming and designing.
I use SnagIt and Camtasia Studio to take screenshots and produce screencasts; I use SyncBack Free to back up my files to an external drive, and I use Cygwin to do command line work.
And amazingly enough, if you insist on looking at the world through a bucket of shit, the world starts to look an awful lot like a bucket of shit: by the end of the book, Rosenberg has left the lay reader with the sense that we are careering towards some sort of software heat-death, after which meetings-about-meetings and stickies-on-whiteboards will prevent all future progress.
For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.
When the software designer defines the visual representation of her program, when she describes the pictures that the user will interpret, she is doing graphic design, whether she realizes this or not.
Why are updates to my reading list so rare? Because computers change a lot in 10 years, but people don't. To make better software, you need to understand how people work, and that is what the books I recommend tend to focus on.
The vast majority of software development projects will fail: they will overrun their schedules, produce substandard results, or sometimes not even finish at all. This isn't an argument; it's a statistical fact.
I challenge any developer to pick up a copy of The Mythical Man Month and not find this tale of a long-defunct OS, and the long-defunct team that developed it, startlingly relevant.
Designing software is difficult, to be sure, but designing a door is difficult too. The nuances of design extend into every object you touch, whether it's some hot new SQL engine, or a humble shoe.
Steve McConnell's Code Complete 2 is the Joy of Cooking for software developers. Reading it means that you enjoy your work, you're serious about what you do, and you want to keep improving.
Rapid Development isn't about rapid development. It's about the reality of failure. The vast majority of software development projects will fail: they will overrun their schedules, produce substandard results, or sometimes not even finish at all.
Any good developer knows that they can code the same stuff with huge variations in lines of code, furthermore code that's well designed and factored will be shorter because it eliminates the duplication.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.