Who remembers Doom? Now, who remembers the reasons that Doom was so revolutionary from a technology perspective? One of the most important advances that John Carmack made with Doom was that it was the first game to incorporate Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), a concept that had been explored in the context of computer […]

Two weeks ago, me, my two partners in crime Aaron Nemoyten and Jessica Mah launched our first official Facebook application: Serial Killer. Suffice it to say that this application is the answer and ultimate de-facto shove in the face to all the other poke apps on Facebook. Before you get all offended […]

Ah, the beauty of trying to do Q&A over the internet for something that works over the internet.
Alex: Okay go to this url and do this.
Aaron: Didn’t work.
Alex: Try it now.
Aaron: Didn’t work.
Alex: Okay try it now.
Aaron: Didn’t work.
Alex: Umm… try it now.
Aaron: Didn’t work.
Alex: [insert […]

Our buddy Siqi, coder of Facebook Mafia, and RoR developer with our friends at Powerset, wrote a comment to Aaron’s last post. This stirred me to write my own (software developer’s) analysis of designing and writing software and picking the “right” features.
In The Republic Plato reminds us that “Necessity is the mother of invention.” […]

Sometimes, when browsing relatively new web sites, I wonder who’s been doing this and who hasn’t. Who actually walks through the experience that their web site creates? Who discovers that their core features are hard to get to, or that they have features that are stupid that nobody wants? Then, of course, you get into the question of the features that were thought of as stupid that became standard… Like seatbelts. But I digress.

I guess we need a checklist for Web features. Here’s how I imagine it:

1: Is this feature stupid?

Picture of our facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote Speech at the Facebook F8 Developer Conference was pretty bad, as all of my readers have agreed. He positioned Facebook as a world changing platform for entrepreneurship and developers. He clearly wants to see people build applications off Facebook as if it were an […]

As a startup founder, I’ve considered using both Elance and Odesk in my early beginnings. I come from a business and marketing background, so somebody’s got to be the programmer. I didn’t have a co-founder at the time and needed something super cheap, so I saw what Elance and Odesk had to offer.
Before […]