Thinking about the globalization of the computer industry through a tech company so American it prominently promoted its birth on an Iowa farm on its packaging.
Jason Kottke, one of the blog elders and author of Kottke.org, celebrated Dave Winer’s 30th blog anniversary by calling him “one of the purest of the pure bloggers.” To that, Dave asked Jason what …
Strong Basics: The Building Blocks of Software Engineering
The following observations were compiled with software engineering in mind, as I identified them while working in that discipline. However, these practices apply universally.
Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today
According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the "What's Cool" button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim ...
How to Fall in Love With a System: Coziness as a Catalyst for Participatory Agency
Coziness can drive the care and cooperation needed for a world’s inhabitants to design and build systems geared towards emergence and interestingness together. In this sense, Autonomous Worlds are uniquely compatible hosts for cozy games.
Happy Friday! What's good?
I've picked up many, many new subscribers to Second Breakfast this week. Welcome. And thank you all for making me feel like my decision to re-enter the ed-tech fray and write another book is a good one. I started Second Breakfast because I very much didn't
In the open source community, there is perhaps no greater gift than code. This is about that time 135,000 lines of gifted code created a new era of JavaScript
Today in TLD shenanigans: dot io is being killed off
Wishing a very pleasant rebranding to all techbros who squatted their web site in an unrelated nation because it made a good pun. On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the ...
The service-oriented computing environment (SORCER)[A] is a distributed computing platform implemented in Java. It allows writing network-programs (called "exertions") that operate on wrapped applications (services) to spread across the network. SORCER is often utilized in scenarios similar to those where grids are used (grid computing) in order to run parallel tasks.