The price of a bad connection when working from home
I wrote a guest post in the B2beematch blog, about some of the challenges in working remotely regarding connectivity. The COVID-19 pandemics have greatly impacted our life’s, and people lucky enough to be able to work from home face a big challenge in remaining productive in dire times. I tried to go on some of the elements that impact in the connectivity and network capacities to remain online, which is crucial on remote working. You can check the post here.
The most annoying thing about online advertising
Right now there is a lot of discussion about how invasive and intrusive online advertising is, including the effects it has in performance. The funny part? I am still getting advertising that hardly qualifies as “targeted” or “interesting“. By now the whole internet should have a lot of contextual information on where I spend my time, what are the pages I read, and what interest me. What kind of ads I see? The same products I see on the broad TV. Just the usual cars, insurance, cleaning products. Plus the spammy “you’re the 10,000,000th… Read More
Online community biases
There are a lot of discussion online about a huge number of different topics. That’s fantastic news, I’d love to had a learning tool that powerful when I was in school. To share some of my interests, and have other people to talk about “cool stuff” and learn from them. Online communities have speed up personal and technological growth intensely, allowing people from around the world to share knowledge and to feel close. But, on the other hand, these kind of communities get naturally and subtlety biased. While this is normal, and probably unavoidable, anyone… Read More
“Blog is dead” and the change in information consumption
I read this post about the “Blogs are dead (we’ll not really/but they are)” thing… Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly… Read More
Rockstar programmer and Rockstar teams
There has been some discussion about the so-called Rockstar Programmer. You know, that awesome engineer (also called 10x engineer) that can produce what 10 other, average engineers can. This post by Scott Hanselman[1] fueled some discussion on Hacker News. What has been overseen about the original post is that he advocates about 10x teams. That resonates a lot, because I think that we should agree that, while there is people with potential to be ninja programmers, that’s not something that can be achieved without the proper care on the environment. A good… Read More
Notifications and emails
We all now that email, being a technology created a long time ago and developed organically into some sort of lingua franca of Internet persona and communications, has a series of problems. No easy ones. Manage the email is a problem of its own, and there are lots of articles about it on the Internet. One of the most annoying is the notifications. We all receive too much email that are only reminders of something relatively interesting in a different app. That could be a new comment on a blog post, an… Read More
Only external comments allowed?
I’m noticing that recently there are a lot of blogs out there that are not allowing comments. I am not talking about specific subjects that could be controversial, and have the comments closed to avoid flame wars or trolls. But the total removal of comments, since the beginning. I must confess I don’t understand it, as my way of approaching a blog is not as a closed book, but a place where discussion can improve the original post. Sure, when the number of comments reaches a point, there can be lots of… Read More
Say NO to web pages adapted to iOS
I really really don’t understand why there are people that think it’s “better” to replace a perfectly good web look and feel for a stupid “adaptation” to iOS with sliding pages and different layout. I mean, c’mon, If your page does not have a good design to start with, why not changing that? For both web clients and iOS devices. I remember when there the wordpress plugin for iOS was activated by default and all the blogs changed totally their appearance for a kind of “magazine” that, yes it looked good, but… Read More
Google Reader as a “Be careful with the cloud” tale.
I have been hit by the recent “readerpocalipse”. I use Google Reader daily heavily, and it is THE main access I use to consume information on Internet. I am taking a look at alternatives, and I (and everyone else that used it heavily) will survive. But I am worried about what impact can this have in the perception and operations of cloud services, specially by Google, but also in general. During the last years, we have seen a lot of cloud services that the perception has been “this is going to be… Read More
Internet y el fetichismo de los números
Una cosa que no he entendido muy bien de la “cultura internetera” es esa reivindicación tan fuerte de los “followers”, los “likes” y la difusión mal entendida. Vale, en cierta medida, si tu blog lo siguen 10.000 y no 10, llega a más gente y (se supone), es más interesante. Sin embargo, especialmente en España, se llega a casos ridículos al querer utilizar los números como arma arrojadiza ante cualquier situación… O, al menos, se justifica todo a través de ello… ¿Que no me gusta lo que has dicho en Twitter? Hago… Read More
Wrong Side of Memphis 