Developing Upwards

The programming language researcher Jonathan Edwards is, honestly, one of my heroes. He published his Future Programming Manifesto which outlines principles guiding his work, and I've re-read it a few times. I want to post it here just because I believe in these points so much but you absolutely must read the full guidelines at length and let them sink in. Inessential complexity is the root of all evil Complexity is cumulative cognitive load Our institutions, culture, and psychology all foster complexity Think outside the box Programming for the people Simplicity first; performance last Disciplined design evaluation and just for a teaser of the full thing: We are not doing Science. We are doing Design

I know of you, but can I say I know you? Every time I see you, you wear a mask. Every time I see you, there is a new mask. I think you wore those masks so skillfully, But I have come to notice them slightly askew. I see with each mask a glimpse of the hidden face, And I see among all the masks similarities. You have taught me much in my life. As a child you taught me fun and carefree joy. When coming of age, you taught me of identity. As an adult, you taught me of freeful dignity. I mourned your loss with those who shared sorrow, And my pain is not unique but it shouldn’t be, Because the difference you have made is vast. The world may mourn your loss in sorrow, But we will always remember your name with joy. In memory of Robin Williams

Reposted from  my post on Medium... I did not love the words I put on the page the last time I sat down to write.   I’m trying to process this feeling and I think that appropriately I’ll do so through writing even more. Maybe I’ll love these words, or maybe they’ll hurt like a toe stubbed on the sofa. Is this really coming out of my head? I can spend days or weeks “meaning to write” but never finding the time (what a lie) and when I finally sit down and get a measly few hundred words down, this is what I get? It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right that anything so useless would be all my reward for getting my shit together and spending a whole half an hour in front of the keyboard. Obviously, I need a reality check.   There are going to be  so many  more bad writing sessions. I’m going to write so many  crappy paragraphs, useless pages, and awful chapters that just have to be thrown away. I’m going to have to, if I want to get to the good ones...

Pretty cool work coming out of Mozilla will allow use of the the Firefox debug tools on desktop to debug Chrome for Android and Safari for iOS, unifying your debugging experience while you fine tune those platform quirks. Really exciting work! This add-on allows you to use your desktop environment to work on several small screen devices without using up precious screen space. You simply use the device and find out what is going wrong on your computer – regardless of platform and browser engine on the device. Get the full scoop at the Mozilla Hacks blog!