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Maps and Territories: Exploring “The Lean Startup’ through Nature, Part III
One of the main tenets of outdoor survivorship is that it is essential to observe your environment. Closely. But observation is only half of the required skill. The other half is an unbiased interpretation of the data you are being given.
Wilderness mishaps and death stories are filled with cautionary tales of people who blindly ignored obvious signs of risk and danger. And, when I say blindly, I mean they made the types of decisions that cause people – those safely listening in their armchairs and far from the buggy, evening woods – to gasp, agog, and say, “What were they thinking?”
Why I Might Short Nintendo Stock
This morning, I read that Nintendo’s stock has more than doubled since the release of Pokemon Go and, as of this writing, Nintendo is worth more than Sony. A couple of days ago, Pokemon Go surpassed Twitter in active daily users and Facebook in engagement. Wherever you go, it seems, there are hordes of people catching enigmatic little virtual monsters and crying out with glee. But here’s the thing: how many more times will people spend their time playing Pokemon Go?
The Legacy of Pokemon and the Implications of Pokemon Go
The little pocket monsters known as Pokemon were first released in the mid-90s as a game for Nintendo’s Gameboy. Fast forward 20 years, and we’re suddenly watching the resurgence of a handheld game that was originally based on the creator’s fascination with insect collecting. The added twist, however, is that augmented reality now makes it possible to let game makers populate our reality with virtual characters that we can spot through our phones. The game has changed. The rapid, overwhelming success of Pokemon Go! surprised even John Hanke, chief executive of Niantic, Inc., the Alphabet spinoff that co-developed the game with Nintendo. Part of his surprise was the rapidity with which the game surged as well as its immediate, and impressive impact on the company’s bottom line. But should it have been so surprising?
Smarter Debugging with Unified Logging & Activity Tracing
At WWDC this year Apple engineers gave a talk about their new Unified Logging and Activity Tracing APIs which is definitely worth checking out. I know logging isn’t exactly going to steal the headlines away from Siri integration or watchOS 3, but as a developer it’s a valuable debugging tool and the changes in these APIs look to save some significant time while debugging crashes and squashing bugs.
Common Sense Security Tips to Protect Your Computers and Devices
If you want to make yourself too anxious to sleep at night, take a security expert out to lunch and ask about all of the ways in which your personal information is vulnerable at home, work, and on the internet. It will be an eye-opening experience! You’ll hear about encryption standards, key management, multi-factor authentication, SQL injection, DDoS attacks, men in the middle, attack vectors, AppSec, OWASP, Pen Tests, social engineering, black hats, white hats, grey hats and one hundred different terrifying data breaches (Target, Sony, Anthem, Home Depot and the like). Here’s some advice on how to protect yourself.
Friday Linked List: July 8, 2016
Here are some papers, articles, and blog posts that I’ve found especially interesting recently. Check them out.
Four Pounds of Nuts: Exploring “The Lean Startup” through Nature, Part II
My father lifted my pack into the back of his car in the EMS parking lot in North Conway, where we’d agreed to meet to carpool the rest of the way into The Whites. He whistled low and under his breath. “Geez, Kendall.” “What?” I was grabbing poles and double checking to ensure I had ACTUALLY put my boots in his car. “Your pack is light . . . you sure you’ve got enough here? I mean, there’s running lean and then there’s running lean. . .”
Level Up Your Coding Skills With exercism.io
A few months ago I stumbled across across an interesting open source project created by Katrina Owen called exercism.io that provides a collection of programming practice problems in over 30 languages. On the surface, it’s a great resource for learning to code or learning a new language. I’ve found however that as you dig deeper it has much more to offer on a number of levels.
Highlights from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2016 (WWDC16)
Apple held WWDC16 in San Francisco earlier this month to introduce new versions of iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and a new version of OS X that’s been rebranded as macOS. These new versions are available to developers now and will be more widely available through Apple’s Public Beta program soon, with final releases this Fall. Alongside the new software, Apple announced some exciting changes coming to the App Store, too: Search Ads and more open and flexible subscriptions.
Kill Your Darlings: Exploring “The Lean Startup” through Nature, Part I
Adapt or die. Accept change or risk losing everything the organism has endeavored to achieve. Let go of what one thought one was to become and be what one is. Kill your darlings. Faulkner’s oft-quoted phrase is frequently used to admonish young writers to edit critically, even when that means killing off beloved, favored words, sentences, paragraphs, themes and even characters. It is advice I have clearly not taken here but let’s set that aside for the time being.
Nanobot: A Tiny Little Twitterbot Framework
There’s been a lot of talk this year about bots and conversational interfaces becoming an increasingly important tool for software developers. A few years ago I wrote about a twitterbot that I created, and I’ve just pulled out all of the common logic into a Python framework that you can use to quickly create your own twitterbots by focusing on just the bits that make your bot unique.
Check out ‘nanobot’.
Federal Appeals Court Upheld Net Neutrality Rules
The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. decided to keep the rules that require Internet providers to treat all web traffic equally. Internet providers had been challenging the FCC’s determination that phone and cable companies should not throttle or block websites from companies that are not willing to pay extra for a virtual fast lane online. Essentially, it means that high-speed internet should be defined as a utility rather than as a luxury and that no broadband service provider, whether fixed or mobile, should interfere with a consumer or business’ access to a fast, fair, and open internet. The FCC summarizes the rules as follows: