Entries Tagged 'software' ↓

In May, several of us put together SocialDevCamp East at University of Baltimore.  It was an incredible day, filled with deep technical content as well as excellent discussions of business strategy and the very real challenges that east coast companies face breaking into the consumer-facing Internet space.

The day was universally hailed as a success, and maybe even a little bit of a breakthrough: for the first time, the “Amtrak corridor” tech communities had come together to face the challenges of the future together as a unified ecosystem, not just as individuals.  The result was a phenomenal mixing of technical, business, and artistic topics and in my mind, was a glimpse of the future.

So, we’re back at it on November 1st, 2008.  You can sign up on the barcamp wiki or on Facebook.

We’re looking forward to another great event, and another awesome afterparty at Brewer’s Art.  Go ahead and start your juices flowing for what sessions you would like to see, and post them to the Wiki.

We’re also looking for sponsors for both the event and the after party.  To find out more, please contact us.

See you in November in Baltimore!

When we first launched Twittervision in early 2007, Twitter was still a pretty small community of users (around 200,000) and only the press and the digerati were paying much attention to it.

Today, with just over 1M users, Twitter is still pretty small by Internet standards, but a lot of people are paying attention to it.

Our API was designed to allow individual users to use the Twittervision location features. A lot of people are using it. We also had a fair number of people who were using our API as an alternative to the Twitter API and trying to harvest vast amount of data using our free API.

Sadly, this was restricting service to others, so we are making some changes to the API that make this kind of use no longer possible. Those of you using the API for your individual projects or in support of client-side apps will see no changes for now — keep doing what you’re doing.

We do sometimes engage in licensing agreements, however, so if you are interested in licensing our data, please contact me at dave at twittervision.com.

Yesterday I met up with Jeff Pulver to discuss some business ideas, and one of the topics we touched on was, “If you could build any iPhone app, what would it be?”

The new iPhone 3G and the imminent release of the App Store have created an amazing amount of buzz and speculation about what the next generation of mobile apps might be.

While I am unable to comment on any of my iPhone development efforts or the details of the iPhone SDK, I thought it might be interesting to ask here as well, “If you could build any iPhone app, what would it be?”

So, simple as that. What is your ideal “killer app” for iPhone? Write your idea here, and maybe we’ll build it!

I enjoy learning new skills and technologies on my own, and it occurs to me that there isn’t a lot written on the subject.

I’ve been developing this approach for about 20 years and here’s a brief summary of what I find works for me.  It may not work for you, and that’s OK.  But give this a try, refine your own technique, and share what works!

1. Choose a topic/technology outside your comfort zone.  This is self-evident; you can’t expect to learn anything new if you’re working in a sandbox you’ve already mastered.
2. Make time for yourself.  Lots of it.  You can’t expect to dig into a topic deeply if you’re distracted by email, phones, tax deadlines, bills, dinner, family, friends, and bathing.  Seriously, these things have to take a backseat, you’ll come across as a recluse, and people will hate you.  Accept it.
3. Set a goal.  It might be as simple as a “Hello World” or something more complex.  However, it should be something you think you can attain and which will make you happy to see completed.  So, choose something reasonable and within reach.
4. Code until you get stuck.  Keep pushing small, obtainable goals until you get to a point where you are baffled or sleepy.  This is the time to take a nap.
5. Before you take a nap, read something.  Your brain runs threads in the background while you’re sleeping.  Don’t waste that CPU power thinking about Angelina Jolie.  Instead, search for guidance on the thing that’s got you stuck (either with a colleague or online), or read (or re-read) a chapter in a coding book that’s relevant.
6. Sleep until you wake up.  This might be 3 hours, 6 hours or 8 hours; your brain will sleep for as long as it needs to process the information you’re trying to absorb.  NOTE: At this point the thought of having a regular sleep schedule should make you giggle.  You should sleep and code when you feel like it, which likely will not be on any particular schedule.
7. As you fall asleep, meditate on the questions you’re trying to answer.  The intense concentration available to you as you are nearing sleep will enable you to define and isolate the problems at hand, and this will provide a kind of “normalized grist” for your brain as it prepares to do your heavy lifting for you.
8. When you wake up, you will have some answers.  You may not have all the answers yet, but you should have some fresh insights that will enable you to blast past your last impasse (wow).  This should give you some encouragement and allow you to repeat the cycle (3-8) again.

I’m presently employing this technique to learn Objective C and Cocoa Touch for the iPhone, and it’s working great.  This is the sort of thing that society will not allow you to do continuously (unless you’ve evolved a significant number of support mechanisms) but you should be able to get away with it at least some of the time.  It delivers great results for me.

And for those of you to whom I owe emails, bear with me; I will get back to you shortly.