How to write a great error message
This post was originally published on Medium. Imagine being in the office. In your cubicle. You’ve worked long hours this week for an upcoming product introduction. You’re tired and cranky, and you just...
What do you need to make a successful web app?
Here’s some things you need to make a successful web app: * A plan to make an application that helps real people to make their lives easier, solving a well-researched problem * Understand human psychology * Know how to design, both in terms of UX flow and visual design * A marketing plan, to tell potential customers...
Why frameworks don’t have much to do with how easy it is to add a feature
You’re using the hottest and hippest new framework? You generate Node-powered Erlang templates in a crowdsourced Haskell cluster? You run JavaScript on a Ruby VM that uses a Lisp DSL? You stream events to your MVVC like there’s no tomorrow? Whatever you do, in a real business, all of these things are...
Client-side MVC is not a silver bullet
This is an edited repost of a comment of mine on Amy’s blog post about why we shut down Charm. Charm, as it is, is using Backbone.js, Underscore.js and Zepto on the front-end, and Rails 2.3, Postgres, memcached, redis, resque, and for websockets Sinatra, and a few other things. The...
5 rules to sell thousands of copies of your ebook
Wondering what your “hourly rate” is when you go out and write a technical book? Traditionally, publishers will tell you that you do it for “exposure” but we all know that you can die from that. Seriously, even for the publisher it’s a big gamble, and with all the extra costs for printing, marketing,...
script.aculo.us launched!
The Web is changing. The 30-year-old terminal-like technology it was originally is gradually giving way to new ways of doing things. Web apps don’t have to stay behind the current graphical trends in ultra-rich-desktop-applications. And they don’t have to resort to fancy plug-ins that break usability...