Slow Productivity: some book notes

1 American authors sometimes forget for many people the dream is to emigrate to somewhere like America. This is a very different kind of ambition from being “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”. 2 Do we have to be very “successful” in the first place? In the sense of being better by a significant than others on some objective measure? Surely not, even though that is the inevitable premise of self-help....

April 27, 2024

Ask Your Developer

Ask Your Developer is Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson’s advice to Businesses looking to survive and prosper in the digital age. In short, Jeff argues that: (1) Businesses need to embrace technology (esp. web technology) to compete; (2) Rather than buying them ready-made (e.g. from a consultancy), businesses do better by buying “software parts” and assemble a custom solution. For example, Twilio excels at providing tools for integrating mobile phone text-messaging to software programmes; Cloudfare specialises in protection from DDOS attacks....

April 1, 2024

Can someone tinker her way into programming in the 2020s?

My answer is no. The attention economy has closed off a route that was available as recently as a decade ago. Background: I came across an unusually patient and helpful answer by adsy on StackOverflow, which led me to this article. After reading it, it struck me that the way people first experience computers and programming has transformed in the last 20 years. adsy got into programming the early 2000s. The dot-com bubble had burst....

March 23, 2024

Installing Jekyll on a Mac in March 2024

Why I wanted to run Jekyll on my Mac to see changes locally. Process Follow the quickstart guide on official Jekyll website Problem 1: gem install jekyll received no output. Solution: terminal helpfully warned that. You don’t have /Users/username/.gem/ruby/2.6.0/bin in your PATH, gem executables will not run. Problem 2: find the PATH Solution: (a) echo @$PATH``, (b) edit .bash_profile``` Problem 3: still no Jekyll Use the which command to find out why Jekyll isn’t recognised...

March 23, 2024

Setting up the blog

This website was set up by following this helpful tutorial.

March 21, 2024