Hacking is Important. Back in the early 90s, Borland International was the place to be an engineer.
Coming off the purchase of Ashton-Tate, Borland was the third largest software company, but, more importantly, it was a legitimate competitor to Microsoft. Philippe Kahn, the CEO at the time, was fond of motorcycles, saxophones, and brash statements at all-hands meetings: “We’re barbarians, not bureaucrats!” At the time, Kahn was not only navigating the integration of Ashton-Tate, he was in the midst of moving the product suite from DOS to Windows. All the products were complete object-oriented rewrites and they were running late.
Years late. . … Kahn was reading a dense history of Central Asia a few years ago when it struck him that many of the nomadic tribes of the steppes were actually far more ethical and disciplined than the European “civilizations” they were confronting.They were austere and ambitious, eager for victory but not given to celebrating it. Kahn’s thinking regarding “barbarians” was prescient. The Hacker Way. BugHub. Creating Effective Landing Pages. Imagine you walked into a car dealership to look at a brand new Hyundai.
You’ve wondered if they have the leg room you need. You approach a sales rep and ask if the Hyundai Sonatas have adequate leg room for a big galoot like yourself. The salesperson nods and says that they are surprisingly roomy and then shrugs and walks away. I imagine you’d feel a bit confused. Our image of car salespeople is that of the consummate closer. You walked into the dealership to find information. While that situation seems absurd in the context of a car dealership, it is surprising how many business people aren’t bothered that their website is doing that every day.
When a visitor comes to your website the very first page they land on is the “landing page.” In this article series, we are going to analyze: What makes a great landing page? Minefold. Ah, Push It. The Push Music Behind 19 Startups. Lately we’ve found ourselves pushing a lot of code here at News.me, which of course, means we’ve been listening to a lot of push music.
For those “normals” reading this blog post (how did you find us and what do you want???) , push music is a song or video played at the moment when new code is pushed to production. It’s a moment of celebration that is usually accompanied by someone saying: Fuck it. Ship it. Push music is one of those things that all internet startups have in common (also on that list is beer, coffee, and challenges finding engineers). News.me’s push music of choice, which we share with Venmo, is a little out of the ordinary. Here’s what they had to say: Sean Cook informs us that “in the good ‘ole days” the mobile team at Twitter enjoyed the uplifting theme from ‘Miami Vice’ or Kid CuDi’s ‘Simple As.’
Derek Gottfrid, CTO and VP of Product at Tumblr favors ‘You Dropped A Bomb On Me,’ by The Gap Band. OnSwipe CEO Jason Baptiste is also a fan of electronic music. Brewtarget: open source homebrewing. Gesturecons - Icons For Multi-Touch Interfaces. The Elements of a Clean Web Design. Clean, simple web designs have become a popular trend.
This article will cover the subject through a two-part discussion. First, we’ll talk about a few traits that clean designs tend to have in common. Secondly, I’ll share some tricks and techniques that can be helpful when trying to achieve a clean design. Common Traits of a Clean Web Design Let’s start by looking at some fundamental characteristics of clean web designs. Solid Web Page Layout Structure If you take a few minutes to browse sites that might fall into the "clean" category, I’d be willing to bet they all have one thing in common: a well-thought-out grid that the designer is really putting to work. For anyone not familiar with designing with a grid, just imagine that each comp starts with an invisible structure of columns and rows, and that structure drives the scale and placement of the elements in the composition.
Pixel Dreams is designed in a grid using the popular 960 Grid System. Good Typography.