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The power of ten minutes a day

The power of ten minutes a day

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In early 2012, I published Jumping into C++. According to the calendar, I wrote the book between January 2010 and January 2012, but it took me less than 200 hours of work. I know this because for most of the time I worked on the book, I kept careful track of my time spent. Between 1/4/2010 and 9/29/2011 (when I stopped keeping track), I’d worked on the book for almost exactly 156 hours and written over 70,000 words. How, exactly, did I manage to write a book in this short a time? I had one simple rule: I had to work on the book for just ten minutes, every day, no excuses. Ever. The original reason I tracked my time, in fact, was that I wanted to motivate myself by having a streak of day... »

Why I use old hardware

Why I use old hardware

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Recently I was making sure my main laptop is ready for travel1, which mostly just entails syncing up the latest version of my music collection. This laptop is a Thinkpad X200, which turns 11 years old in July and is my main workstation away from home (though I bring a second monitor and an external keyboard for long trips). This laptop is a great piece of hardware. 100% of the hardware is supported by the upstream Linux kernel, including the usual offenders like WiFi and Bluetooth. Niche operating systems like 9front and Minix work great, too. Even coreboot works! It’s durable, user-serviceable, light, and still looks brand new after all of these years. I love all of these things, but there’... »

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A Decade of Remote Work

A Decade of Remote Work

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Looking to learn more? While you’re here, I’m thinking about writing a book on this topic. Sign up here for updates. Intro While still in college (go Broncos!), I teamed up with Alex (@slevenbits) to create a startup. We were young, inexperienced and naive. Our first project was called YippieMail and it was an email aggregator. Simply put, YippieMail could display all your webmail accounts (i.e. Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail etc) in the same web interface (this was before most email providers supported IMAP, so you couldn’t use an email client). Looking back at it, YippieMail was a pretty stupid idea, but it did land us meetings with Sequoia Capital and few other VCs on Sand Hill R... »

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HTML is the Web

HTML is the Web

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What’s the story with Frontend Engineers and HTML these days? I’ve been speaking to quite a few recently who just don’t seem to understand it. I mean, they understand some of it. They understand what a div is and what a span is, and as long as it all looks good and works when they click on it, they’re happy enough. So many that I’ve spoken to have answered questions about HTML with things like “Oh, I do everything in React or Vue these days”. But really, it doesn’t matter if all you write is Javascript, because if you’re making websites then the most important thing you’re making is HTML. HTML is the Web It’s all about what gets consumed by the consumer. It’s the UI and UX. It’s the whole pa... »

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Danny Glasser is typing…

Danny Glasser is typing…

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During my Microsoft career I had the opportunity to work on a number of projects that resulted in patents for which I am listed as an inventor. Setting aside the issues surrounding software patents and patent trolling in general, what pride I possess in any patent attached to my name has almost nothing to do with the patent itself, the filing and granting of which are largely the work of attorneys. The pride comes from utility of the work that spurred the patent application and my personal contributions to that work. I care little about the several patents where I am listed as a co-inventor along with Bill Gates — for example, 8,341,405: Access management in an off-premise environment — desp... »