Tag: software

I don’t want your fucking app

i give the “app” model 1-2 years. single purpose, shitty apps that really only just wrap a web view clogging up your phone. some genius added “folders” but that buys you only so many additional apps per phone before the cognitive load is too much. things are already quite broken, with 50% of apps being used a grand total of 5x or less.

Against bespoke software

most businesses are deluding themselves thinking they are unique snowflakes, commission crappy “bespoke” applications, and then wonder why nothing works. they’d be better served by general purpose tools like google docs: they’d not be locked in, and their employees would gain generalizable skills, not be trained monkeys that only know how to press buttons.

Networking Principles

Communications is not an easy science. The math is heavy, and intuition is slow to develop. To complicate things further, the field does not stay put. New concepts are always coming to the fore.

This website offers tutorials I have written on various topics in analog and digital communications that will help you cut through this complexity. I keep adding to this collection, albeit very slowly.

Our field represents a pinnacle of human achievement in applied mathematics. During our engineering education, most of us don’t develop the intuitive understanding of these beautiful ideas. I have tried to make these tutorials as simple as is possible given all the math required. I hope I have been successful in taking you closer to the “aha” mome

Great gov IT raises GDP

There’s a new digital divide in this country, and instead of it being between the rich and the poor, it’s between the government and the people that it represents. The pace of technology increases exponentially, and with too much friction on how the government buys things, that gap will continue to exponentially widen.

This is a bad thing because people’s expectations of service directly correlate to the amount of technology available to them. Today, my parents are vacationing in Croatia, and just 5 years ago, I wouldn’t have expected to get any word from them until they return in a few weeks. Today, I get messages from them on a regular basis throughout their trip. My expectations have changed.

And with government it’s the same thing. 10 years ago, when I started on the Dean campaign, there were no meet ups, there were no video conferences, there were no SMS campaigns, there was no iPhone, twitter, myspace or Facebook. Friendster was just getting off the ground.

But today our expectations have changed. And government needs to shift in order to accommodate those expectations, at a cost that’s within the same order of magnitude that we pay.

So please pass this along, if you care about the effectiveness of the services your government delivers to you, or if you care about small, efficient government, this should be an issue for you.

A country will only be as competitive as their gov it Infrastructure. World class it would save 100s of billions a year and would likely show up in GDP growth too.