I write software 
The law of diminishing returns is such that you sometimes spend an increasing amount of effort for a small incremental gain. Its obverse, that sometimes the first step on the road to awesomeness has a huge effect, can also be true. This post is about how fifteen minutes will save you $1k or more. (Not [...]
Readers know that I’ve been a longtime supporter and have given high praise to my (now former) web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net. I’ve supported them because they do fair usage-based-billing in a market of “unlimited” that’s really limited, because I’m a big fan of their stand against SOPA, on content neutrality, and other matters of libertarian ethics, [...]
The Problem You may be interested in how to wire up or sync CoreData to a remote web service. There are plenty of frameworks to do this, like RestKit, RestfulCoreData, and various defunct libraries (CoreResource, etc.) The problem with these libraries is twofold: They assume things about your backend (like “It’s REST!” or “It has [...]
We do not question assumptions. This is, of course, a tautological statement. But its logical infallibility belies its profoundness. For example, Rondam argues: Underlying the debate about the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the unstated assumption that intellectual property rights have the same legal standing as other property rights. They don’t, and the tacit concession [...]
This is the talk I gave at CocoaCoders about cross-platform logging and analytics. Cross-platform logging and analytics View more presentations from Drew Crawford
People want things to be cheaper and easier and faster than they are. That doesn’t seem very extraordinary, does it? I mean, it’s not really news. In fact, the opposite would be news–if people wanted things harder, slower, or more expensive. You may not even believe it is true. People in fact pay more for [...]
Think for a minute about what you work on. In your work life, in your side projects. What are you going to do this upcoming week that is really, really hard? This is not a rhetorical question–it’s the kind that shouldn’t raise a null reference exception. There should be something. Because you are a good [...]
I have discovered that there are two mental models for computer programs. Software takes one kind of data and turns it into another kind of data. Data is king. I will call this the “black box” mental model. This is the model used by most computer scientists, programmers, and advanced users. Software is pixels on [...]
If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process. The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas. Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD). But [...]
Writing a moderately-trafficked blog, I sometimes get some interesting search queries. Thanks to the awesome folks at Clicky Analytics, I get pretty incredible data on what people are searching for who somehow end up here. Most of these searches are pretty on-topic. If you’re searching for Instruments crashing, for instance, some blog post here is [...]
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