rands

An Introduction to You

Hello, New Person. It’s great to meet you. We’ve been waiting awhile for you to come here and now that you’re here, we’re pumped. It’s going to be so much better with you here because we’ve built up impossible expectations in our heads regarding what you can do. Don’t worry – we’re not going to… more

April 7, 2013 10 Comments

Regular Audio Human

I’m a rookie when it comes to listening to music, and chances are, so are you. Like me, you’re just fine using whatever headphones were supplied with your smartphone. You know there are better headphones out there, but you think, “What’s the point? I can hear the music just fine.” You can, but there are… more

March 28, 2013 78 Comments

Titles are Toxic

You have a job and it has a name. A name of convenience. It exists so that when someone asks, “What do you do?” you can simply say, “I am a software engineer” rather than saying, “Well, there are these things called computers and computers run software and humans write software and I am one… more

March 19, 2013 37 Comments

The Long Thought

When I do a talk, I introduce myself as “Rands. That guy who sounds like a fortune cookie on Twitter.” I relay this introduction with a mixture of joy and sadness. For me, the joy arrives when I successfully distill a complex thought down to fit the 140-character restraint of Twitter. These blurbs can easily… more

February 22, 2013 12 Comments

The Process Myth

On the list of ways to generate a guaranteed negative knee-jerk reaction from an engineer, I offer a single word: process. Folks, in order to make sure that we hit our ship date, we have a new bug triage… process. You’ve heard the groans and you’ve seen the rolling eyeballs and made the fair assumption… more

January 1, 2013 19 Comments

Six Years of Rands

I enabled Google Analytics on October 21, 2006, roughly a year after I started using Shaun Inman’s real-time (yet infrequently updated) Mint software. Both packages are part of my daily routine to see what is going on with the site, but I’ve rarely used them for more than understanding the basics: How is this article… more

December 27, 2012 5 Comments

How I Instagram

I remain steadfast in my belief that one of the best examples of the disproportionate value of the iPhone is the fact that we are able to completely ignore the fact that its form factor is horrible to use as a camera. Yes, the internals are amazing, the guts of the camera are terrific, but… more

December 9, 2012 20 Comments

Stables and Volatiles

Stephen was a hired gun at my first start-up. His contract started a year before I arrived, but he was long gone before I walked in the door. The story goes that when Stephen started, he found a small, solid team of five engineers, a QA lead, and a project manager. They were slowly and… more

November 14, 2012 24 Comments

Innovation is a Fight

Apple is eventually doomed. Yes, the most valuable company on the planet will slowly fade into stagnant mediocrity. It will be replaced by something that they will not predict and they will not see coming. This horrifically efficient culling is a fact of life in technology because it is an industry populated by a demographic… more

November 11, 2012 60 Comments

The Elegant Email

For me, the amount of email that arrives is inversely proportionate to my amount of free time. This means the less time I have to read mail, the more mail that arrives. Greater minds than mine have attempted to tackle this unfortunate time management situation, so I’m going to keep it simple. You and I… more

October 14, 2012 30 Comments