• You see it as a right.
• You think people should be grateful.
• You think of it as a burden.
• You think you are owed.
• You expect to be recognized.

Leading is not for everyone, and that’s fine. Not everyone should be leading, especially if they only want to advance their careers. I believe that leading is a vocation parallel to being an individual contributor. It doesn’t make one role “better” or “worse.” They are just different and equally important. Hence I believe that just because you choose a leadership role shouldn’t mean you are to be paid more than an individual contributor.

Leadership and individual contributors’ roles need to be financially comparable. They should be based on the impact on the overall team and company and not because of the role.

When leading, I am grateful for those that grant me the privilege to lead them. I know that that privilege can be withdrawn at any time. I’ve made more mistakes while leading than those listed above, but I strive to do my best to continue growing so that I can enable others to do the same.

It would be great if Apple added a way for users to have more options for deleting the following data, either manually(selectively) or automatically from their browsers:

1. Web browsing history: After a certain amount of time has passed. [Yes, insert joke here].
2. Cookies and other data that websites store.

One workaround available today for deleting selective browser history more easily is to delete said data via Safari on macOS if you have the same iCloud account on both devices.

Web browser history is easy to select by date and delete all at once. On iOS, you can only do all via the Settings app or one by one. The Safari history on iOS could add an option to the context menu that deletes “all newer” or “older than” links from the selected one. Here where that could be added here.

Cookies could have two additional options with different potential benefits:

1. Deleting based on the date websites were browsed; or
2. Deleting based on the time since the user’s last visit to said website.
3. Deleting all cookies upon closing a tab.

On macOS, the website cookies and data are not organized by date but in alphabetical order. Which makes selectively deleting items a cumbersome job. Every few months, I periodically delete; all-knowing, I’ll need to log in to a bunch of websites I use regularly. It’s not great, but it works.

Just having better options to do this manually would be a huge win, even if not automatic, since auto-deleting stuff for the user can probably bring tons of unforeseen issues.

Something else I wouldn’t mind managing more easily is past Wi-Fi networks.

[…] few eBooks offer any advantage in use over their physical equivalents. eBook readers are still incredibly primitive, and won’t even let you refer to two or more sections of the book at the same time. You can’t photocopy them, copy quotations, or do anything remotely advantageous. What should have been a liberation from the printed page turns out to be the imposition of more restrictive rules.

Jason Snell:

I prefer to read on it than to read on an iPad or iPhone, which is why I keep buying Kindles even though I could definitely read on an iOS device without any trouble. The reflective E-Ink screen is more pleasant for long reading sessions, and the fact that my Kindle isn’t full of push notifications and Twitter apps helps it be a distraction-free reading environment.

[…]

Amazon’s approach to Kindle software updates has been erratic at best and absent at worst, and he’s right that using a Kindle “feels like trudging through soft sand.” The interface is inelegant and in so many ways unchanged from its original release in 2007, just months after the iPhone arrived on the scene. Typography on the Kindle is still mediocre, despite minor advances like support for custom fonts and (in limited cases) the elimination of force-justified text. Even support for library borrowing is hidden, because Amazon really wants you to buy books.
It’s the lack of a proper app story that stings the most, I think. I’d love a version of the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Athletic for my Kindle—the real apps, with the ability to read the latest stories. I know that my E-Ink Kindle screen isn’t going to give me vibrant color or animation, but it could certainly show me the text, which is what the Kindle excels at.

Andrew Albanese writing for Publisher’s Weekly(via DaringFireball):

Under Macmillan’s new policy, which is scheduled to go into effect on November 1, public libraries are allowed to license a usinge discounted, perpetual access e-book for the first eight weeks after a book’s publication. After eight weeks, libraries can purchase multiple two-year licenses at the regular price (roughly $60 for new works). Librarians, however, say that not being allowed to license multiple copies upon publication unfairly punishes digital readers, and will only serve to frustrate users and will hurt the ability of the library to serve their community, especially if other publishers follow suit.

“Libraries are prepared to pay a fair price for fair services; in fact, over the past ten years, libraries have spent over $40 billion acquiring content,” the ALA report reads. “But abuse of their market position by dominant actors in digital markets is impeding essential library activities that are necessary to ensure that all Americans have access to information, both today and for posterity. If these abuses go unchecked, America’s competitiveness and our cultural heritage as a nation are at risk.”

It will affect your deadlines today or sometime down the road. The difference is that today, it’s your choice to make.

Thinking that you get away with this is just naive. It just can’t happen. Not unless you give up on the project or decide to rewrite the whole project, which is an entirely different problem.

Balancing the feature and fixes needed with the necessary cleanup work is difficult. It’s hard. You are not alone in having to make these choices. Making those calls is hard, whether you are the developer, internal or external client, product owner, or even an end-user. The work is needed. Sooner or later, it will become inevitable, and the choice won’t be yours.

There aren’t many options other than just “doing it.” Just as it’s not wise to argue the existence of gravity, you can debate whether it exists. If you try to debate this, you will have the wrong time.

It’s been proven repeatedly that all the money in the world can’t get you off the hook. There are enough examples to go around.

What makes you think you can get away with it? Is it hubris or inexperience, or do you get an adrenaline rush from living on the edge? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you should figure out a way to do it sooner rather than later and make communication front and center since your team, clients, or users need to understand and give you the necessary support.

That has worked fine until now since Google just released the .dev TDL.

It might be time to switch that to a different local TDL; otherwise, your local setting could potentially override an actual functioning app or website with your local configuration.

Granted, it is unlikely to happen unless your website uses the .dev extension, yet, conventions are an important part of a healthy development environment.

With an increasing list of TDLs, the best option might be to start using .development or .local until those get snapped up.

Two-factor authentication is an additional layer of security designed to ensure that you’re the only person who can access your account, even if someone knows your password. This significantly improves the security of your Apple ID and helps protect the photos, documents, and other data you store with Apple. For more information read Two-Factor Authentication for Apple ID.

If you didn’t enable two-factor authentication and believe someone else has access to your account, you can return to your previous security settings . This link and your Apple ID security questions will expire on February 27, 2019.

If you are like me and have a main personal account for all your Apple ID-related stuff and a separate one for your work email or developer account, you are probably trying to figure out what to do if said account isn’t permanently registered on any of the devices you use.

Here’s the simple workaround:

1. Set up a new user account on your Mac
2. Login into your iCloud account tied to the developer account under the new macOS user.
3. Activate two-factor authentication and add your preferred phone number s a backup.
4. Verify you can login into your account via another device or via browser at appleid.apple.com.
5. Log out of iCloud account on the temp macOS user and switch back to your primary macOS user.
6. Delete the temp account; now, you should be able to use the 2fa via the phone validation every time.

Hopefully, Apple will soon allow dual Work/Personal accounts within a single device or iOS 13 and/or macOS 10.15. Until then, this workaround should help.

Wearables represent the first step of a revolution that gets us closer to being hyper-informed, not only on what’s happening in our digital world but, more importantly, what’s happening in the physical world. How we interact with both will change thanks to readily available wearables and increasingly connected devices.

As Ben Thompson wrote a few months back:

To fully interact with this sort of software-enabled environment, I will of course need some way to identify myself; for all the benefits of the human body, projecting a unique digital signature is not one of them. The smartphone clearly works, but it’s not perfect: the more you need it for interacting with your environment, the more noticeable is the small annoyance of retrieving it from your pocket or handbag.

 A wearable is different, particularly if it’s on your wrist: simply raising your arm is trivial. This makes it much more likely you will actually interact in a meaningful way with software-enabled objects around you, which makes even having said objects much more likely. To put it another way, I don’t think it’s an accident that the two hot new technologies are wearables and the Internet of Things; they are related such that each is made better by the other.

Being able to pay without pulling out my wallet or the option to scan my boarding pass with a watch is only the beginning of the bridge between us and the physical world around us. Many of these things were possible via smartphones, but we can now accomplish them without going out of our way. To some extent, we are seeing the first steps of a wearable revolution, similar to but more impactful than the smartphone one. Using technology to augment oneself with the world won’t be confined to people’s phones. This means that we now have an opportunity to create entirely new applications to solve inefficiencies that weren’t possible before.

In hindsight, Apple and Google have been laying the groundwork over the past few years with technology such as iBeacons (built on top of something as widespread as Bluetooth), indoor mapping, personal identity, Apple Pay, and the Internet of Things. When you bring these together, the possibilities for personalized physical interactions on a massive scale are endless.

Brands should take note. If smartphones can alter consumer behavior buried in our pockets, wearables will accomplish even more. I wrote more on this in the Koombea blog.

In plain sight, this strategy seems to work for several companies whose founders merely wanted to solve an annoyance they had. It’s easy to assume that that’s all they did to validate their idea, but it’s probably not the whole story. Hence, many people use this thought process to skip what could be considered uncomfortable and redundant: talking to others about their problems and making sure they feel the same pain points you do.

People that build stuff aren’t “normal” because they’re usually power users. Whatever solution is in the market for a particular problem is probably not good enough for us for many reasons. So, we revert to going out of our way and building a new product outright in the hopes that other people will find it valuable as we did. Why wouldn’t they, right?

Here’s where things go sideways: by not validating correctly, we build a more complex product than people need. More importantly, we’re blind to see the workarounds people use to solve the problem we’re solving. Their workaround is usually good enough for them not to need our super sleek, elegant app.

While doing potential customer interviews, it’s important to find out if the problem is significant enough to get people excited by a brand-new solution. If your results are ambiguous, or they don’t care, you’re probably not hitting the right notes. When this happens, stop! It’s a slippery slope from there.

I’ve fallen into this trap before, and without realizing it, I’ve been blinded by the lure of finding the best solution possible when, in reality, nobody cares about it at all. It’s hard to escape this habit, but we’ll need to drop it to build products that can grow considerably. Simple apps should be easy to use, but, more importantly, your users should be able to explain what it does to others without much difficulty.

There are dozens of examples of power users who have created simple yet powerful products with massive adoption.

“Enterprise-grade” used to mean something for corporate IT buyers, who get warm fuzzy feelings from buying software built with security, traceability, and compatibility in mind. The old saying goes: “Nobody got fired for buying IBM.” First and foremost, IT buyers are buying peace of mind since it’s their job; thus, they have set strict features that the vendors must comply with.

The battle for IT mind share will move elsewhere as the so-called “enterprise features” become standard for most SaaS products. It could be argued that corporate buyers will increasingly evaluate products based on their overall UI/UX and mobile capabilities. Companies like Box, Jive, and RelateIQ have a good head start.

The BYOD trend will curve the demand towards better and more usable software in the enterprise. People have seen the difference in what great software can do, and more will want better and more accessible tools to use at work, just like what they have at home.

“Consumer-Grade” software will take on a new meaning. This is the intersection where IT gets their feature checklist (to cover their butts), and end users work the way they like: with easy-to-use, beautifully designed web, mobile, and tablet applications that work. This is not a trade-off where we’re sacrificing “power” features for usability. It results from rising incumbents in the enterprise software space finding their competitive edge by embracing what’s already standard in consumer products. The 800 lb. gorillas will have to adapt, or they will become obsolete very fast.

Aspiring entrepreneurs have an incredible opportunity to take advantage of this shift in buying behaviors and disrupt companies that lack innovation in these critical areas. As more enterprises go SaaS, they’ll look towards changing some of their legacy vendors with new, mobile, and consumer-friendly offerings. As a result, startups have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do what big companies have a hard time: innovate.

Robert Scobles’s vision of Android tablet future is of single app devices for business and institutions. Apart from the low margins the device manufacturer earns(if they’re lucky), who else gets to win here?

Do developers get to sell dozens of apps? Does Google make any money?

Nope.

Then how is this sustainable?

Why go back to the silly notion that market share is everything. It has to be the right market share: People or business who buy apps. Dozens of apps. No just a large installed base that is virtually useless to the developer ecosystem.

Brad Feld:

Often these entrepreneurs think their idea is brand new – that no one has ever thought of it before. Other times they ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect their idea. Occasionally the emails mysteriously allude to the idea without really saying what it is. These entrepreneurs think their idea is special and magic. And they are wrong. The great entrepreneurs are already focused on the implementation of their idea. They send me links to their website or software. They describe the business they are in the process of creating (or have already created). They point me to what they’ve done to implement their idea and show real users who validate that the idea is important. And they quickly move past the idea to the execution of the idea.

As part of working with entrepreneurs, I see this all the time. People that don’t share their idea freely usually have never built anything before, and thus don’t know how hard it is to build and scale a unique product that pay love or pay for(which ends up being the same depending on you’re market) .

Here’s Google full use of it’s infrastracture to blast past competitors.

Ben Kuchera from ArsTecnica:

In the first few moments of Duke Nukem Forever, your character pees in a urinal and then earns an achievement for reaching into a toilet and extracting a piece of human excrement. Why does the game reward you for doing this? I have no idea. It’s not part of a joke or important to the story; the designers of the game apparently feel that you would miss out by not holding some poo in your virtual hand.

Software(or video game development) is not like wine. Don’t forget to release early and often. This fiasco could have easily been avoided.

The Economist:

But [Apple] has a powerful organising idea: take the latest technology, package it in a simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium price.

I think Apple applies this principle very effectively, but completely disagree it charges a premium. iPhones, iPads and Macs compete on features and price with their competitor’s products.

Robert X. Cringely on iCloud:

The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

I really don’t pay attention to what Cringle usually says, but this time he’s kind of right. Apple really dosen’t have much to loose if the PC becomes just another device with iCloud. Microsoft does.

The mobile revolution is about data, not files. Until iCloud is released, all data in mobile apps rest in silos, unlike desktop apps. iCloud frees that data and makes it available to other devices in the ecosystem. It’s the bold move and it’s worth it for whoever controls it.

For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

Our plans to support modern browsers across Google Apps - Docs Blog

As we’ve said a few times in the past, the only way to decrease piracy is to compete with it and offer products that are superior to its pirated counterpart.

It appears that for (older) movies Netflix is on the right path here.

Now that there’s proof, how do we get studios on board on releasing movies to Netflix, iTunes and Amazon at the same time as their DVD counterparts? It’s all about convenience and sadly right now pirating is so much easier than having to wait for a just released movie to arrive via snail mail.

Twitter and Facebook are great for organizing a revolution. Blogs are for explaining why we need one.

After reading Freakonomics 2, my respect for Paul Allen and his team skyrocketed as they try to solve big problems like hurricanes, global warming and malaria(with mosquito killing laser beam-not a joke). But now, in my eyes, he’s just a plain old patent troll(like the one near his office).

Does HP genuinely want 3PAR or do they just want Dell to spend as much money on it as they can trying to buy it? When I saw Dell had upped the bid this morning, I thought it had been a brilliant move on HP’s part, by forcing Dell to pay more. Now I am not sure what their real intentions are. Maybe they really need this company to compliment their services, or they just don’t want to loose against Dell in any front. No matter how this pans out, there’s going to be some very happy investors on 3PAR’s side.

Gust Avrakotos:

There’s a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse… and everybody in the village says, “how wonderful. The boy got a horse” And the Zen master says, “we’ll see.” Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, “How terrible.” And the Zen master says, “We’ll see.” Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight… except the boy can’t cause his legs all messed up. and everybody in the village says, “How wonderful.”

Charlie Wilson:

Now the Zen master says, “We’ll see.”

I just started a new blog on Tumblr where I plan to focus on writing more insightfull article about startups, business and tech. How wonderful you say?

We’ll see.