I dare you to stop watching this talk once you started ! John Carmack  (@ID_AA_Carmack) legendary programer of revolutionary genre defining games like Wolfenstein,  Doom and Quake, now CTO of Oculus , delivers captivating talk on how light behaves in real world, and the approximations and compromises that are involved in simulating that behaviour with computers. This lecture was delivered at QuakeCon 2013 (yearly convention held by ZeniMax Media to celebrate and promote the major franchises of id Software and other studios owned by ZeniMax.). QuakeCon has historically had a reputation as the “Woodstock of gaming”, and a week of “peace, love, and rockets!”.  (more…)

Gold Master version rained upon us few weeks ago and we have been through traditional new OS release chaos. Neglecting good night sleep in favour of making our apps behave as expected on buggy new OS. This seemed to have been somewhat more demanding then a year ago, but it might be just me being whiny little b**** and forgetting how demanding it was last year. If you indulge me I’d like to reminiscent for awhile. If memory serves me right it was shocking change. Complete redesign of apps was is order, flat design arrived. iOS 7 was buggy as hell on launch but our apps for the most part carried on working as normal. Worse case was your app looked somewhat old, but if your business was dependent on having app that was stable(as stable as any app on iOS 7.0.0) and performing as before on iOS 7, there was (more…)

Vintage Steve Jobs footage on Apple. This is a rare 22 minute presentation given by Steve Jobs on 1980. This video was gifted to Computer History Museum by Regis McKenna and can be found on their online exhibit about Steve Jobs here: computerhistory.org/atchm/steve-jobs/ (more…)

Plain brilliant talk on fantasising about imagining future of programming in 1974. Bret Victor walks on stage of Dropbox’s DBX conference on July 9, 2013  dressed as stereotype of 60’s || 70’s engineer. He imagines what programming is going to be like in future from perspective of early 70′ engineer. He delivers truly thought provoking talk with surprising conclusion(at least for me ☺️) . If you are in business of moving electrons around, I have no doubts that you are going to love this talk. Slides can be found here. (more…)

I would like to pragmatically consider choosing to start development of new app in Swift right now (iOS 8 beta 3).  App that I actually intent to ship and support. Everybody I know, listen to, read and follow quite sanely suggest to stick with Obj-C for now. “It’s way too early, Swift is way to buggy, syntax is subject to change and incomplete”. And of course I have to agree. If you are indie and working on your bread and butter project, you are going to continue develop in Obj-C . Trusted tool you know inside out and are able to develop effectively. Needless to say your customers don’t care about what language is your app written in. It just does not make business sense right now. Same goes if you are working as project lead or contractor for a start-up. You are going to choose to start a new project in  Obj-C, it is easier and cheaper to hire (more…)

Free online documentary about life of inspiring child prodigy Aaron Swartz who committed suicide at age of 27, after lengthy prosecution by US government. Aaron helped create RSS standard when he was 13 years old.  By the time he was 19 he had made his first million by being one of the founders of reddit.com. Afterwards he got involved in political activism, genuinely wanting to make the world better place. He “hacked” (not really, watch documentary for detailed explanation) to MIT’s JSTOR and downloaded vast number of science journal articles. These articles were in public domain, founded by public money, yet access was limited to universities or those who could afford it. For this “crime” he went through lengthy investigation and prosecution by FBI facing unto 30 years in prison. In the mist of all this he played continued to be involved in political activism. Playing key role in stopping SOPA and PIPA proposed bills. Its hard to overstate importance of stoping those bills. I found watching Aaron’s story shocking and horrifying, to think that we really live in the world where things like this can really happen. Irrationality of laws and motives of prosecutors. Documentary illustrates staggering capacity of our society for ignorance, apathy, the worst of our culture is capable. Aaron is inspiring contrast to all that. Example of what’s admirable about culture. Ability to think rationally, to be engaged, to be critical and not settling for status quo, to protect our freedoms and liberties. World is worse off without him.  (more…)

Vinod Khosla chat with Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin about early days of google as well as it’s future. Apart from other things they also comment on beginings of next economic age where most things are done by automated machines and implication on job market.