Real Code
Real Technology Approaches
Temperature Swing
· ☕ 1 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
This is a quick post to comment on the wild temperature swing we experienced here today. It was 60f just a little after noon today and is now 31f. We’ve had greater temp swings in a day, for sure, but it’s always a shock when this happens. I’d planned to ride today when I saw that the temps were rising this morning. This change occured so suddenly that it caught me off-guard.
Writing Break & Storyboard
· ☕ 2 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
Before I begin, I’m gonna say that break really isn’t the right word here. I’m not sure whether interruption is any better, but… I haven’t written here for nearly two weeks. My early summer committment to write daily has been ignored and I want to explore why that happened. It snowed and became bitterly cold for part of this period. I’ve grown to really dislike the cold - and snow in particular - as it impacts my mood & motivation level.
Iphone
· ☕ 1 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
originally published on July 07, 2007 I bought an iPhone yesterday, pretty much on impulse. We were at the Apple store (yes, I did go back) buying my boys a couple Minis, and at the anti-cash-register (there is only one - virtually all checkouts are done with mobile terminals that the sales guys carry in their pockets), when I flippantly asked “You don’t have any 8Gb iPhones do you?”
Voice and Platforms
· ☕ 5 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
Is voice a platform, vertical or simply an enabler for whatever is being provided or produced? Yes. It’s all of these. When I began work on Tincup Voice, I had no illusions about creating a general purpose voice-enabled platform like Siri or Alexa. It wasn’t intended as an input or interface for an on-demand task or query system. Not only was I specifically not interested in solving that problem - I was instead narrowly focused on creating an easy to use mobile transcription that generated editable posts - I knew that I’d need a huge amount of capital to realistically compete with existing voice platforms operated by two of the largest (read: deep-pocketed) companies on the planet.
Dad
· ☕ 3 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
After a long illness, my dad died last week. I wasn’t sure that I’d want to write about this, now or ever. The more I talked about him to my family - who didn’t know him well, primarily due to geographical distance and my mom’s aversion to traveling when they were both still healthy, I realized that I was the only one who could or would tell his story.
145mph
· ☕ 2 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
On 12-JUL of this year, I committed to writing & completing my book. I’m happy to announce that it’s available for purchase, just two and a half months later. Buy now on amazon 145 MPH - Stories of Risk-taking, Entrepreneurship & Integrity is my exploration of the nexus of those three qualities. I use stories of events in my life to illustrate & explain how I came to be the person I am, and how my character was shaped by my earliest encounters with adrenaline-fueled behavior.
Investment Ethics
· ☕ 3 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
recorded on iPhone using Tincup Voice in the default Safari browser. This post is about investment ethics. Specifically, what are the dynamics of a very large investment into a rapidly growing company that is positioning itself as the market leader in a lucrative market, especially a new market - one that previously has not existed? I’m gonna focus on WeWork in this post. WeWork has been discussed quite a bit.
Lions and Tigers and Locks Oh My
· ☕ 3 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
I just experienced something that should not have happened, at least not today, in 2019 - the 42nd year of general use of personal computers & the software industry that powers them. As part of my routine tasks, I was preparing to do some online banking. I typically use Safari on my iMac for this work as it gives me nominally better control of password handling. I opened the browser + went to the login page, where I was met with the userid & password form as expected.
The Great Devops Bundling
· ☕ 2 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
There are only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling. - Jim Barksdale Anyone paying attention to the hosted source control market1 has surely noticed that Gitlab has been steadily & with increasing success bundling all the previously disparate pieces of the software development life cycle (SDLC). There’s no better current example of this today than Gitlab, though Hashicorp is close. The loosely-coupled nature of Hashicorp’s tools makes what they’re doing a less than 100% true bundling, but every tool is meant to work seamlessly with the rest of the suite… so it’s pretty close.
The Race to Zero
· ☕ 4 min read · ✍️ John Minnihan
Build systems innovation is a race to zero