The 4 Hour Workweek – Revisited

Some time ago I read Tim Ferris' seminal book 'The 4-Hour Workweek'. It's a bold take at lifestyle design that challenges common misconceptions about what work actually means and how we should live our lives. In this book Ferriss outlines four main steps for an independent, self-determined life: Definition: Self-awareness. What do you truly want in life? What are your real goals? Do you really want to work till you drop in order to become rich just to live up to society's expectations? Elimination: ... Read more

Collaborating with GitHub and Dropbox

Git and GitHub are awesome tools for developers. Version control systems have been used for quite some time and for good reasons. Git, its distributed approach and GitHub's social coding features like pull requests for instance have introduced a whole new dimension to collaborative software development. However, when working with non-coders (e.g. graphic designers) on projects using Git for managing source files like CSS and JavaScript assets that have to be touched by both developers and web designers can prove to be ... Read more

Automatic Updates for WordPress

I'd like to introduce you (or rather the WordPress users amongst you) to one of the lesser known gems for WordPress - the Automatic Updater plugin. This plugin automatically updates your WordPress core installation as well as installed plugins and themes, which is a boon, especially if you have to maintain several WordPress installations. Read more

Numbers: A Mathematics Toolkit For node.js / JavaScript

Numbers is an advanced mathematics toolkit for JavaScript and Node.js developed by Steve Kaliski, @sjkaliski: Numbers provides a comprehensive set of mathematical tools that currently are not offered in JavaScript. These tools include: Basic calculations Calculus Matrix Operations Prime Numbers Statistics Very interesting stuff. Read more

Bauhaus and Web Design

The other day I've read this somewhat older yet still relevant article by Simon Collision: Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design. In a stream of thought kind of way it deals with the main tenets of the Bauhaus school of thought and how those relate to modern and future web design. It draws upon Bauhaus ideas such as "form follows function", simplicity and the unification of art, craft, and technology - most of which seem oddly familiar in the context ... Read more

I Solve Problems

"My Name Is Wolf. I Solve Problems." Both being an entrepreneur and being a developer boil down to this simple statement: "I solve problems." Read more

Sauce Labs – Cross Browser Testing

Cross browser testing is a notoriously cumbersome problem. When developing web applications or websites any decent web developer or designer will try to test her work not only on her local machine, browser and operating system combination but will strive to cover as many reasonable environments that hold a certain market share as possible. Provisioning all those configurations with every possible combination of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer and OSX, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS can cause quite some headaches, not ... Read more

Virtues of a Programmer

"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." - Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st edition), O'Reilly Media Recently, I've come across those remarkable words by Larry Wall, creator of Perl, again. When I first read them many years ago they made quite some impression on me. I think those virtues subsume pretty well what it means to be a good programmer. Besides, I just like Larry Wall's witty, sometimes quirky, way of putting ... Read more

Piano Stairs – A Brilliant Design

How to improve a millenia-old design: Read more

Publishing for tablets – A market ripe for disruption

This week there were two quite intriguing posts on 37signals' Signal vs. Noise blog: Tablets are waiting for their Movable Type Publishers shouldn't be app developers Both posts deal with the shortcomings of magazine and newspaper publishing for tablets like the iPad. Currently, publishing for the iPad and other tablets mostly amounts to magazine publishers writing native apps that wrap their content. Given that magazine publishers usually don't specialize in software development more often than not this entails slow, unstable apps and a generally ... Read more