Geoff

Paul Graham in his essay Why smart people have bad ideas said that while creating t-shirts for the Y Combinator program they originally considered the phrase “If you can read this, I should be working” but decided to go with the phrase “Make something people want” in the end. Since reading this essay that idea has been stuck in my mind for a while. It played along nicely with what Richard Hamming had to say in his talk at the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series which has been titled You and your research. Hamming says he asked his peers what is the most important area in your field and then asked if they were working in that area. If the person said no he would simply ask why not.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to check “make something people want” off of my list of things to do because i hope i’ll always be working on something useful.

(cross-posted)

I’d been hearing about processing for a while but ever since seeing what Robert Hodgin had managed to do with some of his visualizations I’ve been hooked. Hopefully soon I can make time to sit down with this and put it through its paces.

Anyone else have any cool examples of processing at work?

I ended up starting two of my own in the ruby community. Monkey Test which is a test runner for ruby/rails tests which provides prettier output and flickrb which will eventually be a yet another flickr library for ruby. Sadly Monkey Test is experiencing some issues right now and i need to carve out some time to sit down and iron all of them out. Flickrb is also in a state of disrepair and has yet to see the light of day. Someday soon.