Category: Rants

Fiery. Be careful.

‘Tis the season… to not visit websites

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the life of a web developer.

You’d think that people would go on the internet with that shiny new phone/tablet/toaster they got for the holiday season.

Apparently, no one does that. Here’s a look at my latest hits (not the band type, I mean the number of visitors to hathix.com):

hathix visitors graph
As the festive spirit goes up, visits to websites go down.

From what I’ve seen, this seems to be the case with pretty much every website and app: visits or downloads sharply decrease during holiday season. For what it’s worth, things return right back to normal once the new year begins.

Read more...

Why it’s awesome being a developer

Studiofibonacci free icon set of ninjas with weapons
Apparently, these are a bunch of computer programmers.

Ninjas.

That’s what computer programmers are calling themselves nowadays. The profession (if you can even call it that) goes by a litany of none-too-glamorous names, such as developer, programmer, engineer, technician, and more stuff that doesn’t quite make you the most popular guy in the room. Hence, a lot of, er, programmers (for lack of a better word) go by ninja or such. Which I find slightly annoying – you’re writing code, not killing enemies of the emperor. But I digress.

Read more...

A slightly radical proposal for schools

I’ve often been asked the question “If you could be king of the world for a day, what would you do?” First of all, I’d make myself king permanently, but that’s not the point. Here’s my slightly radical proposal that would be the second thing I’d do if I were king for a day.

I’m part of a club that takes out the recycling in our school in the morning. Let me tell you, we collect a lot of paper: if I collect the paper of maybe 15 rooms that haven’t had their paper collected in a few days, I can fill up a whole trash can. Not the small trash cans you have in your house, I mean ones as big as janitors use. That’s a lot.

Read more...

Yet another rant about Bcc:s

I just got an email addressed to no less than 78 people, and all 78 people’s email addresses were in the To field. You’d think the sender would put all our emails in the Bcc field since, well, the recipients don’t really need to know the emails of the other 77 people who got the email. (In its defense, putting all the emails in the To field makes stalking easier, but isn’t that what Facebook’s for?)

I can understand why Cc isn’t that popular: it does the same thing as To, except it carries a different semantic meaning. Most teenagers (and a bunch of adults too) couldn’t care less about the fancy schmancy semantic meaning, so they just use To.

Read more...