Lifehack your way to happiness
Posted on Friday, December 16, 2005
at 1:32 PM
(permalink)
The term "lifehack" caught my eye today, as it appeared in several posts. The meaning should be self-evident, but it is the word's use that I find so interesting. As it implies, a lifehack is a conscious change one would make in one's behavior in order to find greater fulfillment. It isn't the New Age flavor that appeals to me, but the use of "hack" in a positive sense. It shows that the public is once again finding programming and its lingo cool, an important change since the revulsion felt right after the dot-com crash. Check out the number of books with the word hack in the title. Everyone wants to be a hacker again.
Web 2.0 programmers wanted
Posted on Wednesday, December 14, 2005
at 10:30 AM
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A defining characteristic of Web 2.0 is that it is designed by programmers for programmers, where Web 1.0 was designed by media people and merchandisers for consumers. I know that there is a lot of talk about Web 2.0 being for "the people," but those people are supergeeks. In this first phase of Web 2.0 we are seeing the rapid proposal and adoption of "standards." When the dust settles in a couple of years, we'll have one leading standard and a minority, counter-standard in each area, as always. In the meantime, a lot of programmers are going to get hired to write a lot of new code based on these standards, and that is a good thing. Not just for programmers, but for users, since most of these things will be free. The WSJ (behind a paid subscription) today had a slightly confused article about the proliferation of programming languages, with references to both Ruby on Rails and Ajax. The important point is that the reporter and his editors recognized that programming as a cool activity is rising again in the zeitgeist.
