Writing

Long-form essays on technology, business, design and human behaviour.
Shorter, rawer notes live on the Journal.

Latest writing

20 Mar 2011Don’t Be Afraid To ChargeCharging money is not something a business should apologise for. Customers pay when a product solves a problem well enough to justify the value it creates.Business
3 min 16 Mar 20112 Obscure PHP FunctionsTwo obscure PHP features—including GOTO—show that even much-maligned and rarely discussed language features can occasionally have surprisingly practical uses.Development
1 min 15 Mar 2011Commenting Codes: Yes or No?Comments should explain decisions and intent, not compensate for confusing code. Clear naming and readable logic are often more valuable than walls of.Development
1 min 15 Mar 2011Start “Smush”-ing Your ImagesLarge images can quietly destroy web performance. Smushing and optimising assets before deployment is an easy habit that makes pages noticeably faster.SEO
1 min 15 Mar 2011So, Is Flash Going Away?Flash was already on borrowed time as HTML5 and modern browsers absorbed more of its capabilities. The real question was how quickly the transition would.Development
1 min 05 Mar 2011Email Validations, the Right WayEmail validation is more complicated than it looks. Overly strict rules can reject perfectly valid addresses, including Gmail aliases that use the plus sign.Development
3 min 26 Feb 2011Social Media is the bane of Civil Marketing?Kenneth Cole’s infamous Cairo tweet shows how quickly opportunistic social marketing can backfire when a brand mistakes a human crisis for a promotional moment.Marketing
3 min 12 Feb 2011Simple PHP Mehod ChainingPHP method chaining makes object-oriented code more concise and expressive by allowing multiple methods to be called cleanly and naturally in a single.Development
3 min 30 Jul 2010Understanding ROISocial media is not free marketing. Measuring ROI means accounting for the people, technology and time invested before deciding what the return is actually.Business
4 min 07 Jul 2010Designed to be AddictiveModern entertainment increasingly copies the emotional pull of earlier hits, cranks up the stimulation and risks becoming the cultural equivalent of junk food.Thoughts
1 min 22 Jun 2010Microsoft spent seven times as much as Apple on R&D over the past four years.Microsoft spent seven times more than Apple on R&D, a useful reminder that throwing more money at a problem does not automatically produce innovation.Thoughts
1 min 08 May 2010Andrew Klavan on How 21st Century Technology Affects CreativityAndrew Klavan reflects on how digital technology is reshaping creativity, the artist’s process and the traditional publishing business. Worth considering.Thoughts
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