Open Kosmaczewski

Many people have asked me why, when I was an employee, I used to change jobs so often. The answer stands in between my own curiosity to take on new challenges, and the various assholes I had to deal with through the ages. Just as an example of this last case, here goes a true [...]

During my flight to WWDC this year I could not really sleep, and the 12 hour flight was the source of memorable tweets that will never make it to Twitter. Because of timing and context, and also because of the inexcusable lack of wifi network in some major airlines. Anyway. I used Pages during the [...]

Every year I’m doing the same post (well, in 2006 I completely forgot to do it) that starts more or less with the same phrase: “every year I like to read at least 6 new tech books, and to learn a new programming language.” Last year’s language was Go, and the books, well, here we [...]

Here’s a simple recipe: Contact the most important people in some field. Sit down and ask a similar set of questions to each one of them. Record all the interviews and then write them down. Publish the resulting book, usually with great reviews (such as this one). This does not constitute, by any means, a [...]

Let’s be frank: it’s not the best time to be an iPhone developer right now. In just one year of existence, the App Store seems to have evolved from the hottest to the lamest status, without any time to breathe in the middle, but with some warning signs every so often. Several iPhone developers have [...]

(Image caption: “A passenger in a plane of Northwest Orient Airlines makes a phone call relayed by radio”) Wonderful uses of the Phone by Richard F. Dempewolff Reaching over a shelf in her kitchen, a housewife pushes a button in a modern device similar to a transistor radio. “One, one, five, seven, five, eight, zero,” [...]

A Cooperative Organization: (…) Gore has been a team-based, flat lattice organization that fosters personal initiative. There are no traditional organizational charts, no chains of command, nor predetermined channels of communication. Instead, we communicate directly with each other and are accountable to fellow members of our multi-disciplined teams. We encourage hands-on innovation, involving those closest [...]

Frederick P. Brooks Jr. has written about prototypes, saying that they are not only useful but strictly fundamental pieces of the overall software process, as in many other engineering activities. He gives the example of a pilot chemical plant, prepared to process 10’000 units per day instead of the 2 million units a day that [...]

Click on the “Applications” item in iTunes, and you’ll see this at the bottom of the screen: Clicking there, you’ll get to the App Store:

In the series of highly boring posts ;) here’s another one; in this case, a simple explanation of two different authentication protocols available in the HTTP standard. HTTP Basic Authentication Protocol This is the simplest HTTP Authentication protocol available: The browser sends a request to a protected resource: GET /index.html The server looks for the [...]