nathan_marz_storm nathan_marz_storm-2014 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
1 nathan marz storm-2014-05-10-Why we in tech must support Lawrence Lessig
Introduction: I'm an entrepreneur and a programmer. I've been fortunate to work in an industry that has seen incredible growth the past 10 years. It's amazing that an entrepreneur can launch services that reach millions of people with very, very small amounts of capital. Startups can compete with established services on a level playing field because the internet does not discriminate between different services. The internet is neutral. This has enabled an explosion of services that has provided massive amounts of value to the entire world. I'm not here to convince you of the importance of net neutrality. This has been done thoroughly here , here , here , and here . Instead I want to talk about a much deeper issue. Losing net neutrality would be extremely harmful to our society and our economy, and it's not hard to see this. And yet, the government seems to have a lot of trouble understanding this. The government could fix this problem instantly by reclassifying the internet from an "informat
2 nathan marz storm-2014-02-24-The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
Introduction: Update: I originally quoted the average price of office space as $36 / square foot / month, where in reality it's per year. So I was accidentally weakening my own argument! The post has been updated to reflect the right number. The "open floor plan" has really taken over tech companies in San Francisco. Offices are organized as huge open spaces with row after row of tables. Employees sit next to each other and each have their own piece of desk space. Now, I don't want to comment on the effectiveness of open floor plans for fields other than my own. But for software development, this is the single best way to sabotage the productivity of your entire engineering team . The problem Programming is a very brain-intensive task. You have to hold all sorts of disparate information in your head at once and synthesize it into extremely precise code. It requires intense amounts of focus. Distractions and interruptions are death to the productivity of a programmer. And an open-floor plan e
3 nathan marz storm-2014-02-12-Interview with "Programmer Magazine"
Introduction: I was recently interviewed for "Programmer Magazine", a Chinese magazine. The interview was published in Chinese, but a lot of people told me they'd like to see the English version of the interview. Due to the Google translation being, ahem, a little iffy, I decided to just publish the original English version on my blog. Hope you enjoy! What drew you to programming and what was the first interesting program you wrote? I started programming when I was 10 years old on my TI-82 graphing calculator. Initially I started programming because I wanted to make games on my calculator – and also because I was bored in math class :D. The first interesting game I made on my calculator was an archery game where you'd shoot arrows at moving targets. You'd get points for hitting more targets or completing all the targets faster. A couple years later I graduated to programming the TI-89 which was a huge upgrade in power. I remember how the TI-82 only let you have 26 variables (for the character