Originally published on posts.postlight.com on March 1, 2016. INSIDE: Our second podcast is here and it’s filled with the sound of people talking. It’s the Postlight Newsletter for March 1 — subscribe here.
We did another podcast. Lots of people listened to the first one. That was nice. Some people liked it. Some people had helpful hints, some people had more critical hints. We’ll keep going. All hints are sacred.
- It’s on iTunes (with clean lyrics). Here’s the direct link to the episode.
- Soundcloud works okay now.
- The canonical RSS feed is available.
- There’s an automatically-generated page for it at LibSyn, which is apparently where all the podcasts live.
- We also posted it to LinkedIn but who in God’s name knows what happens when you post things there.
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Oh Lord is the podcast distribution product space riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiipe for disruption.
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In this episode we (Paul Ford and Rich Ziade) fight about Apple a little, regarding the ongoing phone iPhone encryption saga. Rich sides with the government’s right to protect its citizens, and Paul trusts no one on earth and feels we should design our policies accordingly. Both of us are braced for some terrible legislative efforts.
Rich: Does it need to be called the back door? That’s problematic to begin with.
Paul: No, it won’t be called that. It’ll be called the Defending Our Children from Terrorists Technology Infiltration Act…it’s going to be a nightmare — it’s gonna have an acronym.
Rich: Maybe the word “eagle” will be in there.
Paul: EagleChip.
Then, going wayyyy further down the rabbit hole, we discuss former Microsoft exec Steven Sinofsky’s piece on how hard it is to change your digital product, which is called, fittingly, “Why The Heck Can’t We Change Our Product?” Here’s an excerpt (from Sinofsky, not us):
Changing something that people have an emotional connection to is difficult. An emotional connection creates expectations or even norms, and the natural human reaction is to defend the status quo and maintain control. The discussions of change rapidly deteriorate to preference, taste, or argument by analogy, or assertion all of which are very difficult to counter when compared to facts, stopwatches, or physics.
Sinofsky shipped the later versions of Windows, after the Vista implosion. Reading him on product is like hearing, I dunno, Alan Parsons talk about mixing Dark Side of the Moon. This person was there, and managed thousands? Tens of thousands of people? The rest of us are shipping wee little apps with good intentions.
We wrap things up with a question from a listener about whether or not it’s worth learning to code in 2016.
In our opinion this podcast went a little better than the last one in terms of Paul & Rich interaction, but suffered for the lack of Jon Lax. We want to schedule more guests. If you have any ideas let us know.
People who helped with the podcast
Elizabeth Minkel prepared the summary of the podcast. Coordination, research, management: Elizabeth Minkel. Production and editing: Tom Meyers. Podcast logo and design: Matt Quintanilla of Postlight. Studio:Argot Studios.
Ask us questions right now, please!
We love questions about technology, platforms, the history of the web, why things are the way they are, why developers behave in certain ways, things that can go wrong, why it costs so much to build software, which programming language is best, our own hypocrisy, the conflicts of capitalism in a digital network society, the role of law, the delicate interactions between primate behavior and fantastic light-powered playthings, anything like that. Just send an email to paul.ford@postlight.com. It can be anonymous if you want.
Also, and this is pretty random, we’d be glad to mentor people on the podcast. Like, if you want to come on and get mentored, we’ll mentor the shit out of you. And then we’ll call that section MENTORTAINMENT.
Today’s Links
Today’s public data set: Sanger Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer Project (GDSC). Today’s freely available programming book: Open Data Structures (In C++) (PDF). Today’s Creative Commons media link: CarPictures.cc — Thousands of car pictures. Today’s React component:react-captcha — A react.js reCAPTCHA for Google. Today’s JavaScript library: basic-jquery-slider — Simple to use, simple to theme, simple to customise. Today’s North Korean slogan: “Create new legendary stories about sports of heroic Korea in international games!” Today’s variety of religious experience: Neopythagoreanism.
About Postlight
POSTLIGHT is a growing web agency in New York City. We build great things for the web and mobile. Check us out. Thanks!
