Day: January 13, 2012

New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

New York City gets a Software Engineering High School:

This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.

[Cool!]

Source: Joel on Software

Drewbot • “Content” Creep

Drewbot • “Content” Creep:

It’s hard to believe a single word could slate an entire industry for failure. On its own, the word “content” is merely awkward. But as a unit of measurement, “content” affects business is real ways. Ignoring the variables audiences care about in order to populate Excel spreadsheets incentivizes weak writing short on substance and attention spans. All this would be tremendously depressing if it wasn’t creating an enormous opportunity for people with the courage to look beyond the numbers, where it’s too messy to measure, and invest in journalism, videos, photography, and art people might actually enjoy.

Source: inessential.com

Sculley on Apple & TV

BBC News – Ex-Apple boss Sculley sets record straight on Jobs:

I think that Apple has revolutionised every other consumer industry, why not television?

I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated.

So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.

[We’ll see… but it does ring true.]