I maintain a medium-sized open-source project. I welcome bugs and ideas via GitHub’s excellent “Issues” tab. Some Issues are well-written, others are not. Strangely: Issues get resolved fastest are often the shortest – as little as 2 or 3 sentences. Doing it “right” is easier than I expected…
community
30 posts
(background: after 8 years as one of the world’s mid-tier MMO games, City of Heroes (+ City of Villains) is being shut down. The community banded together to ask if they could take over running the world that meant so much to them; NCsoft (the publisher, and a company I […]
In the past, I’ve had terrible advice from brilliant people. The best way to avoid that is to be careful to research the brilliant person and tailor your questions to avoid their weaknesses. Tomorrow I’ll be meeting a bunch of people at Google London’s open day. I started by writing […]
What happens when you get 2 developers working together, sharing their source? What about 10? … or a 100? There was a dream, 20 years ago, that the total would be greater than the sum of the parts. That developers could *re-use* each-other’s code. Sadly, that dream – in 2012 […]
StackOverflow.com has long had one of the worst search-engines I’ve ever seen. It’s clearly a simple thing hacked together. It generally doesn’t work, and most of the people I know use google isntead, and rely upon Google to collage all the stackoverflow results together. Occasionally, you have search terms where […]
Did that get your attention? In the last day or so, I’ve seen a barrage of crap on this topic – much of it ACTIVELY destructive (it’ll make your iPhone apps less successful than if you didn’t do it!). I’m not going to hotlink most of them – they don’t […]
Oh dear, Sheridan’s. Money talks? After winning so much (accidental?) respect in the games industry, for defending against The Wicked Edge of The West, you then had to go and sue developers for using the word “Stick” in the names of their games. Reaction? Well … severe enough that this […]
It’s a bit mean to hilight just one culprit here – this isn’t that rare – but it’s something I’ve been meaning to talk about for ages. Sometimes, bad or broken user-interface has a direct, measureable impact on a business, due to increased customer-support costs (usually CS is paid by […]
With only 250 tickets available, I guess a lot of people in Brighton will be getting one of these today: Dear adam martin TEDxBrighton I’m sorry to inform you that your application to attend TEDxBrighton on 21st January has been unsuccessful. As the first TEDxBrighton event, and offering free tickets, […]
I had a serious customer-support problem with Skype recently, relating to money they’ve taken from me. It’s proved excessively difficult to get a response from them – surprising, considering their size, their brand, and the fact it’s a paid-for service. It raises some interesting questions over Customer Support / Community […]
LinkedIn has unofficially officially removed their “updates” system – you can no longer find out what’s changed in your contacts’ roles, busines, lives, etc. Some idiot at LI corp – who apparently is unaware of the normal consequences of becoming the lowest-common-denominator (i.e. unless you are the market leader on […]
Is there a place to complain that UK government departments are breaking the internet standards and refuse to fix their websites? Occasionally, you find sites that do this. Usually, when you tell the organization, they’re a little embarassed, and rush to fix them. From HMRC, I got a polite, pedantic, […]
(where normaly people might “Be original, then Apologize if you fail”) Just a minor piece of recent DRAMA! DRAMA!, something to cheer up the week… This excellent piece of Advertising / Fun / Augmented Reality / Creativity was – like most big-budget ideas – based on someone else’s idea, someone […]
One great achievement of the web is the huge reduction in barriers to publishing. But the flipside is that we now see extremely low incentives for publishers to keep content “live”. Back when it cost money to publish info, you had good reasons to *keep* your content live once it […]
I got this in my inbox a few days ago, and it’s been forwarded to me by a few people since: (NB: the fact that you still have to login MERELY TO READ THE DAMN FAQ linked from the PR statement is IMHO symptomatic of some of MP’s problems :( […]
I saw an article recently that described this attitude nicely: certain weak marketing executives believe that the purpose of a “conversation” is for them to have more ways of telling the customer what to do; they are seemingly incapable of understanding the idea that a “conversation” involves listening to the […]
Sulka Haro, Sulake Summary The intersection between social and gaming, and where that should be going, instead of where lots of people are obsessing about taking it. (I have more to add here later, but I’ve got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time)
Austin Hill, Akoha Summary Conference organizer introduced this as “during this first talk, think about the platform they’ve made, as much as you do the game; that could be especially interesting for this audience”. I totally support the principles and the ideals. The game looks fun and interesting, and at […]
I just received an “invite” to a pay-for event in London about “smartphone development”: an evening in a bar with a couple of speakers and some networking. So … you can go and listen to an iPhone developer, an ex EA person, and an ex Motorola person, and pay for […]
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22528 “It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens.” (also … If that article is accurate, sad but unsurprising to hear that (apparently) the underpowered […]