Even if you’re technologically savvy, you’re still dealing with these problems — fresh installs of Windows on new laptops, avoiding certain websites because you’ve learned what the dodgy ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know what a spam bot looks like, and so on. It’s not that you’re immune. It’s that you’re instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you, batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications knowing that they want something from you — and I need you to realize that most people are not like you and are actively victimized by the tech ecosystem.

— Never Forgive Them by Edward Zitron

We released another new app: QR Friend.

I was using an older Android phone for a while, without access to Google Lens. That meant I needed to get an app for reading QR codes. But I couldn’t find a decent one on Google Play. They were either outdated, or riddled with ads and unnecessary features. So we built one ourselves.

It is not uncommon, for example, to hear “teachers” make statements such as, “Oh, I taught them that, but they didn’t learn it.” There is no utterance made in the Teachers’ Room more extraordinary than this. From our point of view, it is on the same level as a salesman’s remarking, “I sold it to him, but he didn’t buy it”—which is to say, it makes no sense. It seems to mean that “teaching” is what a “teacher” does, which, in turn, may or may not bear any relationship to what those being “taught” do.

— Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman

Writing code faster or working longer hours is not the fastest way to get a project done because you can only linearly scale up how fast one can program. On the flip side, there’s nonlinear savings that can be had by reducing the amount of work you need to do in the first place. Thus, you should write less code rather than trying to write code faster.

— Software Development is Nonlinear System by Dan Lew

We (Bloco) have done a major update of the Caderno Android app, 12 years after its release. It includes a new icon, a big redesign, and new features like search, backup and dark mode. Plus we’re finally testing revenue models for the app.