When it comes being great at what you do in life, there’s no real formula. Some people have that natural talent for something, and others just love it enough to dedicate the time to get better at it. Regardless of how you ended up where you are, there is always room for improvement. I’m going to talk about some of the things that have helped me along the way become better at what I do: write kickass software. Realistically, you can substitute “S…

There are lots of tiny little fails out there. Here are some that I’ve found. The Digg iPhone app The Digg app came out for the iPhone to much fanfare but I wasn’t originally a fan. First off, you can only really use the app if you have a regular Digg account. If you have a straight Facebook account like I did, there is no way to login. FAIL. If you’re going to release an app to let your users use your product, don’t alienate some of them becaus…

I had a conversation with Loren Segal a couple weeks ago about email. He made a comment about Google Buzz mentioning that he has never used Gmail, and our conversation ensued. My first email address was with Hotmail, as I’m sure a lot of people’s was. Then I moved to Gmail proper and was hooked. I wondered why anybody would use any other email system. I had a few university emails (ualberta, cs.ualberta, ece.ualberta), but I also started up an o…