ReadWriteWeb

On Friday, February 3, at the lovely Delancey St. Theater in San Francisco, ReadWriteWeb and our new home company, SAY Media, co-hosted a release party for Adam Lashinsky's new book, Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired - And Secretive - Company Really Works. It was our first joint event since we joined SAY in December. RWW and SAY are working together to figure out the future of media, so a gathering to discuss a book about Apple was a great place to start.

Apple lives at the center of the worldwide technological transformation that's underway, and Lashinsky's new book sheds light on how the enigmatic company works. It profiles Apple's leaders and their various styles and talents, it describes how the organization is woven around them, and it tells the stories of Apple insiders and outsiders at all levels.

The word "bookmark," referring to a saved Web link, is starting to sound old. "Bookmark" has this connotation of turn-of-the-century Web browsers, when there weren't Web-based services for saving things. Your local bookmarks folder was where you kept links you wanted to go back to. These days, we're browsing on multiple devices, and links aren't necessarily "sites," "pages" or "articles" anymore.

Links can point to all kinds of things. Most of the time, we'll probably never need to visit a link again. But there are plenty of links we want to keep, even if it's just to remember them. How do we keep track of saved links? Where do we put them? I talked to Jori Lallo, developer of Grove.io and a link-saving side project called Kippt, to learn about the future of the bookmark.

MMMmmmm. Thanksgiving. The most delicious American holiday. What did you have? Macaroni and cheese? Pumpkin pie? White meat or dark meat? Doesn't matter, because @FAKEGRIMLOCK, a giant robot dinosaur, is sneaking up behind you, and he has very diverse tastes. Tomorrow is NO EAT FRIDAY. Will you survive?

You may recognize that metallic crunching sound from the comments section on ReadWriteWeb or many of the other big blogs, or perhaps out in the wild on Twitter. FAKEGRIMLOCK stomps around the Web, thriving on code, coffee, beer, bacon and the bones of stupid human bloggers and commenters. Mostly out of fear of becoming his NO EAT FRIDAY meal, I sat down with FAKEGRIMLOCK to ask him what he wants. After devouring everyone else at the table, he turned to me and said, "HERE INTERVIEW. OR ELSE."

Max Ogden is a developer living in San Francisco. He's a Code for America fellow and one of the founding developers of Couchappspora, an open source social network built with Apache CouchDB.

This is the second half of our interview. Part one can be found here. In this half we focus on Couchappspora, Ogden's open source social networking project.

Max Ogden is a developer living in San Francisco. He's a Code for America fellow and one of the founding developers of Couchappspora, an open source social network built with Apache CouchDB.

I recently talked to him about his Code for America fellowship, how he got started programming, CouchDB and much more. Tune in next week for part two of the interview.

Maciej Ceglowski created Pinboard in 2009 "partly out of frustration with a redesign of Delicious that I felt removed a lot of utility from the site, and partly because I had long wanted to have a boomarking site that would archive my bookmarks," according to the About page. Since then, the site has become a popular alternative to Delicious and Ceglowski is now able to make a living on it.

Pinboard runs entirely on a traditional LAMP stack, and it runs amazingly fast. We talked with Ceglowski about the Pinboard architecture and his development process.

Right now there are a lot of reports about large companies in the Valley not being able to find the talent they need. There are also a lot of reports about companies bending over backwards financially to retain the people they have.

But what I found working for a large Valley corporate in the last few years is that it is not hard to find talent. The real problem is that companies are not ready for new talent. There is not enough flexibility in them to really embrace change and use creative, innovative and hungry developers to the best of their abilities. Companies want the new and cool, and then they try to force it to function just like the old and rusty. It's like trying to turn a 1980s Honda into a Hybrid with some batteries and duct tape.

Let's face realities here: it's no doubt tempting and cool for many developers to work for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook or Twitter to name but a few. Where it stops being cool is when gifted and courted developers face outdated infrastructures and the attitude of large Valley corporates.

Jeremy Ashkenas is the developer of CoffeeScript, a programming languages that compiles to JavaScript. Imagine JavaScript but with all the whitespace goodness of Python or Ruby.

Ashkenas works for DocumentCloud, a Knight Foundation funded organization, producing several open source projects including backbone.js and Underscore.js. He is a two-time winner of the Apps for America contest for his applications Know Thy Congressman and Quakespotter. He also created Ruby-Processing.

Bitcoin is an open source, peer-to-peer electronic currency created by Satoshi Nakamoto and maintained by a small team of developers. As part of what's turning into an ongoing series on the distributed Web, I talked to contributor Gavin Andresen about how the software works. This is a technical overview. If you're interested in an economic or political look at the software, you can read the Wikipedia entry or Niklas Blanchard's essay on the project.

Today sees our first full interview here at ReadWriteHack, with Richard Clark, a web developer from New Zealand. Richard is a coder who runs a one-man business designing and implementing code, networks and systems for clients at every scale, from tiny silicon valley startups to national corporates and government departments.

He has designed and built web applications for problems as diverse as energy network modeling, social media, stock market tracking, video processing and intelligence analysis.

We caught up with Richard to ask a few questions about his web development career.