Before GitHub Copilot, before ChatGPT, there was already a tool quietly writing more code than any human ever could.
Ten billion lines. That's how much code quicktype has generated, by conservative estimates. It was arguably the most prolific code generator on the planet.
What if programming logic wasn't something you read—but something you walked through?
Every time I added a field to my JSON, I had to update two files. Every time I renamed a property, two files. That kind of tedium is what computers were invented for.
It used to take a week to see the simplest design change running on my laptop. I got it down to ten minutes. Here's how.
Issue 134 (August, 2010) of Linux Format magazine contains an interview by Jono Bacon in which I discuss Unity and other related topics. Below are the questions Jono asked me and my responses.
I thought I'd share a fun paper cut from this week's milestone that has seen some interesting developments. The proposed changes (and discussion) have grown larger than paper cut size, but some progress was made (resulting in a PPA for you to try) and you may find the work fascinating like I do. The paper cut in question is "Nautilus file browser toolbar is complicated, needs a face-lift". Check the bug report for the description, which I will summarise here.
One Hundred Paper Cuts is off to a great start. After my last post, many people began adding existing bugs to the project, and filing new bugs as paper cuts. Now we have hundreds of bugs filed, and we will probably have hundreds more by the end of the week, but many of the bugs are not paper cuts. Some people are confused because, although every paper cut is a usability bug, not all usability bugs are paper cuts; also, although we have committed to fixing one hundred paper cuts, when your bug does not qualify as a paper cut, that does not mean we do not think it's a great bug that should be fixed.
What if we could make Ubuntu noticeably better—not through major features, but by fixing one hundred tiny annoyances that users had learned to live with?
For Ubuntu 9.10, the Ayatana Project together with the Canonical Design Team will focus on fixing some of the "paper cuts" affecting user experience within Ubuntu. Here I offer an example of a paper cut and a preliminary definition of the term.
