Computer Support Blog

The computer programming field looks about as exciting to most people as mowing their lawn with a pair of scissors. We imagine a field dominated by spastic geeks, hovering in lightless rooms over screens full of green Matrix code zooming past their eyes while they somehow magically decipher it. CodeNow is a nonprofit that decided to make computer programming accessible to inner city high-schoolers by making it fun!  Read more »

Good ideas are only executed as viable business endeavors when the founder of a start-up assembles a team that can make that vision become a reality.  Recently, Vivian Rosenthal won a Next Generation Award for being one of the top five female leaders in the tech industry as honored by L’Oreal.  Rosenthal won her award for founding and managing GoldRun, a website that allows users to place images of real world people and objects into a digital setting based on GPS technology.  The ambitious project has allowed users and advertisers to interact in exciting new ways.  Rosenthal’s vision created GoldRun, but people like Tiffany Grace Ng built and maintain it! Read more »

Jargon, words specific to an industry, profession, or setting, tends to pop up with what a layperson might find to be an alarming frequency in articles that pertain to developments within the tech sector.  As a result, readers are bombarded with numbers and terms that many writers simply assume their readers are familiar with: USB, FireWire, Ivy Bridge, etc.  To help demystify the tech sector and make technical jargon more accessible to non-tech readers, we occasionally explore a common jargon term.  Today’s exploration is API. Read more »

Quite a few creative individuals find that the art they love and skills they develop through higher education are not immediately profitable.  As a result, the current generation of would-be playwrights, painters, and photographers have largely turned to the tech sector for income while they develop the craft they are passionate about in their spare time.  As such, they end up as bloggers, digital artists and software engineers while they work in their off-time toward their “big break.”  One such artist who is leading the dual life in the artistic and tech sectors is Michael Kaplan. Read more »

No company, within the tech sector or outside it, is able to handle rapid growth without having an incredible staff in place or hiring individuals who fast become a team that achieves amazing results.  Neither the assembly of a great staff over time or its rapid development happens as an accident; it is the result of great human resources management.  Choosing personnel who will be successful and might make your company successful is a skill that is mastered by individuals who understand people, understand the specific workplace for which they are hiring, and have incredible instincts.  Michelle Lo has a great track record in staffing tech companies for exactly those reasons. Read more »

Computer programmers are essential to the tech sector, which is why many tech companies try to recruit talented programmers right out of college and many tech companies provide their programmers with uncommon perks (the legendary Google cafeteria, for example).  The life of a software programmer can be a series of odd contradictions: long solitary hours of working alone on coding paired with massive collaborative efforts where a single programmer’s work is buried, without credit, within a larger project.  Most programmers seem to accept that as the reality of the job, joining large firms for the job stability and regular paycheck, content with the tradeoff that their names are unlikely ever to be recognized, even in the software programming community.  That, however, is not the path that Thomas Tempelmann took! Read more »

There is something awkward and fascinating about geniuses who peak at a young age.  While most people work for years to accomplish all that they want, many young geniuses achieve early and spend their adult years taking on projects they enjoy, more than working for money.  On the eve of his move out to San Francisco to start Posterous, co-founder Sachin Agarwal declared that he had accomplished everything he had dreamed of.  That’s not bad for a twenty-eight year old!  Now, four years later, Sachin Agarwal continues to redefine social media on the Internet. Read more »

Privacy rights are some of the most contentiously debated human rights.  Most people in the United States and other free societies treat privacy as an innate human right, a position which comes into conflict with the views of other governments, agencies within the United States government, and Constitutional literalists (there is no explicit Freedom of Privacy guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution).  As technology has improved, the debate over privacy rights has only become more divisive.  That debate was what inspired Phil Zimmermann to create Pretty Good Privacy. Read more »

The business of doing online business is more vital and robust than ever. Those businesses that are not yet taking advantage of the Internet as an income channel are rapidly finding themselves at a competitive disadvantage.  But setting up an online business can be difficult, especially for those who are not technically inclined.  Few people understand that as well as Mitchell Harper does. Read more »

GitHub has become the primary website for democratic open source coding. Open source coding, simply put, is the principle that many programmers work under in which they freely give away their programs and source code (basic programming language) to anyone who wants to use it. Open source software is quite common, though you may not know a program is open source if you are user, as opposed to a programmer.  The Android operating system is a well-known open source program. Google allows programmers to access the root code and write new programs for Android, which makes it open source.  By contrast, programmers who want to write applications for Windows must to access the source code and sign a contract for the right to use the proprietary code.

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