Have you ever used a product of any kind — an app, a device, a plunger — and thought to yourself “Do these people even use their own product?” As a Product Manager at Google and a long-time software product guy, I think this all the time. Sure, Donald Norman, Steve Krug and countless others have written well on the topic of product design, but that’s not enough.

You actually have to use your own products to solve the same problems your target customers are trying to solve.

Google’s Cloud Storage Browser perpetrates a fiction of files and folders that doesn’t exist. The Google Cloud Storage (GCS) API only has two concepts: buckets and objects.

I got an email the other day from an old friend that said he’d met a young developer named Ben and that he was impressed with his “acumen, initiative and hunger to learn,” which made me want to help him if I could. He also said that “his Dad followed your blogs for years,” which made me want to eat right and exercise.

Cloud Source Repositories (CSR) provides support for multiple Git repositories for each project. To log into your CSR repos from within Visual Studio, you’ll need credentials that Visual Studio expects, i.e. a username and password pair. CSR calls these “manually generated credentials” (as opposed to the Google Cloud SDK generated credentials which are the default).

Manually Generated Credentials

I’ve done a bunch of stuff related to Solitaire on my blog for some reason. I guess I’m a fan, although mostly these days I focusing my listening in boring meetings with 2048 or Border Siege (the real reason I have an Android phone).

You’re reading this on the 5th version of my blog.

On Sept. 10, 2015, Winston Kodogo writes:

This blog started as a single static page in 1995 as a set of links to provide to my students while I was teaching at DevelopMentor. I would like to show you a screenshot of that initial page, but as it turns out, the site predates the internet archive, so I can only show you what it looked like in 1998: