A lot of time has been spent discussing how Apple will sell the pending Apple Watch in their retail stores. The Apple Store of today is vastly different from your average retail store — even super-chains like Zales.

Stephen Hackett, who has insider knowledge about Apple Stores, discussed this recently:

I walked in [to a local jewelry store] wearing jeans, a plaid shirt and sneakers but was helped immediately by the staff. The woman who helped me was knowledgeable and helpful, and even though I spent shy of four figures, the level of service was phenomenal. We had a conversation about Merri’s likes and dislikes, and walked through some options together.

He decides:

I don’t think the current version of the Apple Store is going to adjust well to the high-end Watch.

Stephen then doubles down. As a born-and-bred east-coaster, I couldn’t agree more:

The Apple Stores are informal at best, and confusing at worst. We’ve all walked into a busy store just to feel frustrated at trying to grab someone’s attention. Even in stores that have a greeter to help pair customers with sales associates, it’s a far cry from the one-on-one, high-touch experience someone looking to buy jewelry is used to having.

How does Apple reconcile being hip and “with it” while still effectively providing the white glove service to those willing to spend $5000 or more on a watch?

Something occurred to me today that I hadn’t considered previously: what if the Apple Watch is sold in traditional jewelry stores as well? Moreover, what if one store — let’s pick on Zales for argument’s sake — gets an exclusive?

There’s several upsides to this for both Apple and Zales.

According to ifo Apple Store, there’s around 450 Apple Stores around the globe. By comparison, there are 614 Zales stores in the US and Puerto Rico alone. If you expand beyond Zales to Signet’s other brands, there are 1600 stores. Apple could certainly stand to gain that extended reach for a new product that no one is really sure about yet. For one that you really need to try on before you purchase.

Leveraging the experience of a jewelry store salesperson, who is quite literally a professional at walking a customer through the process of trying on a piece of jewelry, is hugely valuable. Furthermore, these salespeople are experts at selling customers on the right piece for them. At navigating between many seemingly disparate choices to settle on the one that is just perfect.

Zales gets to walk away with a win as well. If the Apple Watch is an exclusive, it would allow them to differentiate themselves from a (perceived) higher-end store such as Tiffany’s. Regardless, having the Apple Watch could potentially bring in customers that are both young and willing to spend, but don’t typically think of a jewelry store as the place to part with their disposable income.

These customers are surely the best kind of customer. Impress a young Apple Watch buyer that has deep pockets with great service and they may come back to expand their burgeoning watch collection. Or to purchase a piece for a loved one. Or, perhaps, for that Apple Watch band they weren’t sure they needed but just had to have a couple months later.

Most importantly of all though, I see this sort of partnership as a potentially huge win for Apple. It’s no surprise that Apple needs to prove that it belongs. That the Apple Watch deserves to be held in the same high regard as Omega, Rolex, or Panerai.

What better way to do that then to see an Apple Watch in a jewelry case, in its own special section, right next to the Omegas and the Panerais?

That would be one hell of a clear statement: we belong.

Very recently, former MLB pitcher Curt Schilling congratulated his daughter becoming a pitcher for her college softball team. As any dad would:

Congrats to Gabby Schilling who will pitch for the Salve Regina Seahawks next year!!

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) February 25, 2015

Curt writes:

With that tweet I expected a response. Some congrats for sure, but absolutely the smart ass college kid and likely many of them from RS to reply. And I was not disappointed.

On his site, Curt details some of the deplorable tweets that he received as a result of him being excited for his daughter.

It pains me to say that this, in and of itself, this is nothing unexpected.

His response was.

Curt took it upon himself to doxx several of the jerks who posted those deplorable tweets:

“The Sports Guru”? Ya he’s a DJ named Adam Nagel (DJ is a bit strong since he’s on the air for 1 hour a week) on Brookdale Student Radio at Brookdale Community College. How do you think that place feels about this stud representing their school? You don’t think this isn’t going to be a nice compilation that will show up every single time this idiot is googled the rest of his life? What happens when a potential woman he’s after googles and reads this?

The other clown? He’s VP of the Theta Xi fraternity at Montclair State University. I gotta believe if Theta Xi is cool with a VP of one of their chapters acting like this I’d prefer to have no one I know in it. Also, does anyone attending Montclair State University have a student handbook? If so can you pass it along because I am pretty sure there are about 90 violations in this idiots tweets.

I hope I take these sorts of threats this seriously when Declan is of age.

That being said, I’m sure it won’t be a problem, because Declan isn’t a girl.

Curt summarizes:

The amount of vitriol I’ve heard is not an issue. I am sure I’ll hear more.

But I have to ask, is this even remotely ok? In ANY world? At ANY time?

No. It isn’t.

File this under “how did I not know about this already‽”.

Earlier today, I lamented on Twitter that me having never really learned gdb nor lldb hasn’t served me well when working with the debugger for node.js.

Twitter quickly reasserted its worth, as two people immediately called node-inspector to my attention.

node-inspector, in short, allows you to use Chrome’s JavaScript debugger to debug your Node.js apps. This is the same debugger you may have used to debug your front-end JavaScript.

As I had previously been doing debugging by way of liberal use of console.log(), node-inspector is a revelation. I haven’t felt this free since I switched from writing C++ on the Watcom compiler on DOS to using Visual Studio on Windows.

I expect node-inspector to save me a ton of time in the future.

Your favorite snowman and mine, Dr. Drang, has responded to Brent Simmons’ observation that software engineers don’t really have a code of ethics. Certainly not like traditional professional engineers from old and boring tangible disciplines like civil engineering.

In his post, Dr. Drang makes an observation:

Not that long ago, Daniel [Jalkut] couldn’t be a licensed engineer, because there was no licensure procedure for software engineers, but that changed a couple of years ago. Now there’s a licensing exam for software engineering, although I don’t know how many states currently accept it.

…which he follows with a question:

(I am, by the way, curious what programmers think of the topics covered by the exam.)

I’m a programmer software engineer, and I’m happy to weigh in. But first, a diversion.

When I landed my first job out of college, I was writing software that ran bingo games that masqueraded as slot machines. When I arrived, I immediately realized that despite graduating from a top-10 public undergraduate engineering school, that I had no clue how to write software. We were using crazy things like “source control” and “issue tracking software” that I had never heard of before.

I had to learn quickly. I had to take all the theory that I learned in school and turn it into practical knowledge.

Fast forward a couple years and I’m working for a defense contractor. The firm was, at the time, CMMI Level 3. That means, in short, that we were pretty good at writing software reliably. Our estimates were nearly always on the mark, and our releases were nearly always bug-free.

Here again, I had to learn quickly. I had to learn how to be a good participant in code reviews — both as a presenter and as a contributor. I had to learn what a quality assurance department was, and how they are friends, not foes. I had to learn that, in that environment, waterfall is your friend.

With this knowledge in mind, that brings me back around to Dr. Drang’s question: what do software engineers think of the topics covered by the exam?

I think they make perfect sense, and I like them.

The topics were clearly written from the perspective of someone who takes software engineering seriously. Not the fire-from-the-hip startup world, where failure is an option. Instead, this was clearly written to encourage real, true, software engineering. Development that is predictable and reliable. This is abundantly obvious in the first 10 lines of the topics list:

I. B. Requirements elicitation
I. C. Requirements specification
I. D. Requirements analysis
I. E. Requirements verification
I. F. Requirements management

Perhaps I’m allowing my perspective to be skewed by a career mostly in consulting, but these topics being part of a software engineering exam makes me smile.

The catch about software engineering — about development in general — is that to be a great developer is to be great at the un-sexy stuff. To be a great software engineer is to be great at the entire process of writing software. It begins with defining the problem, and flows all the way through ensuring changes to a deployed system do not break the system:

VI. C. Configuration status accounting
VI. D. Release management and delivery

In this environment where the new and exciting are fetishized so heavily, the reality is that writing code that’s “boring” is actually a good indicator that you’ve done your job well. Having a sign like this, while funny, means we’re probably not doing our jobs right.

Discovered this sign at the W3C headquarters... pic.twitter.com/M9XJ2nW6rW

— James Ward (@_JamesWard) February 11, 2015

Dove ran an ad before the Oscars that I was glad I happened to catch:

The cynical man in me says I shouldn’t be celebrating a commercial. Really, though, I’m just happy to see the message get out.

You are beautiful.

Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch retweeted a couple interesting tweets about the Apple Watch last night:

For fun, I took my Apple Watch models and used SW and some basic assumptions to figure the gold content. 29.16g: pic.twitter.com/WGEnjtj1Yh

— Greg Koenig (@gak_pdx) February 19, 2015

If anyone thinks Apple is charging less than $5k for the Edition, they are smoking crack. Based on the gold content alone, $5k easy

— Greg Koenig (@gak_pdx) February 19, 2015

This corroborates the rumblings I’ve heard about cost.

Not long ago, I remember just having an iPhone could be construed as a status symbol. The Apple Watch will be taking it to a whole new level.

One of the disadvantages of having such smart friends is never knowing when they do great work.

When John writes an amazing OS X review, is it really amazing? Or am I just biased because John is my friend?

Is Overcast actually good? Or do I just really like Marco? Or maybe I just really like orange?

Are the retrospectives Stephen, Federico, and Myke did, for the iPhone and iPad, truly impressive and deserving of our praise? Or do I just find their unique accents so adorable?

I hope and suspect the answer to all of the above questions is “yes”.

When Myke sent me a pre-release version of the new Inquisitive, I was immediately floored. Myke has brought a level of research, discipline, storytelling, and polish to tech podcasting that I haven’t heard before.

Myke is a dear friend. We share a podcast together. I’m predisposed to like everything he touches.

Despite all that, I’m completely confident when I say Inquisitive: Behind the App is good. Really good.

Eschewing his previous interview/profile format, Myke has started Inquisitive anew, taking it in a very different direction. The first series is about making apps in today’s app-obsessed world. There are plenty of interviews in the episode, and perfectly tell the story that Myke is setting up.

It’s a neat and welcome change for me to hear all these voices in one show. As an exclusive listener of one-to-three-host podcasts, Inquisitive sounds so delightfully different to me. As an occasional listener to This American Life, I was very much reminded of that format and editing style. Given This American Life is one of the most popular podcasts on the planet, that’s quite a compliment.

I’m really impressed with the new Inquisitive. Not just because Myke is a friend, but because it’s damned good programming. If you’re a fan of ATP, you should really like it. If you’re not a podcast listener, Inquisitive is a wonderful way to dip your toe in the water. You won’t regret it.

Yesterday The New Yorker released a phenomenal profile of Jony Ive written by Ian Parker. Well worth the very long read, I could quote so many portions of the piece.

These quotes related to cars deeply appealed to my inner gearhead:

[Ive] and Newson are car guys, and they feel disappointed with most modern cars; each summer, they attend the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where vintage sports cars are exhibited and raced in the South of England. “There are some shocking cars on the road,” Ive said. “One person’s car is another person’s scenery.” To his right was a silver sedan with a jutting lower lip. Ive said, quietly, “For example.” As the disgraced car fell behind, I asked Ive to critique its design: “It is baffling, isn’t it? It’s just nothing, isn’t it? It’s just insipid.” He declined to name the model, muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t want to offend.” (Toyota Echo.)

Later:

Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice-president of operations, drives an old Toyota Camry. Ive’s verdict, according to Williams, is “Oh, God.”

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is working on their own electric car:

Apple has several hundred employees working secretly toward creating an Apple-branded electric vehicle, according to people familiar with the matter. They said the project, code-named “Titan,” has an initial design of a vehicle that resembles a minivan, one of these people said.

I’m pretty skeptical. If this does happen, I know who is having the last laugh.

When I first started doing ATP, I wasn’t really prepared for the amount of feedback I’d get. Some of it was funny — who the hell is Casey, anyway? Some of it, though, was really harsh. Some days it feels like everything I say is critiqued or criticized somehow.

It can hurt after a while.

What I have to deal with, though, is not even in the same universe as the hatred that some people face. These people, almost universally women, are ridiculed, ostricised, and even threatened, simply because they are women with opinions.

What Brianna Wu (among many others) has gone through is not only stupefying, but also terrifying. I don’t know how she has the will, the tenacity, and the stamina to continue to fight every day. To continue to fight for something that should already be a given. To continue to fight for her right to be a woman with an opinion.

Take a few minutes out of your day and read her piece at Bustle. It’s well worth your time.