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ACS Europe 2024

This summer, I had the pleasure of being invited to speak on a panel at ACS Europe, which is a global conference for the access control industry. The conference was held at Google’s facility in Zürich, Switzerland. The entire event was invigorating and exciting as competitors and partners alike all met and discussed the industry and where we see it headed. I was thrilled to represent Silverpine…

Tools for a Distributed Software Agency - 2023

It’s time for my annual reflection on the tools that we use to power Silverpine. I’ve been posting these for the past few years and it’s always an interesting activity to see how things change over time. You can see old posts here: 2020 2021 2022 Overall, we have continued to consolidate our tools, which is good from a financial perspective. One notable tool that fell from the list this year…

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Evergreen.ink

I’m super excited to announce the public beta period for Evergreen.ink, our interactive fiction authoring tool. If you already are familiar with interactive fiction and/or Evergreen.ink, feel free to just head on over and start creating! If you want to know more, read on! Interactive fiction is content that falls somewhere between a game and a story. It reads like a novel, but the reader gets to…

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The End

Today, my youngest will attend school for the final day. For fifteen years, we have woken them, dressed them, fed them, and helped them get out the door. After today, we are done. The bittersweet is overwhelming me.

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For Sarah, Rachel and April

Twenty five years ago, I was celebrating my 21st birthday with my college roommates. However, I received a call from my dad that abruptly ended the celebration. My cousin and her three young daughters had been murdered by their father; one of them in the arms of her grandmother who was trying to protect her. He had purchased a gun in Seattle and then drove down to Oregon and shot them in their…

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A Holiday Branding Exercise

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Silverpine - The First Decade

Silverpine – The First Decade

It was 10 years ago this month that Silverpine was founded. Neither Ryan nor I had a plan when we set out. All we knew was that we wanted to build iOS and Android apps for other companies. We had been creating applications for small form factor devices for a long time, and we knew we could use that to help others — the “app revolution” was underway, and we wanted to be a part of it. In the early…

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AirAware!

Ever since the incredibly awful fires/smoke that we encountered in Portland in September of 2020, I’ve been thinking a lot about the environment on a very local level. I fully admit that I was caught off-guard by my first climate related emergency, and I learned quite a bit about air quality terms like AQI. I also discovered some of the various monitoring networks with publicly available data,…

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Tools for a Distributed Software Agency - 2021

Tools for a Distributed Software Agency – 2021

Last year, I posted an overview of the tools that Silverpine uses, and I thought it might be interesting to revisit our toolset and compare with where we are versus where we were. Many of the tools continue to be the same, but there are a few changes. Read on for the details! Communication Tools Slack Without a doubt, Slack is the single most valuable tool for us as a distributed company. One…

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Do You Need A Website?

TLDR; Yes you need a website, and we just redid ours! Check it out! https://silverpine.com

Many years ago when Ryan and I were bootstrapping Silverpine, we ran very lean. I’m talking bare-bones lean. Some would say that we ran on a shoestring budget, but quite honestly, I doubt we would have justified the purchase of a shoestring at that point.

During that period, we were starting to…

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Apple's Native Apps Trojan Horse

Apple’s Native Apps Trojan Horse

Apple announced SwiftUI at WWDC 2019 and like a lot of people, I mostly ignored it because I knew that it would need some time to mature before it would be ready to use in production software. I also wasn’t sure if it would “stick” in terms of long term, viability. However, after another year of development, it’s clear that Apple has made a commitment to it. The newly announced Widgets and App…

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Zoom Insecurity

I recently wrote a roundup on the current state of video conferencing software and one of my comments about Zoom was that it has a history of abusing privacy and not taking security seriously. It looks like my concerns were well founded this week.

According to The Washington Post, your Zoom videos are visible by anyone on the Internet

Security expert Bruce Schneier explains how Zoom not only…

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The Silverpine 2020 Bracket Challenge

The NCAA basketball tournaments (men’s and women’s) are something that I look forward to every year, and we always have a Silverpine bracket competition which is a lot of fun. Obviously, those didn’t happen this year which was very disappointing, but understandable given the situation.

Not to be deterred though, we went ahead and held our own competition this year during our weekly video call…

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Video Conferencing Platforms

How many calls have you been on where the video glitches or freezes? Have you ever seen an attendee list that shows the same attendee multiple times? How many calls have you been on where people are “dropped” halfway through the meeting? How many meetings have you been a part of where at least one person spends the first 5 minutes asking “Can you hear me?” It seems like anyone who has used video…

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Remote Work Preparation

A friend of mine was talking with me earlier this week about his struggles and frustrations now that he is suddenly (and unexpectedly) in a remote work situation. He isn’t sure what tools to use. He isn’t sure how to structure his time. He isn’t sure how and when to communicate with his co-workers, and he has found that his home-office isn’t set up in a way that’s conducive to the kinds of work…

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Silverpine® We received notification today that our trademark on "Silverpine" was registered with the USPTO. We first filed for application back in August, so it's been a long time coming.

Finishing Software Is Hard

For the last couple years, my 15 year old son has been slowly building a gaming computer for himself, piece by piece. For his final computer component, I agreed to purchase it for him if he could accomplish one very specific task. Namely, I wanted him to recreate an iOS app that I had written years ago as I was learning iOS development. He has a natural inclination to programming and has dabbled…

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