Announcing SpoofMAC – Spoof your MAC address in Mac OS X

Download SpoofMAC from GitHub.

Something I’ve needed to do from time to time is spoof my computer’s MAC address. This is useful for debugging network issues or temporarily getting onto the Stanford Wi-Fi network when my physical MAC address changes, such as when Apple replaced my logic board (motherboard).

Read the rest of this entry »

2011 .Net Magazine Awards

I’m really elated to find myself nominated for this year’s .Net Magazine Awards.

I’m humbled by the way YouTube Instant took off so quickly after I built it and I’m extremely thankful to the hundreds of thousands of good people who tweeted, liked, stumbled and otherwise shared my little hack and helped turn it into a worldwide sensation for a few weeks.

Thanks to the good people at .Net Magazine for putting on this awesome award series to recognize so many of the creative people who work in web design and development. Here are the nomination categories:

#3 Best API Use: YouTube Instant
#12 Brilliant Newcomer Award: Feross Aboukhadijeh

Visit the .Net Awards site to vote & view all the nominees

None of Us Knows What We’re Doing

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among a few of the young programmers, designers, and entrepreneurs who I know at Stanford. I’ve learned that many of them share the same mistaken belief about success and how it works.

The Myth of the Superhuman

They believe, it seems, that “successful people” like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Paul Graham, Walt Disney, etc. have some sort of in-built superhuman awesomeness that makes them smarter, cleverer, more brilliant than the rest of us.

They believe that something about these people is unique, that their feats would be unachievable by anyone else.

To be fair, it sort of makes sense, right? I mean, these folks succeeded spectacularly where thousands of others failed forgettably. So, the successful people must be more brilliant than average folk like you and me, no?

An Anecdote: YouTube Instant

Something about this line of thinking doesn’t sit right with me. I know from my own experience building YouTube Instant that success oftentimes just happens without any foresight, pre-planning, or exceptional skill.

When I built YouTube Instant, I was certain that someone else had built something like this before. Sure, I thought it was a neat idea, but it didn’t seem that special to me.

I certainly had no idea that writing those 190 lines of JavaScript would change my life forever.

Read the rest of this entry »

Instant.fm Tech Stack

I’ve received a lot of emails asking about the technology stack of Instant.fm, so I thought I’d share this publicly.

Read the rest of this entry »

My recent hacks

I launched 3 sites recently (Instant.fm, Instant.IO, and EmuSpin) and haven’t written about them yet. I know you noticed.

Instant.fm (built in 3 months)

I was planning a more elaborate blog post to announce this site, but it’s been live for a while now and it’s not a secret anymore (was it ever a secret?). Instant.fm is the culmination of a 3 month long collaboration with Jake Becker, a good friend (and fellow Stanford CS student).

Read the rest of this entry »