I recently had occasion to write about Foursquare, the once popular location check-in app. I’d been emailed by its PR firm about a potential Machine Learning story. In her pitch, the PR rep had called Foursquare a “location data platform.” All this piqued my interest as a tech journalist, as I’m currently writing a...

Improve your website's social media presence with dynamic Open Graph images. Learn how with serverless functions and Sharp in this tutorial.

Hey friend, This Mektup is a personal one. You must have heard what happened in my home country, Turkey. Two earthquakes took the lives of thousands of people (40k+) and impacted millions. (just yesterday, two additional earthquakes took another set of lives) Although my family and friends are physically healthy,...

Here’s Edward Dolnick in his lovely book The Writing of the Gods: The crucial point is that though speaking comes naturally, writing had to be invented. Speech is part of our biological heritage, like crawling and walking. Writing is a product of human ingenuity, like the telephone or the airplane. Thinking of a...