Jake's Walking
He’s been taking a couple of tentative steps but today decided that he was ready to go and has been walking all around the house.
Authenticity
On Sunday evening I unfollowed well over half the people that I was following on Twitter. My criteria for whom to unfollow was simple: anyone that I had opportunities to meet and talk with in my day-to-day activities (coworkers) or could meet with a small amount of effort (Gabe).
I didn’t quit Twitter —- it still fills a niche where distance and schedules don’t afford the type of opportunities at “catching up” that I’d like and in these cases, I can live with Twitter as a poor substitute for the real thing. But I don’t want that poor substitution to continue as the standard.
Heart of Chicago
Coworking Space in Chicago
Nice looking coworking space in Fulton Market, though a coffee shop fits my current needs.
Why Cal Hates Django
Cal Henderson is one of the best technical speakers around. Check out his talk at DjangoCon on why he hates Django:
The bits about Rails developers and PHP are hilariously funny.
Sensible Defaults
If you’re using Capistrano for your deployments and don’t want to accidentally have master (as opposed to your well-tested branch) deployed to production, it’s probably a good idea to write your deployment task so that it’s impossible to deploy anything that’s not a branch to your production environment. Ahem.
Code Annotations
You know the TODO’s and FIXME’s that accumulate in code and then nothing ever happens with them? We’ve added the explicit step in out retrospective where we search our code for instances of these, throw them up on the wall with the projector and one of three things happens:
- A ticket is created that captures the gist of the annotation and is thrown into the product backlog. The annotation is deleted;
- The annotation is acted upon and the annotation is deleted;
- After discussion, the annotation is deleted.
This way we’ve got one place for all of the things that we want to do (our backlog), the author of the annotation had a better chance of being able to recall the details that led to the creation of the annotation (since they’re at most two weeks old) and our code isn’t being littered with annotations that no one ever acts on.
We have a large refactoring coming up that the code that we’re presently working on will touch and we are annotating where our new code will interact with the refactored code. We’ve established a unique annotation for this and are leaving these in for the planning of the refactor at which point they’ll be removed. For every rules there’s an exception and common sense should prevail.
Turkish Delight
Josh’s band, Parks and Gardens, performed last night and Kathy was good enough to video one of the songs for those of us that couldn’t make it.
Dead Man's Switch
Shit happens. Sometimes, it happens to you. If it does happen, you might wish there was something you had told the people around you. How you feel, what you regret, where the money is stashed.
For this, you need a dead man’s switch.
Such a great idea!
Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) on Steak Knives
Imagine if you’re designing a restaurant. And in this restaurant we’re going to be serving steak. And because we’re going to be serving steak we’re going to be using steak knives. And since we have steak knives, people might be stabbing each other. And therefore we need to put fences around all the tables. We need to have cages so that people are protected from each other, because who knows what godawful thing they might do, sitting there with knives.
That isn’t a good idea. It isn’t a good way to design a restaurant, it isn’t a good way for us to live our lives in society. A society that is based on a lack of trust ends up being a distrustful and violent society. We normally don’t think twice about sitting next to someone with a steak knife because we trust them. And yes, occasionally people go berserk in restaurants and stab each other with steak knives. We put up with this, though, because we like the human community and it’s kind of nice that I can go and sit in a room and not worry about people stabbing me, not because there are cages but because they’re basically good people.
So at Wikipedia we consistently had a design philosophy to use the softest possible security. We try not to lock anything down unless it absolutely needs to be locked down.
This type of common sense is like a breathe of fresh air.
Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know
If anyone had any doubt, “Web 2.0” has jumped the shark.
One In Five Employers Uses Social Networks In Hiring Process
CareerBuilder recommends that job seekers:
Remove pictures, content and links that can send the wrong message to potential employers.
Update social networking profiles regularly to highlight latest accomplishments.
Consider blocking comments to avoid questionable posts; avoid joining groups whose names could turn off potential employers.
Consider setting profile to private so only designated friends can view it.
Why should totalitarian governments have all the fun? Also, no mention if the 20% of employers that do this are the kind of places that you want to work in the first place.
2008 AWS Start-Up Challenge
Amazon Web Services is hosting their 2008 Start-Up Challenge. They’re looking for the next hot start-up that will use AWS for its infrastructure with a grand prize of $100,000.
daemon_controller
Phusion released daemon_controller, a Ruby library for managing daemons and it looks very good!