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I got passed the baton by Giles Bowkett. In my flattery, I’ve decided to return the favor by aping his style. He also pinged a bunch of people, and thus far only Paul Dix and I have responded. How old were you when you started programming? I was six or seven when I began to […]
I came on to keep a system alive and rewrote it from the ground up, learning OO along the way. The system solved an office politics problem; this was intentional. If you’re in your early 20s and you tell CEOs they fucked up their org chart, you’ll never get anywhere, but if you just build […]
A couple weeks ago, at RailsConf, I tweeted that I was skipping Joel Spolsky’s keynote and why. Judging by the few responses I got, most people took this to be a joke. It’s not. I try very hard to watch what I put into my head. To a greater or lesser degree of success. All […]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the following: Writing headlines that get dugg vs Writing headlines that get remembered Mastery of video game controllers vs Mastery of video game / problem-solving concepts Convincing people to pay for your stuff vs Creating stuff people can’t live without Google ability vs Research ability Being able to […]
Greg Pollack, of the incredibly awesome RailsEnvy (you have to watch these funny videos), cornered me briefly in the speaker’s lounge at RailsConf and asked what I’d rant about. The answer, apparently, is “excellence.” Amy Hoy at Railsconf 2008 from Gregg Pollack on Vimeo. This whole thing reminds me that I want to see a […]
Be meta. Try to become a meta designer, or meta whatever area you are in. What being meta means is to look not just at the details of what you are doing, be it design or business or whatever, but take the big picture view, the ‘meta’ view, and see how every action you take […]
Twistori, as implemented, was a whim—I woke up that morning with the desire to ship something. I picked something I’d been thinking about a while, but had never committed pen to paper or pixels to Photoshop, and stripped it down to its bare essentials, something that could be achieved in a day. The challenge was […]
This is one side of the story of twistori. I will tell the other later. Anyone who knows me knows about my rants. I like to rant. I rant about a lot of things, and always have—but as the years have accumulated in me and changed me, so have the topics of my rants shifted […]
I—like so many others in the Rails-o-sphere—am getting interested in git (a new-fangled source control system). I’m a late adopter in this case, at least by some people’s standards. Because “some people,” in the Rails community, means the guys who went and created the git repository service github. So on the one hand, Chris, Tom […]
