Having just torn through two “brain vacation” novels (Maxx Barry, if you must know), I’m back at it. I just can’t stay away from non-fiction long enough. I need a vacation. Anyway, I’ve begun reading The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, which so far is […]
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 […]
Big surprise? Here’s an internal Microsoft email written by Bill Gates, which allegedly came to public view due to a lawsuit. From this Seattle PI blog post. It’s long, but definitely worth at least a skim: —- Original Message —- From: Bill Gates Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM To: Jim Allchin Cc: Chris […]
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 […]
I’m still on the quest to make this blog more like a blog—I think the articles are eventually going to be treated differently. I am a huge believer in the power of books. Books are the one thing I own “in excess;” my favorite charity is book-related and bookstores tend to create in me that […]
Tobie Langel interviewed me for the revived Prototype.js blog. He’s working on a series of interviews, of which I am the second, and Sergio Pereira was the first.
