May 2013
1 post
1 tag
We're Talkin' About Profits!?
Amidst the news of the Yahoo! acquisition of Tumblr, I saw a lot of praise for the VCs who “knew” that Tumblr would grow like it has, of Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo! renaissance, of David Karp’s Steve Jobs-like product genius.
While the adoration may be well-deserved, one tiny word missing from the celebratory media coverage: profit.
I don’t know why, but the infamous...
April 2013
1 post
2 tags
Fixed Bid Contracts
I was listening to episode 57 of the Ruby Freelancers Show yesterday and, while some of the advice was fairly good, one of the panelists said something really counter-intuitive.
Eric Davis remarked that fixed vs. hourly is merely semantics since customers are essentially trying to map the project’s cost to their budget to ensure there is a cap on their spend.
Eric says:
If you really...
March 2013
2 posts
1 tag
Breaking Down Amazon's Mega Dropdown →
Love it.
February 2013
3 posts
1 tag
9 Easy Questions →
This slide deck by Joel Spolsky is slathered in pure truth.
I wish I was smart enough to recognize these things when I graduated college. I’ve learned most of them the hard way; the others came to light during my privileged time working for Joel at Fog Creek.
If you ever talk to young developers, designers, or product managers about career path, please dog-ear this link and pass it...
1 tag
“As a manager, I can’t easily know how many hours each person on my team is...”
– http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-in-working-remotely/
January 2013
5 posts
Rails has Two Default Stacks →
Starting Rails today is like starting to watch a soap opera in the 7th season.
Wise words here. Learn how to ride the bike before you pick out your custom wheels and sidecar.
What would the greatest technological leap you'd...
cdixon:
I possess a device in my pocket that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.
I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.
via
December 2012
4 posts
2 tags
Rocking GTD with Trello →
I’m a very heavy Trello user and erudite GTD’er, so I was thrilled to stumble upon Josh Earl’s GTD-with-Trello system, which I’m going to experiment with.
I’ve been using Ryan Carson’s (non-GTD, but effective) approach to organizing TODOs with Trello for a few months. It’s worked well, but my biggest impediment lately has been my failure to clearly...
“You can tell something is important when people spend money on it and when one...”
– Merlinn Mann / 46:30
http://www.43folders.com/2010/04/27/impro-talk
2 tags
How to Redirect Tumblr Post URLs After Migrating a...
TL;DR: For the solution, click here.
Tumblr has a great feature that lets you create multiple blogs beneath a single umbrella account. However, your primary blog—i.e., the one you create first—is special.
How so?
When you <3 someone else’s Tumblr post, the action is associated with your primary blog
You can only follow other blogs with your primary blog
There are some...
October 2012
1 post
January 2012
1 post
1 tag
Please don't learn to code
I remember stumbling upon tryruby.org a few years back. It was this neat little web-based shell that helped teach Ruby in a fun and interactive way.
The site lowered the barrier to entry for newcomers: you didn’t have to download anything; you didn’t need an editor or an interpreter; you didn’t even have to know what a shell was. You would simply read the instructions on the...
March 2011
1 post
Using Mercurial Subrepositories
Code reuse is important. As developers, we don’t want to keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. We should leverage code that we’ve already written, and use open source libraries and frameworks where appropriate.
Having the source code of a library that your project depends on is very beneficial. You can browse through it, debug into it, and make changes to it. But what is...
November 2010
1 post
1 tag
Sticky notes with CSS3
I’ve been working on a pretty cool wall-mounted status board as one of my projects at Fog Creek. It’s a webapp that runs on a vertically mounted LCD screen in our office. It displays a bunch of interesting information like tech support calls, staff vacations, tweets about FogBugz, and more.
I’ve been incrementally adding features and improving the UI whenever I have spare cycles. The other...
