Posts

The always enlightening Umair Haque has a great HBR article on focusing on worst practices . Some good ideas. I notice how companies like Zappos (and even Google) avoid this by internalizing some of these ideas intuitively.

1. Ask your critics
2. Spend a day in the trenches
3. Examine your past
4. Diet on your own dogfood

Really like it. Can think of a number of places I’ve worked at that would do well to take the advice on a strategy day or day out (and myself for that matter in reflection and repose.).

You know, one of the things I love best about the Rails community is its sense of fun and how damn helpful everyone is in helping you learn in novel (and yet, really useful) ways. Cause, seriously? Programming shouldn’t be as hard as your first year comp sci class made it out to be.

Enter Rails for Zombies . Check it out, sign up and get learnin'.

Brrraaaaiiinnnnnzzzz…

Well, I got rid of my TV a few year ago and don’t miss it at all (though bittorrent a few choice shows here and there), but kinda loved this history of TV in the catchphrases of the popular shows of the times. It’s a bit uncanny actually. Thankfully, the full lists of the quotes and their shows are below the video (thankfully, because for me at least, I’d only seen “How I Met Your Mother” after Futurama in the list. Scary. Guess I gotta up my show watching.)

Really love this tough-love talk on metrics for your startup and how you should implement and kill features based on what they do to the bottom line. Awesome, if ugly (and annoying it does a bit of sales pitch, but hey).

via Ringo .

Fact is, managing code is difficult, even with git and github .

The fact git makes branching and merging so cheap and easy creates a new problem. Go away and work on something else for a while, leave a project and come back or even get distracted with prioritizing another feature or an urgent production hotfix and suddenly, you’ve got a problem. Add in a team environment and you’d better have something agreed.

I love getting packages in the mail too so I totally get xkcd 576 (hint, hint.. ok, even more I love sending random packages to friends while I’m abroad).

A kiwi developer did a little work to make it happen and has been having it auto-tweet all the things it sends. Kinda cool. Wondering what is going to the be most interesting/coolest/weirdest/nastiest things he’s going to get.

Wow, this is quite beautiful, but looks real dangerous. Didn’t even know it was called speedflying (insanity is the colloquial Canadian term.).

Sadly though, despite saying that, thinking in the back of my head how much fun that would be on a snowboard. ;-)

via Geeks are Sexy Technology News .

Mind-blowingly great post from Firefox’s lead designer (now a dead link) Aza Raskin on the power of prototyping as communication, why you need to start with design and how to communicate ideas visually since it’s all about influencing people. Like, wow… And very topical for my team at the moment (which does not have a designer or front-end engineer). And it definitely re-affirms Agile as a process.

To Design is to inspire participation.

Yeah, so I love games. Particularly real world ones like Werewolf , and I have to admit, I had not heard of Humans vs Zombies (HvZ) until the other night. Looks like so much fun. Defend yourself against zombie hordes with nerf guns and socks.

Here are the rules for playing at an Uni . I’m sure these could be adapted for more rapid style games amongst smaller groups.

And check out the theatrical trailer for one Uni’s upcoming game:

Very likeable animation by the Smart Bubble Society for my old peeps at Greenpeace , it’s well done, though don’t find it that compelling (also, someone really needs a better way to present the hard numbers on off oil and coal generation - right now, all people hear is it’ll be expensive. No one likes that.). Though see interesting solar development here .

What do you think?