Posts

The always astute Joel Spolsky talking about the book Coders at Work. Zeroes in on a interview with Joel Zawinski and the avoidance of technical fancy-pantsedness. Love this quote from Zawinski when asked about his pet peeve for over-engineering:

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.’

Shipping is a feature. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing.

If you’re upgrading to Snow Leopard this week, and a rubyist, you’ll need to sort out your dev environment again and the awesome HiveLogic has provided some great updated instructions (though I can’t tell if this works with 64bit MySQL as I know that was a gotcha for me last time I upgraded).

Happy upgrading my geeky friends ! I will be doing the same as soon as I get to Oz (or slightly sooner if stuck in Honkers longer).

OK, a bit dry, but a very interesting presentation (from a super geeky perspective) on using the open source package R and some nice libraries for doing social network analysis of data sets.

Can definitely see how I can use this for community segmentation in an interesting way.

Doing a bit of work on community actor identification for the new gig (or at least looking at how we can get some tools together to automate analysis).

Very handy little snippet from aaron longwell’s blog. I always have this happen to me on personal projects when I do something and then don’t get back to it from real work till a few weeks later.

git co development # The destination branch
git diff HEAD...topic-branch"</p>

the magic there is the … In English, that symbol means show the difference between the common ancestor commit and HEAD…. in other words, only show what changes in the topic branch while it was distinct from the branch it’s being merged into.

I’m moving to another organization with a more entrepreneurial and startup orientation to activism. Been thinking a lot about how this will change my job focus and have been really impressed with Eric Ries and the five things he thinks startups CTOs need to focus on and his canonical, “The CTO’s primary job is to make sure the company’s technology strategy serves its business strategy.”

• Platform selection and technical design
• Seeing the big picture (in graphic detail)
• Provide options
• Find the 80/20 (understand the objective and then give it for 20% of the cost)
• Grow technical leaders (and technical skills of the organization)
• Own the development methodology (it decides what we can do and what we need to do)

Those of you who know something of my checkered backstory know I actually started off University in astrophysics. I still carry that sense of wonder about the universe and its secrets with me and am always floored about what we learn about the world beyond our backyard. Hubble’s 3D model of the red shifted data from the Hubble Ultra Deep field:

Personally, just waiting for warp drive and transporters myself… and that big screen TV on the bridge.

mySociety , the force behind such excellent online pro-democracy tools in the UK as TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow are calling for proposals for the next amazing online tool they need to build.

Got a great idea, but lack the development muscle to make it happen ? Here’s your chance to create something with clear social, civic or democratic value and make the UK a better place (and it needs it).

Seth’s most recent post perfectly outlines one current predicament I’ve seen a lot lately: Pretty tactics; absolutely no strategy.

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, ‘I’m going to post this.’ If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

Fantastic post from the insightful guys over at 37Signals:

Hire a ton of people rapidly and a ‘strangers at a cocktail party’ problem is exactly what you end up with. There are always new faces around so everyone is unfailingly polite. Everyone tries to avoid any conflict or drama. No one says, ‘This idea sucks.’ People appease instead of challenge.

And that appeasement is what gets companies into trouble. You need to be able to tell people when they’re full of crap. If that doesn’t happen, you start churning out something that doesn’t offend anyone but also doesn’t make anyone fall in love.

Gene Kranz was Flight Director during the Apollo missions and the guy immortalized as the get it done person who helped get the Apollo 13 astronauts home when everyone else thought they were done for and famously attributed to the quotation “Failure is not an option.” This is what he said after the death of three astronauts in a training exercise in 1967 which became known as the Kranz Dictum: