Posts

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:

Bless the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Always doing some awesome work, they’ve put out a great piece on digital self defence.

6 Ideas For Those Needing Defensive Technology to Protect Free Speech from Authoritarian Regimes and 4 Ways the Rest of Us Can Help

Of course, authoritarian regimes can be widely interpreted here. Personally, I think the UK has gone off the deep end with both the way its using laws and its over-zealous database creation. And let’s face it, any country thinking of putting internet filters on your information is not that much further away (yes, I’m looking at you Australia and NZ) to say nothing of unapologetic offenders like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Great post on Startup CTO mistakes I’d rather not repeat…

1. Not getting involved in “the business”
2. Keeping the technology vision in your head
3. Adopting bleeding-edge technology
4. Giving up control of the development process
5. Staying too hands-on and not getting hands-on enough

I actually found it interesting how these were still applicable to my current non-startup role.

The bleeding edge technology one is one I’ve managed to avoid (though my team would argue any open source and anything but java is bleeding edge), but I think more poignant is the one about giving up control of development since it makes it impossible to execute on a technology vision. And yeah, could probably be accused of keeping too much of the tech vision in my head (or not communicating it well enough). Sometimes what seems obvious and transparent when you’ve thought it up is pretty murky to other people (so add communicating it better as well).

It’s a bit sad I predate the moon landing, but this is kinda cool. In a few scant days, we’ll be celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing which is a symbolic milestone that all humanity can be proud of despite what we’ve done in space since then.

I should point out I often use Kennedy’s example of this as a clear BHAG (Big, Hairy Audacious Goal), when talking about strategy planning because it has a clear, measurable, unambiguous achievement within a time limit.

Personally, I think there is nothing like poking fun at the stupidity of certain initiatives to illustrates how flimsy and foolish they are. Laughter, IMHO, is the greatest weapon in the activist’s arsenal.

Great little ad from Australia’s GetUp on the plans of the Rudd government for internet filtering throughout the whole country (yes, shockingly for a democracy like Australia, the same sort of thing you’d expect from China, Iran and some other sadly misguided repressive regimes).

Every hurdle a user has to hop through to get to the meat of what they’re trying to do on your site is another opportunity for them to opt out.

Lazy registration, where you get the minimum possible (dead link to webjackalope) from your users and get more information form them as time goes on, is where it’s at (in fact, increasingly technologies like OpenID and OAuth might even make lazy registration redundant).

At some point all web applications and sites, if they’re popular, need to think about how to scale past their database bottleneck. All the big boys these days are using memcached, and with very good reason (even those not using Rails).

Rails has fantastic support for memcached and this great screencast bad link from the guys at RailsEnvy goes over when and how you should use it in your app with some very good real life examples.

I use rake tasks pretty much, well… everywhere in my Rails programs. They’re amazingly handy for automating things I want to keep track of, mailing things out to people regularly and just generally doing useful stuff.

Firing them on a timer though usually involves going in and manually editing cron with the infamous crontab -e

Hand-edited is no problem for me, but when distributing code it is a little annoying since you usually have to put instructions in for people to do it manually and its one of those things people always forget to do.

Love this diagram from Bud Caddell on getting yourself into the Hooray zone for optimum business happiness. Not just for startups, I want this for my department. Love the underdog kung fu ideas this encapsulates.