From two weeks ago at RailsConf 2009, David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote address on Rails 3 and the Real Secret to High Productivity. There’s a lot of interesting refinements coming with Rails 3 which I compare to the forth coming OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release being more about gradual improvements over earth shattering new features.

Also from RailsConf 2009:

• Keynote Videos
• Community Videos
• Speaker Presentation Files
• Photos from James Duncan Davidson

This video is about when you have nothing, and then making it into something.

Originally found here.

Cory Doctorow recently gave a talk at the O’Reilly Tools conference on a topic near and dear to my heart – Digital Rights Management. This talk is directly mainly at the world of eBooks and how we can avoid the mistakes made with digital music (many of which are finally being corrected).

Lots of good pearls of wisdom in Cory’s talk.

Scientific American has an excellent piece about How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood – something that I completely agree with. Yes, it is possible to program almost anywhere but at least for me, the environment plays a huge role in both the quality and creativity of the project I’m working on.

From the article:

• Architects have long intuited that the places we inhabit can affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Now behavioral scientists are giving their hunches an empirical basis.


• Scientists are unearthing tantalizing clues about how to design spaces that promote creativity, keep students focused and alert, and lead to relaxation and social intimacy. The results inform architectural and design decisions such as the height of ceilings, the view from windows, the shape of furniture, and the type and intensity of lighting.


• Such efforts are leading to cutting-edge projects such as residences for seniors with dementia in which the building itself is part of the treatment.

Architects have long intuited that the places we inhabit can affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. But now, half a century after Salk’s inspiring excursion, behavioral scien­­-tists are giving these hunches an empirical basis. They are unearthing tantalizing clues about how to design spaces that promote creativity, keep students focused and alert, and lead to relaxation and social intimacy. Institutions such as the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego are encouraging interdisciplinary research into how a planned ­environment influences the mind, and some architecture schools are now offering classes in introductory neuroscience.

Such efforts are already informing design, leading to cutting-edge projects, such as residences for seniors with dementia in which the building itself is part of the treatment. Similarly, the Kingsdale School in London was redesigned, with the help of psychologists, to promote social cohesion; the new structure also includes elements that foster alertness and creativity. What is more, researchers are just getting started. “All this is in its infancy,” says architect David Allison, who heads the Architecture + Health program at Clemson University. “But the emerging neuroscience research might give us even better insights into how the built environment impacts our health and well-being, how we perform in environments and how we feel in environments.”

Full article

How to recognise a good programmer

“It’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer.

I’ll summarise some key indicators and counter-indicators in a list at the end of the article.”

• #1 : Passion
• #2 : Self-teaching and love of learning
• #3 : Intelligence
• #4 : Hidden experience
• #5 : Variety of technologies
• #6 : Formal qualifications

The criteria in bullets

So, in summary, here are some indicators and counter-indicators that should help you recognise a good programmer.

Positive indicators:

• Passionate about technology
• Programs as a hobby
• Will talk your ear off on a technical subject if encouraged
• Significant (and often numerous) personal side-projects over the years
• Learns new technologies on his/her own
• Opinionated about which technologies are better for various usages
• Very uncomfortable about the idea of working with a technology he doesn’t believe to be “right”
• Clearly smart, can have great conversations on a variety of topics
• Started programming long before university/work
• Has some hidden “icebergs”, large personal projects under the CV radar
• Knowledge of a large variety of unrelated technologies (may not be on CV)

Negative indicators:

• Programming is a day job
• Don’t really want to “talk shop”, even when encouraged to
• Learns new technologies in company-sponsored courses
• Happy to work with whatever technology you’ve picked, “all technologies are good”
• Doesn’t seem too smart
• Started programming at university
• All programming experience is on the CV
• Focused mainly on one or two technology stacks (e.g. everything to do with developing a java application), with no experience outside of it

Full Article

At a tech-business event where I was talking with people about the dynamics of creative groups, a fellow offered that we are becoming a hacker culture, meaning that young people are prone to alter or repurpose software and devices to their liking, to evade DRM and copy protection and generally make things work the way they like.

He’s right– but this isn’t new at all. Sociologist Claude Levi-Strauss spoke about the concept of bricolage, which is usually translated as tinkering or using what’s available to create a new thing. Hacking, in other words. Levi-Strauss posed this as a basic process in the creation of culture.

Continued….

From Working Through

Notes from Rubyfringe

* Dan Grigsby - Don't work for the man, be a programmer/entrepreneur instead. Treat each venture as an experiment and don't be shy about terminating the ones that don't work. You'll strike out a lot but eventually hit a home run.
* Yueda Katz - Living on the edge is fun, but also dangerous. Finding a balance between the cutting edge and the bleeding edge is the trick.
* Luke Franci - There are methods for testing other than code-oriented ones like unit testing. RCov doesn't mean much. Use QA, usability tests, and code reviews for well-rounded coverage.
* Obie Fernandez - To be successful at consulting, watch the balance of power in the relationship with your clients. Most Rails freelancers are charging too little - he recommends no less than $100/hr.
* Matt Todd - Don't be afraid to dive in with both feet. Make mistakes, learn from them. Pick good problems to solve.
* Jeremy McAnally - Frameworks are getting fat. Frameworks should be specific. Don't use Rails (or any other framework) outside of its domain.
* Hampton Catlin - Javascript is a good general purpose language, but terrible in the browser. Add-on libraries like Prototype and JQuery are just band-aids on this problem. The client-side language should be tightly coupled to the DOM, like CSS. He proposes Jabl.
* Giles Bowket - Fuck the man, fuck the mainstream. Programming is a tool to do your art. His art is music, his tool is Ruby, and the result is Arcaeopteryx. (Giles stole the show with this talk. He ran like twice as long as his alloted time but we were all so into it that no one minded.)
* Damien Katz - If you want to become the guy that gets paid to build cool things, take a risk: start by making something cool without any plan for how to get paid for it. (He did that, and now IBM pays him to work on CouchDB and contribute it to the Apache Foundation.) Also, Erlang is sweet.
* Reginald Braithwaite - It's too bad Ruby isn't more like Lisp or Haskell.
* Tom Preston-Warner - The scientific method rules, use it for coding (and life). Ruby 1.8 has weird memory leak bugs. Github now has a git-powered pastie site, gist.github.com. Also, Erlang is sweet.
* Blake Mizerany - Sinatra is a framework for fast, small web services. Routers are unnecessary obfuscation; treat a web resource url like you would a function name, and address it directly.

Full article

TONS of goodies from two of my favorite recent conferences (spanning 2006 – 2008 in most cases). Some of the best content is hidden behind some odd titles.

Videos from Defcon 15 Hacker Conference

Hacking Videos from Shmoocon

It must be a Monday — check the news feeds and the first thing I see:

Comedian George Carlin dies

You will be dearly missed amigo. I can think of seven special words in your honor

The media is obviously all over this over the last 48 hours and of everything I’ve read, nothing comes close to John Welch’s bit entitled Good-Bye George…ya fuck. Well said Bynkii.

Full article

Some good practical and doable advice for managing your inbox. Sure, there are a million people offering advice on managing large volumes of email but Cory is someone I’ve interacted with first hand who really walks his talk in this area. Even though I have no direct business dealings with Cory, we’ve exchanged numerous emails over the years and he always answers me promptly and not just with typical brush off generic answers.

I live and die in my email, receiving hundreds of non-spam messages every day. If I’m stationary and not actually feeding or playing with the baby, chances are I’ve got my laptop open somewhere nearby, online and downloading mail. It’s my alpha and my omega, my version control system (if I want to find an old version of a document, I just find the copy I emailed to someone earlier), my address book, my journal and my confessor. I have over a million archived pieces of email, going back to 1991. What’s more, my inbox is almost always empty. I’ve spent more than a decade tinkering with my email workflow, perfecting it so that I can manage whatever life throws at me through my inbox. I’ve come up with a few tips and hacks that never fail to surprise and delight my friends and colleagues when I show them off

Full article

I’ve waiting for this book to hit the shelves ever since Cory released a teaser chapter on his podcast last summer.

The book arrived at stores yesterday (4/28/08) and in traditional Cory fashion, he’s also released it for free under the Create Commons License as well as a for sale audio book. His publisher has also put together the little flash app below which is one of the single best user experiences for online purchases I’ve ever used to date (for the audio version).

Story Summary:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

This is the kind of ’stop the bullshit mentality’ writing that I wish we saw more in corporate America today.

The story behind this letter and the lives it consumed paint a much darker picture of the failing giant.

From memo written by Numair Faraz to current Moto CEO Greg Brown, and the rest of the executive team at Motorola,

Maybe it sounds like I take the downfall of Motorola personally; I do. It was my experience at Motorola, with people like Geoffrey and all of the loyal employees who still remain, that taught me what corporate America can and should be. But with people such as Zander and yourself, Motorola symbolizes the worst of our country’s corporate culture.

Full article via Engadget

This isn’t a particularly new story and many people familiar with Get In The Van have no doubt heard the story before but you’ll have to humor me because today’s is my birthday and I’ve been wanting to put this up for a while now.

Henry is one of those rare people who I feel has rock solid integrity and its one of those few and far between cases where someone from our youth has gone on to excel while never changing their principals for the all mighty dollar. If you don’t know the story, it’s a great one and thankfully one that continues to this day with his IFC TV Show, radio show: harmony in my head, his various movie projects, spoken word tours and gigs with the Rollins Band among other things at his website.

I traded rocky road for rock ’n’ roll and learned that risk-taking leads to rewards

Some people had Elvis. I had punk rock. My mom frowned upon television and raised me on Beethoven, Miles Davis, Dylan, even Barbra Streisand. In high school, my friends and I went to arena rock shows—Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Led Zeppelin. Then we saw the Clash. Within a year we transitioned from arena rock to the clubs, and were listening to the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.

Punk rock gave me an alternative to how I was living and seeing things. I had gone to a military-leaning prep school. It was an oppressive ­environment, and I learned to stand straight. When I heard punk rock’s lyrics, abrasiveness, and forcefulness, it was the music I had been waiting to hear. Going to gigs, I met people who were just as mad as I was, who didn’t judge me, who shared my point of view. Punk rock gave me that point of view, as well as a voice, a backbone, and the knowledge that there are options in life.

It’s always fun when the more mainstream media outlets start to run pieces validating what anyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention already knows and MTV put out a pretty decent piece on just such a topic today. This is the first in a three part series on the subject and it’s worth the read.

This is a nice month by month breakout featuring some of the more interesting events that helped reveal the future of the music business.

Make no mistake about it, 2007 was a b-a-a-a-d year for the industry. According to Nielsen SoundScan, album sales were down 15 percent from 2006 (a trend that’s continued for eight straight years now); big-name artists jumped ship in increasingly complicated — and messy — ways; and the powers-that-be seemed to get even more heartless and disconnected, thanks to a series of lawsuits, feuds and terrible decisions.

In fact, you could probably say that 2007 was Year Zero. Things started to change because they couldn’t possibly get any worse. Full Article

From David Walsh

Being a web programmer is hard work. Long hours, coupled with the fact that we’re presented with nothing but problems, can make our job unbearable. Not to mention deadlines and unreasonable customers. Oh, and the fact that we’re all casualties of the never-ending browser wars.

So why do we do what we do? We love programming. We love creating functional, virtual worlds where people can get information, post pictures, and meet people. We love taking a given set of rules and bending them to their limits. We love that we can post a collection of code that can some day be a money-making powerhouse like Facebook or Digg.

With all of the rewards that come from being a programmer, the job can still be overwhelming. Dealing with the stress that our job creates is an important skill. I’ve compiled a list of ways for you, as a programmer, to keep your sanity.

Full Article

Good advice for anyone doing freelance web work from Wakeup Later

A great piece by Kevin Cornell that was posted back in August at A List Apart on a topic that we all could do well to brush up on.

Whether your chosen medium is pictures or language, food or formulas, everyone has the capacity to be creative in their work. But we can often lose our motivation to create, making it difficult to stay focused and excited on a project. So how does one keep their creative well from drying up?

Maintaining your motivation to create is actually a long-term endeavor. Starting out can be tough, but with discipline and consistency you will eventually reach a point where staying motivated only requires minimal daily maintenance—a simple matter of learning to make the right choices at the right time.

Full article

Question of the day:

“What importance do you place on formal education in your team? In today’s information age, it seems that about any kind of knowledge is only a few keystrokes away, and anything one might want to learn about is freely available and can be mastered given the drive and, of course, trial and error to develop the skill. Naturally, this especially applies to web technologies (more so than, say, neural surgery). What kind of educational background does your team harbor, be it for business or technology, what practical advantage does it lend, and what do you think about the crowds of talented, self-taught “amateurs” which the web has made possible?”

Read on

Pointed from Daring Fireball

Joel Spolsky on the difference between “Designed by Apple in California” and “Hello from Seattle”.

You get your brand new iPod home, in its shiny black box, which you open, and the first words you see are: “Designed by Apple in California.”

It’s printed on the back of every iPod and iPhone, too. Ah, the way these five words evoke a flurry of happy memories.

You think of California, not the actual state, with its endless dismal boulevards full of muffler shops and donut stores, but the California of memory: the Beach Boys, the Summer of Love, and the beatniks, a utopian land of opportunity, an escape, where you go when you leave behind the cold winters and your conservative parents back in Cleveland.

Either way, the iPod slogan Designed by Apple in California triggers a flood of emotional responses that just make you happy to have selected this MP3 player.

Of course, Microsoft’s Apple Envy is so impossible to disguise that the back of the Zune says, “Hello from Seattle”

Um… excuse me? Hello from Seattle? That has, I’m afraid, none of the same resonance. It evokes nothing. Boeing and rain, maybe. Kurt Cobain’s unhappiness.

But really it’s just a desperate desire to be like Apple, without even a smidgen of understanding of the culture code that makes Designed by Apple in California work. It’s not even clear that anyone at Microsoft would understand that there is such a thing as a culture code, although they are to be forgiven for not reading important books by French intellectuals. After all, they’re in Seattle and it’s raining.

Anyway, Apple already did “Hello.” “Hello” was charming once. In 1984. Now it’s just old.

“No wonder expectations for Microsoft’s Zune run so low–the company encourages them. Touting the newest iteration of Microsoft’s digital music player in an interview yesterday with the New York Times, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (pictured above, right, with J Allard, VP of design and development for Microsoft’s entertainment division) described its predecessor as half-assed.

“For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got,” Gates said. “The satisfaction for the device was superhigh. The satisfaction on the software actually is where we’d expect to see a huge uptick this year.

It was just so-so on the software side. I’m sure a year from now we’ll do even better. But I’m blown away by what they’ve been able to do in a year.””

Full story

An interview with one of my favorite Mac developers Allan Odgaard. Considering I pretty much live inside of his creation 8-10 hours a day, its always interesting to see what’s going on inside the mind of Allan.

Full Interview

There are so very many things that I love about the Internet but chief among them is the phenomenon that I have experienced time after time where you have an idea formulating in your mind over a period of time and by the very fact that you seem to be thinking about it, before you know it you come across someone else who has verbalized your very thoughts on some blog or website. That seems to happen to me more often than not as of late but today it happened in spades.

I’ve been using Ruby on Rails for a little over a year and half now and apart from the technical side of Rails, I am very much attracted to the philosophy of Rails as espoused by David Heinemeier Hansson. David has written a piece today entitled Who wants to live in the Real World? that I really identified with. I’ll quote David below and I highly encourage you to take a look at the conversation that occurred in the comments. Good stuff indeed.

From SVN The Real World must be a truly depressing place to live. It’s apparently a realm where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always lose. I’m told that the only thing that works in The Real World is what its inhabitants already know and already do. No matter how flawed or inefficient that way may be.

People who live there are said to be living Real Life. An existence filled with pessimism, despair, and every shade of pitch black imaginable. Yet strangely, these people living Real Lives seem not to be interested in getting out. They are not looking for a change of scenery of the dreary Real World.

Instead, they’re actually trying to recruit! In arguments everywhere, they’re trying to convince those of a sunnier demeanor that they must convert to Real Life or perish. That resisting the Real World is futile. This call persists even in the face of contrary experiences. Tales of people who actually did things differently and still lived to see the sun rise in the morning.

Please don’t be fooled, there’s nothing even remotely attractive about The Real World. It’s a bleak mirage suitable only as a place of communion for those who have lost all hope.

This is one of those ‘right place at the right time’ type of entries where it just so happened to be the words that I really needed to hear on this particular morning. My son and I had just recently rented this video and had a blast watching it the other night.

Sam de Brito does a wonderful job of pulling together a piece entitle Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the Secret to Life that really set me straight this morning and I think you’ll enjoy it as well.

A truth is a truth regardless of the generation it comes from and its cool to see one of the classics from my youth holding up so well so many years later. As Ferris says:

…life moves pretty fast… you don’t stop to look around once and while, you could miss it.”

Truer words were never spoken.