FewBar.com – Make it good

YouTube – RSA Animate – Drive.

If you’re an engineer, you hate testing. Seriously, who likes doing what those mere mortal “users” do? We’re POWER users and we don’t need to use all those silly features on all those sites. Just look at Craigslist, clearly an engineer’s dream tool.

For web apps, testing actually isn’t *that* hard. The client program (the browser) is readily available on every platform known to man, and they generally don’t do much more than store and retrieve data in clever ways. So, its not like we have to fire up a Large Hadron Collider to observe the effects of our web app. Continue reading

This article about “Duct Tape Programmers” excerpts another article with interviews from great coders. I just had to share this fantastic quote from Jamie Zawinski

“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.”

I’m a big fan of “the proper amount of abstraction”, but I think its important to remember the scope of each thing we’re working on. Rock on jwz.

Seth Godin’s recent post about responding to discussions about things you don’t understand has got me thinking about hiring people.

When involved with a staffing decision, I look for one trait in particular above all others. If you don’t know how to say “I don’t know”, and ask for an explanation or help, then you’re not really smart. You don’t have a good process for learning. You may have a mountain of knowledge in your head, but it is surrounded by a huge, impenetrable ego shield, and so, cannot ever be added to. Its like you took the sum of what you knew, and stuffed it into a snow globe. When people shake you up.. sure.. its pretty, but thats all there is to it.

I’d rather work with people who are open to having their entire belief system about certain subjects shattered by a better idea. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stick to your guns and assert your own ideas and beliefs. It just means, when challenged, be like the Zen Buddhist Aikido master and flow with the force of the attack, and when possible, use it to your advantage.
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