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Rails Conf: Joel Spolsky

Joel today gave a pretty good keynote on the importance of aesthetics and technology today.
He pointed to the success of Amazon’s checkout page. His thought is that their checkout page is so well received because it allows users total control of the experience rather than the locked-in Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 process.
It’s […]

Don’t Overplan

208 Gradual Stiffening
[…]The novice by comparison, spends a great deal of his time trying to figure out what to do. He does this essentially because he knows that an action he takes now may cause unretractable problems a little further down the line; and if he is not careful, he will find himself with a […]

Very cool wire hiding thing

I need my laptop to stand up and hide wires! http://www.bluelounge.com/spacestation.php.
Thanks SVN.

Summing up how I feel about deadlines

Hitting arbitrary deadlines to me sounds good for a highly siloed company aiming to put out “some features.” Not a company striving to create a remarkable product in a competitive landscape where innovation is the only thing that’s going to count. A company like that needs rapid innovation cycles, feature teams, constant input and […]

Urgency in software development

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/966-urgency-is-poisonous
When a few days extra turns into a few weeks extra then there’s a problem, but what really has to be done by Friday that can’t wait for Monday or Tuesday? If your deliveries are that critical to the hour or day, maybe you’re setting up false priorities and dangerous expectations.
Sometimes I think we all […]

Paul Miller: Not a good guy and past president of the American League of Lobbyists

Public asked to shape open-government bill
“I don’t think the way you advocate is to put everything online and say, ‘All right American people, weigh in on that,’ because then what’s next?” Miller asked. “Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?”
I have no idea what […]

Sorry if you noticed the bad formatting

Seems that Wordpress will add
tags inside of object tags even if you’re using the regular editor (admittedly - I’m not on Wordress 2.5).
However, that does very bad things to your layout.

Don’t fuck with love - the music video

I don’t know who put it together, but this animation is kind-of like a live-action popup. The song is good, but the video makes it.
http://video.ifc.com/medialab/523/128/dfwlifc.swf

Insanely great video (documentary?) about a crazy ramp in small town Europe

This documentary is insanely awesome. I can’t tell if it’s real or not. It’s about a moderately sized ramp that everyone says is “huge.” in a small town in Germany?
Anyway - it’s hysterical. You can link to it here.

Seth Godin on building a personal brand.

Seth has a nice little post on using Twitter and blogs. Since seeing him talk about Meatball Sundae, I’ve been more than a little inspired in our new enterprise: Jump Canopy. We already have one product: Critboard. This blog has been a little “practice” for me before we go into […]