I’m just going to keep posting stuff about Valve until I get tired of it. Did you read the Valve employee handbook? If not, you should. To catch you up, at Valve, the corporate structure is completely flat. They have no managers, and everyone decides what to work on for themselves. The handbook explains what is expected of Valve employees and how people should adapt to that corporate structure.I’m sure some people find it intriguing and others terrifying. ...
Apropos of yesterday’s post, today someone has posted a leaked copy of the Valve employee handbook (a PDF). Here’s an except from page 8: We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100. Very much worth reading.
Lane Becker and Thor Muller have a new book out about the importance of harnessing serendipity – making your own luck. Becker explains why startups are better positioned to do so than established businesses in an interview with the New York Times’ Nick Bilton: It’s a problem for start-ups as they grow and become a traditional business, because most businesses succeed through repetition, process and routine. But all of those things are designed for rote predictability. So we engineer our businesses to squash the role of serendipity inside their organizations. Even start-ups, when they get big, and they stop listening to your users, fall into a process of repetition. ...
For a long time, I was shocked by blogs like Etsy’s engineering blog, Code as Craft. I had a sort of old-school “information is power” mentality that led me to believe that letting competitors know about your technology stack would put a company at a disadvantage. Building scalable systems is hard, and I thought it was foolish to give away your secrets. I also prided myself on being able to sleuth the details of a company’s technology stack using URLs, HTTP headers, and page source. ...
The biggest change in my work habits of 2012 has been the move from doing most of my work on my laptop to doing most of my work logged into a Linux virtual machine via SSH. I’ve used many editors over the years – Vim, Emacs, TextMate, UltraEdit, BBEdit, but the switch to working on the VM has led to using Vim for pretty much everything. For the past few months, I’ve been working hard to improve my Vim chops, with very pleasing results. I’ll probably write about Vim later. ...
Let me be clear: There is nothing more important we can learn as young people than to be kind, tolerant and accepting of others. Anil Dash, A Note About Panther Pride
The big news of the week is Facebook’s purchase of Instagram. I wasn’t going to write anything about it because it didn’t seem like there’s much to say that hasn’t already been said, but that may not be the case. For general commentary, I would recommend Paul “@ftrain” Ford’s Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out. I want to talk about something specific – Instagram’s filters. I was on the fence about posting about it, but after The Daily Show made fun of it this week, I felt compelled to do so. I’m not in the business if picking apart jokes, but I see the sentiments in the Daily Show piece reflected frequently in serious commentary as well, and for the sake of all of you out there who are about to start building your own photo sharing apps in hopes of hauling in a huge bag of loot, I want to make sure you don’t emphasize the wrong things. ...
The Netflix prize has fascinated me since it was announced and won. Today Netflix engineering has a blog post discussing their recommendations systems that explains why they chose not to implement the prize-winning algorithm. What stuck out to me most was this bit on how important recommendations are to Netflix: We have adapted our personalization algorithms to this new scenario in such a way that now 75% of what people watch is from some sort of recommendation. We reached this point by continuously optimizing the member experience and have measured significant gains in member satisfaction whenever we improved the personalization for our members. Let us now walk you through some of the techniques and approaches that we use to produce these recommendations. ...
Here’s a fantastic post from Rebecca Murphey that lists the skill set front-end developers should be working to attain. Here’s her prediction of where things are headed: Whatever it is, I think we’re seeing the emphasis shift from valuing trivia to valuing tools. There’s a new set of baseline skills required in order to be successful as a front-end developer, and developers who don’t meet this baseline are going to start feeling more and more left behind as those who are sharing their knowledge start to assume that certain things go without saying. ...
JavaScript: The Good Parts is one of my favorite computer books ever written, not just because it’s an excellent primer on JavaScript, but also because the title alone provides guidance to a way of living that’s worth pondering. This week, PHP: a fractal of bad design is making the rounds. It’s a lengthy list of thoughtful criticism of PHP as a programming language (and Web development platform). The PHP core team should read it, although the truth is that most of the problems can’t be addressed without breaking old PHP applications, and the PHP folks are generally reluctant to make those kinds of changes. PHP has a massive installed base on shared hosting servers – breaking old applications reduces the adoption rate of new versions. ...