Posts

GitHub has one of the most interesting approaches to product development and software development of anyone in the industry. Zach Holman posted an overview of their process and talked about how they have maintained it as the team has grown. Toward the end, he writes: This stuff doesn’t come easily, but it unfortunately leaves easily. Figuring out ways to streamline, to improve your process, to grow your company as you grow your employees is a constant struggle. It’s something that should be continually re-evaluated. ...

Yesterday, I linked to a Malcolm Gladwell piece that included the following sentences: The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame. It put me on the lookout for other examples of rich people whining about being victimized, and reminded me immediately of this week’s Economist cover story – provocatively titled “Hunting the rich.” Here’s how it starts: ...

Malcolm Gladwell on the wealth gap: It is worth noting, though, that in the social and political commentary of the 1950s and 1960s there is scant evidence of wealthy people complaining about their situation. They paid their taxes and went about their business. Perhaps they saw the logic of the government’s policy: There was a huge debt from World War II to be paid off, and interstates, public universities, and other public infrastructure projects to be built for the children of the baby boom. Or perhaps they were simply bashful. Wealth, after all, is as often the gift of good fortune as it is of design. For whatever reason, the wealthy of that era could have pushed for a world that more closely conformed to their self-interest and they chose not to. Today the wealthy have no such qualms. We have moved from a country of relative economic equality to a place where the gap between rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and Hong Kong. The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame. ...

Just a few random items I found interesting over the past few days: People are being killed in Mexico for tweeting about the activities of drug gangs. Enabling yourself to post links from the Wall Street Journal to your Facebook page involves giving them a lot of privileges. Here’s a great list of do’s and don’ts for New York. New York Times columnist Joe Nocera warns about the unfortunate likely outcomes of the Solyndra scandal. ...

Tom Insam on why calls to invalidate software patents will continue to go unheeded: So, with lots of handwaving, we can argue that this petition is asking the US government to unilaterally destroy $100bn worth of corporate-held property. It’s always politically difficult to take valuable things from people who have the means to defend their right to keep them.

Like a lot of people, I don’t trust Facebook. A lot of people deal with that by deleting their Facebook accounts, but I don’t want to do that. A lot of friends and family members post their photos to Facebook, so I need an account if I want to see them. It’s also the main way to keep in touch with certain people. That’s Facebook’s hook for the skeptical – they know you like other Facebook users more than you hate Facebook itself. ...

Blogging is mostly about pointing to interesting stuff and, for some people, commenting on it. Whether you’re paid to blog or not, one of the real ethical conundrums involves walking the line between quoting or summarizing enough of the work you’re commenting on to interest your readers and providing so much detail that there’s no reason to visit the original piece. For sites like Business Insider and the Huffington Post, that’s no dilemma at all. Their business models are based on essentially republishing other people’s work, as explained by Ryan McCarthy on Felix Salmon’s blog. I found that post through Marco Arment’s first-hand account of having his work reliably published on Business Insider’s site as though he is one of their authors. It’s also worth checking out Business Insider’s response to Marco, in which they argue that Instapaper and Tumblr are essentially in the same business as they are. ...

Brent Simmons writes about how wrong he was to assume that nobody would ever see code he wrote, and how coding with the assumption that other people will eventually work on his code makes him a better developer: But now I write code with the absolute certain knowledge that it will end up in somebody else’s hands. I could be wrong, yes, but I’ve learned that it helps me write better and more-maintainable code if I just assume from the start that somebody else, most likely a friend, will end up working on that code base. ...

I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, a medium-sized city that I know like the back of my hand. I downloaded FourSquare last year and started using it, but I found it mainly to be a toy. You check in at the places you go and maybe you eventually become mayor. It was kind of fun, but there was no obvious utility. This weekend I went on a trip and rather than planning where I wanted to eat, I decided to rely on FourSquare to pick restaurants, and it turns out that it’s very useful indeed and becomes more useful the more you use it. You start out by using the Explore feature to show you restaurants that are popular on FourSquare within a certain radius. ...

Matthew Yglesias answers a question from a reader about what to do to contribute to political change in this country. As the reader points out, reading political blogs, watching The Daily Show, and chatting about it with your spouse is not really going to get it done. Matt offers two suggestions: write Congress and promote your views out there in the world, among people who may not agree with you. I second both of those recommendations. I can say first hand that I have changed the political views of some friends and family members through sheer persistence and a willingness to be annoying. I would also point out that I have had my changed on some subjects by engaging with people who disagree with me. ...