Year: 2006

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-08-14

The Rise of “Worse is Better”

The Rise of “Worse is Better” is a famous essay by Richard Gabriel – Distinguished Engineer and Principle Investigator at Sun Microsystems, which closely related to the “It’s Not Software” article that I’ve just blogged about.

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

Technology related reading – Steve Yegge

I’ve been pointed to the (now abandoned) blog of Steve Yegge way too many times. But for some reason I never read it. Maybe it’s the look of it. Maybe it’s because of the lengthy articles. But that’s a fact – I haven’t read a single post there until today, desipte the URLs being saved in those many places where I look for stuff to read.

Steve Yegge worked for several years (7?) at Amazon.com and last time I heard is still there, being a development manager for internal Amazon stuff. You can read more about him here, if you wish. By the way, he has also started a real blog too.

Anyway, today I discovered his excellent writings. It’ll take me some time to go over all of them, but here are the few really good ones from those that I’ve read today.

  • The Nonesuch Beast – rant about some irreducibly complex problem domains that people think are “simple”.
  • Practical Magic – thoughts about what a programmer is allowed to get away with not knowing.
  • Saving Time – rambling montage on productivity, emacs extensions, and automation habits. MUST READ.
  • The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions – an exposition on how he personally conducts the first 10 minutes of a technical phone screen.
  • It’s Not Software – an essay about differences between traditional software development and creating software services. This one is an absolute MUST READ.

There’s more, of course.

One blog less

For the last couple of years I’ve been only posting about how my blogging grows and expands. I’ve been adding blogs to my collection like there is no tomorrow. Today, for a change, I’ll announce that I’ll maintain one blog less.

I decided to get rid of my Bloglines blog. It just isn’t worth it to have it separately. The post editor sucks, there are no comments, tags, and other features that I’ve got so accustomed to. About the only good thing was the “Blog this” link in Bloglines that I used to post.

Instead, I discovered something that existed in WordPress functionality for years. Something that I saw many times, but always ignored. It’s called a “Press It” bookmarklet. All I had to do was go the admin interface of my blog, choose Write Post screen, scroll down, and drag-n-drop one link to my bookmarks tab. From now on, when I read something that I want to blog about, I just (optionally) select some text I want to quote and press the blog button. I’ve tried it today and it works like a charm.

My bookmarklets

Now I have a total of four bookmarklets that allow me to do everything I need with the currently viewed webpage – bookmark it at at del.icio.us, subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds at Bloglines, email its URL via GMail, or post it to my blog. So far so good.

With less blogs that I have to maintain, you can expect more posts in the rest of my blogs. I’ll also gradually transfer the post from my to-be-closed Bloglines blog here.

Managing people

And again for some Joel Spolsky. This time he examines some management approaches.

If you want to lead a team, a company, an army, or a country, the primary problem you face is getting everyone moving in the same direction, which is really just a polite way of saying “getting people to do what you want.”

In particular, he talks about:

Mmm… business concepts in the engineer-friendly language – yummy!