It turns out it’s quite a birthday day today. Â Not only GitHub is being five, but Gmail is being nine! Â Between the two of them, that’s a lot of my screen time right there. Â Anyways, happy birthday Gmail. Â Please stay free and awesome, and thank you for all the time you saved me with your excellent spam filters.
GitHub is five years old. Â I find it really difficult to believe that the service I rely on so heavily, both at work and at home, haven’t even been around so recently. Â I use GitHub both at work, and at home. Â In fact, every single piece of development I do, even if that’s just for a one time bash oneliner, I start it with a new git repository. Â And more often than not, that repository ends up being pushed to GitHub.
Happy birthday, guys! Â Please keep doing what you are doing. Â It obviously works for millions of people.
Here is a Quora question that I got in the personalized weekly newsletter. Â I never had anything close to a lot of money, but I’m pretty sure that if a miracle happens and one day I do, I’ll lose them all pretty quickly. Â Thus, I was vaguely interested in the answers. Â However, the answer by James Altucher (most voted) was way more than I expected.
Then Internet stocks started to go down. This is ridiculous, I thought. The Internet is here to stay. I knew nothing about stocks or valuations or anything resembling rational thought. I doubled down. Then quadrupled down. Then 8-upled down.
From June 2000 until September, 2001 I probably lost $1 million a month. When anyone says, “this is ridiculous”, that’s code for, “I’m about to lose a lot of money”.
I couldn’t stop. I was an addict. I wanted to get back up to the peak.
I wanted to be loved. I wanted to have $100 million so people would love me.
I was the worst idiot. Writing this now I feel like slitting my wrists and stomach. I had 2 kids.
I felt like I was going to die. That zero equals death. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. I had lost all my friends. Nobody returned calls. I would go to the ATM machine and feel my blood going through my whole body when I saw how much was left. I was going to zero and nothing could stop it. There were no jobs, there was nothing.
Read the whole thing. Â It’s fascinating and impressive.
I just came across Alex King’s announcement of his new plugin – Threads:
I’ve just released an initial beta of Threads, a WordPress plugin I’ve been working on for about a year. The idea is simple: show posts that comprise a single overall story/topic in a timeline. Then link to that timeline from the posts so that your readers have a chance to get more historical context about a post without you having to link back to 20 previous posts.
This sounds like an excellent idea.  Some of things that I see it being used for are event coverage posts and live blogging.  There are, of course, already plugins for WordPress to  Organize Series of posts, and to do Live Blogging.  But they each have their limitations.  Live blogging posts easily get huge.  And series do have a navigational nightmare about them.  It looks like Threads plugin aims to address those issues.