Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Jon Udell at O’Reilly Radar – Heds, deks, and ledes: „When a copy editor applies a real or virtual red pencil to a piece of journalistic prose, he or she is likely to use weird spellings: hed for head (headline), dek for deck (subhead), lede for lead (first paragraph). The idea is that these intentional…

Rob Walling – It’s Easy to Be Great…It’s Hard to Be Consistent: „We’re entrepreneurs – we’re made to be passionate about ideas, and the next idea is always the easiest one to be passionate about. Yep, it’s tons of fun to think of ideas. And it’s easy. It’s also fun to start building them. And…

William Kent back in 1988 – The Many Forms of a Single Fact: „There is an underlying fallacy, namely the assumption that a simple binary fact (relationship or attribute) always maps simply into a pair of fields. While that is the foundation of current data design methodologies, there exist a troublesome number of exceptions in…

Steve Yegge back in 2006 – (Not) Managing Software Developers: „I think the best managers don’t want to manage: they want to lead. In fact most leaders probably don’t think about it much, at least at first, because they’re too busy leading: rushing headlong towards a goal and leading everyone around them in that direction,…

Gojko Adzic – Seven key ideas of real quality assurance: „“You don’t get quality by testing it in, you get it by designing it in”, said [Tom] Gilb. Many business users never define what they actually want in a measurable way according to Gilb, which is why projects do not meet the expected levels of…

Michal Zalewski – HTTP cookies, or how not to design protocols: „There is simply no accurate, offcial account of cookie behavior in modern browsers; the two relevant RFCs, often cited by people arguing on the Internet, are completely out of touch with reality. This forces developers to discover compatible behaviors by trial and error –…

Joel Spolsky, back in 2001 – Human Task Switches Considered Harmful: „I feel like when I have two programming projects on my plate at once, the task switch time is something like 6 hours. In an 8-hour day, that means multitasking reduces my productivity to 2 hours per day. Pretty dismal. As it turns out,…

Todd Hoff at High Scalability – NoSQL Took Away The Relational Model And Gave Nothing Back: „With NoSQL all relationships have been pushed back onto the poor programmer to implement in code rather than the database managing it. We’ve sacrificed usability. NoSQL is about concurrency, latency, and scalability, but it’s not about data.“

Signal vs. Noise – Nordstrom’s Employee Handbook — short and sweet: „Rule #1: Use best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.“

Seth Godin – Organizing for joy: „The alternative, it seems, is to organize for joy. These are the companies that give their people the freedom (and yes, the expectation) that they will create, connect and surprise. These are the organizations that embrace someone who makes a difference, as opposed to searching for a clause in…