Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Bill Taylor – Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit–And You Should Too: „The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: „If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.“ Zappos actually bribes…

Paul Graham – Lies We Tell Kids: „Whenever we lie to kids to protect them, we’re usually also lying to keep the peace. One consequence of this sort of calming lie is that we grow up thinking horrible things are normal. It’s hard for us to feel a sense of urgency as adults over something…

Clay Shirky – Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: „It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem. […] The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed…

Joel Spolsky – How to be a program manager: „The number one mistake most companies make is having the manager of the programmers writing the specs and designing the product. This is a mistake because the design does not get a fair trial, and is not born out of conflict and debate, so it’s not…

Eric Ries – Why PHP won: „Everything is request-oriented, short-lived, and stateless. A PHP script is like an object itself, encapsulating a bit of functionality behind an interface defined by HTTP. It’s one of the most effective paradigms for software devlopment in history. The platforms that win on the web are those that mirror its…

Wolfgang Michal – Keine Rente für Wallraff!: „Arme & Arbeiter kommen in den Medien nur vor, wenn man sie denunzieren kann (Hartz-IV-Schlampen, Kinderverwahrloser, Bildungsdeppen). Für etwas stehen, etwas riskieren, ein Thema durchsetzen, das ist nicht das Ding der jungen Reporter. Sie wollen bloß unterhalten. Opa Wallraff wird’s schon richten.“

Extracts from the book The UNIX Philosophy by Mike Gancarz – The Three Systems of Man: „The third system appears after people become disenchanted with their second system. The Third System is: often built by people who have been „burned“ by the second system often given a name change to disassociate it with the original…

Paul Graham – Why TV Lost: „The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. But they’re still dragging their heels. They still seem to wish people would watch shows on TV instead, just as newspapers that put their stories online still seem…

Mike Hendrickson at O’Reilly Radar – State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 4 — The Languages: „If you look at the five-year trend for the languages shown below, you can see that C# has been steadily growing year after year while Java has been going in the opposite direction during the same period.…

Alistair Croll at GigaOM – 7 Questions to Evaluate SaaS: „With software as a service, the focus has become whether the tool is good enough on day one and how well it will adapt over time. […] How effectively can your users accomplish their goals? How many cases-per-minute or entries-per-day can workers do, and how…