Table or Booth?

No thanks, God

I'll trust that it was well intended, but President Obama's letter to his followers this Thanksgiving completely omits any mention of the one thing that still holds our country together: God. 

Earnings-Based Consumption

We cannot spend our way to good economic health, even in the short run.  We have to produce.

John Stiglitz, Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1997 - 2002 took callers on CSPAN this morning, one of which was a democrat who suggested (paraphrasing), "With the economic downturn and the tax payers being the problem, with the bad mortgages and such, why not just give every American one million dollars? Then people would spend money, helping businesses, and letting people keep their houses and jobs."

Why stop at one million?? Why not 10? How about 100 million? We'd all be set for life.

I'm all for consumption as a important part of market health. However, the problem with consumption based on money given versus money earned is that, when given, you have no skin in the game. No risk taken. This changes everything. If you lose it all because of a bad decision, oh well. 

With money earned, you have a vested interest in not seeing it disappear. With money earned, you do your best to get the maximum value you can for every penny. This kind of incentive works.  Money-given based consumption eventually reduces productivity to point of total dependency.  This is socialism and, as history shows, has a strong track record for destroying markets.

RailsConf 2008 Saturday Night Key Note: Kent Beck

I got lazy and didn't blog about DHH's key note last night.  So, before I get on with Kent's salient story-style wisdom, I'll quickly catch up with DHH's.

Continue reading "RailsConf 2008 Saturday Night Key Note: Kent Beck" »

Jim Weirich, Joe O'Brien, and Chris Nelson acted out a dialog where they built an application to reserve conference rooms.  Very entertaining and novel approach for a tech conference!  I loved it.  But, to the point now - the summary...

So, you want to build something?  

Their are at least two philosophies to fleshing out the model: Traditional object-based modeling and behavior-based modeling.  How are these different?

Continue reading "Summary: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Modeling Systems" »

May 30, 2008 at 06:08 PM in Current Affairs, Ruby, Software, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Digg This | Save to del.icio.us

Lessons Learned:

• Freeze existing functionality
• Field small, co-located, talented team (4 developers)
• Dedicate long technology evaluation, prototyping, and planning period
• Assign technical decision maker and communicator to management
• Leverage UX team: all page design and HTML gen, then give to dev to slice up and wire
• Change only the obvious
• Deploy beta frequently and actively recruit feedback  

I'm at RailsConf.

Portland, Oregon is, well, Portland (overcast and wet). Got in late last night and walked over to Stanford's. The service was friendly, even at 10:30 PM.  Everything about the burger was above average.  And it came with hot, crispy, slightly salty fries.  It was all devoured with sips of a local wheat bear that I forget the name of.

So far, having been away from Ruby and Rails for over a year, it feels like going back to a place you used to live. Some things are still the same. In other ways, I hardly recognize the place.  New techniques like elastic computing (and plenty of competing commercial hosting options), new tools such as git, tarantula, and hobo, etc.  Good stuff.

I'll pretend I blog and let you know how it all goes.

Summary: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Modeling Systems

Jim Weirich, Joe O'Brien, and Chris Nelson acted out a dialog where they built an application to reserve conference rooms.  Very entertaining and novel approach for a tech conference!  I loved it.  But, to the point now - the summary...

So, you want to build something?  

Their are at least two philosophies to fleshing out the model: Traditional object-based modeling and behavior-based modeling.  How are these different?

Continue reading "Summary: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Modeling Systems" »

May 30, 2008 at 06:08 PM in Current Affairs, Ruby, Software, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Digg This | Save to del.icio.us

Lessons Learned:

• Freeze existing functionality
• Field small, co-located, talented team (4 developers)
• Dedicate long technology evaluation, prototyping, and planning period
• Assign technical decision maker and communicator to management
• Leverage UX team: all page design and HTML gen, then give to dev to slice up and wire
• Change only the obvious
• Deploy beta frequently and actively recruit feedback  

I'm at RailsConf.

Portland, Oregon is, well, Portland (overcast and wet). Got in late last night and walked over to Stanford's. The service was friendly, even at 10:30 PM.  Everything about the burger was above average.  And it came with hot, crispy, slightly salty fries.  It was all devoured with sips of a local wheat bear that I forget the name of.

So far, having been away from Ruby and Rails for over a year, it feels like going back to a place you used to live. Some things are still the same. In other ways, I hardly recognize the place.  New techniques like elastic computing (and plenty of competing commercial hosting options), new tools such as git, tarantula, and hobo, etc.  Good stuff.

I'll pretend I blog and let you know how it all goes.

Yellow Pages.com Rewrite

Lessons Learned:

• Freeze existing functionality
• Field small, co-located, talented team (4 developers)
• Dedicate long technology evaluation, prototyping, and planning period
• Assign technical decision maker and communicator to management
• Leverage UX team: all page design and HTML gen, then give to dev to slice up and wire
• Change only the obvious
• Deploy beta frequently and actively recruit feedback  

RailsConf 2008

I'm at RailsConf.

Portland, Oregon is, well, Portland (overcast and wet). Got in late last night and walked over to Stanford's. The service was friendly, even at 10:30 PM.  Everything about the burger was above average.  And it came with hot, crispy, slightly salty fries.  It was all devoured with sips of a local wheat bear that I forget the name of.

So far, having been away from Ruby and Rails for over a year, it feels like going back to a place you used to live. Some things are still the same. In other ways, I hardly recognize the place.  New techniques like elastic computing (and plenty of competing commercial hosting options), new tools such as git, tarantula, and hobo, etc.  Good stuff.

I'll pretend I blog and let you know how it all goes.