-
Vacation
It’s early Friday afternoon and I have an entire weekend ahead of me as I write this but I already feel like I’m at the point where my vacation is winding down and the responsibilities of going back to work are already staring me in the face. Last week I celebrated two fun milestones: I…
-
Standing for Something
I want to see more companies start to actually take a stand on issues. That’s one of the things I respected about Basecamp. Until their cofounders kind of revealed themselves to have some serious issues, they had a track record of striving to be good citizens. For the most part, companies love to seem like…
-
April 28, 1995
Today marks 26 years since I said goodbye to my mom for the last time as I walked out the door to wait for the bus. Later that day, she and my brother Brandon died in a car accident on the way to go shopping. It’s so weird, too. With every year that passes, the…
-
Basecamp and Leadership
So, Basecamp announced some internal changes this week for how they are going to run their company. Over the years, Basecamp has built up a reputation for resisting some of the hustle culture associated with so many startups, and for working smarter, not harder. Among other things, they invented Ruby on Rails, they have been…
-
My Sweet Setup: Carbon Copy Cloner
Carbon Copy Cloner is one of those tools that focused on doing one particular thing, but it does it incredibly well. The thing: copying everything from one drive on a Mac to another, and copying it so well that if you boot your startup disk, you could boot up straight from the clone disk and…
-
Constant naming and lookup in Ruby
I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how constant lookup worked in Ruby, but I encountered a surprising piece of behavior recently and I wanted to share it. We had a god model at work that contains thousands of lines of code, much of which is in methods that aren’t truly core to…
-
Knowledge Work Is Different
Every now and then, I’ll be feeling out of it and I’ll step away from work. Maybe I’m feeling sick or fatigued, or maybe I heard a gutting piece of bad news going on in the world. Whatever it is, I know I don’t have it in me to keep doing my work, and I’ll…
-
My Sweet Setup: NetNewsWire and Feedbin
When you look at NetNewsWire you can just tell it’s a Mac app through and through. At first it might feel a little spartan, but it is nonetheless quite full-featured as a reader. But once you get to know it, it’s quintessentially a Mac app. It uses a beautiful and standard Mac interface. And it…
-
My Sweet Setup: RSS
Being an RSS user is probably one of my most unconventional and nerdy habits, but they’re such a better way to experience the internet I feel I must evangelize them. I could write paragraphs of text, but inspired by a recent talk I saw at RailsConf, I’d like to show you instead in a more……