What people want from work today, I think, is personal growth. So if managers are going to add value, I think it can’t just be about productivity. A manager is there to give the worker what the worker needs to succeed. And what workers need in order to stay at a job is personal growth, so a manager should foster that.
A manager can be a coach, a mentor, a sounding board. All the things we would love to get from a friend but don’t usually have friends who are up to the task. In this regard, a manager would need to be very hands on in a way that helps us to be better people — not just better workers.
I know: Big challenge. But at least it’s something to aim for.
Tumbly goodness, page
8 
Kottke
says a tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream
of consciousness… with more than just links.
Anarchaia was the first, but there are many copies. And they
have a plan.
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May Day 2007: A Day of Remembrance
The boys at Catallarchy, “remembering the plight of those who lost their lives to an ideology which promised to free the workers of the world but did the opposite.” An excellent feature as always.
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This little block will change every day, probably with me ranting about something or other but perhaps with links to neat stuff I’ve found.
— Me, eight years ago today, while a sophomore at Rose.
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If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it’s not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever.
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mgrdcm:
btw, ‘ted.oconnor.cx’ really ought to redirect to ‘edward.oconnor.cx’.
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hober:
yeah, good point
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mgrdcm:
also ‘edwardmichaelcolbertdanielliam.oconnor.cx’ too ;)
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hober:
hahahaaha
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mgrdcm:
and yes, i did test that one earlier
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hober:
I don’t doubt it.
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mgrdcm:
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[E]ach program has an appropriate level of care and sophistication dependent on the uses to which it will be put. Working above that level is, a way, even less professional than working below it.
— Gerald Weinberg (via Dave Smith)
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It’s really unfortunate that engineers and entrepreneurs have to allocate so many brain cells to preventing VCs from destroying their companies.
Maybe the best way to win the game is to not play in the first place.
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[A] programming language is not simply a means of solving some particular problem. A programming language doesn’t define the solution to the problem, it defines how the solution will change over time. This is the categorical mistake that so many make when criticizing languages: the expressive power of a language is not the measure of a language’s ability to model a problem domain, it’s rather the ability of the language to control changes in the problem domain.
— The Problem Is Choice (emphasis his)
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The celebration of the culture that saw fit to stick an apostrophe in my last name, forever cursing me to break online forms with cryptic but not unexpected SQL errors, is always entertaining[…]
— Stephen O’Grady, on St. Patrick’s Day
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In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it’s really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.
— Tim Bray
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Reasoning about code that depends on something other than its inputs is arguably the operational meaning of ‘complexity’ in software.
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Traffic comparison of Eventful, Upcoming, and Pollstar.
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And what you may also catch a glimpse of is how hard I have to work to get both of them to share the shared space, to relax, to play with their ideas, to listen to each other. Even when both people are friends, even when the technology for their collaboration is present and enabling, there is an art to working together — a subtle, and sometimes profound art — as subtle as the art of listening. It requires that each person let the other person in.
For the two people we were watching trying to work together, their very independence, their very own creative genius proved to be an obstacle to collaboration. In organizations, small and large, there are many more obstacles to collaboration.
Many of them are equally profound and subtle, cultural as well as structural. Others can be traced to things as obvious as incentive systems, which are often disincentives to collaboration.
— from The Art of Collaboration by Bernie DeKoven.
Emphasis mine. -
The truth is that more than half the stuff that gets proposed [on public-html and WHATWG’s mailing list] is plain BS, more than half of what’s left doesn’t interest me, and the rest is so over-discussed that it’s better just to read what Hixie says.
— Jeff Cutsinger, on the volume of messages to public-html (emphasis mine).
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Django and AJAX —
Which means that here and now, in 2006, if you call yourself a ‘web developer’ you have absolutely no excuse for not knowing JavaScript. And if you don’t know JavaScript, you have absolutely no right to call yourself a ‘web developer’.
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Seen around the office recently.
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What really happened to Starbuck? I’m currently hoping for a rescue by some kind of Final Five/Ship of Lights mashup. #
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BarCamp LA #3 is in two weeks. Be there.
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What are ye having, will ye have a pint? Yes, I’ll have a pint with you, sir, And if one of us doesn’t order soon We’ll be thrown out of the boozer.
— Waxie’s Dargle (trad.)
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