20 years ago I joined my first bonafide startup. It crashed and burned over egos. The ego’s of the founders vs. the ego’s of the VC’s backing it. Doesn’t matter who was wrong or who was right. When the battle of wills was over the idea was over too.
20 years later and no lessons learned.
Every day I get messages from recuiters about “opportunities”.
Every single day.
Thing is, they’re boring. Come work with us and build the new, better whatever. Nothing new, nothing disruptive. All about copying are remixing the current status quo. I remember when startups did stuff nobody else had thought of. Is it just because we’ve thought of everything? No it’s not.
It’s the cowardace and greed of the current generation of entreprenuer and those who fund them. They know who hit a home run in the past and they want to get onto that train. Screw building a business, screw making something just copy the market leader.
Well that’s not good enough. Being the next Facebook or Zynga or Google (and there will be a next, never doubt that. Just like Facebook was the next MySpace) is a boring goal.
Disrupting the experience. Building for the future. That’s where I want to be.
So RocketNinja is a git shop thanks to me. We climbed from being a perforce shop when I took over server developement here. We use github, mostly just for the safety of having a remote managed repostitory rather than any of their add on features.
Github: Git on the web. There’s a built in tree and source viewer and editor, an inline code comment features hooked to email. The pull request feature is amazing. Branching and merging across many repositories can be a challenge to an organization. Trying to perform code reviews on changes eminating from GMT+2 in GMT-8 is a pain. Pull requests fix that, completely.
Gitorious: github as open source. Almost as good, and deployable by you and me on our own servers.
Tower: Easy. Efficent. Powerful. Boloney! Awfull visual design, poor task flow and ugly as sin. It’s so busy that even the easy tasks are hard. Thanks guys.
SourceTree: hey, it’s got mercurial support too! Other than that it’s a big WTF.
Gitbox: What’s cool here is nothing. The nice empty space, the minimal controls and focused design. Gitbox does the 90% subset of what you need from version control and leave the rest off. Two lists, a list of changes and a list of content of those changes (or, at the top of the timeline a list of pending changes). Create, switch, pull or push from your branches and remotes. Commit as well. The winner by far.
GitX: The standard when it comes to viewing history, not fancy or complicated. It does one thing and it does it … well ok. Oh and it’s open source, so if you feel the need you can make it even better.
His claim is that saying WordPress gets your blog post copied and reposted by some sort of blog spam ring.
wtf i say.
So here it is, WordPress in all it’s glory. Take that jwz!
For years I’ve complained to coworker and “bosses” that encrypting data in a web app was foolish. If the key had to be available at run time the same access that granted a hacker acces gave her the key to the data as well. A one way hash of constant data is really no better and adding salts doesn’t actually increase security since, like keys, they’re available at runtime. Now I’ve got a club now hopefully this article by Bruce Schneier will allow me to drive a nail into the coffin of such schemes. Of course the reality is that none of those who’ve suggested these schemes will be deterred, as they know more than anyone else does anyway.
Charlie Stross is a guy who really writes his blog. A whole essay, not just a stretched out twitter post. I could wish i could write like that, seemingly effortless cranking out the verbage. Yet in the end it all wraps up neat and tidily. It doesn’t seem like any amount of effort on my part will ever get me there, but here’s to committing to try.
I’ve been coding java professionally since 1997, started with java 1.0.3 as a matter of fact. Back then java was not clearly better. Python existed, and in fact I built some systems with it. I worked on the OS/2 port of python implementing and maintaining the threading and os modules. Not only did python run more reliably but it was faster. Somehow though java won, the crowd chose the tool closest to the last tool and away we went. Nowadays everybody seems enamored of ruby, due I hope to rails and it’s active record focus, because the language itself stinks. It’s painfully slow, and really how many different ways does a language need to express greater than? Having gone through the excercise I can honestly say Rails is a fine “contractor” framework. When you only need to finish 80% of an app, it’s the fastest way there. As long as you’re not on the hook to reach 100% it’s great.
