I'm not much of an Ayn Rand fan. Although I confess to a certain guilty pleasure reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (despite prose that can charitably be called leaden), her thinking I found to be naive in its positivism.

[More]

Have you ever engaged in a discussion/argument with someone who (despite your cogent arguments!) simply can't be moved off of their position? Chances are, you're dealing with a fundamentalist. These discussions are, in the truest sense, a complete waste of time. So how can you avoid them? By learning to recognize the signs you're dealing with a techie fundamentalist.

[More]

Recently, I read Ben Nadel's post of his thoughts stimulated by a book that we both seem to be reading, Drive by Daniel Pink. Ben is thinking about the best way of compensating workers. It's a great read with lots of comments. It reminded me of how I stumbled into something that I had pretty much forgotten about -- and I wonder if it would work in a different context.

[More]

Most of you will be familiar with blogger extraordinaire Ben Nadel. Ben recently posted about a fundamental misunderstanding he had about jQuery event objects. There's something very important to be learned about how Ben approaches problems.

[More]

A recent article in "The Business Insider" here reveals some of the questions Google uses to interview applicants. Google's smart, right? So, we should emulate Google?

[More]

Recently, I was reading a post about how Perl blew it (here-- and why it's lost its viability as a web language for new projects. Many of the comments were savage in their response. Yet, ask any non-Perl person and I think they'd agree that Perl no longer has the luster for writing web apps it once did. Given that, why the extreme reaction to what seems a fairly obvious point?

[More]

I spoke with a friend recently who told me that his company had just hired another programmer to keep up with the work. Good problem. Bad solution.

[More]

Malcolm Gladwell is a fabulously successful journalist. He's written blockbuster books: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What The Dog Saw. I find them both interesting and entertaining. Gladwell delivers a product that provides value and he's reaped the appropriate rewards. A heartwarming tale of success, no? Not so fast, grasshopper...

[More]

Since I announced that I was going to do future development with Ruby on Rails, I've received some email asking "Is ColdFusion really dead then?" CF developers have been hearing this for years, but I started thinking about the question itself.

[More]

Well, this is a hard post to write. After months of investigating, soul-searching, and examining, I've decided to move future application development to Ruby On Rails.

[More]