“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.”
—Quarry worker’s creed
October 2011
9 posts
Felicia Day's RSS Rant →
feliciaday.com
This puts into words something I’ve been feeling for a long time. I think RSS is a great format with a ton of both current uses and unrealized potential, yet it seems like lately more and more sites want to drop support for it. Twitter actually once had an RSS link on their pages, but removed it, and now the only way to get to it is look through the API documentaion.
I’m looking at you tumblr, for dropping your “post from rss” feature ಠ_ಠ
Steve Jobs on the Value of Saying 'No' →
betabeat.com
Instead of just posting ‘RIP Steve Jobs’ or something, I wanted to take a moment to focus on the message of one of the many great keynotes this man gave.
A Parable of Version Control
A younger programmer asked an elder about his code and his coding style, and how the older programmer would do certain things. The older programmer said ‘Let’s take a look at your code’, so the younger took out his laptop, opened his editor, and showed him.
The older programmer looked at the code, thought about it for a bit, and then started editing it. He deleted the class internals, leaving only the structure, and then rearranged the structure, saying ‘Here’s how I would do it to make it more efficient and readable’. After he was done, he saved the file and gave it back to the younger programmer, who was ashen-faced.
‘That… My code is gone!’ said the younger programmer. ‘But you have it in version control somewhere, right?’ asked the elder. ‘N…. no.’ was the reply. ‘Well then,’ said the older, ‘now you’ve learned two lessons.’
Working without version control. Not even once.
