A Healthy Venus
On launching the Health Benefit News River.
An Introduction to A/B Testing
I've read about five extremely solid articles on this site (20bits.com) today; all thorough, easy to read, and cover interesting topics.
"All I need is a Programmer"
Ethan Vizitei with a great piece on people’s misconceptions about what coders do and the difficulty with which they do it.
That Vista Thud is the sound of executive layoffs
eWeek: “… Nearly every Microsoft executive associated with the Windows Vista launch has left the company. Vista has proven to be a career-ending enterprise …”
Maintainable Programmers
This was a really great lesscode.org piece by Aristotle. The follow-up discussion in the comments was superb as well. Being in the middle of everything really warped my view of what was going on back then, I think.
Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's Company-Wide Memo Regarding the Microsoft Takeover Bid
“Welcome to Microsoft.”
Sun and MySQL: I don't get it
Oops: “At $1 billion … Sun paid a multiple of 10 times sales for MySQL today. Optimistically assuming a 20% profit margin, they are looking at a multiple of 50 times earnings for a return on investment of around 2% per year. Optimistically.”
How Software Companies Die
Orson Scott Card: “You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can’t exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.”
Give Me a M: The MySQL/Sun Q&A
Steve does the Sun/MySQL aquisition Q&A and speculates on some interesting effects of the deal: “… YouTube sold for $1.6 billion, and consumed virtually no software. If that acquisition was to take place today, they would have been buying from Sun.”
The Pirate’s Dilemma
“We live in a world where it is legal for a company to patent pigs, or any other living thing except for a full birth human being, but copying a CD you bought onto your hard drive is considered an infringement of someone else’s rights.”
Why I Hate Mission Statements
“The easy and fun way to test whether a mission statement/purpose/motto is garbage is to negate it and see whether it still holds up.”
An unordered list of thoughts I had during a conference call with a potential client today
“Facebook isn’t the internet, dipshit.”
More Thoughts on The Renaissance, Agile and developers
“I tell you one thing for sure: Far more developers understand the business they work in than business people understand the technology that drives them forward.”
Lifecycle of a bad idea [dive into mark]
While not all bad ideas include a PowerPoint presentation, all PowerPoint presentations include at least one bad idea: PowerPoint.
Free software is a weak mode of production | Free Software Magazine
“The success of GNU/Linux and other free software projects is annoying.”
But Martin, Enterprise Software IS Boring
A well thought out and respectful response to Fowler’s argument that business software doesn’t have to be boring (RailsConf 2006). Good points abound but I have to disagree with the premise.
The (Business-Driven) Enterprise Architect
Excellent description of where Enterprise Architects should be moving and why…
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
Doc just got upgraded to hero status…
The Power Of Us
“Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business” — that’s not all it’s shaking up…
Process of Forming a Company
I guess it’s okay to say out loud now that I'll need all the information like this I can get.. :)
SFP: Come see us
Aaron Swartz writes a novella about his startup interview w/ Paul Graham et al. I'm so jealous!