On launching the Health Benefit News River.
I've read about five extremely solid articles on this site (20bits.com) today; all thorough, easy to read, and cover interesting topics.
Ethan Vizitei with a great piece on people’s misconceptions about what coders do and the difficulty with which they do it.
eWeek: “… Nearly every Microsoft executive associated with the Windows Vista launch has left the company. Vista has proven to be a career-ending enterprise …”
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.
“Welcome to Microsoft.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Facebook isn’t the internet, dipshit.”
“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.”
While not all bad ideas include a PowerPoint presentation, all PowerPoint presentations include at least one bad idea: PowerPoint.
“The success of GNU/Linux and other free software projects is annoying.”
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.
Excellent description of where Enterprise Architects should be moving and why…
Doc just got upgraded to hero status…
“Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business” — that’s not all it’s shaking up…
I guess it’s okay to say out loud now that I'll need all the information like this I can get.. :)
Aaron Swartz writes a novella about his startup interview w/ Paul Graham et al. I'm so jealous!