Ryan Tomayko

Doing It Wrong —

Tim Bray on the state of Enterprise tech:

This is unacceptable. The Fortune 1,000 are bleeding money and missing huge opportunities to excel and compete. I’m not going to say that these are low-hanging fruit, because if it were easy to bridge this gap, it’d have been bridged. But the gap is so big, the rewards are so huge, that it’s time for some serious bridge-building investment. I don’t know what my future is right now, but this seems by far the most important thing for my profession to be working on.

That’s what led me to start (the now defunct) lesscode.org almost five years ago. Things actually seem to have come a long way since then, when the idea of using open source, dynamic languages, or web protocols would get you laughed out of the room. That’s not the case anymore.

I’ve given up the idea that advocacy can have an impact, though. Everyone has something to pitch The Enterprise. You get lost in the noise. Useful tech wins eventually.

"It's like twitter. Except we charge people to use it." —

This email exchange is quite possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever read on the web. Here’s a tiny piece:

Actually, you were asking me to design a logotype which would have taken me a few hours and fifteen years experience. For free. With pie charts. Usually when people don’t ask me to design them a logo, pie charts or website, I, in return, do not ask them to paint my apartment, drive me to the airport, represent me in court or whatever it is they do for a living. Unfortunately though, as your business model consists entirely of “Facebook is cool, I am going to make a website just like that”, this non exchange of free services has no foundation as you offer nothing of which I wont ask for.

It’s just pages and pages of that.

Thank you @mojombo.

UPDATE: @SimonEdhouse responds
UPDATE: zing

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.

GPL workarounds —

“Ten months later the company dies from a sudden buffer overflow.”

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.”

Why You Need a Degree to Work For BigCo [raganwald.com] —

:)

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 top 20 IT mistakes to avoid —

w00t! lesscode bringing in the tail….

Stealth Start-Ups Suck —

God this is so true and I’m doing exactly what he says not to. :(

The Power Of Us —

“Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business” — that’s not all it’s shaking up…

Small is the new big —

I missed the precursor to the last link. This one might even be better..

More on small —

Yes! Yes! More on this in a bit…

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!