Buster McLeod

enjoying the act and the product of work

Went to the Building of Basecamp seminar in Chicago this week and had a great time with all of the people of 37 Signals. More than simply a dry explanation of how they built Basecamp, I felt like the experience was more about how to create and sustain a small innovative company that succeeds for the right reasons. Also, perhaps unexpectedly, how to enjoy your work: both the act of working and the product of it. A question we've been tossing around at work recently is: "how do we make sure that, if this succeeds, we still want to work on it?" In other words, how do we build a company that we want to work at even if we don't necessarily have to? All these things, right now, are exactly the kind of stuff I'm interested in, being in a small company myself that plans to innovate and succeed for the right reasons, all while having fun. Looking forward to Jason Fried's visit at the end of his road trip. Meanwhile, I learned a lot more about Ruby on Rails that I'm looking forward to taking advantage of.

Meanwhile, week three at the Robot Co-op comes to a close and I've finally got the skeleton of the prototype pretty much functional on my PowerBook (though it's ugly as hell). I'm going to start adding the stylesheets, javascript, and page flow tweakage this next week, and filling out the rest of the functionality after that. The great thing about our first version is that it's really pretty simple technically. All that is old is new again. Design is of course the most difficult thing to get right, because as the 37 Signals people say, the interface is the software. Hiring is also moving along quickly, so if you were planning on applying, now's the time.

Quick pretend games. Let's say I have a 10-sided die.

*Game A:* I will roll the dice 10 times. You can choose to either have a 1 in 10 chance of getting $1,000 or a 5 in ten chance (or 1 in 2) of getting $10 each time the dice is rolled. You can only choose one of the odd/pay out combos for all 10 rolls. Which of the odds do you choose?

*Game B:* I will roll the dice 1 time. You have the same options between odds and pay outs. Which do you choose?

*Game C:* I will roll the dice 10 times (like in Game A), and the odds are the same, but this time you are choosing between 1 in 10 chance of $1,000,000,000, or $10,000,000. Which do you choose?

I made up these games because I am trying to understand how I act upon risk in different situations. When relatively small amounts of money are involved, I eagerly seek risk (for it could be exciting and have a much higher pay out than not seeking risk). When I only have a single chance though, I tend to be more conservative. Also, when the rewards are both "good enough" I am also okay with being more conservative.

So, as you can probably guess, this is how I answered: Game A, I chose the first option; Game B, I chose the second option; and Game C, I chose the second option again.

Ruby, Rails, radicalness

September 1st was my first official day at The Robot Co-op, though it's something that has been in the works for quite a while. We are looking for a few blogging software developers at the moment if you are (or know of) one. Meanwhile, I'm building a prototype using David Heinemeier Hansson's beautifully elegant Ruby on Rails web application framework. I'm learning Ruby and Rails at the same time, and I'm absolutely loving it.

Every web developer has heard the earnest promises of new development frameworks and has perhaps steered their ship to the siren calls of ultimate flexibility combined with ultimate simplicity only to crash on the rocky shores of incomplete solutions and misled assumptions shortly thereafter. Some have even tried to build them themselves. But it's an extremely difficult problem... what works for one person or one type of problem might not work for another person or another type of problem. Naturally, having been burned a few times myself, I'm skeptical of any new framework that hasn't been around very long, but the early adopter in me still likes to try new things when they are available (especially when people are raving about it). With Ruby, in less than 2 weeks (most of which actually wasn't spent coding but rather doing other startup-like tasks such as moving desks around, setting up the stereo, and interviewing people) I've been able to develop faster (and with better code, I think) than I would've been able to even in something I was very familiar with like Perl and Mason. A few features of Ruby on Rails that I find to be brilliant:

* Built in functional and unit testing (I have to learn more about how to use this though).
* Built in documentation creation (using RubyDoc).
* Usage of the Model-View-Controller design pattern, where all three pieces are in the same language.
* Ruby is a pure object-oriented language.
* Rails lets you follow a few conventions (such as mapping db tables to objects and using the table columns as object attributes) that save a lot of typing and duplication
* The Ruby on Rails IRC channel is super helpful.
* There is this thing called "scaffolding" that lets you jump-start your development with a lot of pre-built functionality like adding, editing, deleting, and listing a particular object in your system.

I've still got a lot to learn (building a prototype on it is probably the best way to learn it quickly), especially about more of the unique advantages of Ruby over Perl and functional testing, but it has been a joy so far to work with it. I'm looking forward to seeing David again in Chicago next week (I'm going to their Building Basecamp seminar with my other two coworkers).

rich, famous, or powerful

Would you rather be rich, famous, or powerful? It's a variant of the healthy, tasty, or cheap question. And the fast, cheap, and good question. Though, think about it. Really answer it. It reveals a lot I think. Tell me your answer, I really want to know. Have you already answered this question or is this the first time?

Potential is so desirable. Think about why you want to be rich, famous, or powerful. What's the fourth quadrant? Happy. What's different about being happy? Two things. One, it's not directly attainable. Two, it is not a means to an end like the other three. Is it, rich therefore happy, or is happy therefore rich? Likewise with famous and powerful. Who is the chicken, who the egg?

The question begged is... with the first three... what do you do with richness, famousness, or powerfulness? What is the egg that these chicken eventually lay? Is it happiness? Or is happiness still elusive? If not happiness, then what? Dare you say freedom or peace or the always ambiguous "I would be able to do whatever I want". But what is that?

changing blogging habits

Today was my first day at the new job. I want to tell you what we want to build, but just this once I think I actually want to build it first. Just for fun. See if that works better than talking about it but never building it. I know, I'm lame. Suffice it to say that I'm busy and I like it. I will post photos.

Something strange has happened with my blogging habits. I've actually started using LiveJournal a lot. A lot of protected entries that only a few people see. In fact, I pretty much just cut-and-pasted a huge part of this entry and put it into LiveJournal, where it better fits.

A few things that I like better about LiveJournal than this weblog:

* I can control who sees what. Many times I protect entries even when there's nothing that I necessarily want to keep private... I think because I like knowing who's in the room.
* You can even create custom groups of friends and mix and match them for particular entries.
* Even comments can be more personal and interesting when you know that the entry is protected from the general outside world.
* Leaving comments is really easy. The way the little "post reply" link opens up a comment box right there for you is awesome. Also, email notifications when people reply to your posts and comments really makes conversations stay alive much better.
* Threaded comments are really much better at encouraging on-going communication rather than one-offs that don't necessarily need to be continued as conversations.
* I use it more to communicate with people I know in real life, even as a simple way to coordinate plans.
* The friends pages are just awesome.
* Nobody talks about CSS, RSS, PHP, SOAP, etc.
* I think it's all about the conversations, really.

Some things that could be improved:

* Page view statistics (they don't have them at all).
* Better default templates (I get the feeling that I'm not really their target persona for some reason).
* If there was a way to also see all of the comments that your friends had made (just like the friend's list but for comments instead of posts), that would be totally cool.

That's really it. It's pretty solid overall. I wonder what will happen in these next couple months... perhaps I can find a way to combine the weblog and LiveJournal needs into one thing. All these different buckets that I throw content into: camera phone pictures, low-threshold links, weblog, LiveJournal, work wiki, work weblog, paper journal, emails to friends. My early adopter instinct tells me these should be better consolidated, but my inner satisficer tells me that it's good to diversify these buckets and let them compete for my attention and interest. Let them all evolve at their own pace.