If we were only trying to hire in Chicago, we’d never have the world-class team we have today.
. . . Being in the same room occasionally is great, but I would much rather work with A players remotely than B players in the same office, if that's the choice.
DHH on Hiring Remote Workers
The Microsoft Stack Did Not Kill MySpace, People Did
An article on the High Scalability blog provocatively titled Did The Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace? caused a bit of a flap on Hacker News today.
While perusing the article, I immediately remembered highlighting a certain passage from Peopleware, indisputably one of the great classics of our field. I grabbed my copy off the bookshelf and found the passage on page 5 under the heading The High-Tech Illusion:
The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it's more crucial, but because it's easier to do. … Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work.
If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there."
PowerShell Tip: Pipe to the Windows Clipboard
Through this blog post, I discovered the wonderful clip, which allows you to pipe to the clipboard from PowerShell (or cmd).
The IT department at my company has a weird scheme that they like to use for assigning computer names, so I find myself running a PowerShell command like this several times a week when I need to summon my cryptic computer name:
$Env:COMPUTERNAME | clip
Wired | Tired | Expired
This should make sense to a significant (and some would say unfortunate) segment of the developer population:
| Wired | c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe recycle apppool "MyAppPool" |
| Tired | cscript c:\windows\system32\iisapp.vbs /a "MyAppPool" /r |
| Expired | iisreset |
The State of ORM at Microsoft
I just watched a pretty good presentation by Microsoft’s Eric Nelson that untangles the mess that is Microsoft’s ORM strategy. It’s appropriately titled:
ORM, EDM, ESQL, Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities - Confused?
This topic is of particular interest to me, as I’ve begun work on a new application using the latest and greatest Microsoft stuff after having been out frolicking in Railsland for a while.
Some light reading seemed to indicate that the ADO.NET Entity Framework was the officially blessed product going forward, and this presentation confirmed that and provided a nice explanation of how the various technologies listed in the title fit into the picture.
