Great Article for People Not Sold on Ruby on Rails

I'm actually a bit blown away by how good this article is from A List Apart.

I'd be quite surprised if an open-minded developer from any background could read it from beginning to end and not be very intrigued by Ruby on Rails...and hopefully enough so to at least give Rails a test-drive.

So if you've somehow never heard of Ruby on Rails, or have heard of it but don't understand why it's so interesting to so many people, then please read this article.  It's very well written, and I promise it won't bore you.

Bolt of Lightning #1 of ∞

Tedium == Opportunity for Clever Automation

(Note: This is a revelation I had today, and I consider it a cousin of Blodgett's First Law.)

West Michigan Day of .NET 2008

I finally broke down and registered for the West Michigan Day of .NET on May 10.

As I've said, although I'm quite active on Twitter, I'm typically not especially social in real life.  But that's something I'm interested in changing, and this is too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Many of my Twitter friends that I've never met face-to-face will be there.  I thought about listing them here, but there are simply too many.  One of them even called me out by name on his blog. :-)

On top of that, there are some very good looking sessions on the schedule.  In particular, I'm excited to hear about MonoRail, Boo, DSLs, and testing features in Visual Studio Team System.

Bring on the awkwardness!

Justification Doesn't Scale

If there's one thing I think I'd most like about working for myself, it's that I wouldn't have to justify my decisions to anyone (other than my customer, probably).  I could just do what I knew was right without wasting time explaining the "why" to anyone.

You get a great idea, you discover something new and useful, you just do it, you don't explain it.  Wouldn't it be nice to spend no time justifying, and all time doing?

Maybe the best way to become more efficient/productive is to reduce the amount of time you have to spend justifying things to people.

I'd be interested to hear from sole proprietors or other one-person businesses out there:

• Is not having to justify your decisions to managers, co-workers, etc. one of the big reasons you chose to go solo?
• Is it really as great in practice as I'm imagining it to be?

I know there have to be downsides, like being solely responsible for any negative outcomes of your decisions/whims, but living with total integrity and accountability appeals to me as well.

Wired | Tired | Expired

Wired	GitHub
Tired	Google Code
Expired	SourceForge

Blodgett's Comprehensibility/Flexibility Hypothesis

Comprehensibility and flexibility are incompatible. You must sacrifice one to get the other.

See here for some background.  I hope I'm wrong!  Prove me wrong!

Am I More Interesting on Twitter?

Something just occurred to me:

I have more followers on Twitter (currently 108) than subscribers on my blog (currently 85).

Is that significant?  Am I more interesting on Twitter than I am on my blog?  Why is that?  Should I make the writing I do on my blog more like the writing I do on Twitter?

Hmm...my mind is going in a million directions now...