h3h.net

A lot of people want to get an awesome job, but most of the advice out there is geared toward joining corporate bureaucracies and saving some repressed human resources manager from a frightful view of reality. Résumé templates, guidance counselors and the corporate ladder have conspired to make your career as boring and reproducible as [...]

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

-John W. Gardner

Quality is important in plumbing, philosophy, and coding all the same…

Recently I used Fog Creek’s Copilot software to attempt to help a family member import some favorites into Firefox. I followed the original Project Aardvark team two summers ago and knew what Copilot was in broad strokes. So I ran the two minute trial and things seemed to work as expected. I bought a day [...]

I really like Ruby’s idiomatic use of ? and ! token characters at the end of method names to indicate the method’s purpose: a predicate or a mutator (or otherwise destructive method), respectively. The benefits can be seen with examples. If the task is replacing a substring inside of a larger string, JavaScript would have [...]

Usually I don’t do roundup type posts, but there has been a lot of awesome recently and I felt it was prudent to catalog some of it. Review Board A Django-based web app for managing code reviews. I have yet to try it, but it looks awesome. I’m going to see if I can work [...]

A Mac software company, Panic, just released their newest product: Coda. I am thoroughly impressed by the extreme attention to detail and quality paid by those developers on both the website and the product itself — it’s nothing short of a work of art. That said, I don’t think I’d use Coda myself because I [...]