- The Building-Learning Paradox
If you want to learn a new langauge or framework you need a good project idea as the basis for what you’re building as you learn. But if you have a good project idea to work on, you want to get it to market as soon as possible. I present to you The Building-Learning Paradox.
I conjecture that this paradox is the reason that highly motivated people tend to learn in smaller incremental steps rather than diving head-first into a new technology. It’s basically impossible to satisfy both these main motivators at once. Not 100% sure what I’m going to do for this project I’m working on right now, but I think I’m going to sacrifice speed in order to learn something new. We’ll see if I can keep that up for very long.
How do you deal with this paradox? I’m curious.
- Another Cyclist Hit by a Car
First it was LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who broke his elbow when a taxi dashed through the bike lane a few weeks ago, now it’s the host of NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Peter Sagal, who got banged up by a car while out riding casually on his summer vacation:
I didn’t get knocked out, but felt pretty bad lying there on the ground. I did an inventory and all my parts were still there, and nothing felt broken, but I was having trouble breathing so when somebody ran up I asked them to call 911 and tried not to move. Ambulance came, EMTs checked me out, and by that time I was starting to feel a little better and thought maybe I could shake it off and just call home for a ride. Then I tried to sit up and an invisible angry dwarf with a knife stabbed me in the back. So I enjoyed a relaxing scream and lay back down, carefully, and they put me on the backboard with the neck brace and put me in the ambulance and I stared at a series of changing ceilings until I got the emergency room at a nearby hospital.
via Peter Sagal – Blog » Blog Archive » How I Spent My Summer Vacation.
I’m not sure if it’s the fact that more bicyclists are on the road these days, or if drivers are more distracted than usual… but as I plan a trip that will have me riding 250ish miles on-road, this sort of thing concerns me.
Guess the main takeaway here is that we cyclists need to be more defensive when sharing space with motorists, and do our part to obey the laws so that we can get self-righteous when the motorists do not. Also, we need much better bike infrastructure here in Los Angeles and across the country. Now that would be tax dollars well spent.
- Learning Rails – Day I
I’ve been reading up a bit on Ruby and think I have a passable handle on the syntax. Also studied the structure of Rails apps. So now it’s time to actually build something to actually learn it. And because I have no patience for more Hello World examples, I’m going to build something actually useful.
Only problem is that I don’t have any tiny project ideas right now. So I’m going to re-work an existing idea and build a social restaurant recommendation site, based on my previous (poorly-named) Edahh project. If it turns out well, it might just be the basis for a re-launch of that service.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first:
$ rails whirlfood -d mysql
And the adventure begins.
- The Problem with Unsuccessful Ideas
Saw this today in The Atlantic, talking about writing fiction and the simple reason that many stories are unsuccessful and uninspiring:
The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination. To vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer.
Replace “stories” with “startups” and “fiction writer” with “entrepreneur” and I think we might have a universal truth here. I know that in my roles as a developer, entrepreneur, and consumer getting bored is the primary reason I don’t do or complete something.
Present me with a great idea or fantastical concept and I’ll work 24×7 to make it into reality. But if you need someone to debug your kernel drivers… I’m not that guy. Don’t get me wrong – I’m super-grateful that those guys exist, it’s just not my brand of work.
- Why Ruby on Rails vs C#?
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately trying out a variety of development technologies and one of those is Ruby on Rails. I haven’t yet figured out exactly why people are so excited about it. Perhaps it’s because the convention-over-configuration methodology hides quite a bit of complexity from the developer. But my issue with it is simple – I like to be in control of my software and I like more explicit design.
- Planning a Bike Tour Down the Coast
I’m getting that feeling that I need to get out of town for a little while again. It strikes unexpectedly and must be sated.
So, I’m putting together a bike tour to start in about a week around the 29th of this month and lasting for either 3 or 4 days. The plan is to ride Amtrak up the coast for 5 hours to San Luis Obispo, explore for the evening and spend the night, then ride back home to LA.
- Inspiration Is For Amateurs
Great working music from one of my favorite creative design-oriented blogs:
This late-summer concoction wraps electronica, techno, synth pop, and dash of sultry boogie-woogie into a dreamy, magic carpet ride. We nicked the title from a favorite Chuck Close quote, “Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.”
via 99% Music Mix I: Inspiration Is For Amateurs :: Articles :: The 99 Percent.
- What Makes a Great Employee?
“So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action.” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It is human nature to think that we truly understand the world around us. This is especially true of our individual perceptions of human interactions. We believe that we understand what motivates our employees. Likewise, we think we understand what is important when placing an employee into a new position, trusting our intuition. But, it turns out that in many cases, the most important factors based upon behavioral science in employee selection are counter-intuitive.
- TalentScan – it’s like mint.com but for your employees!
We’re in beta testing and preview period for our new product at Humantelligence that we’ve dubbed TalentScan. Simply put, TalentScan makes it drop-dead easy for any business owner or group leader to analyze their people and find ways to improve efficiency as well as foster communication and understanding among their workforce.
If you picture a cross between Mint.com and Google Analytics, but instead of looking at your bank accounts or your web stats, we’re looking at the motivators and behaviors of the people you work with. TalentScan gives you really interesting information about your employees that you probably didn’t know. It discusses their dominant workplace motivators, workplace behaviors, ideal workplace and life priorities. And that’s just for starters. Plus, it’s totally free to try it out and get quite a lot of useful information without even giving us your credit card info.
Planning to unveil all the details over the next few weeks as we march towards the public launch, but you can get a quick peek and register for notifications over at TalentScanApp.com and we might even squeeze you in to our beta test group!
Update: It’s now a public beta open to the public!
- FolioHD – Free Online Portfolio
For those of you who are interested in a super-quick way to create an easy online portfolio, I recently launched a site called FolioHD to do exactly this. We’ve had about 100 people sign up so far and had over 2GB of images uploaded already. So, yeah. If you need a portfolio site, you should try this free online portfolio site and tell me what you think!
We timed it and it only takes 60 seconds to sign up, upload some pics and have your site live. Beat that with any other site and I’ll be surprised…
