Monday Question: What Are You Reading?

I’m going to start posting questions for my readers every Monday. At least until I run out of questions.

Last week, I posted a collection of mini book reviews. I have a bit of an addiction to books, which should be obvious by now. So today’s questions is: What are you reading? Doesn’t matter whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, technical or biographical. Let us all know what you’re reading (or have read recently).

Questions Before I Buy a MacBook Pro

So I think I’m about to buy a Macbook Pro - the 17" model specifically. Before I do, I have a couple of questions that I’m hoping someone can help me answer:

• Is the High Resolution (1920-by-1200) display worth the extra money vs the 1680-by-1050 display?

• I’m going to buy a Refurbished model from Apple, due to the substantial cost savings. Does anyone know of any reason not to? A quick google search doesn’t seem to reveal people having issues, but I thought I’d ask.

Bonus question: What are your “must have” apps for OSX?

Rails Snippets - 11/2

New in Rails: Request Profiler

Jeremy Kemper recently committed a request profiler to Rails. It lets you make a request to a URL repeatedly, and then see an HTML or text report of where your code is spending it’s time. This looks very handy.

Building Tempo With Rails - Part I

A walkthrough of building an app with Rails, which includes feature definition, using Piston to manage plugins, and Restful Authentication. Nice.

SEED Conference Recap

I attended the first SEED Conference on Monday. It was a great event - it exceeded my expectations, and was a bargain at only $395.

The event itself was small (the website says 135, but it seemed like there were a few more than that), and relatively informal. The venue was the McCormick Tribune Campus Center on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. The building is very interesting in and of itself, lots of different colors and textures, and the El runs right through the building.

Mike Rohde did a very well-written summary of the conference (complete with very nice sketches), so I’m not going to do that here. I’m going to highlight some key thoughts from each of the three speakers. As a side note, I got to meet Mike Rohde at this conference. I’d been reading his blog for a number of years, and it was very enjoyable to get to know him. If you’ve not seen his site before, check it out.

Carlos Segura

Of the three people presenting (Carlos, Jason Fried, and Jim Coudal), Carlos was the one I knew the least about. I knew he was a designer, and was one of the original founders of 37Signals, but beyond that I knew very little. I really enjoyed Carlos’s talk - it was much more visual than the other two. He has a very impressive body of work, including reviving the Corbis brand. Overall, Carlos’s talk was very engaging - he conveyed a lot of his information through photos and stories. Here’s a collection of thoughts I jotted down while he was talking (all of this is paraphrased, none of it should be taken as a direct quote):

• Stretch yourself - expose yourself to new things. He gave an example about how he didn’t like country music, but then visited someone’s office who was listening to bluegrass music, and fell in love with it.

• Don’t be afraid to break all the rules. His company did the covers for a very well-received comic book series called “The Filth” that defied all of the conventions of what a comic book should look like, and as a result it stood out in a sea of identical-looking comic books.

• Stay small. He talked about the problems you face when your design firm gets big (his company is currently 2 people, although it has been up to 18). When you get big, you end up having to take work just to “feed the beast”, as he put it. When you are small, you can be much more choosy about the work you take. This was a recurring theme throughout the day, from all three speakers.

• He doesn’t do focus groups - he thought it led to mediocrity.

• Failure isn’t a bad thing - good things often come from it.

Jason Fried

If you’re reading this, you probably know who Jason Fried is. In case you’ve been under a rock, Jason is the founder of 37Signals, and it’s most visible employee. Here’s a summary of his talk, which focused on collaboration:

• Keep your teams small - 2 or 3 people. When you do this, you are forced to focus on what’s important. You also get clearer communication for free.

• Keep your team apart. Keeping them away from each other helps them to stay focused and get things done. “Interuption is the enemy of productivity”

• Use passive, not active, forms of communication. Active is stopping by someone’s desk, tapping them on the shoulder. Passive is email, IM, Campfire, etc. When you’re getting ready to interrupt someone, you need to ask yourself “Is this really worth interrupting them for?”.

• Meetings are toxic. They should be a last resort. Meetings break your day into small, unproductive chunks (amen to that!). A 1 hour meeting with 10 people in it isn’t a one hour meeting - it’s a 10 hour meeting. Think about that.

• Judo. Chop your problems into smaller and smaller problems. Don’t make big decisions, make lots of smaller ones. Decisions are progress, and progress is great for morale.

• Manage quality by using the software while you build it. (My commentary on this is that only works if you’re building software for yourself. It breaks down if you’re building a medical records system for a doctors office. Still sound advice though, if you can apply it.)

• On hiring and retaining, Jason talked about how they pay competitively, but offer lifestyle-based perks such as 4 day work weeks in the summer, flexible hours, etc. He noted that someone will always pay more, but the work environment and lifestyle perks can make a big difference.

Jim Coudal

Jim runs Coudal Partners, a design firm. Jim’s talk was the most entertaining of the three. He’s a very funny guy. He showed several videos, including this one, which I identified with a little too much. Here’s the key points I got from him:

• You have to try things all the time. This was my big takeaway from the conference as a whole - try more stuff and expose yourself to new things. Jim is one of these guys who comes up with new ideas all the time. Some work, some don’t. From each one, you learn something.

• Don’t be afraid to fail. They’ve tried a bunch of stuff that didn’t work out, but they learned things by trying, and often times the failures led to something else.

• Don’t talk things to death. When you have a good idea, do it. Even if it’s a small part, do it.

• Curiosity is a craft

• Take your short attention span and turn it into something creative. This tied back to the video I linked to earlier. There’s nothing wrong with jumping around and trying different things.

• “Taste trumps skill” - this is one of their hiring criteria. Skills can be acquired, taste not so much.

• Choose your clients carefully. This was a recurring theme as well throughout the conference. Coudal judges every project on three criteria: Is it profitable, can we do great work, and can we learn something (that may not be 100% what he said, but it’s real close). That doesn’t mean that every project needs to meet all three - they might do something where they make litttle profit but learn something, or a project where they make a lot of money, but can only do average work. They won’t take work where they won’t make much money, can’t learn anything, and couldn’t do good work.

So these are the high points. I took 7 pages of notes, not all of which I’ve recreated here. At the end of the day, I got a lot out of this conference. It was a unique day, in a unique setting, and gave me a lot of food for thought. According to the SEED Conference site, they will be hosting more of these. I would highly recommend attending.

Rails Snippets - 10/31

The Halloween Edition

Obvious Code: Creating a simple news publishing system in Rails 2.0

One of the first tutorials I’ve seen that focuses on Rails 2.0.

Deploy a Ruby on Rails app on EC2 in five minutes

This would seem to make deploying a Rails app on Amazon’s EC2 very simple:

EC2 on Rails is an Ubuntu Linux server image for Amazon’s EC2 hosting service that’s ready to run a standard Ruby on Rails application with little or no customization. It’s a Ruby on Rails virtual appliance. If you have an EC2 account and a public keypair you’re five minutes away from deploying your Rails app.

Rails Snippets

A collection of Rails links

Using Paypal with Rails

This is a nice step-by-step article on integrating PayPal with your Rails application, using ActiveMerchant.

Rails 2.0 Features: Multiple Views

I’ve only skimmed over the new features in the upcoming 2.0 release of Rails, but this looks like one of the nicest features. This is a good explanation of how it works and why it’s useful.

Mongrel 1.0.3 is out

A bugfix release of Mongrel is out. Looks like 1.1 is due soon, and it looks interesting:

“Mongrel 1.1 is coming real soon now with JRuby support and a few other things.”

Emacs on Rails

Being a bit of an Emacs junky, I’m not sure how I missed this. Looks mature, and very functional, and almost TextMate-like. The link has a nice flash video of Emacs on Rails in action.

Free Rails book from Sitepoint

Sitepoint’s book “Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications” is now free, at least for the next month. I’ve only skimmed it, but it looks like a decent introduction, and the price is certainly right.

SEED Conference

I will be at the SEED Conference in Chicago on Monday. If you’re reading this, and you’re going as well… say “Hi” in the comments below :)

What I've Been Reading

Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz

:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385512058?ie=UTF8&tag=approachingno-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0385512058

Geeks are, generally speaking, much better with technology than people - I’m no different. But the fact is your ability to build and maintain relationships with other people will take you farther in life than any technical skill you can acquire. For a lot of people, myself included, these are just not skills that come naturally. Fortunately for us, this book was written. Never Eat Alone does a very good job of explaining the hows and whys of developing and maintaining relationships over the long term. The book is a quick read, but explains very well some important concepts of “networking” (I term I don’t care much for, but that’s neither here nor there). Mr. Ferrazzi discusses why it’s important to build a network of associates, and then immediately delves into the the how. He also explains how to leverage your network when you need to, like looking for that new job, or when you need the help of a friend of a friend of a friend to close a big deal. This book is written in a casual style, and is peppered with real-world examples of what works and what doesn’t. If developing and maintaining relationships with people is not something that comes naturally to you, then you need to read Never Eat Alone

Developing The Leader Within You by John C. Maxwell

:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0785281126?ie=UTF8&tag=approachingno-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0785281126

John Maxwell is one of the best authors on the topic of leadership. Developing The Leader Within You is easily the best book I’ve read on leadership. Mr. Maxwell covers how to develop influence with people, creating positive change, problem solving, and developing people - among other things. If you were to only read one book on the subject of leadership, this is the one I would recommend. Developing The Leader Within You covers the fundamentals of leadership, does it well, and does it in an easy to read manner. If you are (or aspire to be) a leader, you need to read this book.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston

:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597141/104-3429296-6459107?ie=UTF8&tag=approachingno-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1590597141

This book is, very simply, a collection of interviews with the founders of successfull internet companies, such as del.icio.us, 37Signals, Craigslist, Flickr, and more. As such, it’s easy to read this book in small chunks - most interviews are only 3-4 pages long. It was written by Sarah Livingston, who is one of the founding partners at Y-Combinator, best known as “that VC firm Paul Graham runs” (Paul is one of the interviews in this book, naturally).

I really enjoyed reading this book. It gives a rarely-seen perspective on what it’s like in the early days of a startup. If you’re interested in starting a startup of your own (or even joining one), buy this book

• it’s always better to learn from other people’s mistakes.

Note: The links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy a book, or anything else (need a copy of OS X - Leopard or a MacBook Pro to run it on?), I get a small commission. You too, can help feed my book addiction :)

Marc Andreesen on Career Planning

Marc Andreesen has written a very good series of articles on career planning that is worth a read, regardless of whether you are just starting college or have been working for decades. Marc has a lot of good thoughts on how to choose a career, a college, and a job. He then goes on to explain his ideas around what skills you need to develop to be succesfull.

The series so far contains three articles:

The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 1: Opportunity

“Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.”

That quote pretty much sums up this article.

The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 2: Skills and education This one has some good advice on choosing colleges and majors, but the real wisdom is in his advice on which skills you need to have, regardless of your chosen field. I won’t spoil it for you (seriously, go read it), but Marc really nails the key skills and why they are important.

The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 3: Where to go and why The final article in the series discusses how to choose the place to work, not only in the sense of which company, but where (domestic vs. international). Marc discusses the different types of companies you can work for and why you would want to work there. Marc has a bias towards small high-tech startups (surprise!), but does discuss other types of companies, as well as starting your own.

That’s all he has written (for now). All in all, there is a lot of good advice in these articles. Read them yourself and then pass them along.

Paul Graham on Stuff

Paul Graham has a new article up called Stuff:

I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady’s attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn’t even remember what else I had stored in that attic.

And yet when I got back I didn’t discard so much as a box of it. Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.

On a related note, Paul’s site now has comments, which is a first. They’re powered by Disqus, which is a Y Combinator funded site. The comments look nice, and it supports threading and some advanced functionality like forums.