Dev::Blog

Blog design in the age of RSS:

“The risk is no longer of losing readers with an an insufficient volume of posts, but of annoying readers with insufficiently interesting posts. In my original article, I argued that Long Tail tactics discourage overthinking the quality question. Throw it all out there and let the marketplace sort it out, I urged; good will rise to prominence and bad will fade to obscurity. But the problem with RSS is that it isn’t a marketplace. Once someone’s subscribed to your feed, they get everything, whether they want it or not. Bad content is as prominent as good content, and one can tarnish the other. So what are the new Rules of Push? Is there a Push threshold–a post worth pushing? If not, what to do with it?”

Chris’ Long Tail article has been around for a bit, but I’ve just started reading and re-reading it after spending months reading about the article (future essay topic: The Internet and the Rise of the Secondary Source?), and it’s one of the few pieces in recent memory that I’ve actually found myself highlighting. As I spend more time in the web development area, his thoughts are having a big influence on me, and since I’ve been thinking a lot lately on my potential use of RSS in future projects, this bit is timely. Alternate future essay topic: Stop Shifting My Damned Paradigm So I Can Actually Get Something Done.

Someone’s OS X software list

Is it representative of most OS X users? Beats me. I’ve definitely got some catching up to do in 2005 - my dock’s pretty much Firefox, NetNewsWire, BBEdit, Transmit, VLC, Omni Outliner, Mail, Terminal and calculator - not the graphing one, the plain old regular one (the conversions are handy in this semi-metric world). There are some other apps (MarsEdit is under evaluation), but I really haven’t taken the time (ha!) to learn better ways of doing anything. That said, nobody at my (PC-based) workplace can understand how I get so much done in my free time. With the exception of Visual Studio, I can do pretty much everything faster on my Mac (although to be fair, I don’t have to put up with my boss interrupting me every five minutes when I’m at home.)

The Code Room: while it’s hard to envision a Microsoft marketing technique as a “reality” show, it’s probably as realistic as most of the other stuff out there. Now, I can’t exactly fault MS for making the download a self-extracting EXE, but it’s kind of hard to watch on a Mac. If Microsoft wants to inspire passion for their development environments, they might want to drop the cost of entry and at least make their ads cross-platform…

(Via The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout.)

The Graphing Calculator Story is yet another tale of developer obsession that I can use to show non-coders as an example of, well, I don’t know what, exactly. Maybe just an example of things I think are cool. Synopsis: contractor at Apple finishes his term with his project cancelled, but decides to finish his application anyway. Hilarity ensues.

I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn’t ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Greg had unlimited energy and a perfectionist’s attention to detail. He usually stayed behind closed doors programming all day, while I spent much of my time talking with other engineers. Since I had asked him to help as a personal favor, I had to keep pace with him. Thanks to an uncurtained east-facing window in my bedroom, I woke with the dawn and usually arrived ten minutes before Greg did. He would think I had been working for hours and feel obliged to work late to stay on par. I in turn felt obliged to stay as late as he did. This feedback loop created an ever-increasing spiral of productivity.

Nobody at my current job feels compelled to do this kind of thing, and I’m not saying that I would do it either, but the idea of working somewhere where people might attempt such a feat is appealing.

Interestingly, this is the fourth “behind the scenes” story of software that I’ve read recently. The other three were also about Apple software. Are there any stories like this for Microsoft, Channel 9 notwithstanding?

(Via Slashdot.)