19th Century Advertising, An Electric Car, Conway’s Law, and Why Gustavo Duartes Love Programming
Gustavo Duartes expresses why he's Lucky to be a Programmer:
Few things are better than spending time in a creative haze, consumed by ideas, watching your work come to life, going to bed eager to wake up quickly and go try things out. I am not suggesting that excessive hours are needed or even advisable; a sane schedule is a must except for occasional binges. The point is that programming is an intense creative pleasure, a perfect mixture of puzzles, writing, and craftsmanship.
Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic writes about the Chevrolet Volt, a new electric car from General Motors
With the Chevy Volt, General Motors—battered, struggling for profitability, fed up with being eclipsed by Toyota and the Prius—is out to reinvent the automobile, and itself.
Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis: a rather dryly-titled (aren't they all, though?) paper taking a look at Conway's Law, and empirically testing it on similar open source and proprietary software development efforts.
And finally, straight from 1898, Claude C. Hopkins's book Scientific Advertising was recently brought to my attention. I'm yet to fully read it, but seems like a very thorough write-up of the foundations of advertising, and being written in 1898, can at times paint quite a picture of life back in that time. [Another PDF version here.]
I Think You’re Fat
Journalist A.J. Jacobs - writing for Esquire magazine - tries out Radical Honesty, making for some humourous encounters. An excerpt:
My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then forget to come back.
"Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?" she asks.
"Well...is there a payoff?"
"Fuck you."
It would have been a lot easier to have kept my mouth closed and listened to her. It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why make waves? "Ninety percent of the time I love my wife," I told him. "And 10 percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings that 10 percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?"
Blanton's response: "Because you're a manipulative, lying son of a bitch."
(via Jeff Atwood)
[This post had been sitting in draft for damn-near 4 months now. God knows why it took me so long to get around to publishing it; I figure it's time now.]