The lesson of the Holy Shit is that when you stumble upon a truly revolutionary idea, you have the ability to recognize it. There are lots of people who, when they first saw a web page, thought, “I can order pizza on the phone with a live person. Why would I do it on the… more
They played bridge every Wednesday at Netscape. In the middle of the cafeteria. Like clockwork. The players were a collection of ex-SGI guys and they worked for a variety of different groups at the company, but as I learned a few months later, this core group of men quietly defined the engineering culture of the… more
I can turn a phrase. High school journalism is where I discovered this. Mrs. Wickett kept bringing stories to me in my junior year “Needs a clever headline.” I’d read the story and throw out a terse, clever headline. No clue where this ability come from. If I actually think about how I pick the… more
Right now, there’s a CEO standing in front of his 85-person start-up at an all-hands meeting and he’s saying, “In the next 90 days, we need to do the impossible”. The particular version of impossible doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone in the room is shocked when he says it. You can tell by… more
There’s a gaping hole in The Taste of the Day. Yes, it’s a handy task management system, but it’s incomplete. It describes a process for constant scrubbing of a task list, as well as a handy place to keep distractions out of your way via the Parking Lot, but at the end of the day,… more
Think of this. You have a job where, whenever you need to, you can find the absolute truth. When someone asks you, “Phil, why is this happening?” you are 100% confident that you can figure out the precise answer. This is the idyllic situation many engineers on the planet Earth live in, and, well, it’s… more
It all started with a tweet: “Making a list of superstitions / foolish consistencies / lightweight OCD behaviors e.g. I always put my RIGHT shoe on first. You?” This right shoe behavior started during ice hockey. The team was bad… like 0-10 bad. Last game of the season against the best team in the league… more
At my favorite local coffee shop, Lorraine gives me shit when I purchase coffee in a paper cup, “You… are not saving the world.” She’s right. I’m not, and it’s actually worse. Each time I reach for a sip and this sad little corpse of tree flesh greets me with its pathetic weight and palpable… more
I sidestepped the evaluation notebook issue in The Gel Dilemma, but this omission has bugged me because I’ve cared about what I’ve written on for a lot longer than I’ve cared what I’ve written with. The Mom is to blame here. When I was 10 she gave me a journal entitled “Moments Worth Remembering”. There… more
The rumor that Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails comes as no surprise to those familiar with Twitter’s shaky uptime record and its tendency to lose its mind in increasingly impressive and creative ways. So, new platform. Fine. Saw that coming. What continues to surprise me is this: why aren’t we more pissed when Twitter… more