Monthly Archives: May 2010

YAGNI: Answers to some common objections to dropping out

As a follow-up to this post, here are some common objections to the argument that a young software developer is better off dropping out. (For the uninitiated, YAGNI is short for You Aren’t Gonna Need It. It is one of … Continue reading

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Turn on, tune in, drop out

Seth Godin: Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high school students [...]? Biggest reason: So the schools can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in US News … Continue reading

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Ruby Tempfiles in Depth

I have an article about using temp files in Ruby up at the brand spanking new We Are Titans website. I cover some features of the Tempfile class that you may not know about. In other news, there is still … Continue reading

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Quickie Objects in Ruby

Sometimes you need a quick object one-off object. Maybe you’re writing a Fake Object that needs to mimic a subset of a real library’s functionality. Ruby provides several facilities which make it easy to throw together objects without the ceremony … Continue reading

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Thoughts on the Dell Studio XPS 16

Soon after starting work with We Are Titans it became clear that my much-loved but aging Inspiron 9300 (seen above) wasn’t up to the task of modern distributed Rails development. There’s just so much a single core and 2GB of … Continue reading

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There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Dinner

Recently I was contacted by a recruiter for a prominent West Coast startup. As I was scanning over the “about our company” blurb provided by the recruiter, my eyes stopped on the phrase “…free lunch and dinner“. I knew at … Continue reading

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