joshuago’s Bookmarks

Competitors will invest in marketing, and the combined marketing efforts of a number of competitors will accelerate the development of a nascent market. It is very hard to build a market all alone. Also, when a large company enters a market, it validates the market in the minds of many who had not been paying attention to it before.

Reading news online feels like flying Economy. Loud distracting banners, cheap stock picture material, sloppy typography, a lot of useless comment noise, machine generated reading tips, no human service, and a claustrophobic information design make the reading experience a torture.

We should go pro and abandon anti. Because believing in something? Going after it by running as hard as you can? That is not cool—it is ugly and it is awesome. Why be reductive? Why undercut a true and honest attempt?

Use bcrypt because it's slow as hell. It introduces a work factor which affects how expensive the hash function will be, and can keep up with Moore's law.

Letter to Amazon's shareholders detailing the nature of investments technology infrastructure. Favorite tidbit, personally, is about how technologies are implemented almost exclusively as services, because it "reduces side effects and allows services to evolve at their own pace without impacting the other components of the overall system."

Use simple requires in your library. If you need to catch the case where the dependency could not be found, rescue from plain old LoadError, not Gem::LoadError.

Don't mess with the load path. Define VERSION. Declare gem dependencies in your gemspec, not in your "lib/" subdirectory.

As soon as you sit down, electrical activity in the muscles drops. Levels of the enzymes responsible for vacuuming fat out of your bloodstream plunge.

The secret of success turns out to be so incredibly simple: Work your ass off.

How a newspaper company got in the business of for-profit higher education and took heat for exploiting the poor. Also, how it benefited from government policy and dealt with internal culture clashes.