joshuago’s Bookmarks

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.

Prime numbers applied to repeating background images for amazing results.

Provoke emotional reactions instead of informing. Take with a grain of salt, but remember that traffic means ads, ads mean money, and money is like life-giving blood to any business.

It takes balls to abandon features — grow some.

The Post on its move to a new web-based CMS, Methode. Apparently cost them $7 million, but at least it's used by a bunch other big-name papers such as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the Boston Globe.