markdown
In 2009 I lamented the state of Markdown: Right now we have the worst of both worlds. Lack of leadership from the top, and a bunch of fragmented, poorly coordinated community efforts to advance Markdown, none of which are officially canon. This isn’t merely incovenient for anyone trying to
remote work
When I first chose my own adventure, I didn't know what working remotely from home was going to be like. I had never done it before. As programmers go, I'm fairly social. Which still means I'm a borderline sociopath by normal standards. All the
open source
I'm a big advocate of learning on the battlefield. And that certainly includes what may be the most epic battle of them all: open source software. Contribute to an open-source project. There are thousands, so pick whatever strikes your fancy. But pick one and really dig in, become
programming languages
I have the very great honor of speaking at this year's EclipseCon with one of my heroes, Clay Shirky. The theme of this year's EclipseCon is collaboration -- so all the talks are presented by two speakers. Our talk, The Social Mind: Designing Like Groups Matter,
forums
I was struck by the conclusion of Andy Oram's thoughtful piece on the next generation of online forums [http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/02/developing-an-i.html]. > People who want to learn more about computer technology and solve problems they encounter on their systems currently have a
version control
I consider this the golden rule of source control: Check in early, check in often. Developers who work for long periods -- and by long I mean more than a day -- without checking anything into source control are setting themselves up for some serious integration headaches down the line.
software development concepts
I was browsing around the CouchDb [http://www.couchdb.com/CouchDB/CouchDBWeb.nsf/direct/Introduction] wiki [http://couchdb.infogami.com/] yesterday when I saw Damien Katz' hilarious description [http://couchdb.infogami.com/alpha1] of how technical documentation really gets written. You know, in the real world: > Welcome to