Ideology and branding go hand in hand. They inhibit intellectual honesty.

During his celebrated startup school talk dhh said that the few examples of extremely successful VC funded companies are brought up over and over to brainwash. It played out even better since he went (right?) after Greg McAdoo who had the great analogy of the surfer on the big wave with and the slides to go with it. Dhh had a point, though. And a very good one at that.

Whenever I realize there is some brainwashing I look for the ulterior motive. In the case of the seed ...

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I've been accused of undermining the design process. And yes, I do. Here's why.

Reason 1: I operate in an environment where most of the design choices have been made for me already. They have been made in sensible ways -- probably better than if me and my team would go and make them.

In Code Complete, McConnell goes in great depth into how spending time up-front designing the architecture, the sub-systems, and the components of each sub-system of a software project pays off handsomely because it costs less to change a design or design document than to re-write ...

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I was trying to debug an apache configuration a couple of days ago. On some forum someone was asking what was the cause of a certain warning/error message and what to do to fix it. The first answer was (almost verbatim) "There is something wrong with your apache configuration. Go read the documentation." Gee, thanks. How useful. I feel so enlightened. I couldn't have figured that out on my own.

RTFM is a stupid answer to any question. If you think the question is not worth answering because it is in the documentation just move on with your ...

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Or what I wish everyone who makes podcasts would keep in mind.

I really could do without Joel's "anecdotes" about bad service at hotels and Jeff's ill-conceived off-the-cuff off-subject remarks. Sometimes these things take up most of the hour! Perhaps I should just quit my whining and just unsubscribe. And I would. But then I wouldn't hate it -- I simply wouldn't care.

The reason I don't unsubscribe is that then I would miss out on the 20 or 30 minutes of priceless insight into software development that's in there. I find Joel and Jeff ...

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