July 2011

A Thought About Ransackgate

July 31, 2011

The topic of the week is the horrible experience of a customer of the online vacation rental service Airbnb who had her house trashed and valuables stolen. It has been a major public relations disaster for the company. Hopefully it will end with the perpetrators captured, the victim properly compensated and Airbnb able to continue their […]

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Women in Technology

July 26, 2011

Anna Lewis at FogCreek has done the programming community a favor by looking at history and finding that computer science was not a male-dominated field as commonly assumed: In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to […]

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Ruby on Rails Advocacy

July 12, 2011

These kind of articles are, I guess, fun to write, but do they really help in the spread of Ruby on Rails? If the idea is to convince .NET developers and development teams that switching to Ruby on Rails is a good thing, then a better use of one’s time would be to switch gears […]

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Questions to Resolve While Writing Data Synchronization Code

July 7, 2011

My home laptop fell a few days ago and the power button stopped working until I got new parts shipped and replaced. Everything went back to normal or so I thought until I opened Google Chrome on another system I was using, and found that the bookmarks I had added in the last few days […]

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Why You Need to Worry About Changing Other People’s Minds

July 6, 2011

Yesterday’s rambling post about beliefs may have seemed rather irrelevant to the subject of this blog, but actually there was some meaning to the madness. Many different business and project contexts require an understanding of how people think and how you can convince them of something different. To give a few examples: A customer has […]

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Beliefs and Discussions

July 5, 2011

I don’t have a Grand Unified Theory on why people believe what they believe and how they change their minds. But here are some observations recorded in no particular order: Almost all of our beliefs fall into two categories: I believe X. It is an opinion and I am open to changing my views. I believe […]

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