This may be an irrelevant observation, and excuse me for that, but---the wardrobe malfunction was 10 years ago?! Good Lord, my brain's system clock needs a battery replacement.
Every episode of my podcast, I remind my listeners that today is International Backup Awareness Day. Ironically, it looks like Jeff forgot to backup his blog images... again.
Congrats. I've been reading for 10 years! Atwood & Spolsky have always been great reading, and mainly because they push back on fads without being to over the top, don't oversimplify, and don't pretend to have the one-true-answer.
I liked this advice too. I think it is an interesting counterpoint to Jeff Bezos's "Regret Minimization Framework," i.e., take the path that is least likely to leave you with regrets.
What do you do about a path that scares you a bit, and is also more likely to leave you with regrets? I suspect one's choice in this case says a lot about one, and I also suspect that people like Atwood and Bezos would go for it: perhaps they would define "regret" as "not having tried something that could have been amazing!"
I read them as saying the same thing. What would Bezos be more likely to regret in the future - staying at a cushy high-paying job when he had an awesome idea he could have implemented, always wondering what might have been if only he had tried it, or trying a grand idea, failing at it, probably not losing much of anything, and going back to another cushy high-paying job?
Yes, in the case of Bezos, it was mostly his decision to leave his cushy, high-paying job to go start an online bookstore. It seemed crazy at the time, but he knew he would regret not trying.
There are older blogs on the web (mine is 13+ years). What impresses me about Jeff is that he has built up such a huge audience, and effectively converted that into a business. I don't always agree with his opinions, but that's fine I can still admire his output.
I've had a few offers to buy my domain but even though it's not one people follow I've still become attached to it as part of my identity, it's used for my main email address.
Just looked now and archive.org's earliest capture of my alicious.com domain is 2004. By that it's my 10yr anniversary in 2 weeks. Though I started the site ~1996 [it was on Geocities for a time too] I don't think any content remains from then.
SO has changed the web. It's a wikipedia-calibre resource - at least, for programmers - and its various spreading incantations in every direction seem destined to displace every other forum vehicle. It is truly a victory for humanity.
What he says is not true at all. People will (almost) always recommend better solutions when someone is "asking the wrong question".
And what he says about Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky is total nonsense. There's nothing bad about quoting other peoples' articles. Why reinvent the wheel ? Even articles that contain extensive references contain insightful context.
I think it sort of misses the point. Both Jeff and Joel write blogs about software development and how they think you can do it better. They don't claim to be solving the world's problems themselves, they're just saying "here's a bunch of stuff we found useful or interesting".
Jeff in particular I think is a relatively modest guy who these days knows he has a certain level of clout and uses it to raise the profile of ideas he finds interesting or useful. I don't think he claims to be a genius solving the problems of software development single handedly.
Personally I think you've got to be a fairly bitter individual to dislike internet-Jeff (by which I mean the public Jeff Atwood - IRL he may kick kittens for fun in which case hate away if you have personal reasons to think he's a bad person). Disagree with him about things sure, but I really struggle to see what there is to suggest that he's anything other than a decent member of the human race.
Can't comment on the science, but... If you suffer from depression (and if I recall correctly, Jeff Atwood does), one of the biggest problems is that you forget all the good things, ie all the memories and accomplishments that would normally make you think that things are actually pretty good. By putting things out in the world, you make these experiences more tangible and harder to forget about.
Much of what the brain and sense organs do is filter information down from reality through the senses, down again through the brain (where it's then reconstructed into a virtual reality). For me, depression is like switching over to a completely different filtering network.
No comments/discussion directly on the blog anymore? Looks like we've been purged for the anniversary. This is funny considering the recent complaint-driven-development posting. I also found the app-pocalypse-now a little ironic considering they just released a SO app.
"Along with the new design, you may also notice that comments are no longer present. Don't worry. I love comments. They'll all be back. This is only a temporary state, as there's another notable open source project I want to begin supporting here."
He's just shifted over to a new platform, as you likely would've understood from reading the article. And he explicitly states, as quoted, that comments will be back... Unsure how irony computes in this circumstance.
The irony was commenting about his recent criticism regarding the proliferation of native apps for websites post right after stackoverflow released a native application for their website. If you read his posting on the topic he criticizes things like having different interfaces on every application while the SO app announcement posting prompted the idea of different native interface on each platform. That seems to me that he is saying one thing while his company is doing the opposite, hence the irony. Sorry if you disagree.
Yes but he rambles a bit sometimes and somewhere between the Janet Jackson breast to Watchmen segue I missed it, sorry. I'll try to jump the comment gun less.
