Dale: Did you know I built a bridge once?

Emerson: Sorry?

Dale: A bridge.

Emerson: No I didn’t know that.

Dale: I was an engineer by trade.

The conversation carries on, with Dale describing how much shorter people’s commute to work was as a direct result of the new bridge. He starts to list off the number of hours that the bridge had saved people from being stuck in their car, driving to and from work.

This speaks to me powerfully, because it subtly reveals how desperately we, as people, desire to build things that matter.

For a bit of context, he states:

Do you include the half-baked stuff, or hold it until it’s fully-baked? Apple wasn’t going to include a front-facing camera until they had software that made it useful in an iPhone-caliber way. HTC is happy to include a front-facing camera and leave its utility (and user experience) in the hands of third-party developers.

And from here – he carries on to state the following:

Android and iPhone fans will read the preceding paragraph very differently. Android fans will read it and say, “Exactly — give us the hardware and let developers figure out what to do with it.” iPhone fans will read it and say, “I can’t wait to get an iPhone 4.”

My first thought, reading the above paragraph wasn’t “I can’t wait to get an iPhone 4″, but rather “Thank you for saving me from having to deal with mediocre implementations of video calling that will no doubt increase my blood pressure and shorten my life. Thank you that I don’t have to give a flying crap what Qik or Fring are. I can’t wait to get an iPhone 4.”

These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” he said.

And later:

Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away.

Note the emphasis is mine. I highly recommend reading the whole piece entitled Why Twitter is a Trap.

I’ve been starting to feel this way about connectivity for a while now. Most notably I’m disturbed by the shakes and withdrawal symptoms I seem to acquire any time I’ve gone for more than 17 minutes without checking my email.

How do we continue to push the envelope of technology and the evolving web without forgetting what it’s like to cut down a tree, plant a garden or cook on an open fire? Maybe what I actually want is the cowboy-like space life of Firefly, but I’m not really sure.

What do you do to avoid ‘connectivity’ as a trap?

• Time consuming
• Often grossly inaccurate
• Usually done while flying by the seat of your pants, with a marginal (at best) understanding of the functionality that you need to estimate.

I’ve always been a pessimistic estimator, and it’s something that people I’ve worked with for a long time understand and appreciate (even if they make fun of me for it, at times).

Some people might think it’s crazy to be a pessimistic estimator, because any estimate that you give to a client that’s padded by 50 or 100% is potentially going to be high. It might be a lot higher than some other shop who might totally low-ball an estimate just to land a contract.

In my opinion, in my way of doing business, the risk of a dissatisfied customer from a blown budget due to a low-ball estimate is significantly greater than the risk of losing a few contracts because of pessimistic estimates.

I would rather estimate high and exceed expectations by coming in well under budget; even if it means that I lose some work along the way because someone felt my estimates were too high.

With some of the recent discussion surrounding “monkey patching” in Ruby, I think that the timing seems about right, for some serious thought to be given about the long-term effects of maintaining Ruby-based code-bases, should prolific “monkey patching” continue to be used haphazardly by many of the libraries, plugins, gems and other code that makes (sometimes critical?) modifications to the underlying core language classes.

Nick Sieger has crafted a thoughtful response to Avdi, which includes the quote:

[Monkey patching is] still a basic part of the Ruby programming culture, like it or not.

While Nick is totally correct, and Ruby does give you the power to shoot, maim and otherwise pillage and murder yourself in a bazillion different ways – that doesn’t take away the fact that it is still an incredibly powerful, elegant and syntactically beautiful programming language.

At the risk of sounding like a trite broken record (for the 485,000 time), I think that once again it boils down to using and choosing the right tools for the job. If the consequences of Ruby’s dynamism (among whatever other consequences) outweigh the positive benefits that a Ruby solution provides – then choose a different tool.

You can complain about the verbosity of a language like Java all you want (heck, I know I do at times), but I come back to Java sometimes after working with Ruby for a few months, and I’m all of a sudden thankful for strict, static typing, always knowing what I’m gonna get.

What continues to irk me are the folks who seem completely hell-bent that their way is the only One True Wayâ„¢.

I was in a job interview the other day (company name shall be kept confidential) at a place that does extensive software development in many languages including Java, C, C++, Perl and PHP (at the very least). Near the end of the interview, we were discussing different languages, and I mentioned how sometimes I really enjoy the dynamic typing facet of Ruby, as opposed to the statically typed facet of Java. At this statement, one of the interviewers piped up to tell me that the fact that I enjoyed dynamic typing at times was “the most brain-dead thing” he’d ever heard anyone say.

It seems so strange to me, to be on the receiving end of an insult like that, coming from a company that performs extensive development in PHP (which is not only dynamically typed, but also weakly typed, as opposed to Ruby which is strictly typed).

At any rate, all of that comes to some sort of summary that everyone should already know by now:

1. there is no silver bullet
2. think before you choose your tool/language/whatever
3. don’t hate the unknown simply because it’s unknown
4. don’t call someone brain-dead if they sometimes enjoy a programming language that is dynamically typed, it hurts their feelings
5. read Avdi’s series on sustainable development in Ruby.

a person who works as a writer, designer, performer, or the like, selling work or services by the hour, day, job, etc., rather than working on a regular salary basis for one employer.

I have a few reasons why, at least for the past few years, I’ve chosen to act as a freelancer, instead of going out and “getting a real job” – as they like to call it.

Here are my many and varied reasons for choosing to freelance, not necessarily with any in-depth discussion, but surface level reasons.

1. I haven’t found any companies (yet) that I’d like to be an employee of. I find that most companies underpay and under-appreciate their employees (especially software developers), and if I was going to work as an employee of a company, I want my work to be appreciated, and I want to be paid a fair wage.
2. A lot of companies favor people based on seniority instead of skill.
3. As a freelancer (at least when the getting is good), you can choose to work on whatever projects are most interesting, keeping the work varied, and hopefully fresh. This is rarely the case when working as an employee.
4. Tax breaks. I don’t know how the world works where you live, but in Canada – you get SCREWED for taxes if you’re an employee. If you freelance, or run your own business, you can legitimately save $1000’s of dollars a year that would otherwise go to poorly planned government projects, or 2010 Olympic Games.
5. I work best when I want to work, not 9am to 5pm. I’m often up early, starting work around 7 or 8am. I like to play video games for an hour in the afternoon around 3pm. I like to take a break when my wife gets home from work so we can have a coffee together, and then do a couple hour of work in the evening. As an employee – you can pretty much forget it (there are a few companies who don’t care when / how / where you work, but not many).
6. I like working with lots of different companies, solving different kinds of problems, and meeting different kinds of people. This is pretty much a given as a freelancer, and pretty much never-gonna-happen working as an employee of a specific company. Again, there are exceptions, but I’m speaking in general terms.

Freelancing isn’t for everyone (and it’s not always roses and candy canes), but these are a few of my many reasons for choosing it, at least at this point in my career.

When the perfect company comes around, offering me the perfect job, or when the economy goes to crap (probably related to some kinda sub-prime mortgage hoopla), maybe I’ll change my tune.

Our data center client lists reads like a who’s who of Calgary businesses. Are you in it?

Marketing like this has always bothered me. It makes me want to flip the bird in their general direction, because climbing past the drivel it reads like this:

If you’re not hosting in our data center your company sucks.

Peer pressure for the enterprise. I thought we got past that in tenth grade?

Note to Q9 (this one’s free): Hire better marketing people.

He talks about a bunch of things Apple could have done to make the early adopters “ok” with the fact that they were just out $200. But then he goes on to say:

The key is to not give price protection to early buyers (that’s unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less.

I wish more corporations would take the route of doing everything in their power to make their customers feel respected. To make their customers feel like they have a choice and could take their business elsewhere (even if they can’t take their business elsewhere).