As a kid, I was an impatient little brat. On any occasion that required waiting, I became Squirmy Wormy until I pushed my dad to make the demand parents so often make of fidgety kids, “Sit still!” Recent evidence suggests a rejoinder to kids today in response to this command, “What!? Are you trying to kill me?!” There is compelling evidence that modern workers propensity to sit for prolonged periods every day makes them fat and shortens their lives. Hmmm, you wouldn’t happen to know any professions where sitting limply at a desk for long periods of time...
While attending Oredev 2011, I had an interesting conversation with Corey Haines about his perception of the Ruby community as compared to the .NET community. One thing he suggested is that the .NET community is seems a bit insular and self-isolating. He noted that when he attended .NET user groups, he only saw folks he knew to be .NET developers. But when he attends Ruby, Scala, NodeJS, Erlang, etc. user groups, he sees many of the same people at these meet ups. While I’m not completely against identifying oneself as a .NET developer to indicate your primary focus,...
Of course that assumes that Joel wears a size 9 and a half. Once again the Joel Cycle takes another turn. The cycle goes something like this: Joel critiques something or other. Bloggers counter Joel’s claims, many with thoughtful counter arguments. Soon a flood of comments and posts start to turn a bit ugly and form around two camps: The Joel is an idiot why do you even read him? camp and the Joel is successful, what have you ever done that you can disagree with him? camp. Rinse and Repeat It really is an interesting phenomenon to watch...