Quote: "... The best entrepreneurs understand these dynamics and have been exploring “attach” business models, which basically means charging for something outside of the app store, like offline products/services (e.g. Square, Uber), online services (e.g. Spotify, Dropbox), and sometimes even hardware. Most of the companies that have succeeded (= generate real revenues/profits) on mobile were either desktop incumbents (e.g. eBay, Amazon, Facebook) or have attach business models."

Another bit on culture at work.

Loved this quote: "If people close to you tell you something’s impossible, they’re saying it partly because they care about you, but partly because they fear that if you succeed, it will expose their timidity to the light of day."

Too late for Memorial Day but good tips in here if you enjoy making your own burgers.

Love this: "How to compose a successful critical commentary:
1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."
2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism."

OMG.

And I'm a slacker.

Quote: "I try not to open Twitter too often."

Interesting list... but got me googling around for what 'culture' really means. Is 'culture' really "hackdays" and "unlimited vacation"?

Great write up on what a PM does.

OMG just saved me years of frustration.

Might have to buy this for my pops for xmas.

Some good stuff in here for just working with people in general.

Great list of stuff to review during the first five minutes of a crisis to get an overview of what's happening where.

Definitely feel the influence of the negative bias in my own decision making.

Well said.

Came across this via Nate Silver's book.

Keep referring back to this at work, love his example about creating change via humor.

Good list of books for guys should I ever read everything from my amazon wishlist.

I'm such a sucker for maps on stuff.

Hot damn what a great list of talks.

Quote: "Aaron’s unique quality was that he was marvelously and vigorously different."

Never met aaronsw, admired from afar though. Great tribute by ET.

Quote: "How long you spent on it. How hard it was to implement. How clean your architecture is. How extensible it is. How well it runs on your machine. How great it will be once all their friends are on it. How amazing the next version will be. Whose fault the problems are. What you think they should be interested in. What you expected. What you were promised. How important this is to you."

If / when I get a new Mac.

Great custom t-shirt site.

Quote: "Which is the Root Cause? DB access bug or monitoring failure? Answer: don’t care about "root causes”. They don’t exist (multiple things conspire for failures to happen). Also, kind of moral/blame-ish. Ask instead: if we made an incremental improvement in area A or area B , which would prevent the broadest class of problems going ahead? Much better conversation...
Remember, There Is No Axe Murderer (Probably)."

Ran into this a couple weeks ago when onsite with a customer and was seeing 3ms for a "file.exists" type of operation when inside of a VM which was about 100x slower than corresponding VM's in our own infrastructure.

Data driven usability questions: "People throw around sayings like “Easy to Use” or “Intuitive” but without some data those are merely opinions. When it comes to measuring ease of use, there are well established things to track: Success rate: What percent of users can even do the thing its supposed to let them do. Often this is well below 100%. Time on task: how long does it  take users to do the thing it supposed to do. Better designs take users less time. Error rates: how many mistakes or confusions does the user have."

I like the notion of 'deep work', social software seems to discourage this kind of thing.

This is brilliant, love someone diving in this deep.

Quote: "Your Stables are there to remind you about reality and to define process whereby large groups of people can be coordinated to actually get work done. Your Stables bring predictability, repeatability, credibility to your execution, and you need to build a world where they can thrive.

Your Volatiles are there to remind you that nothing lasts, and that the world is full of Volatiles who consider it their mission in life to replace the inefficient, boring, and uninspired. You can’t actually build them a world because they’ll think you’re up to something Stable, so you need to create a corner of the building where they can disrupt."

Yes.

Quote: "One of my favorite Joan Didion quotes is “I don’t know what I think until I try to write it down.” Writing is thinking. A lot of busy people say they wish they had more time to “think” — to be proactively thoughtful rather than reactive. But “thought time” is a hard thing to actually schedule, let alone measure. Writing, on the other hand, is something you can schedule to do and then evaluate and measure the output (e.g. 700 words a day or a blog post a week). When someone tells me they don’t do much writing anymore, I sometimes wonder, When do you think deep-ish thoughts? And how do you ever know how coherent your thoughts actually are?"

Super interesting in light of the stuff that I just read about Winston Churchill, who was a prolific writer who, maybe not coincidentally, was also a deep thinker with a lot of focus. Makes you wonder which leads to which.

Same thing can / should be applied to bigger software releases: instead of asking if the release will go out on time, ask which features are 100% done and bug free and which features need more work.

Quote: "Nowadays, a candidate must believe not just some but all of the following things: that abortion should be illegal in all cases; that gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it; that the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home; that the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame; that global warming is a conspiracy; that any form of gun control is unconstitutional; that any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk; that Israel can do no wrong and the “so-called Palestinians”, to use Mr Gingrich's term, can do no right; that the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and others whose names you do not have to remember should be abolished."

An awesome list of attributes for real "senior" engineers.

GREAT list of performance tools for http / JS / css work.

Nice list of apps if you're on OSX.

Similar to the previous bookmark..

Deep look at how GC works in the JVM.

Some good tips (PrintTenuringDistribution was one I hadn't heard before) in here.

As the title says.

Description of what SRE is at Facebook

Looks like a cool tool for browser testing.

More on SRE's, love the description.

Heard about this title / type of team from Erik Onnen, who is doing something similar at Urban Airship. Sounds really cool.

You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

Quote: "As he believes first and foremost in Mitt Romney and his ambitions, he can’t conceive that others can conjure anything larger than themselves or their possible personal gain.  Here and now, he is laid bare by his own cynical critique of others who will not follow him in selfishness.  It is not that Mr. Romney is merely unfit to serve us as president.  Based on this latest revelation, it may go much deeper.  If he believes what he told that group in private, he may well be unfit to serve us as a fellow citizen."

Glad to see this, have been wondering why it didn't exist for awhile.

Bought one of these at 6pm tonight, caught the mole by 9pm. Highly recommended.

Hand made, did the Black Rock trail this past week a couple times.

via mathowie, really awesome mac app that makes your desktop 'live'. Free.

Cool looking app for car <--> phone integration.

Great advice, totally agree.

Cool little tool for performing browser performance tests using a variety of browsers from multiple locations.

Quote: "... one of the very best gifts we can give our children — the thing that will help them achieve more and be better in their lives — will be the ability to focus. Reflecting on it, I think that’s always been true to some extent, but now, in an always-connected, eager-to-interrupt world, it’s quickly becoming crucial, not just for our kids, but for ourselves." Concur.

Great post on recruiting, personal touch goes a long way.

NICE. @adam.wulf: you've got to get to this place for me.

Apple believes the future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past.

LOVE this video, my seven year old immediately wanted to build a rover out of Legos after watching.

Huh, apparently aaron.s.johnson and aaronsjohnson and aaron.s.j.o.h.n.s.o.n@gmail are all the same user. Easy way to do plus addressing without having to user a +.

Quote: "At Zynga and FB, it is vastly easier to bring down Zynga with a performance bug than it is with a feature bug. In fact, we need to teach our engineers: performance first, correctness later..."

Saving for posterity:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/screenshots

and then:

killall SystemUIServer

Very interesting.. will try out.

Quote: "... one uncommon, vivid adjective can carry an entire thought."

Big fan.

Fun list of 30 day challenges, ie: small, attainable goals for enriching your life.

Quote: "We’re radically over-developing the parts of quick thinking, distractable brain and letting the long-form-thinking, creative, contemplative, solitude-seeking, thought-consolidating pieces of our brain atrophy by not using them. And, to me, that’s both sad and dangerous."

Great article for anyone looking to lose a couple lb's, props out to Mr. Teague for the mention of LoseIt!

Turns out this is relatively helpful:

jmap -histo:live <pid> > dump.out

and the advice around sampling this over time and then comparing diffs. WAY better than analzying heap dumps.

Bunch of tips on memory usage and Lucene / Solr.

Great post on Lucene / Solr + memory usage.

jmap -permstat <pid> Could be an interesting tool for us on the cloud since we're going small on the ol' permgen settings.

Yes.

Quote: "This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor."

Awesome.

Nice hack.

Great design finally coming to Android.

Lego plans

A look resource size graphs of a bunch of sites, surprised to see Twitter up there at the top... err bottom.

Great list of books for kids.