Beautiful design and great content.  I really love how the ToC on the right side follows your progress through the document.

If you need to send HTML email from your web app, check this out. You can see all of the templates by cloning the repo and opening the html files in your browser. MailChimp’s team has spent a lot of time building and testing these on different email clients so you don’t have to.

I think this article articulates a very important aspect of management. The leader’s job is not to be the bottleneck that everyone depends on for guidance. A leader’s job is to present a vision and philosophy and grow a self-sustaining embodiment of those ideals. This depends on communication and trust.

I’ve described my profession (Programmer/Software Dev) as having an ultimate goal of automating away our profession. We’re still a ways away, but the principle holds for any position where you aim to leverage resources to do more than you can on your own. Success is reaching a point where your resources (be it computers, people, robots, carrier pigeons) are maximally and sustainably utilized towards reaching a shared goal. How you achieve this depends on the situation, but the consistent thing is to remove yourself as the bottle neck.

I forget how cool jQuery is when I’m away from it for a while. This is a good reminder.

Very cool method. I’d love to see something like this with tighter integration with Compass and SCSS.

This is a great summary of a few major players in the NoSQL space.  It doesn’t go in to too much detail, but it’s pretty fair to each one.  I especially like the use cases he outlines for each.


> cp -R /usr/local/mysql/data /usr/local/var/mysql
> brew install mysql
> cp /usr/local/Cellar/mysql/5.1.51/com.mysql.mysqld.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
> launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mysql.mysqld.plist
**optional** > rm -rf /usr/local/mysql


This was a fun presentation to listen to and I think Merlin makes some great points throughout.  I loved his comments about how nerds aren’t doing what they do for the money.  To paraphrase one portion:

If you give a painter a bunch of money to not paint any more they won’t be happy because they have money.  What makes them happy it to paint

This is spot on and describes well this idea that jobs that require creative thought generally can’t be done better by throwing money at it.  There are other things that you can give those “creatives” that can have a bigger impact.  I’m not saying that money isn’t important.  What I am saying is that there is a point at which more money isn’t doing anything good.  Pay enough to take the issue of money off the table.

If you can give the “creatives” autonomy and control to do what they think is best you’ll have happier developers and designers, and I guarantee happier customers to.

Merlin also talks about looking to the horizon and preparing yourself for what is coming next.  He encourages “nerds” to always keep looking ahead and try to avoid getting stuck the the rut of what you think is great right now.

Here’s what I see on my horizon:

Rails is great, but the time of server side is transitioning to client side.  This has been a while in coming but I believe that Javascript will be the primary language web developers are using and only secondarily their server side language of choice.  I’ve been eyeing this space for a while know and it’s only getting riper for the change.

If you are a math nerd start brushing up on your statistics and big data.  We’ve figured out how to collect huge sums of data, but only in the last few years have we really started understanding scalable and flexible ways to process that data out side of academia.  I’ve heard this elsewhere and I’ll echo it here: Statisticians will be driving the next generation of crazy cool apps.  It’s already starting especially around the twitter api, and it’s going to grow even more.

Fun times!!

Very cool tool for organizing and manipulating a project on PivotalTracker.  I really wish it used oAuth or something, though.

This idea of a simple query language that actually is geared towards normal people is interesting.  SQL was supposed to be that way back when, but no one today would ever claim that a search engine that exposed SQL to users would be better for the masses.  But a simpler version could have some really awesome broad impact in other areas.  As people become more comfortable using semi-structured queries we can use them in our own web apps without extensive education or making them “advanced features”.  I don’t know if Blekko can succeed, but if they can I think the web will benefit in some interesting ways.