Giles Bowkett

I'd love to hear Giles Bowkett do another dramatic reading, for this essay. The first one was an instant classic: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/06/let-other-95-of-reality-in.ht…

(I'm not going to subscribe to read this so I'm just assuming...) Is this a good time to bring up the Tyrany Of Structurelessness? http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The observation is: if you pretend that you don't have a hierarchy, then your de facto hierarchies will be harder to see, harder to criticize, harder to improve. This is reflected in the standard failure modes of agile process ( http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2014/09/why-scrum-should-basically-ju… ) so, tell me - who actually makes decisions at Facebook?

just wanted to say I recommend your book in my own latest ebook, which I used Docverter to build. I freaking love Docverter btw. (my latest ebook = http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2013/10/new-ebook-software-as-disserv…

I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old. Places where people happily reported to work for 40 years, picking up a snazzy gold watch at the end as a token of life-long loyalty. I'm sure picking up the odd Lamborghini ( http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-and-dhhs-l… ) as a token of last month's worth of effort is also a good plus... :-)

You may want to checkout this short book by Giles Bowkett: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2012/11/i-wrote-ebook-in-week.html It goes into the areas (like AR models) where Rails breaks the classic "OOP Golden Rules" and why it is able to get away with it in some cases.

Not sure if I agree with everything stated here, but a great read. I've been moving backwards through some of the posts, really liked this : http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2012/02/secrets-of-superstar-programm…

Did you read his post, "Blogs Are Godless Communist Bullshit"? http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/12/blogs-are-godless-communist-b… He's not concerned with credibility. He's mocking the system, mocking its methods, but using them to build his own traffic and generate money via affiliate marketing. It's a parody. I'd say the original post and all the followups he's doing along the same lines are incredibly effective at demonstrating his point.

Context failure: linking to Ryan Tomayko's article without linking to the article that's brought it to people's attention again, namely Josh Peek's 'Gem Packaging: Best Practices'. http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/9/1/gem-packaging-best-practices Giles Bowkett has also written about the related issue of screwing up the load path: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/unshiftfiledirnamefile.html It's also worth noting that Ruby 1.9 requires rubygems automatically, as it's included in the standard library.

"They say I'm a birdbrain. If I am, can I just fly away?" http://youtube.com/watch?v=7Ynw9RT9coU All right let me dress up in a suit and monocle to accomodate the distinguished gentleman. I've gone into great detail as to why sites of this nature are all inherently doomed via a flaw in their paradigm. http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-hea… If my learned colleague shalt consult the appended citation, he will see that my predicated futures have come to trespass, and verily this event doth match the anticipatification in profile.

I think this is ultimately caused by developers not quite knowing where and how to place their ambition. It's easy to look at the big legacy app and be like, "I can fix that!" Then they roll up their shoulders and go to work, management be damned. Management can't see or understand what he does, and they're paying him for his expertise, so they give him the benefit of the doubt and let him do what he thinks he needs to do. I documented my own answer to this situation here. Basically, don't treat organizational problems as technical ones. They're paying you to do a job, everything else you do is basically an ambition. First rule of ambition is to do no harm. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8768524 If you're going to refactor, don't refactor in the direction of new. Refactor in the direction of coherency. Do things that you can finish, or, that at least, don't matter that much if you don't. Like adding tests. Nothing wrong with that. If you want to fix the legacy app, you need to make less ambitious changes, because you need to be able to finish them. Instead of changing the data types, refactor the initialization code. The initialization code runs once, data manipulation code is basically convention and you need to change it everywhere at once or not at all. Refactor it to the point where you can change it everywhere at once and then do that. Or get really good with a text editor and macro the changes. Giles Bowkett has a great book on it. Unfuck A Monorail For…

Really, the issue is that the news feed is broken. Absolutely. I coded up a replacement using the GitHub API: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/10/node-miniapp-minimal-github-d… It broke when they changed the API, but by then I had found http://defunkt.io/dotjs, which allows you to execute any code in a ~/.js file for a given domain. So I put $("div.news").hide(); in my github.com.js and instantly had a more relaxing, comfortable life. I completely disagree with this part of your post: Facebook has done a really good job solving the problems of information overload and would provide a good model. But I do agree with these: The most important step is to group updates from each project. Right now half of my news feed is comments on a single repository. Those should take up only one or two slots. The next step is to filter according to some metric of "interestingness." My advice is do it and share the hack. I think the best way to find trouble spots in your UI is to find out what people are writing hacks to work around.

This is not a new phenomenon. When I first found HN, I conducted an experiment: Along with ordinary attempt-to-contribute comments, I made a couple of content-free remarks whose only attractiveness was the shared premise that "startups are awesome". They immediately received nearly an order of magnitude more upvotes than anything else I had written. That was all it took to convince me that Giles Bowkett's original critique of HN was entirely correct, when he said several years ago that this transformation was inevitable: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-hea… I just checked, and my last comment was 906 days ago. This phenomenon is not new, and any reaction predicated on the idea that this is a relatively recent, relatively sudden decline are unlikely to succeed. It's a structural problem, possibly with human nature, and the best we can do is slow it down (at which HN has been successful, but that's probably only because it's not a business, and so explicitly does not share other sites' preoccupation with growth).

I wouldn't be surprised if this works, because I've done something similarly drastic that worked for me. Here's my story: Last year I read something by Giles Bowkett about how he lost weight and got healthy. I've read about many fad diets and they all seem crazy or impractical. What he described sounded just boring enough to work. If you think about what a silver-bullet diet would look like, this is it. Here's his touched up version of what I originally read: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-i-lost-75-pounds-in-six-m… It's Dr. Fuhrmann's Eat To Live diet: Eat more vegetables. Lots more. Eat mostly vegetables. I didn't follow the diet exactly. I just tried to eat lots more vegetables. I was a young, fairly healthy guy but maybe 15 lbs overweight. I ate more vegetables, lost 10 lbs in a month, and felt fantastic doing it. I didn't eat any less or more. I didn't workout more. I simply lost weight and felt great. I don't know if the no-grain thing will work for anybody, but the more vegetables thing sure worked for me.

Just create a new account. I get banned all the time. This is my third account. You can't take it personally. It's either some person being wrong about you or some automated system. Who cares? I love it when I get banned, it means I won't be back for a while, until the desire for attention overcomes the inertia. This site is kinda like Get Satisfaction for bloggers. "You don't have to create an account. It's just that everybody on this one thread is talking about you right now, and they're all taking your lack of response to mean something." I hate the karma system. Any site that has one is fundamentally flawed (detailed rant: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-hea… It's an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship, and I hate to kick somebody when they're down, but this guy, with all his sad whining about "I don't know what I did wrong, why don't you love me any more"? That is not the sign of a healthy community. That is the sign of an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship. Any venture capitalist knows that you run a lot of experiments and some things fail. The karma system is fail. Throw it away. PS, please ban me.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "it should tell us something." So, I apologize in advance if the following is a misunderstanding. (For the record, I don't much care about someone's HTML per se. I'm talking about presentation. I'm not being a web standards fanatic, if that's what you meant.) If you mean that they are all substance and no frills and that that's a good thing (or something along those lines), I would argue that presentation matters. You don't have to follow the latest fashions, but Crockford's site makes it literally hard to read his (excellent) articles. There are no margins. The line spacing is painful. Applying Readability to that page makes the article not just prettier but more substantive (because I can draw the meaning from it more easily). Giving literally zero thought to the visuals of a webpage is comparable to giving literally zero thought to the order of a presentation or paper. All writing is partly about communicating, and giving no thought to such things is not cool and intellectual. It's likely to be lazy or pretentious. (One of Giles Bowkett's posts about this page makes an interesting comparison of the visual layout of Hacker News versus that of the Guardian. Found the post: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html… The bit that struck me is this: > If you are a geek, you are probably consuming information in a less sophisticated structure then your non-geek peers. I think there's some truth to that,…

"... Good points but why not just comment within the thread? ..." Read ... http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-hea… and specifically ... "... When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site. Votes appear to be free, like contribution is with Wikipedia, but in reality you have to register to vote, and you have to be there frequently for your votes to make much difference. So the votes aren't really free - they cost time. If you do the math, it's actually quite obvious that if your popularity contest for ideas inherently, by its structure, favors people who waste their own time, then your contest will produce winners which are actually losers. The most popular ideas will not be the best ideas, since the people who have the best ideas, and the ability to recognize them, also have better things to do and better places to be. ..."

I used Erlang before Elixir and it was awesome, albeit with a syntax that required getting used too. I've often looked at bridging the gap between Ruby and Erlang, and closely watched and tested solutions like Reia [0], Erlectricity [1] and Ernie [2]. I was delighted when Jose started getting involved in the space and released Elixir. Thanks Jose! [0] http://reia-lang.org [1] https://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/05/erlectricity-erlang-ruby-bri… [2] https://github.com/mojombo/ernie

Do Ruby on Rails devs also get the same treatment? I know Giles Bowkett talked about Rails/node.js back in 2012 [0], but is the situation now reached a point that JS devs haven't even heard of Rails? [0] http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2012/02/rails-went-off-rails-why-im-r…

Cool stuff. Brings to mind earlier tools for generating/manipulating dance music using code. For example, Archaeopteryx, from Giles Bowkett: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/02/archaeopteryx-ruby-midi-gener…

Compare: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-hea…

In terms what they can do, Ruby and Python are very similar, yet Python generates about 1/100th the drama of the Ruby community. I'd say that points very strongly at ego, or at least the culture of the community. If that doesn't convince you, have a look at the update at the bottom of this post from Giles: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/rails-went-off-rails-why-im… Python programmers appear to be more welcoming and don't seem to have the same need to wave enormous meta-programming wangs at each other. Not to say that metaprogramming isn't useful, but that it's just another tool in the toolbox. Take mailsnake for example: https://github.com/Leftium/mailsnake/blob/master/mailsnake/mailsnake.p… Completely classy :)

This post reminded me of this old (and long) rant: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/blogs-are-godless-communist… Relevant quote: "The Hollywood job market doesn't work the way Joel thinks it does. It barely works at all. If you thought Google and Microsoft interview questions were ridiculous, wait until Joel Spolsky has us all dressing up in Catwoman suits just to get a job, after we've established ourselves as stars."

I understand that it is frustrating to you to feel that someone may have been inspired by some aspects of your project. However, I think it's important to consider a few things for perspective: 1. Your web app is close to, if not already, dead: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2011/03/i-may-let-hacker-newspaper-di… 2. So what if this guy was inspired by your app? Who doesn't do research before implementing an idea? 3. Your most persuasive evidence--the header font--appears to be the most unpopular aspect of the app, judging by the comments, and so will probably be changed shortly, anyway. 4. The developer is not in direct competition with your project, as he didn't even code it for the same platform (yes, an iPad can browse the web, but yours was not, specifically, an iPad app).

Sure it will be a vicious cycle. Same thing with fashions and popular hangouts. It's human nature, and somehow peoe make money in those businesses :-) http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-hea…

DHH is bad and nationwide. http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/10/im-bad-im-nationwide-job-secu…

That article reminded me of Giles Bowkett’s blog postings advertising his video- and ebook-based classes, e.g.: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/programmers-what-to-do-if-you… I have no idea if the courses are any good, but he does market them to programmers, and since he has put up more than one blog posting of this nature, I assume he must be getting sales.

I since stumbled upon Giles Bowkett's variation whereby he uses a colour-coded horizontal line for each task. I like it. It emphasises the "chain" aspect and works well within the space constraints. http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/02/calendar-win-rapid-course-cor…

Hardly news. Everything that need be said about TC was covered years ago in Giles Bowkett's post: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-hate-only-ever-destroy.…

Giles Bowket made almost the same point, but he was much funnier: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-hate-only-ever-destroy.…

You might appreciate Giles Bowkett's Hacker Newspaper (http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/), which among other things skips all links to TechCrunch. See Giles' post about it here: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html…