Craig McDonald

StorkUp - Social shopping for mums

Something that I’ve been pondering recently is the (not particularly insightful) observation that individuals in a specific group use a common language to signify that they are part of said group (and thus imbued with, what they consider to be, some positive characteristic or ability).

This is often seen when dealing with the likes of recruitment consultants or estate agents, where the use of utterly cringe-worthy phraseology seems to be an essential ingredient of the job.

Back in my law school days, I spoke to an advocate who made a similar point about police officers in the witness box (and in general). He opined that their use of a sort of pseudo-legal terminology was designed to impart a sense of power and ‘officialdom’, but it frequently caused hilarity in court when a grumpy judge would take issue with it and demand a re-statement in plain English.

This sort of language use is very much a learned-behaviour and, as such as someone who (for better or worse) operates on a more instinctive basis, I find it quite amusing when I come across it.

Actions not words should determine ability and authority; not to mention the willingness of one individual acknowledge such traits in another.

StorkUp - Social shopping for mums

“A players hire A players,” he said. “B players hire C players. Do you get it?”

Steve Jobs

vs.

“If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”

David Ogilvy

No explanation needed with the latter…

@robertogds: HowTo backbone.js using rails 3

robertogds:

Backbone.js is a very interesting piece of software created by Jeremy Ashkenas that “supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing modelswith key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling,…

nfarina:

It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award.

I made the executive decision to leave our comfy world of Versions because it seemed clear that Git was winning the Internet. There was much grumbling from my teammates, who were busy enough doing actual work thank you very much.

But I pressed forward. We signed up for accounts on Github. We learned how to type 'git push' and 'git pull'. We became more confident. Git is just like any other source control system! But it wasn’t long before one of our devs called me over to look at a…situation.

Read More

The first time I was responsible for a web app that was deployed remotely, the procedure went:

1. Call the client’s project director and ask for remote access to be arranged.
2. Wait 7 days (assuming the right people weren’t on holiday, etc)
3. Receive confirmation that access was now available.
4. Within an allotted time window, deploy (slowly) over the 64k ISDN line provided.
5. Repeat the next time, and the next…

Fast forward 10 years, and (for me at least) it is now simplified to:

git push heroku master

Ahh… progress.

giant robots smashing into other giant robots: CoffeeScript: Spartan JavaScript

thoughtbot:

I’ve been writing some CoffeeScript lately, and it’s been fantastic. I wish I had started looking into this language sooner. Here’s some thoughts about it.

the good

Writing CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript feels like I’m fighting a whole new battle. JavaScript is not a verbose language….