From Tumblr

Exactly what it says.

Jeff Atwood writes about the deeply frustrating "everyone should learn to code" movement, which also frustrates me because it feels symptomatic of a broader trend: a general cultural focus on how software is made over why we make it. So much of the conversation in programmer circles focuses on things like methodologies, principles, or design […]

The NYT's Kevin Roose lives like the 1% for a day, and reports back: I’m outfitted for the day in a navy pinstripe suit, picked out by Clifton C. Berry, who outfits Wall Street workers with his own line of bespoke menswear. It’s probably the best I’ve looked all year. But I’m way overdressed for […]

Or: "Multi-tasking: Threat, or Menace?" Tony Schwartz writes: What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it […]

Ryan Tomayko on how he manages engineers at GitHub: I actually don't show people how to make decisions and ship product in any real direct way. There's no How To Ship Product training class or anything like that. Instead, I just do work. I write down ideas and then market them internally. I ask designers […]

Matt Bai tells the long, sad story of last summer's initially promising but ultimately failed debt negotiations between John Boehner and the White House. In short, it seems the main reason Obama administration should have been less eager to make a deal was because the only people sane enough to negotiate with them (e.g. Boehner, […]

Om Malik: Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about photos, and Instagram had found and attacked Facebook’s achilles heel — mobile photo sharing. Bingo.

David Weisman in Seed, on a surprising overlap between what Buddhism teaches and science observes: Despite my doubts, neurology and neuroscience do not appear to profoundly contradict Buddhist thought. Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to […]

You know this acquisition is different because Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post about it: For years, we've focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we'll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos […]

I agree with most of this. In my experience, pair programming is very useful as an occasional tool for transferring knowledge (i.e., when one developer knows a lot about something another developer needs to know a lot about). Other than that, I'm really not sure how much more valuable it is than a healthy code […]