smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Jeff Barlow has distilled the art of understanding and importance down to a simple catch phrase — pay attention and give a shit.

And it left me thinking, what have I learned? And more importantly what have I learned that I could share. Of late, I’ve simplified some lessons-learned into two ideas I keep repeating to myself: Pay Attention and Give a Shit.

A great article that breaks down the idea of keeping it real and building importance.

Bravo! Michael gets it — blogging is a journey.

For the longest time, I thought blogging was about you. That’s what everyone told me. “Blogging is a conversation”. Not my blog. My blog is a place where I share my thoughts. Where I write what I want to write. Not for you. For me.

When you understand that blogging is in many respects a gift given freely to others, you begin to understand that the finish line, fame and fortune really isn’t the goal.

Blogging isn’t conversation — with it’s propensity for short duration and expectation of feedback — it’s communication. There are simply no limits in what one can achieve when the journey becomes more important than the end.

Jeff Atwood has a great piece on the relentless pace of programming change:

“It’s no longer unique for something to be new, no longer interesting when something is shiny. Eventually, you grow weary of shiny new things.”

The Magpie Effect — no sooner do we finally get a chance to check out some new programming platform, it’s already obsolete and out-of-favour.

Why should anyone invest time and energy developing in the latest craze, when even it’s biggest proponents and drum beaters change their minds on the current framework flavour every other week?!

There in, gentle readers, is the moral of the story and why it’s a rare thing indeed to see such technologies embraced by a wider audience or why they seldom seem to gain much long-term traction, despite the hype.

The pace of change is such that both platform and programmer alike become their own worst enemy, dooming the platform before it has any real chance of taking wing.

A conspirational hat wearer believes Rands in Repose is Garbage:

“I really don’t know how to approach this; I thought it was sarcasm until I read the rest of the article. Is it supposed to be profound?”

Profound? No.

Is it an interesting insight into “data on data”, that is, taking an existing data set and performing statistical analysis on it? Yes.

Indeed I’ve noticed the article cropping up in discussion already — along with some fascinating patterns regarding twitter usage.

Rands in Repose is a smart read as it’s author takes the time to break often-complex concepts down to a level the lay-person can grasp, not because it’s pitched as some esoteric Mecca.

“Without further ado I give you: Airbag: As Seen from Around the World.” — Greg Storey.

Gorgeous design and interface to an inspired global experiment. A snapshot of Airbag readers over a period of 24 hours.

Stuart Brown rolls us through his take on 2007 - More Web Design Trends & Cliches:

“It’s been well over a year since I compiled the original list of web clichés, so I figured it was time to revisit some of the trends currently prevalent in web design now.”

Some interesting punters have turned up in the parade along with some gorgeous descriptive illustrations. Succinct and devoid of the typical fluff and space fillers many such “reviews” tend to collect.

Jason answers a question on how 37signals perceive the relative importance of formal education:

“What we care about is intelligence, curiosity, passion, character, motivation, taste, intuition, writing skills, and the ability to make smart value judgements.

Which echoes a point that I see re-enforced time-and-time again. Formal education is no substitute for quality experience. How one handles the outside-of-box scenarios can be far more telling of experience and skill set, than smart handling of the day-to-day details alone. Jason continues:

“A few of these qualities may benefit from exposure to higher education, but we feel most of them are better learned through practical experience.”

Indeed I dropped out of tertiary education during my second year, as the material being taught had absolutely no relation to real-world environs and was painfully out-of-date. I then bounced around various IT related jobs (on purpose to an extent) in an attempt to gain valuable experience and exposure that I could utilise in future, more structured roles.

Granted, a degree or doctorate might have opened more doors at the outset, but if the decision makers behind those very doors are looking for dynamic, flexible people with the ability to think laterally and make intuitive and experience based choices — and more often than not, they are — then no amount of education (alone) will solve that need.

Michael Lopp has written one of the single most quotable articles I’ve read in recent times, entitled The Nerd Handbook:

“Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast because of his strange affinity with the computer. This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor.”

“Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor is another game.”

It’s frightening just how ‘close’ many observations are and how many I can put my hand up to — truly required reading for anyone that works with, lives with, or simply wishes to better understand the nerd.

Jesper takes another cracking shot at why stuff keeps staying broke, despite constant development marching forward:

“Okay, stop. Guys working on larger capacity hard drives, flash drives, cheaper memory, better power supplies, fundamentally different CPUs and cures for cancer, you can keep going. The rest of you, spend five years fixing the fundamental issues.”

The problem is that fixing issues just isn’t sexy. Oh, sure, you can make debugging sound sudo pseudo-sexy, Joyent’s constant spruiking of dtrace to all who will listen is proof of that.

Fixing problems has always been the Achilles Heel of any software or hardware platform, because it’s often easier — both up-sell and manage — to build something new than fix the old one. The entire software and hardware industry is entirely geared up to consume and burn, not rebuild.

And that won’t change until the consumer and the market embrace the concept of “green” re-use and re-cycle concepts. Ironically it’s just as much our fault — for demanding change over improvement — as those controlling the product cycles. Makes you think, doesn’t it.

"If pick up lines aren’t your thing, let this beautiful business card do the work." — the successor to the douche card, via keo.

"I decided it’s time to give back to the loyal reader who are posting their thoughts on each entry I press the publish button to." — offering to pay for additional comment will inevitably result in quantity over quality.