The Productive Programmer

I just finished up The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford. It was so good I decided to buy my own copy. It definitely made me realize how much more efficient I can make myself. There are a ton of tips for both Mac and Windows. One of the major themes was automate everything you can. Thanks Neal!

No Fluff Just Stuff

Today is the first day of the Twin Cities Software Symposium. The first talk I attended was REST: Information Driven Architectures for the 21st Century by Brian Sletten. Very informative. Definitely not an introductory REST talk. I'm curious to hear Brian's Semantic SOA talk later today. A couple things that stuck included Jon Postel's "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."

A couple of things Brian talked about that sound like they're worth investigating include Sinatra, a DSL for building web applications in Ruby and retrievr, which lets you find Flickr photos by creating a sketch of what you're after.

Brian's new gig sounds pretty cool: League of Legends.

Einstein

I recently finished reading Einstein: His Life and Universe, a biography by Walter Isaacson. I enjoyed it very much. It gave excellent insight into the man. The most interesting thing to me was that even though he was brilliant, he struggled with things in his everyday life just like everyone else. His family life wasn't perfect and neither were many other aspects of his life. I love the fact he was a non-conformist not only in science, but in political affairs as well.