A new Mars rover, aptly named Curiosity, landed today. I saw this quote at CNN.com from Steve Squyres, a member of the Mars Science Laboratory science team, in part of an article mentioning if the rover would be looking for evidence of anything in particular.

Let’s go to an interesting place with good tools and find out what’s there.

Steve Squyres

Often it’s easy to get caught up in a singular mission. Have a goal, and it’s that goal or bust. But the enormity of that goal can easily create a blindness to all the fun and opportunities that lie before me. I can forget to take some time to just explore and appreciate the things that appear in the middle of a problem space.

Steve shares a nice reminder I don’t always have to have a goal.

It’s ok to grab a favorite tool: a journal and pen, a pick and guitar, a laptop and favorite code editor, and just start making something. Anything.

If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do.

Lucille Ball

Lucille’s quote summarizes a ton about being busy.

Most people are scared to be busy.

When they’re asked if they took on that new project or hobby they keep talking about, they’ll usually reply that they’re just “too busy”.

They’re constantly fighting some battle to actually accomplish less.

But often these same folks lookup to others who seem to be doing and accomplishing so many more things in the same 24 hours a day they have.

How is it that successful people are doing so many things well and they’re busier than everyone else?

In high school, I noticed a strange correlation. It seemed that as I added more things to my plate to do, I actually got better at doing the individual things. When I had less to do, I performed worse.

In a single week I could be...

I liked the film because it was about taking risks and learning to let those you love take risks

Steve Jobs

Steve was a fan of Finding Nemo from Pixar (his other company). It’s not hard to see why.

This scene from Finding Nemo is where Nemo’s father loses his son and begins an impossible task.

The whole movie, really, is a perfect metaphor for how a lot of us feel when we have to tackle a new challenge, especially starting a new business.

In front of us is a huge ocean to cross. We can’t even see the faintest hint of our goal ahead. How the hell are we going to get through this?

With persistance and some help from others we eventually do.

P.S. Get my next post on Twitter: here.

UPDATE: I created a gem to fix the problem I start to discuss below.

You should read the updated post about this topic, here. I describe the problem of Rails caching of etags and the gem in more detail.

Original Post

If you’re writing a Rails app that’s getting any traffic whatsoever, you probably are using some method of caching.

Client side caching with etags has been a wonderful addition to Ruby on Rails. That, combined with lazy loading of your queries, and you can save a ton of processing without needing to worry about page or action caching.

Here’s such a simple tip that wasn’t at all intuitive to me at first.

How do you bust your client side caches when you deploy your application?

If you look in the official Rails docs you can find out a tiny bit more about the methods: fresh_when and stale?, but they don’t teach anything on this issue of deployment.

In other...

I still know people who haven’t seen this video of Caine’s Arcade. That’s a shame. This story is incredible.

I think the biggest takeaway from the whole thing is how much a child was able to create using, simply, cardboard and tape.

Most people think they need to move a mountain to create a business or accomplish a goal on their bucket list.

A few months ago I was helping a dozen folks test their business ideas. The most common trait I noticed from 90% of these budding and even seasoned entrepreneurs is how much they believe they need to accomplish before they can even start approaching potential customers.

What’s funny about the 90% number is that it seems awfully close to the same percentage of businesses that I find can be started without much more than Caine’s cardboard and tape.

90% of these business ideas don’t need the technical co-founder, or the brilliant designer, or...

Some products merely try and make experiences more convenient for their users. But I think the great ones, the ones that really capture people’s attention, make their users strong where they were once weak.

Instagram is an obvious and often mentioned example. People suck at taking photos. Instagram turns everyone into at least as good as a photographer as the kid at the theme park taking your picture in those retro photos where everyone looks like they’re from the 1800s.

Another weakness most of us have is how terrible we are at spelling.

Git, something software professionals use to manage version control, attempts to aleviate how bad I am at spelling.

git chckout

git: ‘chckout’ is not a git command. See ‘git –help’.

Did you mean this?
checkout

This is just a convenience of git. But look at how well Google has turned a weakness of mine into an absolute strength. Auto...

Michael Jordan has always stood out out as someone who deeply understood the value of practice. He got great, not by constantly playing basketball, but by drilling, practicing and conditioning.

Here’s an interesting video, if you didn’t know much about Michael’s interest in practice and strength conditioning.

How many of us can say that we practice much?

We want to get better at our work. But often we just continue to do work. We don’t practice being better leaders or software developers or whatever it is we do.

Just like Michael didn’t just become great by playing over and over again (his job), we can only get so good at something without some kind of practice.

Practice is something that allows us to fail. We can try new things. We can see what works and what doesn’t and then improve.

When we continue to work without practice we often just do the same thing we were doing...

I’ve been a fan of literature on improving the mind for some time. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert in the field or anything, but I do know a bunch of bits and pieces. Like speed reading. Or techniques to take unrelated things and make new combinations in order to generate more creative thinking. Or how to use meditation.

A lot of these techniques have been incredibly useful. Speed reading is one of the coolest things I’ve learned. It’s helped me plough through a ton of books that I didn’t used to have time for.

But one technique that has always puzzled me in how to take advantage of is a “memory palace”.

Just a tiny bit of background on what a memory palace is.

You probably feel you or at least most people are mediocre at remembering things. At best. However, memories aren’t all the same. We’re actually, as a species, much better at remembering things spatially.

For example, if you...

The richest guys I know all listen more than they talk.

— Chris Sacca (@sacca) June 29, 2012

I was in a cab yesterday with my wife and the cab driver sneezed. After he sneezed, I participated in a custom I’ve done automatically for many many years.

I said, “bless you.”

The cab driver said, “ahh-choo.”

Did I hear that right?

He sneezed again. I said, “bless you.” He said, “ahh-choo.”

I found the exchange a funny reminder of how easy it is to misunderstand people and ideas. Was the cab driver saying the word “ahh-choo”. As in, maybe when he was learning English, someone taught him about this English phrase and custom of saying “bless you” after someone sneezes. And when someone sneezes they usually go, “ahh-choo.” The cab driver must have learned or remembered the order of the custom wrong and thinks “ahh-choo” is a word that he’s supposed to utter when someone says “bless you”...

When I was 11 and in grade school, I wanted to be 14 and in high school. When I was in high school, I wanted the freedom college was going to bring. When I was in my first post-college job at 21, I wanted to have the experience and confidence a 30 year old had at the company I worked at.

Youth is wasted on the young.

George Bernard Shaw

“What do I want to be when I grow up?”

At almost every stage of our life, we think about growing up. What’s the next and better thing we are going to grow into.

It doesn’t stop at a personal level either. People love to ask this of non-human things. Business folk and investors love to ask companies: What’s your business going to be when it grows up. I’ve done this over and over again.

The problem with asking this question is that we ask it before we know who we already are.

So a more useful question is to ask yourself: What would remain if...