A couple weeks ago, the hip-hop artist Macklemore released an album, The Heist, containing the song 10000 hours.

I’ve been a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and author of a few popular books you’ve probably read or at least heard of. Things like The Tipping Point or Outliers.

In Outliers Gladwell makes readers aware of the “10000 hour” rule. It’s not a rule he invented, and it’s more like a “rule of thumb”.

If you want to be great at something, it’s probably going to take 10000 hours of practice.

So it was neat to see the 10000 hour rule, Gladwell and a few other names of people whose work is important to me inscribed in a song which describes some of the struggle that went into Macklemore’s career and creating the album this song is on.

Even if Macklemore isn’t your music of choice, it’s still pretty damn cool to see a song inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s work.

...

The other day walking to the office I spotted this.

I hadn’t quite seen something like that before. A truck that has a retractable, accordion-like body that entirely collapses. Seemingly to be able to get at that cargo from every direction you possibly can.

Sounds like a very useful thing even for trucks in smaller sizes like home moving trucks. I’ve used a moving truck a few times, and the back of the truck isn’t always the most convenient place.

For example, the back of the truck sometimes seems to slow people like professional movers down. If you’ve ever watched a truck being unloaded, there’s often a guy waiting outside the truck while others are occupying the back unloading a piece of furniture. It seems interesting what would happen if you removed that choke point and gave movers the ability to get stuff off the truck from all sides.

What’s also interesting to me is how...

A few months ago I blogged about a problem I was having with busting the http caching Rails does. That post had a pretty naive solution, and I wanted to provide an update to raise a bit more awareness of the problem and a better solution.

First, I’m a bit surprised that this isn’t a problem folks are talking more about.

The basic gist of the problem is: when you use Rails http caching using something like fresh_when in your controllers, simply deploying your application will break the styling of your application for anyone who has one of your pages already http cached. Let me show you what I mean with a super simple application.

All this application does is render a simple view, and makes sure to set an etag.

class WelcomeController < ApplicationController
  def index
    fresh_when(etag: "VERSION_1")
  end
end

In your app the fresh_when likely wraps around an object and uses...

You are what you read.

I’m always very intrigued by what the people who inspire me read. So I scour the internet to find hints of what books guys like Marco Arment, Jason Fried or Notch might be reading.

I’d also be very interested in seeing a Twitter news stream like they see it. Who’s inspiring them today? What bits of information are they glancing at that I might have missed in my own stream?

Twitter used to make this easy to do. There was a feature to read someone else’s Twitter stream. No more apparently.

However. Twitter publishes not just the people that follow someone, but everybody they follow. Their “followees”.

And there are lists. Twitter lists allow you to read a different news stream that’s just made up of tweets from people in that list. So I can go through the followees of someone and add each of them to a list.

The problem is that it’s a shit-ton of clicking...

“What the f*$ are carrot jeans?” I asked myself while looking online recently.

Ah I get it. I guess they look like these.

They make your legs look like carrots. Huh.

Reminds me of something.

About 15 years ago I was sitting around a dorm room chatting with a friend of mine about a concept.

Why can’t pants be square?

If you can’t imagine what I’m talking about, let me explain.

Pants traditionally make your legs look a lot like cylinders. That’s because the material wraps around your leg in a circle. But who’s to say it can’t be a square.

What if you could wear pants that made your legs look a bit more like Gumby? (Spongebob wasn’t a thing anyone knew about yet.)

I loved the idea. I thought about it constantly and talked to everyone I knew about it.

I remember telling a friend of my mother’s who’s awesome at sewing. She listened to the concept and laughed. But she...

Working on a new product. Design guidelines: This design would have worked in 1998, too.

Jason Fried (@jasonfried) September 24, 2012

I recently picked up Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” for a re-read.

The examples are hilariously old. Almost on page one is a redesign the author did of Flooz, the virtual currency startup that was famously touted in 1999 by Whoopi Goldberg and burned through 10s of millions of dollars in a couple years before shutting down.

It’s funny then how a book written in 2000 is still so full of wisdom we should be paying attention to when creating websites. But probably aren’t.

This really resonates for me with one of his first pieces of advice:

One of the most crucial items in the persistent navigation is a button or link that takes me to the site’s Home page. Having a Home button in sight at all times...

I’ll never get tired of folks innovating on things that the rest of us overlook, take for granted, or simply treat as a commodity we can’t differntiate from competitors.

So on a bunch of levels, I love seeing this recently in a recipe newsletter my wife and I have been subscribing to for awhile.

just returned from an intensive salad seminar for food recipe developers in Carmel Valley, California, hosted by Dole Fresh Salads. During the course, we learned about some of the latest salad trends and tried some truly innovative ways to incorporate healthy greens and vegetables into all our meals and snacks, including arugula in our pineapple mojitos…

The Scramble

Dole. King of something most people don’t think too hard about.

Salad. Lettuce. Greens.

That’s a quick part of the grocery store for me. I need spinach. It’s there. It’s in the cart. No thought at all. What’s cheapest.

...

I spotted this in a restaurant here in Chicago. Most people might not recognize it. But the million people that ride it each day would.

It’s a drawing of Chicago’s elevated train. Our “L”.

I love that an artist was able to elicit these feelings and pride about Chicago and its train from taking something as complicated looking as its map, and recasting it with just a handful of imperfect lines.

It’s also an interesting reminder to me that I don’t always have to create pixel perfect train maps when creating things. It’s easy to get bogged down in designing something that’s perfectly laid out, and must contain so many bits of information because EVERYTHING I have to get into this project is so damn important. But sometimes the job you’re trying to do doesn’t really warrant the layers of complexity you’ve convinced yourself you needed of the finished product.

Sometimes a...

A quote often attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

If you take the quote too literally, you’ll miss the power of what he was trying to teach.

Hemingway realized that we aren’t always the same person. We have at least two sides to us when it comes to creating something. Sometimes our brains see endless possibilities, where we feel we can create anything our minds conjure when hearing that whisper from our muse. And the muses are everywhere we look.

Other times, our brains are great at tearing down all the bullshit, and finding the kernels of what’s efficient. What’s practical. What’s actually good. And usually that brain doesn’t like what it sees of my other self’s work.

When I create, I try to take Hemingway’s advice.

To begin a new blog post, or even a new software feature, I’ll start when I feel I have a thread of something with tons of possibility. I start from a book I read that...

(Comic from xkcd)

There’s a lot I don’t agree with on the internet. I’ve got opinions coming out of my ears.

There’s this comment I saw on Hacker News that I vehemently want to rebut. There’s this company that pissed me off recently online. There’s a few people that were pretty rude on a bus ride in Chicago last month.

I could write some flaming pile of words about how someone has done something terribly wrong on the internet, and I could share an opinion where we could all get really enraged as we go to work.

But then I looked at my website analytics recently and saw this:

This reminds me of something very important that I think goes missed by a lot of folks trying to get more traffic to their blog or project.

Celebrate others.

There’s all sorts of negative stuff I have an urge to write.

But seeing the above screenshot reminds me of something I’m super proud of. I often...