Recently a company launched a product named Grid that comes from some pretty original thinking of how a spreadsheet can look and function.

Immediately there was a discussion about “Can this product really call itself a spreadsheet? It doesn’t do calculations,” which was pointed a little critically at Grid.

Paul Graham, one of the investors behind Grid said:

The reason I interpreted your question as a snarky one is that it seemed such a pointless one otherwise– like asking, say, whether a boat can be called a boat at a stage so early in its construction that it wouldn’t float.

Actually, I like that question a lot.

Can a boat still be a boat if it doesn’t float?

But not for the purpose it tried to serve in the above discussion. For the reason that it helps us break down the prejudices and stereotypes we have of the products we use every day.

It’s an incredibly enlightening...

Ernest Wilkins wrote a terrific piece last week in Chicago’s RedEye on a “cheat sheet to being a man”.

The advice is useful for anyone struggling to think about balance.

But what really stands out is his simple heuristic on creativity:

Create something, whether it be a screenplay or a deck. Build something with your hands or your keyboard. Take pride in losing yourself in something you love doing. Share it with people, even if it sucks. Stay on it until it doesn’t anymore.

Ernest Wilkins, RedEye

I’ve created a number of projects over the years. Some I’ve stuck with and some I haven’t. The few I regret are the ones I never stuck with long enough to get into a non-suck form.

I know a lot of people who struggle with choosing which idea to commit to. Or when’s the right time to abandon ship and move onto another idea.

Just pick one. Any of them. And make something out of it. Move...

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...