Mindfire is a collection of Berkun’s essays and articles, all of which you can find online on his site or other places. If you’ve never read his work before – I would also recommend Confessions of a Public Speaker, especially if you have to do presentations or speak in front of an audience – it’s a great introduction to his writing; if you’re familair with his stuff, it’s many of his gems gathered into one place.
Here’s the Mindfire’s table of contents, which should give you an idea of what’s in it:
Warning Preface
Part 1: Gasoline 1. The cult of busy 2. Wants vs. Beliefs 3. How to be a free thinker 4. How to detect bullshit 5. Should you be Popular or Good? 6. There are two kinds of people: complexifiers and simplifiers 7. Are you indifferent? 8. Does transparency matter? 9. How I found my passion 10. How to be passionate
Part 2: Sparks 11. On God and Integrity 12. Hating vs. Loving 13. The surprise inspiration of death bonus: Your quota of worry and how to shrink it 14. How to make a difference 15. Why you must lead or follow 16. Why the world is a mess: a theory 17. The size of ideas 18. Book Smarts vs. Street Smarts 19. Why does faith matter? 20. Can you be great, with grace?
Part 3: Fire 21. How to give and receive criticism 22. How to learn from your mistakes 23. How to keep your mouth shut 24. Creative thinking hacks 25. Dr. Seuss and wicked constraints 26. Why smart people defend bad ideas 27. Why you are not an artist 28. How to convince anyone of anything 29. Attention and Sex 30. A strawman for everything
Epilogue How to Help This Book in 60 Seconds Notes and References on the Essays Acknowledgements Index Colophon
It’s the first of November, 2011, the start of Pragmatic Programmer Writing Month, a.k.a. PragProWriMo!
The idea for PragProWriMo comes from NaNoWriMo, which is short for National Novel Writing Month. Started in 1999, it’s an annual creative writing project in which participants try to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. According to Wikipedia, NaNoWriMo started modestly with 21 people working towards writing a novel in a month, but grew to 200,000 participants writing a total of nearly 3 billion words in 2010.
It’s time to write that book you’ve always wanted to write.
We’ll start together on November first and in thirty days or less you’ll know if you are meant to write a book or not. Your commitment is to sit down every day and write pages. They don’t have to be good pages—they won’t be great pages—you’ll have plenty of time to fix them later. Keep writing.
Less than a month to find out if you can do something you’ve always wanted to try. Such a deal.
I’m not saying you will finish the book in thirty days nor that what you write will be worth publishing. I’m saying that by December first you’ll know.
You’ll have a pile of pages or you won’t.
On one hand, if you don’t, then you are one of the many people who wants to have written a book but doesn’t want to write a book. There’s nothing wrong with that. In a month you’ll know if that describes you or not.
On the other hand, you might find that you love writing. You’ve got something to say and you love the hard work it takes to craft words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into passages that people want to read. Then you are meant to write a book. You won’t be able to stop. You still might not be able to publish your book, but that doesn’t keep you from being an author who has written a book.
In between those two hands are the vast majority of us. We write when the planets align. We have blogs but weeks or months might pass between our posts. We can participate in this month of writing by posting a solid blog entry every day for the month of November. Then we might go back to the once in a while or we might continue.
If you’re a developer and have been looking for a way to stretch yourself, improve your communications skills and expand your career opportunities, PragProWriMo offers a structure by which you can do so:
You can take the pragmatic approach and write a blog post every day in November. Although it’s simpler than writing an entire book on some aspect of programming or technology or writing a 50,000-word novel in a month, it’s still an undertaking that calls for a lot of work. The time and effort involved in daily blogging is considerable; in my own experience, it requires about an hour per post, longer if it includes code or step-by-step tech walkthroughs.
You can write a book on some aspect of programming or technology during the month of November. A novel-sized technical book might be too tall an order for a month’s worth of writing, but a smaller book with a limited scope – say, an introduction to metaprogramming in your favorite dynamic language, a collection of tips and tricks for Git or a gudie to getting the most out of your Shopify shop – would be within the realm of possibility.
Creative Commons photo by Anne-Lise Heinrichs. Click the photo to see the original.
To help you on your way, the Pragmatic Life blog offered a set of articles on writing in the month of November 2009:
During the month of November, I’ll post articles about writing. Give it a try, even if you only write a blog article or two – you might find that it pays off in ways that you never even imagined.
One of the nice things about working at Shopify is the gear you get to work with. The standard issue machine for most employees – most of us are developers and designers – is a 15” MacBook Pro. Combined with the other goodies that Shopify developers get: Mac LCD display, Magic Mouse, keyboard and Aeron chair, it’s a great web development setup.
Until recently, most of the developers were working on machines with the stock 4GB RAM. While an out-of-the-box MacBook Pro is more than enough to support a lot of coding, development and testing are resource-hungry activities. With our developers taking on increasingly ambitious projects and the prices of 8GB SODIMMs falling, we saw fit to double the developers’ RAM. They seemed pretty happy about it.
As the Platform Evangelist, I don’t write any production code; any coding I do is for examples, demos and tutorials. The stock 4GB RAM is more than enough for those coding needs, but my other work uses resource-hungry software. Although I generally prefer Mac software, I have yet to find a tool that can beat Windows Live Writer, which I run on Windows under Parallels.
Evenly sharing 4GB of RAM between MacOS 10.7 and Windows 7 yields a worst-of-both-worlds on both sides. I eventually went with assigning 3GB to MacOS and the remainder to Windows. While workable, it’s still pokey, especially on the Windows side.
This sluggishness, coupled with my starting work on videos, meant that it was time for an upgrade.
At the time of this writing, the price of 16GB of laptop RAM is still pretty steep: most vendors are asking for $700 for a pair of 8GB SODIMMs on average. The less bleeding-edge configuration of half the size — two 4GB SODIMMs — is much, much cheaper: about one-tenth the price of 16GB.
For the early-2011 15” MacBook Pro, the RAM you want for 8GB is 2 204-pin 1333Mhz 4GB DDR3 SODIMMs. I picked up the two SODIMMs pictured above at a nearby Tiger Direct outlet for CDN$68.
Replacing the RAM on the current-model MacBook Pro is pretty easy. The only tool you need is a PH00-sized Phillips screwdriver to remove the 10 screws that hold the base of the MacBook Pro. Popping out the old SODIMMs and replacing them is pretty simple, as the video below shows:
After installing the RAM and replacing the bottom cover, I fired up the MacBook, which booted without a hitch. A quick check of “About This Mac…” under the Apple menu confirmed that the RAM upgrade went successfully:
Before I replaced the RAM, I ran the trial edition of Geekbench on my MacBook Pro and got this report:
Here are the Geekbench scores for the old configuration:
Total Geekbench score: 9885
Integer benchmark: 8314
Floating point benchmark: 15175
Memory benchmark: 5691
Stream benchmark: 5260
With the new RAM, Geekbench reported some slightly better scores:
Total Geekbench score: 10014
Integer benchmark: 8409
Floating point benchmark: 15225
Memory benchmark: 5926
Stream benchmark: 5576
On the MacOS side, things seem a little snappier, especially when switching apps. The difference in performance in Windows under Parallels with the extra RAM is like night and day. I changed the RAM allotment in Parallels so that Windows uses 4GB of RAM and ran the Windows Experience Index test. Here are the results:
Windows Experience Index base score: 5.4
Processor: 5.4
Memory: 7.3
Graphics: 5.9
Gaming graphics: 5.9
Primary hard disk: 6.4
I decided to compare the performance of Windows 7 under Parallels to the same version and edition of Windows 7 running on my fastest PC, a Dell Latitude E6500 with 8GB RAM (a fabulous parting gift from my old employer). Here are its Windows Experience Index results:
Windows Experience Index base score: 4.2
Processor: 6.4
Memory: 6.4
Graphics: 4.2
Gaming graphics: 4.4
Primary hard disk: 5.9
With the new RAM, it’s like having a brand new machine. In fact, with Windows running snappily on the Mac – so much faster than it did before – it’s like having two brand new machines.
I don’t have the convening power of a Governor Brown, but for those of us around the world who care, I hereby declare this Sunday, October 30 to be Dennis Ritchie Day! Let’s remember the contributions of this computing pioneer.
For C and Unix, as well as all the goodies that came forth from their creation – from the concept of platform-independent programming languages and operating systems to the internet to the platforms we use today at Shopify (we develop on the Mac, deploy to Linux and procrastinate on our iPhones, iPad and Androids) to “Hello, World!”, we’re taking this day to pay homage to Dennis Ritchie. As like to say: “Mr. Ritchie, I salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!”
Welcome Daring Fireball readers! In case you were wondering if I’ve prepared a response to the article titled The Types of Companies that Publish Future Concept Videos, take a look here.
Pictured above is Microsoft’s most recent technology concept video. Here’s their description:
Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go.
This video encapsulates everything wrong with Microsoft. Their coolest products are imaginary futuristic bullshit. Guess what, we’ve all seen Minority Report already. Imagine if they instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today.
Of course, he’d never say such a thing about Apple’s classic Knowledge Navigator video, which at the time it was made – circa 1987, when the Macintosh II and SE, IBM PS/2 series and Amiga 500 and 2000 were brand new machines – was at least as pie-in-the-sky as this newest Microsoft video. It’s contained within one of the segments of the video below, which features videos by Apple:
Now I’ll agree with Gruber that by and large, Apple technology is generally more enjoyable to use and feels more like “the future”. I will also agree that my former employer, whom a former coworker recently referred to as “The Fail Ship Microsoft”, seems a shadow of its former self and far less likely to be the company to create future industry-defining products than Apple — or at least the incarnation of Apple with Steve Jobs as Chief Tastemaker. Today’s Microsoft doesn’t have a keeper of the vision: Bill Gates has left to focus his on saving the world, Ray Ozzie, the guy who took on the role of “chief visionary” at The Empire, resigned last year along with the Entertainment and Devices division’s last, best hopes, Robbie Bach and J Allard. The people who remain are extremely skilled techies, astute suits who can continue to drive sales and “keep their managers’ scorecards green” (that’s a common expression within the company) and an evangelism team that’s second to none and of which I was a proud member, but they’re all hamstrung by decision-makers with the sense of vision that God gave oysters. That’s one of the reasons I left the company: to be an evangelist, you have to believe, and I didn’t believe anymore.
I part ways with Gruber in his declaration that Microsoft should spend more effort making some cool stuff today and less on creating concept videos. Concept videos aren’t promises of products coming in the next one or two years, but act as a star by which people can navigate the future and an inspiration to invent it. Working with technology means dealing with overwhelming amounts of minutiae, and it’s all too easy to get lost in the technology for technology’s sake and forget about what it’s all for. I would argue that if Microsoft wants to rehabilitate its image and regain its relevance in the hearts and mind of both the alpha geeks and the public at large, they should probably make more of these videos, not only for the public, but for their own benefit as well. Without visions like concept videos to guide them, especially with the lack of someone in the visionary role, they may remain stuck on their current course: doing well but effectively coasting, content to make incremental improvements to already successful products or playing catch-up as with Internet Explorer, phones and tablets in efforts that are in danger of being too little, too late.
Some other concept videos worth watching include these old AT&T ads from that played all the time between shows in the early 1990s. Many of the predicted devices and services in these ads came to be, but AT&T had little to do with their creation:
Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini was a user interface guy at Apple from 1978 to 1992, after which he worked at Sun and created the Project Starfire concept video, a little drama that illustrates his vision of the office of the future. Just as Apple’s Knowledge Navigator has the 1980s all over it, this video has all the earmarks of early 1990s television, right down to the incidental synth music that’s straight out of the better, earlier seasons of Beverley Hills 90210.
Here’s part one:
The first thirty seconds of the video shows how risky it is to try and add little “realistic” touches to a story about the future. In the first thirty seconds, Princess Di is mentioned as having joined the British House of Lords; in real life, she died seven years prior to the story’s setting of 2004. Also sad is the fact that while Sun existed in 2004, it would be absorbed by Oracle six years later.
Here’s part two:
Compare the Starfire video with this “vision of the future” video that Microsoft debuted at the TechReady conference in early 2009. Popular Science said that "The 2019 Microsoft details with this video is almost identical to the 2004 predicted in this video produced by Sun Microsystems in 1992." I’ll leave it to you to make the call:
The first trailer for the upcoming installment in the Grand Theft Auto series of games, Grand Theft Auto V, comes out in a week. I’m looking forward to this one.
You’ll have a pile of pages or you won’t.
