Flipping Out
Abby and Riley were trying to do handstands on the gymnastics mat in the family room. I guess maybe Riley got tired or forgot what to do at a later point, and had an amusing little faceplant.
Asymptomatic
There must be intelligent life down here
For Want of a Grease Pencil
Staring at the walls in the office is not conducive to constructing posts. I’m not sure how I’ve even managed the last 9-10 years worth of posts. You’d think I’d run out of material.
I was mentioning to someone the other day that I paradoxically - since the walls are plain white and small - have a lot of good ideas while in the shower. I had another one of those days today. I must have come up with three or four solid ideas about things I wanted to blog, but simply lost them upon setting foot outside the bathroom. Less dramatically, we had plans immediately after I showered this morning, so I didn’t really have a chance to act on my ideas.
What is Habari's core message?
On IRC a few weeks ago this question was posed by an unassuming visitor:
What makes Habari different from any other blog application like WordPress?
I blew a mental gasket sitting at my desk, but managed to scrawl out a few words that managed to be quoted here and there by folks in the community. It may have sounded profound to others, but it was really offered up in haste and without much consideration.
Since then I’ve been thinking: If I had to give a serious elevator pitch about Habari, what would I say?
All The Community That Your Blog Doesn't Have
Habari’s community is a sight in action. Two weeks ago, I threatened to make a significant change to the appearance of Habari’s back-end admin, and the day afterward, I executed on that threat.
The Monolith design for Habari’s admin had been on the slate for a long time, even prior to Michael Heilemann’s announcement back in February. We’ve been striving toward user interface excellence. While there’s been a lot of contention by those concerned over what constitutes the best design, I think it’s impossible to deny that the design is handsome.
The Monolith source code had lingered in a branch of the source repository awaiting the day when it would be mature enough to merge. It became clear to me that although opening branches of our repository for non-PMC (Primary Management Committee) coders to work on special-interest changes to the core code was good for innovation, it wasn’t necessarily as inviting in the spirit of our community-contribution nature.
So after a couple of months progress, and with the blessings of several other PMC members, I made good on the threat of merging the Monolith code to the main branch of the code repository, and over the past two weeks the flurry of contributions has been nothing short of amazing.
Developer Interview Questions
I’ve had the occasion over the past few years in my capacity as a long-time developer to interview candidates for jobs within my company and for clients I’ve contracted for. As a result, I’ve had some time to formulate some opinions about what questions to ask developers who are applying for a position, and the types of answers to expect from a candidate that you’d want to hire.
Sadly, I think the market of good developers is far, far too small. I do subscribe to the philosophy that great developers are born, not made, although I also believe that you can produce adequate developers with good training and persistent oversight. It is really unfortunate that coders who want to get jobs aren’t as versed in what makes a great developer great, and it’s a frequent topic of discussion when hiring rounds begin.