Chris Maddox tyre

You’ve doubtlessly heard something about Spotify coming to the United States. Those crazy Europeans have been rocking out to this streaming music service, according to Wikipedia, since late 2008. The tech press went positively bonkers when Spotify launched in the home of the brave. I’ve played around with the free service since day one, and have to say it is pretty neat.

It’s called Spotify Open and costs zero, although unlimited streaming likely won’t last beyond 2011. That’s a rather generous offering (read: money-pit) to sway numerous freedom-loving users to ditch iTunes and start streaming.

So what did I do?

I bought this EP off of iTunes today. For $4.99. That was free on Spotify.

Product managers love features because they are demonstrable proof that shit happened. It can boil down to a shift in blame: you can't blame me that the customer didn't like it, look at this list of things that got done! It's bigger than anyone else's list! It's an objective measure, where 3 hastily crapped out features are better than 1 awesome feature.

Engineers have an equivilent: commits and lines of code. If I'm worried about other engineers or my boss viewing me as unproductive, I can just show a montrous diff and what are you going to say? 'Just Shit It Out' create a massive mess, but at least I can wave my arms around and brag about the sheer quantity of crap that I produced. A phrase we had in college was 'quantity is its own quality.' We were justifying purchasing 2 handles of plastic-bottle vodka over 2 bottles of the nicer stuff.

Quality is harder. It's harder because it takes more thought, more work, and you often get less cumulative things in the end. Oh, you refactored the core logi

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TLDR:

Please stop overvaluing your time at the expense of your users. It is easy to get caught up in a features pissing contest with that other startup down the road, but don't lose sight of your mission. Take one problem that people have and solve it. Well. All of it. All of the time.

Last year I read the wonderfully concise essay Half, Not Half-Assed by the 37 Signals team.

It took me more than five minutes to figure it out, but the time spent thinking was definitely worth it. Talking with coworkers, friends, or conference attendees about those handful of paragraphs reinforces this.

I say a lot of stupid things. Some examples:

I told an English professor (in London, no less) that Lil Wayne was a better linguist than Shakespeare.
I've said that C is an uninteresting language and no longer relevant.
I told Obama's former Economic Advisor that I thought most of Economics was made up.

You might roll your eyes and say,"You don't know what you are talking about. You are young and näive."

You would be correct, and that's exactly the point.

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	Benchmark.bmbm do \|b\|
	b.report('single quotes') { 37_000_000.times { 'Six sets straight, ace, cut em in the bathroom.' } }
	b.report('double quotes') { 37_000_000.times { "Six sets straight, ace, cut em in the bathroom." } }
	b.report('%q') { 37_000_000.times { %q{Six sets straight, ace, cut em in the bathroom.} } }
	b.report('%Q') { 37_000_000.times { %Q{Six sets straight, ace, cut em in the bathroom.} } }
	end

	# user system total real
	# single quotes 3.480000 0.000000 3.480000 ( 3.481189)
	# double quotes 3.510000 0.010000 3.520000 ( 3.507431)

	class ImmutabilityValidator
	def validate(record)
	if record.persisted?
	record.errors.add(:base, "#{record.class.name} cannot be updated after created.")
	end
	end
	end

	require 'benchmark'

	iterations = 2000000

	Benchmark.bmbm do \|x\|
	x.report('double equals') { iterations.times { true == true } }
	x.report('triple equals') { iterations.times { true === true } }
	end

	# Rehearsal -------------------------------------------------

	function rails_console {
	local version=$(rails -v \| grep -o 'Rails [0-9]' \| grep -o '[0-9]')
	if [[ "$version" == "2" ]]; then
	./script/console
	elif [[ "$version" -gt "2" ]]; then
	rails c
	fi
	}