I think the last time I posted a link dump, I was flaking from my new tattoo. This week, I’m flaking from the tattoo’s touch-up! Much less pain for the touch-up, but the itching may drive me nuts if it doesn’t end soon.

Luckily, it’s healing very quickly.

Have some good reading:

• Tony and Hilary’s Tiny Loft Apartment – I feel like it's been forever since I read The Tiny Life blog, but what a purdy little house to come back to.
• Six Thoughts On The Case Of The Breast-Feeding Professor | Alas, a Blog – "The child was allowed to crawl on a floor! Shocking! She had to take a paper clip out of its mouth! Shocking! Etc, etc. Makes me wonder if these people have ever met an actual infant. Seriously, the things are like a cross between a stumbling drunk and a vacuum cleaner."
• Emptyage — Yes, I was hacked. Hard. – The more personal telling of the @mat hacking.
• S.Lott-Software Architect: Performance "Tuning": running in 1/100th the time – "The idea of 'tweaking' a working program to improve performance is generally misleading.  It might happen, but the impact is minuscule at best. [...] Generally, reduce Cyclomatic Complexity." Keep reading >>

Crafting a business.

Duh, right?

I don’t mean writing software on the side while you have a full-time job and dreaming that someday you’ll be your own boss. I mean sitting down with a spreadsheet and some historical data, and projecting real-deal income and expense numbers. Figuring out how to create every penny you need to make something successful and sustainable.

Okay, that’s not actually the business itself. Doing the work to make those numbers work is the business. Bookkeeping is the business. Putting fingers to keyboard and phone to ear, day in and day out, is the business. But those numbers are crucial, and your eyes must be open to the actuals of what you’re doing.

When the numbers don’t have to balance, it seems easy. It gives an inflated sense of success: I have x visitors per day or month on my site, I make $y in advertising/royalties/whatever, my part-time product makes $z, and I have a name and brand. I’ll just scale up my time and make that many times more. I got this in the bag, yo.

Keep reading >>

One-on-ones. Damn, how do they work?

(I swear, that video has provided me with endless amusement.)

Go read or re-read the earlier post. Shoo.

Several things make one-on-ones rather different here at Big Corp than they were at Skookum:

I’m a contractor

The “long-term view” is ultimately a question of “How long do we need you?” and “Will I stay that long?” It’s all very amicable and such, but I don’t get things like: company-paid conferences, to attend internal bigwig visits, paid lunches, to meet my boss’s boss, or much internal mobility beyond what I carve out for myself. (Big Corp is very paranoid about contractors thinking they’re employees.)

Instead, there’s a short- to mid-term view that focuses on workflow, project timelines, and resource management. Many of the hands-on folks in my area are contractors, and there are relatively few of us remaining, so any comings and goings are big news.

More manager involvement in projects

My new manager isn’t a producer¹ or project manager, per se, but does run the occasional project and is a head honcho on the public site. That puts him in a spot where he can directly influence my work by talking with the relevant producer. Not that I’d be uncomfortable talking to most of them, unless there’s a real mess in the making that someone with seniority needs to handle.

Less structure

Keep reading >>

This week’s internet cruising:

• A reason to UI test, or “How to fill in the gaps” – "My stance: We unit test the ever-living raccoons out of the app now (thanks in no small part to Jukito). And we do have a UI testing process that was used for major features. While I agreed that we should have more, I was leery that it would make us any more productive. And I doubted it would help us discover any more issues than we already were…"
• Guide to CSS support in email clients – Articles & Tips … – A nice set of tables covering CSS support in various email clients.
• More “I do"s, less “to-do"s: wedding planning simplified – Courtesy of Luke, this is a pretty nice-looking set of Google-crafted tools for wedding planning.
• Should you work for free? – Hrm, maybe I should be doing less work for free…

This week’s internet cruising:

• 1995 – I loved me some JNCOs.
• Playing the ‘playing the racism card’ card – "Most of us don't have to bend over backwards not to be seen as racist because we don't go around saying racist things."
• Pigeonnier – Bee-yoo-tiful.
• Jim & Sid’s Tiny Houses – Some of these are so cute!
• Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results – "Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this."
• Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List
• R is for Reliability – "How to handle each type of potential failure is a choice; a choice you may not realize you are making, but a choice nonetheless, and we’ve all made them on all of the projects we’ve worked on, though we’ve probably not thought about it for most of them."

Speaking of 1995, I’ve added an opt-out option for analytics on my about page. No special browser plugin required!