Jul
23
The camera had a power I hadn't expected
I was rewarded for being interested in things. I was rewarded for being interested in everything.
5 min read
Nat Bennett
"Apocalypse thought leader." "Upsettingly good at metaphors." "Wow, you're loud."
I write about how to make software, and how to survive making it.
Jul
16
Work wants to own your soul
Work wants to own your need to grow, and your need to build, and your need to love.
4 min read
Jul
09
How to get more business ideas than you know what to do with
Stop thinking about generating business or product ideas. Focus on finding people who would be good customers, and talk to them regularly about their problems.
7 min read
Jul
02
Motivate people by repeating their words right back to them
Does it help me to use words that confuse people? Does it help me to spend time telling people what words they should be using instead, time I could be spending listening to them instead?
3 min read
Jun
25
Quiet your productivity demons with knitting, today!
It is very, very hard for my particular demon to call an activity that produces a physical object, that I can hold in my hands, and that will ultimately keep me or a friend warm, "not productive."
5 min read
Jun
18
Tracking Conversion Rates on the Ghost platform with Amplitude
How good can I get at "selling" subscriptions? Out of the things I enjoy writing about, which are the most interesting to people? What metrics can I collect that are interesting and actionable?
4 min read
Jun
11
Burnout recovery, and the self-care trap
Most of the advice I've gotten about burnout has been useless-to-actively-harmful. "Have you tried yoga and meditation?" "Take more time
4 min read
Jun
04
Using RSpec Feature Tests to Actually Test What You Think You're Testing
Given the brittleness of RSpec's have_tag matcher and the presence of new Webrat and Capybara matchers that do a better job, have_tag was not included in rspec-rails-2.
4 min read
May
28
A close read of the ActionDispatch::TestResponse class
Last week I talked about how I didn't know what an ActionDispatch::TestResponse was, or how and why it gets
7 min read
May
22
How does anyone learn to test?
This week I got to the part of the "Learn Enough to Be Dangerous" Rails Tutorial where you write a
4 min read