Latest News >> 2008-07-20 2008-06-25

I’ve been completely fed up with news/feed/rss/atom readers these days. I use Linux as my primary operating system, and I only have a few feeds that I want to rip through quick so I can get to reading the content. Yet, trying to find a reader that doesn’t suck donkey balls has been a chore.

2008-06-21

Wanna know what all the Ruby vulnerabilities are? Or at least have a fun look at how to search through code for clues? It’s a blast.

2008-06-13

I’m dropping a large blog post on everyone to just say that I haven’t died, I’ve just been busy working on my book for A/W about Mongrel. I had contracted with them to do a book about deploying Mongrel, but then decided it wouldn’t be a very good book since we’d already done one about that topic and there wasn’t too much more to say.

12/15/06: Announcing My Coding Retirement

Don’t Worry, Mongrel’s Safe

I’m officially retiring from coding professionally as of Wed Dec 13 17:57:46 PST 2006 and I’m going to get back into management like I was before Mongrel. There just isn’t any way I can stay happy and sane writing crappy social networks for clueless morons anymore. If I’m gonna stay in the software industry, I’ve gotta gain control and start showing these idiots who are running things how it should be done. The majority of my education is in business IT management and I’ve been successful at it in past jobs, so that’s what I’m going to do from now on.

Before writing Mongrel I was running a tight little group of developers at the New York City Department of Correction. My team managed to crank out more successful award winning projects than entire companies like IBM, TATA, and Bearing Point. I estimated that we probably saved tax payers 20 million dollars in contracts that didn’t have to go to a big consulting agency simply because we were employees of the DOC. Hell, we even made an RSS feed people could subscribe to and watch inmates being arrested, moved and released. How awesome is that?

That was about six months ago, and while I quit to go try my hand at the Ruby on Rails consulting thing, I’ve really thought I needed to get back to management. In that time I’ve started thinking and writing about management issues as a way of formalizing what I know about management. The few essays and rants I’ve already written have people thinking about these problems, and I plan to write many more.

I’m coding open source until the day I die. Nothing I’ve ever done has worked so well as a means for exploring my ideas and getting them out to people. Blogging is nothing compared to turning my ideas into a fully functioning program that others can marvel at and play with. I just can’t stand writing software for other people. If I’m gonna write something it’s because I’m interested in it and want to do it, not because some other idiot needs another social network site.

Yet, I couldn’t quite come up with the perfect example demonstrating why I deeply need to return to leading programmers. There were a few annoying examples with some of my consulting gigs, and some people trying to take advantage of me, but nothing I could really write about. I tried writing about other people’s stories, but it just doesn’t have the same impact as something that happened to me.

Since I can’t come up with a specific example I can publish, I’m just gonna say that I don’t want to code for someone because they treat me like their bitch. Many people have tried to take advantage of me in weird ways, and they seem to have type-cast me as “coder guy”. In a few instances I figured out they were just trying to use my name to get contracts or other positions.

Rather than waste my time coding on a doomed project where I have no control I’m going to spend my time trying to gain control. I’ve had quite a bit of success in the past at leading teams, so hopefully I can do it again. I really want to start trying to impact the management side of the industry the way I’ve done with the coding side of things.

And that’s all. No long essay or “whiny” post about all the people who’ve wronged me (and man, there’s some whoppers). Just announcing my retirement and I’m going to go play in the Rain.

P.S. The “whoppers” are being collected for a tell-all book about how horrible the industry is on both the management and coding side of things. If you’ve got stories about crap managers, insane programmers, con-men posing as techs, or incompetent system administrators or DBAs then shoot me an e-mail and lay it all out. I’ll never release names…unless you want me to.