Livingston: What advice would you give to a programmer who’s thinking about starting a company?
Spolsky: I’ve got a lot: [laughs] Don’t do it. It’s going to suck. You’re going to hate it.
Can I steal one from Paul? Don’t start a company unless you can convince one other person to go along with you. If you [...]
Joel Spolsky has written a review of Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, a book about the development of a personal information manager called Chandler. Started by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Corporation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and one of the people behind Go Corporation (a company whose life and death is chronicled in [...]
You don’t need me to tell you anything. Actually, you probably shouldn’t even read anything more about the movie. You should just go watch Children of Men.
It’s always funny to read books on current events a few years after they were published and try to find those cases where they were flat out wrong, or even encounter some very funny coincidences. In this book the first moment came when Friedman is arguing against Samuel P. Huntington’s assertion on The Clash [...]
I bought the 2000 paperback edition of Thomas L. Friedman’s book on globalization The Lexus and the Olive Tree on an acquaintance’s garage sale, as she was getting ready to head back to the United States and wanted to sell a bunch of books she felt would be too expensive to carry back.
The book consists [...]
I’ve just found out about Wikinomics, a new book exploring the power of collaboration and how it can not only add value to a company, but absolutely change the playing field. An example from the Newsfactor.com story:
When Rob McEwan became CEO of Goldcorp, he and company geologists knew that their property contained untapped [...]
I’m not sure how much I can say about Girl in the Cafe, a great little TV movie I’ve had the pleasure to catch in cable a couple of times, without sounding like an infatuated schoolboy. Calling it Lost in Translation with a brain would be doing it a disservice, since it brings that [...]
Merlin Mann shares, via Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a quote from W.H. Murray (a mountain climber I’d never heard of outside the book):
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then [...]
One of those interesting albums I found on Jamendo, Zywiolak’s demo 2006 is a sort of darker, slightly heavier Dead Can Dance from Polland.
People like to talk a lot about the power of the Internet to democratize content distribution and bring an audience to unknown little bands, right before they rush off to download the latest Madonna album from Kazaa.
Fortunately there’s a few sites like Jamendo, which are really focused on distributing albums of new bands and getting [...]