career

For a little while yesterday I sat at a book store and flipped through several books on Ruby and Rails. I'm not the most passionate Ruby developer in the world, but I really do like the language, and prefer it at every opportunity.

In 1993 I moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and started working as a consultant for a company I now refer to as The Evil Empire. The company didn't seem evil when I first started; in fact they were 26 of the nicest people I knew. Right away they made promises of considering me as a partner, and after my first year I was named Employee of the Year.

The cage

When a friend found a cow in her front yard the other day it reminded me of a question by Gerald Weinberg. I think his question was like this: "How do you keep a buffalo from running away?" The answer is simple: give it just enough room so it doesn't realize it's in a cage.

I've found that when it comes to work a lot of people are just like the buffalo in this story: You're in a cage, but your cage has gotten large enough so that you're comfortable, and most of the time you forget about it.

This article is now part of my new eBook, which is only $2.99 on Amazon.com:

I hope you enjoy my book, and more than that, I hope it helps you have a very profitable and rewarding career.

For some reason I didn't work w/ the Mac much until last year. Actually, to be fair to myself, a lot of that probably had to do with unpleasant experiences with earlier versions of the Mac OS.

But as I was talking to a co-worker this morning I realized that it was a mistake not to spend some quality time with Mac OS X when it came out. Having worked with it for over a year now I've come to take many things for granted that it can do. The discussion this morning had to do with the power of scripting native Mac applications with AppleScript.