Another Christmas, another reading of A Christmas Carol done. I love reading this book at anytime of year, but it should be read in the run up to Christmas.
Nicholas Bate has all the skills you’ll need for 2020.
Morning routines for the rest of us
Curtis McHale offers an important reality check when it comes to emulating the routines of the successful.
It’s important to remember that many of these famous people are entirely divorced from anything resembling the reality of the rest of us. At one point before they were successful they didn’t have this routine and had to rush through the laundry at 5 am so they had clean pants in the morning. Yoga and cryotherapy weren’t even a thing they knew about and wouldn’t have cared about if they had heard of it.
— The morning routines we idolize are often from people divorced from reality
My morning routine isn’t anything to write home about at the moment. Wake up at 5:30 am, spend a few minutes doing some stretches to loosen my back, shower and get ready. Have a quick breakfast and then head out the door to work.
It’s not the ideal morning routine that I would like to have, but I’m prepared to take the hit in the short term.
Just waiting for The Rise of Skywalker to start. 🍿
You are most welcome Nicholas
A thank you note from fellow blogger, Nicholas Bate.
I forget how I came across Nicholas Bate’s blog. I discovered him, and a few other great blogs, while I was a heavy user of Google Reader.
Today, I’m still a daily reader of his blog and a select number of other blogs that I find are essential to my daily reading.
I’ve been a bit quiet this year in terms of blogging, but it’s starting to pick up again. Without the daily posts from Nicholas, Michael, Kurt and Curtis, I’m sure I would have packed in blogging years ago. So, thank you guys for your time.
It’s these fine blogs and many more that keep me writing and ultimately posting to the Internet. Long may it continue.
The Ruby cost at Basecamp
David Heinemeier Hansson breaks down the cost of the operations at Basecamp with a spotlight on the cost of running a Ruby on Rails product.
Working with Ruby and Rails is a luxury, yes. Not every company pay their developers as well as we do at Basecamp, so maybe the rates would look a little different there. Maybe some companies are far more compute intensive to run their apps. But for most SaaS companies, they’re in exactly the same ballpark as we are. The slice of the total operations budget spent running the programming language and web framework that powers the app is a small minority of the overall cost.
For years I’ve heard arguments that Ruby on Rails is too expensive to run, but I’ve never seen costs for anything as big as this. And to be honest, I was surprised that this was all it was.
Sure, every SAAS product is different in what it does, how it’s built and how it’s run. But, the fact is that Ruby on Rails is an ideal web framework for most SAAS products and has been for years.
I’ve watched the JavaScript hype train trundle on now for a couple of years and I can’t see any clear advantage of it over Ruby on Rails or any other non-JavaScript framework for that fact. And I think developers are starting to realise this.
Given the choice between Rails and any other framework for an application, I will keep going with Rails. It doesn’t have the big hype around it that it did ten years ago, but it’s still proving to be a developer-friendly and therefore business-friendly framework to build your SAAS product with.
I am catching up on some podcasts this morning.
This Rework episode with Dave Teare from 1Password is worth a listen. Especially if you are a 1Password customer.
Nighthawk sounds like a good Twitter client with its smart filters, close friends and a chronological timeline.
Lightsabers done right
A look at the different techniques used to make the lightsaber work on screen through the different Star Wars movies.
Enter the sequel trilogies, which would achieve the pinnacle of lightsaber effects by merging the various techniques from over the years. Like the prequels, the blades of the lightsabers on-screen would be added digitally, with the on-camera fights taking place with plastic prop stand-ins. Also like the original trilogy, the battles were still fought on actual sets as part of the Star Wars sequels’ commitment to trying to embrace more practical effects.
Of course, you’re bound to hit on the right combination after numerous attempts. The sequel trilogy does get it right though with the lighting effect from the lightsabers.
It’s just a shame though, that we haven’t yet seen any other colour of lightsaber than the blue and red done with this effect.
I had one of those mornings on the train where I could have just kept writing and writing. Sadly, it came to my stop and I had stop and head to work. I hope I can pick up tonight where I left off this morning.