Ryan Tomayko

Scott Chacon on The Geek Talk —

Working with Scott is such a huge honor. I don’t even have words to describe it, really. He’s a class act. You get a glimpse of it in this interview.

He even lets loose some GitHub secrets:

At GitHub we don’t have a project tracker or todo list – we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us. No standup meetings, burndown charts or points to assign. No chickens or pigs. It’s sort of the open source software style of business – everyone itches their own scratch. Inexplicably, it works really well and keeps everyone engaged, new features appearing quickly and bugs fixed rather fast. No managers, directors, PMs or departments – and it’s the most agile, focused and efficient team I’ve ever worked with. Maybe we should write a book about it.

Do whatever you want. Do it now. Don’t fuck around.

Maintainable Programmers —

This was a really great lesscode.org piece by Aristotle. The follow-up discussion in the comments was superb as well. Being in the middle of everything really warped my view of what was going on back then, I think.

Depressurize the priorities —

“Most of the time you should be working on The Next Most Important Thing. But there are times when it’s okay to depart. Times when you need to depressurize after completing a dive in the stressful, complex pool of Big Problems.”

What if powerful languages and idioms only work for small teams? —

“What if closures and meta-programming and expressive type systems and annotations and all of the other tools that give us the power to build powerful abstractions actually don’t scale to larger teams?”