Nice concept, but you will probably be waiting a while in order to get that call. Maybe people are more vain that I think that they are and are googling themselves often.

Simply wicked!

Death to the fail whale they are calling it. Maybe so, but what really got me was this.

Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs.

Uh, what?

What could possible be unique to your power and cooling needs opposed to well, ANYONE ELSE RUNNING A FUCKING DATA CENTER?

Sure they have a metric crapton more users than you or I will ever have. But unique cooling and power needs?!?! Bullshit!

Yes you have servers, routers, SAN cabling, racks upon racks of gear. We get it, you’re a big site. But that doesn’t make you suddenly special. Just because you have a lot of cooling and power needs doesn’t make you suddenly unique to the rest of the world.

I work for a company that has several large data centers. We host more companies than I probably even know about. And you know what, we use a LOT of power and cooling. Why you ask, we’re a freaking data center, its what we do.

While building a data center gives you other benefits which you have listed (customization and flexibility), its doesn’t make you special so stop acting like it.

In your home directory, edit your .ssh/config file. If you don’t have one, that’s not a problem, simply create a new one. Then enter in the following line:

ServerAliveInterval 60

And you’re done! Now wasn’t that easy?

Happy terminal camping partner!

Software development isn’t about implementing every feature that a customer requests. Its about implementing what is right for the product. And a lot of times that involves cutting existing features and more time than not, simply saying no to a feature!

So with that baseline set…here’s something that I’ve noticed recently. iTunes has definitely started pushing more of the cast albums at me in their weekly “what’s new” marketing emails. Here’s the thing about the Glee cast versions of songs…when listening to the sample track, it doesn’t get me to buy the song. Instead, it makes me search to find the original song because their cover reminds me of how awesome the original version was.

Does this happen to anyone else?

You may not have it that bad. Your company may lock down some of the social media services which eliminates a lot of the distractions. For many of us out there we are getting bombarded by interruptions. And as a programmer, it is horrible for productivity.

I think Jason Fried from 37Signals has summed it up best in this snippet from his BigThink interview.

So do yourself a favor, turn off your IM, your email etc. Avoid tapping your co-worker on the shoulder when an email will work out just as well. And get back to getting stuff done!

More posts coming soon…promise!