Kindle-friendly edition

Many of my friends have emerged recently from the Dorito-stained pages (or finger-smeared screens) of Game of Thrones Book V, blinking and pawing at the scroll bar, desperately seeking something new to read, anything, just to “the high” going. FRIENDS, I AM HERE TO HELP YOU.

All are of the following books are available as ebooks and in dead-tree format, and come highly recommended from me:

This Machine Kills Secrets by Andy Greenberg
The human history + politics behind Wikileaks and the crypto-mask TOR
Andy, the author, is a smart obsessive, which means he and I get along along great. The book is a great walk down memory lane for me, being an owner of the early ’90s editions of both PGP: Pretty Good Privacy book (before RSA bought them) and Schneier’s Applied Crypto, the bible of modern cryptographic implementation. As you fall into the story, you’ll learn about the smart, often scary governments and agitators building the cyptography architecture that will one day enslave (or free) you. Trigger warning: beards.

Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America by Bakari Kitwana
The interlink of pop, music, race, and anxiety in America, yo
America is racist. As. Hell. Growing up on the outskirts of the only apartheid city in the US (Detroit), you see this every day. Kitwana does a nice job in this one. Highly recommended for Americans whether you identify as white, black, or something else.

The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi
Post-apocalyptic biopunk fiction from the author of The Windup Girl
Biopunk is the name for fiction focused on what horrors and wonders will be unleashed on society as DNA splicing and genetic engineering become commonplace. Think cyberpunk but wetter and smarter, with fewer cyborgs and more science. Dark, fun read about a potential future tribalized state infused with shades of a more American, energized JG. Ballard. Trigger warning: lots of child soldier stuff.

The Power of Introverts [in a World That Can’t Stop Talking] by Susan Cain
It may not shock you to learn that I’m an introvert.
To be quite honest I’ve not finished this one yet, but it’s great so far and very eye opening with respect to how much 21st century western society worships extroverts, everywhere from politics to business to dating. Pretty gross.

The Power of Gold: History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein
GET THAT GOLD
Are you a raving survivalist with AdBlock, a Go-Bag, and a self-sustaining farm in the words that will feed your family when “The Big One” hits? Then this book isn’t for you! ;) Instead, it’s a hyper-detailed history of the evolution of gold as a precious metal, monetary sink, and currency, from antiquity to the present. I learned a bunch.

And by popular request, my top five financial meltdown books:

1. Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson
2. Richistan by Robert Frank
3. Griftopia by “Raving” Matt Taibbi
4. The Big Short by Michael Lewis
5. Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confession of a Hedge Fund Manager by Keith Gessen

N.b. The above links are Amazon affiliate links meaning I get a few cents kickback if you buy them. If that bothers you, just google the book name and click that link, and I’ll get nothing.

University of Michigan’s engineering school has a great program, ENTR407, for engineers who reject the notion of being a cubicle slave at Google or Facebook, and instead are passionate about starting their own companies. In other words, a class for entrepreneurial engineers. What a great idea.

Each week a different distinguished (ahem.) startup founder flies in to share startup stories with a class of young engineers. On October 5th, I was invited to Ann Arbor to speak with over 400 future founders about how our company, 140 Proof pivoted from a social analytics shop to a $25+ million+ social technology business. With a 45 minute time slot, we probably talked for an hour and 20 minutes. I can’t wait to go back.

Click (the right-hand side of) the slide above to view the slides.

Tweets:

Video coming soon, please come back next week to watch the 3 minute highlight reel.

As a software engineer, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside great visual and UX designers for nearly 10 years of my life. Under pressure of shipping many sites + apps, I’ve studied how great designers work. I’ve hired and mentored leaders in the design field, and borrowed many of their tricks and tools, tweaking them to incorporate what I know about building web apps. This class is the first edition in my sharing those hacks.

Design is no mysterious black art that requires loving Helvetica and smoking a lot. Design is something you do, not something you are, and everyone, even straight up command-line nerds like us, can learn it, at least well enough to bang out some decent looking version-ones. Time to get serious.

Sign up for DESIGN HACKS now and learn in 90 minutes how to be good (enough) at visual and UI design to ship sharp-looking alphas and betas.*

Design Hacks at General Assembly, the first rapid-fire design course taught for engineers, by an engineer.

Secure your seat now: j.mp/design-hacks.

* Skinny jeans not included.

Why do Tumblr, AirBnB, and Path cause so much excitement? DESIGN.

Why did Facebook buy Instagram, Daytum, and Gowalla? DESIGN.

Why did the iPhone win? DESIGN.

Are you delegating the future success of your startup up to some art-school kid with skinny jeans and a weird haircut? F that! Tickets!

You’re welcome. :)

Final result: smoooooth scaling!

For a scalable Twitter button for your website, check out the scalable CSS Twitter button I created:

Happy hacking.

via Kirill Sheynkman:

Open source popularized the idea of creating public projects and actively soliciting community feedback and involvement. Tens of thousands of open source projects have been created, but only those projects that built sizable communities have thrived. Most of the large infrastructure software categories were eventually filled by strong open source projects and some spawned successful commercial software companies, like RedHat, XenSource, Sourcefire, MySQL, and JBoss. These companies span a broad range — from operating systems/hypervisors to security to middleware and database/content management.

Coders now expect the same instant gratification as end users. Instead of having to download, configure and manage all the associated software components, more and more of these capabilities need to be packaged “as-a-service” — hence, the move to cloud services. It is also important to remember that software development is an art, not a science, and programmers want a very simple and elegant programming interface.

Read More: APIs and LEGOs

New York’s business press like the WSJ and Forbes are classically slow on the draw… :)

And there you have it – with one free download and a few minutes of configuration work, you can snoop all of iOS’s web traffic for fun and/or profit.

View tutorial: Inspect iOS HTTP traffic without spending a dime

Don’t use Cucumber unless you live in the magic kingdom of non-coders-writing-tests (and send me some fairy dust if you are!)

— 37 Signals

I acknowledge you, here. Thank you for all the awesome things you did.

Yours with notes of celery and anti-matter,

jm3

Everyone wants to make a difference in the world, but many startups are busy chasing dollars, dreams, and the competition. I just learned about a new startup, Yoxi (“yo-see”) that my friend Josh Fischer from grade school is involved with, which aims for a higher goal.

Yoxi takes the game aspects that I tried hard to push at [crowdsourced photo-funding site] Zivity — by voting for a team, you take on responsibilities to promote and evangelize it — except that Yoxi wraps these social game mechanics around Kickstarter-like social change projects. So teams pick projects, make videos to promote them, and then compete to get funding and change the world. It reminds me of Kickstarter meets Change.org — and that’s meant very much as a compliment!

Slick and Glossy

Yoxi is very much the kind of “non-tech” startup I’m known to roll my eyes at: everyone looks very hip and fashionable, the site and the videos are very well-produced, there are no founding engineers or technical back-end aspect, etc. — but Yoxi seems like an awesome company built to do good things… and Josh is a very funny guy. I think they’ll do quite well.

Check it out

(They used to have some sweet videos at http://yoxi.tv/post/611 and http://yoxi.tv/post/476, but the links are now broken)

The FAQ also has a nice visual section on how the game mechanics work too. [ed: the link to the FAQ is now broken too, wtf]

My advice to Yoxi at this point:

1. Provide something for all types of users.

Right now, some aspects of Yoxi feels like there’s nothing  for the middle of the 80:19:1 group to do — power-users can create videos, and casual users can tweet, but it doesn’t feel like much of a community … yet.

The “80:19:1” principle in online communities is based on the famous Pareto Principle or ”80:20” rule, here referring to the idea that 20% of users contribute 80% of the value.

The 80:19:1 rule turns 80:20 on its head and shows that, in online communities like YouTube, Flickr, Kickstarter, Github: 

• 80% of visiting users are passive consumers who will watch a video or click a link, then ultimately leave. These are the vast majority of “silent” users in most communities, who generate a tidy sum of activity and ad revenue, but don’t visibly contribute to the site.

• 19% of users will go the extra step and vote on items, rate things, post comments, flag issues, etc. These users are sometimes called “curators” or enthusiasts.

• finally, just 1% of users (one percent!) will go “all the way”, creating and uploading their OWN original content that excites other users and pulls them into the site, fueling growth.

These ratios aren’t exact, obviously, but they’ve been empirically shown to repeat themselves in community after community. What the 80:19:1 rule suggests, in community design, is that there needs to be variable levels of engagement for each type of user. If your site only has things to do for the 1%’ers, then 99% of your users will be confused as to what to do (this is a standard “expert community” problem).

Yoxi is just getting started, so partly this might be a cold-start / Catch-22 problem; with more engaged users, the site might getmore engaging … but until that happens, Yoxi should experiment with different ways to get users to engage and share more. Too many of the video pages are simply … EMPTY.

2. Provide real video embeds

The videos on Yoxi are great, so they should make them embed-able.

A huge part of how Youtube won (besides Flash) was by allowing their video player to be embedded on other sites so that videos could travel. Bloggers, social networkers, and reporters all used YouTube embeds to enhance their own sites and give YouTube additional distribution. Yoxi uses some super-slick Flash video player, above, but it doesn’t allow embedding. If they had, I would have embedded their videos in this post, and you might be watching their video instead of reading my post.

So check out Yoxi, see what you think, vote on some projects, and change the world.

Everyone did a great job. Public speaking scares most people, and timing your presentation to slides that auto-advance is tough. These were the best of the bunch:

Gleb Budman (@GlebBudman) from Backblaze

Gleb shared an awesome walkthrough of how Backblaze created a 70 TB server in a plywood box.

Jess Lee (@jesskah) from Polyvore

Jess gave a great talk on agile product development using “Fake Doors”, a technique that we also use at 140 Proof to evaluate demand for a feature before building it.

Shivani Khanna (@sk_shivani) from Fliptoast

Shivani gave an inspired, funny talk about the advantages of being lean without a full dev team.

Paul Howe (@phdc), from BlueSpark

Paul shared an awesome example of lean startup prototyping using GreaseMonkey, which is a favorite trick of mine.

“Don’t let not having the tools be your trepidation!” — The Business Card Guy, at your fingertips.

Prank calls will never be the same again.

businesscards.jm3.net

Internet nerds will be familiar with the classic “Business Card Guy” video, a bizarre Youtube cult classic of a motivational speaker- type guy berating some bozos about the low quality of their business cards, and the high quality of his own ridiculously glossy business card.

Now the best quotes from this internet classic video are yours, for free, and are just a click away, for all your prank-calling and office hijinks needs. Introducing:

The HTML5 Soundboard for the Business Card Guy

Featuring:

• Full HTML5 sexiness
• rspec tests
• Capistrano deployment
• works in Safari, Firefox, iPhone Safari, and Google Chrome (sorry if you use some horrible windows browser thing)
• includes tiger blood
• built on my totally sweet Sinatra-Template site boilerplate code
• Code available on Github.

Check it out, share it with friends, amaze your mom, baffle your dog: 

The HTML5 Business Card Guy Soundboard

If you haven’t seen the original video, you can watch it here:

License:

The Unlicense (aka: public domain)

1. Strong Motion
2. The Corrections
3. Rework
4. The Paypal Wars
5. The Immortal Class
6. The Selby is in Your Place
7. Winner-Take-All Politics
8. Richistan
9. Griftopia
10. The Big Short

Bonus 3:

1. City of Thieves
2. Zero History
3. Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confession of a Hedge Fund Manager

Please read any or all of them, and let me know what you think.

I have the rare pleasure of working with Jamie Wilkinson at 140 Proof, and Jamie has the rare talent of being an expert on ”internet fame.” He gave a great talk at the Vimeo Festival on promoting your work online, and I’ve summarized his presentation for those of you who are too lazy to watch the whole thing. Link and the full video follow at the end.

1 - Write Blog Poetry

Encourage many interpretations of your piece by combining multiple catchy headlines (some used in post), pictures, video w/music.

2 - Ride the Wave

Make work that’s relevant to existing online things that that are already popular and trending (remixes, riffes, parodies)

3 - Publish Early and Often

It’s impossible to predict what will become a hit, so don’t bother — instead, release as quickly as possible — ideally spend less than a day on a project — in order to increase the chances of pick-up.

BONUS 1 - The “Eggbasket Theory”

There are no “influentials”; anyone can launch an awesome project that goes viral, don’t focus on being the “influential” guy, focus on making LOTS of projects.

BONUS 2 - The “Min. Effort / Max. Output” Curve

Strive to hit the fast, valuable left side of the curve, quantity is better than quality.

BONUS 3 - “Pre-Document”

Telegraph your intent first with a page / blog post / video (ala Kickstarter), and you might even get press even before you start

WATCH FULL VIDEO HERE:

THEN GET FAMOUS.

Bundler (gembundler.com) is a new-ish Ruby gem for managing dependencies within your Rails / Sinatra / Ruby app. At the time of writing, Bundler’s not yet 1.0, so any complaints are just bitching, at this stage.

Bundler was written by great ruby programmers (Yehuda Katz + Carl Lerche), it’s passed through 40 point releases, and it’s on track to be the de facto standard for application gem management in Rails 3. But it’s slow as balls.

Using Bundler is simple: list your app’s gems in a Gemfile, run bundle install (or bundle lock), and any missing gem requirements will be installed into a local gems directory, and chroot’d off from your main system gems, allowing you to sandbox different gem sets for different apps without conflict. In concept it’s great.

Unfortunately, the implementation is glacially slow, even for what should be trivial operations.

For example, check out the below timing comparisons (sub 1 second vs 20 seconds) when checking whether a single gem (sinatra), with one dependency, is installed. (on my system, it is). The first test uses simple unix shell commands: gem + grep.

Bear witness: the simple unix test takes:

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jm3 % time gem list | grep "rack\|sinatra"
rack (1.2.0, 1.1.0)
sinatra (1.0)
sinatra-bundles (0.2.0)
gem list 0.19s user 0.03s system 97% cpu 0.226 total
grep "rack\|sinatra" 0.00s user 0.00s system 1% cpu 0.224 total

jm3 % cat Gemfile
source "http://rubygems.org"
gem "sinatra", "1.0"

jm3 % time bundle install
Fetching source index from http://rubygems.org/
Using rack (1.2.1) from bundler gems
Using sinatra (1.0) from system gems
Your bundle is complete! Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

bundle install 20.67s user 1.15s system 94% cpu 22.993 total
jm3 %

20X slowdown for a no-op? Yes, yes, it has to walk the dependency tree and calculate recursive deps, but cache that shit!

Rubunkulous!

A robust & resilient link-checker

Introducing Rubunkulous, a delicious link-checker using Yehuda’s moneta gem (specifically the  xattr storage module) to find and record dead links in large bookmark collections.

Many scripts and apps purport to check your delicious links but all of them fall to their knees when confronted with my massive 14,000+ link bookmark collection. Rubunkulous was designed to perform well with big link collections like mine. It caches API responses and tracks its own progress so you can interrupt and resume it whenever you like without losing data or wasting time re-checking links.

I used this project to teach myself:

• loading values from Yaml
• persisting to and reading from Moneta stores
• parsing XML in ruby
• handling ctl-C interrupts and recovering
• opening and modifying classes with class_eval (this project began as extensions to a Del.icio.us library for Ruby called ”ridiculous”, but the Ridiculous code had bugs and did some things I didn’t need, so I gave up modifying that and wrote my own (simpler) interface to the Delicious API)
• handling network exceptions

I hope you enjoy it. May your links be clean as the driven snow!

github.com/jm3/rubunkulous

Introducing Rubunkulous, a del.icio.us link-checker using Yehuda’s moneta (specifically the xattr storage module) to find and record dead links in large bookmark collections.

Many scripts and apps purport to check your delicious links but all of them fall to their knees when confronted with my massive 13,000+ link bookmark collection. Rubunkulous was designed to perform well with big link collections like mine. It caches API responses and tracks its own progress so you can interrupt and resume it whenever you like without losing data or wasting time re-checking links.

I used this project to teach myself:

• loading values from YAML
• persisting to and reading from Moneta stores
• parsing XML in ruby
• handling ctl-C interrupts and recovering
• opening and modifying classes with class_eval (this project began as extensions to a Del.icio.us library for Ruby called ”Ridiculous”, but the Ridiculous code had bugs and did some things I didn’t need, so I gave up modifying that and wrote my own (simpler) interface to the Del.icio.us API.)
• handling exceptions

I hope you enjoy it, may your links be clean as the driven snow.