Tom Preston-Werner, founder of Github, on adapting to your customers and their requests:

And that’s the secret. Don’t give your customers what they ask for; give them what they want.

via Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year

I recently had to update some screenshots on the StatsMix marketing site and needed to remove some personal information like API keys from the image. I wanted to just gracefully pixelate the data, keeping the image looking nice.

I’d done it before, but couldn’t remember what steps to take. After a some trial and error, I figured it out and decided to write these steps down in case I forget (again!) or someone else can benefit from this.

1. Open Photoshop
2. Crop section of image to pixelate
3. Select Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic
4. Set the Cell Size to 3 square

Please note, I’m using a pretty old version of Adobe Photoshop (CS3) and these steps may not work anymore. YMMV.

Not sure where (or when for that matter) I stumbled on this article, but after cleaning up tons of tabs in Firefox I thought I’d share this:

We came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it – only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle.

It’s a convenient shorthand metaphor. So feel free to steal the term. And when progress seems a little slow because you are doing a bunch of hardcore architecture work, just remember – it’s a black triangle.

And steal it I shall! I can definitely see myself using this metaphor in the future.

via Tales of the Rampant Coyote: The Black Triangle

Great sports franchise, bad investment…

It costs $250 a share, pays no dividends, benefits from no earnings, isn’t tradeable and has no securities-law protection.

Although the offering document calls the shares “common stock,” they confer almost none of the advantages of a traditional stock. The document warns that buyers “should not purchase common stock with the purpose of making a profit.”

via Are the Green Bay Packers the Worst Stock in America? – Total Return – WSJ

I recently learned a new shortcut within the TextMate editor (used daily for all my text editing as well as programming) that has made me much more productive.

You can preview any formatted document (so far I’ve tested HTML and Markdown) by simply holding down ⌃⌥⌘P (control-option-command-P)

Here’s an example from within TextMate while working on a Markdown document. The shortcut turns this

into this

Incredibly useful, especially when working on documentation in Markdown. Do you have any other hidden TextMate tricks?

Great quote on Ruby:

Ruby is the Twitter of programming languages, capable of expressing its purpose with little dialogue.

via 3 areas where MacRuby shines vs. Objective-C – The Ranger Station

An interesting perspective on why JSON has become so popular compared to XML from MIX Online: The Rise Of JSON:

There is the simple fact that JSON is smaller as a payload than XML. And no doubt JSON is less verbose than XML.  But there’s much more to it than just size.  The crux has to do with programming.  JSON is natively tied to JavaScript. As an object representation of data, it is so easy to work with inside JavaScript. Its untyped nature flows perfectly with how JavaScript itself works. Compare this to working with XML in JavaScript: ugh.  There’s pretty fascinating piece by James Clark called “XML vs. The Web” that really dives into this.

JSON’s untyped nature flows with how the web itself works.  The web does not seem like typing; it doesn’t like schemas; it doesn’t like things to be rigid or too structured. Just look at the failure of XHTML.  A beautiful idea for the purists,  but for the web, its lack of adoption underscores its platonic ideals.

I’m odd I guess since I still enjoy working with XML. Considering our API integrations at StatsMix though, JSON is definitely the prevailing format.

Spot on summary from Lance Walley of Chargify on what a startup should strive for:

We want to delight customers by giving them a great experience, from releasing improvements to answering phone calls & support tickets. But I want to do even better. I want customers to say, “Whoa, that is sexy! I never even thought of that!”

One of the primary reasons I moved to Boulder was the amazing community of startups here. So I was really surprised Boulder didn’t have an active edition of StartupDigest.

StartupDigest is a free curated email of the best startup events, what you need to read, and jobs at top startups in 57 cities and 6 universities worldwide.

Emailed every Monday morning, it’s a great way to know what’s happening in your area. As an entrepreneur and startup founder, I love hearing about new and upcoming events so I volunteered to curate the Boulder edition previously done by Andrew Hyde.

You can get an idea of what the list covers by looking at the latest issue that was sent out this morning. There’s also an archive of past issues.

If you’re interested in startup and entrepreneurial events in and around Boulder, please sign up for the Boulder edition of StartupDigest.

Also, if you organize an event or conference in the area (or know of any relevant events), please get in touch with me to make sure it’s is added to the list.

This is sad:

According to the 2009 Deloitte Shift Index, 82% of people who are firm employed aren’t passionate about their work.

via Rypple