robosox

Agreed. It's also an argument for just being a well-rounded person even after entering adulthood. Staying on top of non-technology news & issues, taking time to travel, spending time with (and learning from) friends outside of the tech industry...all of it exposes you to problems outside of your normal circle of awareness.

This. I don't care how much a tech blogger has studied Google from afar. Ken Auletta actually embedded himself at Google and wrote a frickin book about its history, its culture, and most importantly how it makes decisions. He is in a crazy strong position to comment on why Google does what it does.

These are exactly the kinds of questions that the "don't be evil" motto is supposed to answer. That phrase has been flung around over the years by people who get angry at Google for this-or-that, but during the time I worked there, I found that the most common internal usage of the phrase spoke directly to ethical dilemmas like this. I have a feeling they've kept that in mind while building this product.

This is correct. I have a Wifi-only Kindle and have never been charged for an Instapaper transfer.

The title is a reference by Google about how they "celebrate" their own failures by calling them out both publicly and internally. Not meant to be mean-spirited / schadenfreude-esque.

Can't agree with this comment more. I realize this article is aimed at getting the best hired gun you can, but the best way to partner with a developer is to do just that - actually partner, not toss requirements over a wall. Get their advice on design decisions early on. Make them feel a part of the product's direction. Ensure they understand and are on board with what the product is trying to accomplish. Then let them run with it.

You could combine this approach with the whole "hire 3 people and see who can turn in the best result" idea. But I strongly believe that having developers who are motivated is extremely important...and the best motivation involves giving them ownership and autonomy as well as objectives.

Yes, it would have - I'm not arguing against that point, only speculating why this guy didn't hear back from Apple.

Especially considering the timeframe - right around WWDC. This eng manager was likely scrambling like crazy to get ready for that.

Also, if the manager was considering hiring this guy, he was probably looking not just at his code, but evaluating what kind of a person he is and culture fit. If they're hustling to get ready for WWDC while this guy keeps emailing and pointing out what competitors like Google are doing (as if they don't know this), he may have concluded that this is someone he just doesn't want to work with, regardless of the guy's algorithm.

Agreed with others about the interface - very slick. Great job getting it launched. A few comments/thoughts:

- I'm interested in the game mechanics portion. Would be interesting to have additional badges based on whether a task is completed on-time or ahead of schedule rather than just completed at all.

- Some kind of crossing-out animation when you mark a task as completed (like w/Google Tasks) could make it more satisfying. Right now the item just disappears quickly...I want to revel in my accomplishment of completing a task!

- In your welcome email you may want to include a confirmation mechanism to ensure that person is indeed the owner of that email address.

Yes. The way you've posed the question is slightly backwards to me. Sit down and take a crack at learning both Python and Ruby first. Whichever language you prefer will obviously guide you toward which framework to use.

Another thing to consider is what your goals are here. Is this just learning for learning's sake, or is there a project you have in mind that you want to build/prototype? In my experience the differences between Django & RoR are minor, but your end goals obviously will also help guide you toward one framework over the other.

Agreed. At first I couldn't tell if this was an Onion-style article satirizing the type of kool-aid that's passed around at these kind of conferences. Actually, if you read it that way, it's pretty amusing.

That said, if he's really passionate about it, more power to him. Personally, I think Kinect is overhyped but will find a niche audience and grow from there.

+1. As a developer it's easy to take the old "not invented here" attitude, but you don't even know if people will be interested in your idea. Get it out there as quickly as possible with off-the-shelf software first. If it's something people want/need, your users will flock to it for the content. They truly don't care about the tech going on behind the scenes, especially as you're beta testing it.

You're missing something :-) the phone was lost on March 18th, not April.

Great article, and as indicated in his blog's comments, very similar to Rands in Repose (http://www.randsinrepose.com) whose writings in this space are similar.

I can't stress enough how useful 1:1s are for my own team (I believe Google follows the Andy Grove model mentioned in "High Output Management", another great book). It's easy for engineers to under-communicate those somewhat-important-but-not-really issues with their tech lead / manager, and getting it out on the table during 1:1s is crucial to keeping said issues from getting out of hand.

Maybe. My concern is, who knows how long it would take Yahoo to absorb Foursquare, how much Foursquare code would need to be refactored in order to play nice with Yahoo's, how long it'd take to sort out personnel issues, and so forth. It's easy to envision not hearing from the Foursquare team for a good 6-9 months post-acquisition, by which time they really would have lost ground to their bigger rivals purely from an innovation standpoint.

You can already do this. Select a message ('x'), open the More Actions menu ('.' period), type the label and press return. No greasemonkey necessary.