The Woodwork

I just get back from Amsterdam and two of our engineers are leaving Tagged and we have a lot of job openings.
One of the departing wrote an interesting e-mail on leaving which I’ll quote below and maybe it’ll give you an idea what it’s like working here. But first, some open job reqs…
[Tagged Jobs Reqs [...]

(I am sitting in a presentation on a web framework in our office conference room given by a former employee who is now a consultant. One of my engineers asks the consultant to give an example from experience where he had to modify the framework code itself.)
R—: “Yeah, that happened to me, you know when [...]

Every time I talked about web cookies, my ex-girlfriend would say, “Mmmm, cookies.”
Besides messing with my train of thought, it also gave me an unhealthy obsession with cookie implementations in web development. Today, I was taking apart how YUI implements subcookies, and the source had this comment in the subcookie parser…
PLAIN TEXT
JavaScript:

/**

* Parses a [...]

I guess the news in my world today is that Bebo sold to AOL for $850 million.
Trust AOL to make the Microsoft-generated $15 billion “valuation” look like a steal. I’m curious how much Hi5 must be worth now:

Just trying to add some perspective. Not sure how Falco thinks “dominating in the United Kingdom” is going [...]

The other day someone asked me again about what I thought about jQuery, and I’m getting tired of repeating myself for almost a year. jQuery actually is fodder for an interview question I sometimes ask:
What’s wrong with the jQuery $() function?
[Showing you the money after the jump.] (more...)

We use YUI at Tagged because that’s what I chose. We lost a couple front end engineers at Tagged so I’m having to pick up the slack—this means actually having to learn the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) in earnest. So I whipped up this diagram of YUI 2.5:

There are some errors, but it’s good enough [...]

Someone took exception to me saying:
“I have yet to read a good “Pragmatic Programmer Series” book.”
…with the lines:
“I think that’s a bit of a hard knock of the Pragmatic Bookshelf. I’ve had a number of books which I’ve really enjoyed from them; The Pragmatic Programmer and Practices of an Agile Developer spring to mind.”
Hehe, he [...]

This popped in my e-mail box just now:
Subject: Anyone know a top Rails programmer for Tech Advisor role
Could be as little as one hour per week? Great opportunity for this person to inherit vp of engineering position once we get funded. We are close to launching, and hopefully to being funded.
…
This is wrong in so [...]

…a place to send all the people who washed out coding PHP.

I haven’t read this book so I can’t comment, however, I have yet to read a good “Pragmatic Programmer Series” book. The one all the Rails developers jizz over, is so poorly written and full of errors, I am beside myself.

Please buy this book.
Not [...]

Received an e-mail today advertising a great example of three rights making a wrong:
Recipe for disaster
Ingredients:

1 part favorite web programming language

1 open source book publisher
1 alma mater

Instructions:

Combine all ingredients.
Spinkle terminology liberally.

Charge $1600.

…
Not sure what to think about this, but I'm starting to wish I got rejected from graduate school. When people start charging for what [...]