Anthony Panozzo's Blog

You don't really need your caps lock key. Seriously.

You can swap it with a different function that you use all of the time. I recommend switching it to the escape key. You can also change it to function as a control key. But why would you want to do this?

Benefits

First, the caps lock key is modal, which means that much mayhem can result from misplaced keystrokes with the caps on, especially when working with complex text editors. There is little visual and no tactile feedback on the state of the caps lock. This inevitably leads to annoyances when the lock is on. There's a reason that login dialogs always warn you when the caps lock is on.

The Personal MBA program founders think that you can understand the fundamentals and mechanics of business by reading a list of books that they have hand picked as the best in the business field. They conjecture you might get close to the same education level as a traditional MBA with much less time and money.

While skeptical that it will line up fully with most MBA programs, I think that this program has the right idea. The best learning comes when one is interested in something and really wants to learn more about it. I am interested in learning more about business and entrepreneurship since I feel that my strengths lead in this direction. It seems that these books will give a high return on time invested, as most of the time I see new connections or learn new skills. While the information might not be applicable right away, just knowing more gives me confidence that I will succeed when the time comes. There seems to be a lot to learn, but it's not rocket surgery either. Many concepts are similar to each other, and having a background in economics probably helps.

Matt wrote that coding is like writing. I came to the inverse, although similar, conclusion in high school. Writing words resembles writing programs for the brain. In both, to communicate your meaning correctly, you need to know your audience and signal based on your representation of the underlying system. This will allow the interpreter to understand what you are saying.

I originally felt this parallel when I constructed arguments for essays. Words and sentences must be read through sequentially and the work needs to make sense. This resembles writing a program and running through it in your head before executing. When writing a paper, I found framing arguments often corresponded to declaring variables. The introduction of a paper lines up with initialization, setting the evaluator's mind in a specific state for later communication. The conclusion is cleanup. Pronouns are abbreviations or aliases to entities. A sentence that could be ambiguous should be expanded out, much like one would use parentheses to clarify a potentially ambiguous expression.

In Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method, Gerry Weinberg (author of Are Your Lights On? and Secrets of Consulting) discusses his main writing workflow. Weinberg primarily collects ideas and words with energy behind them, which he refers to as "fieldstones". He then analogizes writing to building a wall with stones. Overall I thought this book was fantastic, with many ways of generating ideas and working with them in an original manner.

Weinberg always seeks to move writing forward, and keeps a list of things to do depending on his energy level and state of mind. If he feels high in spirit, he might develop fieldstones into new sections. If he feels drained, he might reword a section that needs fine-tuning or perhaps take a break.

Weinberg's technique seems to produce a volume of writing: he has published over forty books and numerous articles and other writings.

Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application Author: 37signals Published: 2006 Pages: 177

This book describes the philosophy of development at 37signals when they created five successful web applications while taking no venture capital.

The biggest theme that I can see with this book is that you should do a few things exceptionally well as opposed to doing many things, only some of which are done well. I see this theme repeated in many works that I read. You don't want to be good at several things, you want to be world-class at whatever you choose to do.

I really liked the firm's approach to taking venture capital. They are big fans of bootstrapping by keeping functionality at a bare minimum to what is required. Having less features means a firm can spend time on the very most important features and ensures that they are agile enough to change plans once a page is actually out there. Every single feature that goes into your software is a liability, and users will not want it taken out. So think carefully about every feature. Be ready to say "no" a hundred times. If you keep hearing about something, you will know that users really need it. This comes back to designing something based on the actual underlying needs of users and doing continuous usability testing and getting continual feedback to ensure that designs work as desired.