Shanti’s Dispatches

Gada.be - a meta-cool search engine by Chris Pirillo and co. Been meaning to blog about this for a while (you may have catched it in my del.icio.us links). Obligatory narcissim: shanti-braford.gada.be.

Why Ruby on Rails - because, sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words =)

memeorandum - getting a lot of buzz lately. the interface is still a little too confusing (or just not appealing?) to me.

How to Interview a Programmer

Revver - got video? get paid.

The Case of the 500-mile email - never say “that could never happen”

The Hacker’s Diet - it may be time for me to get on this =) though I despise using the word “diet” with a passion

moo.fx - super lightweight javascript library

35 sexiest websites you’ve forgotten about

Indian techie flamewar - the english is just great

thinking outside the VC box

Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us was interviewed on Joho the Blog.

Things that I’m glad to hear from the interview:
- private bookmarking coming
- group-based bookmarking and the ability to subscribe to a ‘moderated’ tag (subscribing to just a tag, i.e. ‘ajax’, is fairly useless due to too much noise)
- how del.icio.us scales
- lots of other goodies!

Apparently sablog.com is worth $29,356.08 at the time of this writing (lol):

If you believe the numbers spit out by this site… I have a bridge you might be interested in buying, real cheap.

Remember mailing lists? Email? That old thing… yeah.

You can now get my dispatches from the garage, delivered direct to your email box.

It’s pretty simple. Just signup using the form below:

Mologogo looks pretty slick.

Apparently the backend uses Ruby on Rails, Google Maps, and various other kinds of mashable web-services enabled goodies.

www.glenrhodes.com - The power of the Sleep Cycle

Flash developer Glen Rhodes on the Power of the sleep cycle:

Ok, I’ve been talking to people for a long time about the fact that you can get by on 6 or even 4.5 hours of sleep per day without question. The secret is NOT the amount of sleep, but rather the number itself; a multiple of 90 minutes will change your life.

This is so true. Back when I was totally indie and had no schedule whatsoever, I would gravitate towards 24 hours awake, 4.5 hours asleep, with a 90-minute break thrown in there for good measure.

Actually, I generally had no idea how long I was sleeping, because without an alarm clock, there’s no sense in paying attention.

My biggest problem with the standard 9 to 5 schedule is that it assumes you can somehow, magically be ideally be awake, alert, and ready to program during that time.

If you naturally gravitate towards a 24 hour on, 4.5 hour off schedule, you end up getting out of whack every week and/or weekend, only to be on a decent, sound schedule for maybe a day or two.

Of course, I’m not complaining.

Now, if there was a way to accurately measure productivity (which there isn’t), we wouldn’t have this problem (as much).

This page over on Sproutit.com explain a little more about what the guys over at Sprout It systems are up to:

There are 20 million businesses with 10 or fewer employees in the United States alone. Our mission is to build a suite of web hosted business applications uniquely designed for these very small businesses.

Our first product, called Mailroom, will help small businesses, small groups, and even bloggers handle the large amount of email they receive from their websites. Companies we surveyed spent on average 3-4 hours per day answering email from their public email addresses alone (support@, sales@, etc). Our service can cut the time these businesses spend on email significantly and improve the quality of their replies.

Keep up to date with their progress over on The Big Act blog.

Another great article from Joel Spolsky, this time on Setting Priorities:

Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, ‘are you sure?’ and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, ‘is this what you want?’ and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you’ve gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you’re really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back.

His method is very Wisdom-of-Crowds-ish, which is probably why it works so well.

Comments weren’t working on here (for a while)… just moved over to a new host, upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2.

Everything should be groovy now =)