NetFlix’s Culture
An lengthly but interesting series of slides on NetFlix’s cultural philosophy.
- 6 a point well made about values vs reality.
- 10 to 18 interesting core values: especially Curiosity!
- 26 and 27 are eye opening and challenging.
- 33 and 34 going against the flow.
- 41 to 59 ’freedom vs process’ friction.
- 86 to 91 focus on performance and agility.
- 106 higher salary vs bonuses and stock options.
- 111 not a common corporate line.
- 120 to 125 why culture means so much…
They sound like a pretty interesting company to work for!
RSS Feeds Moving!
I am going to be moving this sites RSS feeds away from FeedBurner this weekend. Mostly because I want per topic feeds and I have not yet found a FeedBurner plug-in for WordPress that supports that.
Consider yourself warned if you are using an RSS reader!
Update: I didn’t move the RSS feeds in the end.
Myth of the Genius Programmer
From the Google I/O 2009 conference:
“A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We’ll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.”
Despite being almost an hour long this is a very insightful video that I’d recommend any Software Engineer watches. I find it fascinating that so many programmers want to erase their perceived (or actual) mistakes in source control systems. I guess everyone secretly wants to be the perfect super programmer. However I typically learn more from my failures than my successes: perhaps it is natural to be more introspective about failure than success?
If you find the title or video too pretentious then the question and answers session (around 42:40) is still quite interesting as the presenters get grilled by the audience.
New look for new posts
You may have noticed that I’ve changed the visual theme for this blog to something more minimalist. I have also removed most of the widgets, which I am going to replace with some plain old links to me on other sites.
I did this in preparation for getting my act and starting writing again, hopefully new posts should start appearing this week.
Window Managment on Large Monitors
I have had a 24″ monitor at work for a while and recently bought myself a 24″ for use as a second monitor on my 17″ iMac at home. I really enjoy the extra screen real estate that a large monitor with a resolution of 1920×1200 provides. However most applications don’t really make good use of the massive screen real estate of a large LCD monitor e.g. web browsers viewing fixed width webpages. This leaves you with the problem of how to maximise your usage of your screen real estate, if a single application using the whole display is sub-optimal then viewing two or more applications can be more useful.
The simplest solution to this is to manually position and size the windows of your applications so you can view two or more at once. Arranging application windows manually quickly becomes tedious, due to the many events that can occur in a modern operating system which cause your application windows to be moved around, re-sized or moved to another monitor.
The solution to this problem is using Window Management utilities which allow you to easily re-size and move application windows around, typically using key combinations. These utilities exist for most operating systems for Mac OS X the window management utility is called SizeUp, the equivalent utility for the PC is called WinSplit Revolution. I use both of these applications daily, WinSplit is freeware but SizeUp costs a minimum of $4.99 and its worth every cent. Each utility has some unique features: WinSplit allows you to chain several window configurations on a single key combination and SizeUp allows you to set up a key combination for moving windows between monitors.
I would struggle to maximise my use of one or more large monitors without a Window Management utility. Hopefully one day this functionality will be built into operating systems as large monitors become more common. Until then Window Managment utilties are going to be an essential tool that ever serious power user needs.
