EXACTLY

GitHub [automates] tedious — and important — tasks. There’s a very strong culture of building mini-apps and Hubot scripts if it helps with automation.

There’s two reasons for why we push hard on this. The first is most obvious: you’re letting a scripted process save you time so you can focus on doing real work. The second is more subtle: AUTOMATION REDUCES INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE. Institutional knowledge leads to a minority group inside of the company retaining answers. That forces new employees to bother those few in order to make impactful changes. It becomes a very verbal, synchronous process

A Point Of Order

An interesting thing about HTML5 veers off its rails quite quickly:

Speaking of the 90s, Brett McLaughlin says:

Back in the ancient days, when electronica was cool and not called "house music"

First, the term "house music" predates the term "electronica" by over a decade, much nearer to two decades.

Second, the term "electronica" was never cool. MTV and Spin magazine invented it; it never had anything to do with where the music came from.

I hope this guy knows more about HTML5 than he does about music, but I'm not finishing his post.

Why Republicans Are Insane

This is the best thing I have ever read on the Republican Party on the Web. It is one of my favorites ever in all media after The Wrecking Crew, The Daily Show, and The Big Sort.

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

...

The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction.

Madison RubyConf In A Nutshell

People have asked me if Madison RubyConf was a good conference. This is easy to answer.



I am wearing a penguin.

It is a stolen penguin.

In addition to stealing and wearing a penguin, I heard great talks, I enjoyed giving my own talk, I learned a bunch, Rob Sanheim schooled me with his DJ skills, I got a ton of awesome research material for my music projects from Randall Thomas of EngineYard -- who's done some awesome music hacking of his own, and has the background to actually understand the stats end of AI and machine learning, where I kinda flounder and make shit up -- and everyone had a great time.

I would say the only downside was the clever restaurant employee who stole my penguin back when I wasn't looking. I'll give her credit, though, because I never even saw her coming. I don't know if she just had a natural talent for it, or if she developed the skills because people steal those penguins all the time, but she was like a penguin repo man ninja.