benrhughes

There's a surprising amount of overlap between the two. I always liked Buddhism conceptually, but it never really clicked with me. Stoicism on the other hand feels quite natural. Maybe it's a anglo-centric thing.

At the root of both philosophies is the realization of impermanence of all things. Recognizing (and really feeling) this impermanence goes a long way to helping you to mindfully appreciate what you have.

To give you the flavour of what I mean, some Stoic practices include:

- negative visualisation: imagine what it will be like when thing/person X is no longer in your life (which is inevitable). This, somewhat counter-intuitively, brings you into the present and helps you enjoy what you have.

- periodic self deprivation: go a week without your smartphone, or hot showers. This does two things: it teaches you that you can survive without something you're attached to, and also lets you appreciate it. In some ways the essence of Buddhism and Stoicism is "appreciation without attachment".

Stoicism is very practical - Epictetus, Seneca etc basically set you homework. The foundational principle is that there are 2 classes of things: those completely within your control, and everything else. Happiness, freedom and living a good life come focusing your energy on the first class, and being indifferent to the second. The "homework" is about helping you practically interact with the world from that perspective.

edit: for further reading, I'd recommend Irvine's A Guide To The Good Life. Although I find reading Epictetus and Seneca much more enlightening, Irvine is a nice on-ramp.

At home I still use git. In part because of github, in part because I like some of the default behaviour better, and in part because being forced to learn how it works to dig my way out of holes broadens my understanding of DVCSs in general.

"When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shun the being seen to do it, even though the world should make a wrong supposition about it; for, if you don't act right, shun the action itself; but, if you do, why are you afraid of those who censure you wrongly?"

[1]: https://github.com/benrhughes/crashdown

Also, (and this is the main reason, really) it's just a lot of fun.

Because WP bugs me, I've written my own lightweight markdown based thing in node[1] that I'm gradually moving everything to.

On the upside, the Posterous thing finally taught me to not rely fully on free services, no matter how good the feature set.

[1]http://github.com/benrhughes/crashdown

The app itself is really nice. Seems to do exactly what I'd expect. Nice and simple.

Good work.

Url is https://api.twitter.com/oauth/mrklt.herokuapp.com/session?oa...;

  public class Foo
  {
     public string Bar { get; set;}
  }

  var foo = new Foo { Bar = "Hey there" };

So they're not just making sure OSS works with their products. In a lot of situations (esp in dev tools) they are actively promoting and releasing OSS.

I have my default branch set to 'dev' so that that's where pull requests go by default (otherwise I end up with pull requests going to 'master', and having to manually merge them). However, I'd like the github project page to default to 'master', and I'd also only like issues closed when they're merged into 'master'.

I guess what I'm asking for is more granularity in the default branch settings: I'd like a 'default branch' and a 'default branch for pull requests'.

Ed: Do you own a video camera?

Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.

Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.

Ed: What do you mean by that?

Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

I'm glad to see Trello is going so well. It's a great product and a great example of not having to build something that covers every possible use case.

If you're not keen on self-hosting, I'd want: - the ability to export to an importable format (eg, wordpress's WXR). Exporting html/text is all well and good, but I need to be able to migrate - other stuff I'm sure you've thought about, like custom domains, custom URLs (eg /this-is-the-post-title) etc - discoverability of other users/"blogs" on the network

Nice work though. I really like it.

But more and more, it seemed to create an emptiness in me. Or more to the point, it brought the existing emptiness to the surface. There's a kind of desperation there, with everyone clamouring to be less lonely.

It also occupied too much of my thought process. I'd find myself subconsciously rephrasing thoughts into 140 character chunks. It was weird.

I'm still half tempted to go back, and try and to see if I can maintain the relationships without the downsides. I'm not too confident though.

1a) A Guide to the Good Life is an easier introduction to Stoic philosophy if you don't want to dive straight into Epictetus

2) The Black Swan by Taleb to change the way you think about risk

For small scale apps this is overkill, and you can squash persistence and business logic into the model. But for some complex apps you really benefit from a multi-layer approach.

Thankfully I changed the app to link to the landing page rather than the downloads page.

In any case, it was nice while it lasted. Especially the ability to track the number of downloads.

Guess I'm spending the night changing my release process and landing page :(

That was a bit over a year ago. Now I have ~500 active users and a half a dozen of contributors. I get random "thanks" emails, the occasional donation, and something nice to put on my resume. And the satisfaction of actually shipping something.

Billions of rows in performance critical apps is pretty edge case. I think a lot of people paying for Oracle could pretty easily migrate away.