HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

bscofield

588 karma · joined January 20, 2008

The b stands for Ben.

http://benscofield.com

submissionscomments
bscofield··on Tracking Joy at Work
This is great! I love to see people exploring mood tracking and looking for correlations and insights. I hope you write more about what this helps you discover.

<shameless plug> I built Moodprint (http://moodprint.com) to do the same sort of thing. It's using random sampling as well, though it's personal as opposed to team-based, and it allows free-form mood entry. Some people have been using it for >6 months, and it's helped find patterns around work and relationships, for instance.

bscofield··on ReadOps: A virtual book club for people interested in Ops
Sorry -- we're still setting up, so things are a bit muddled. I've moved the welcome message onto the homepage and made the discussions public, so you should be able to get a better idea of what's going on now. Thanks for the feedback!
bscofield··on Marvel Comics API
Good luck! I traveled that road for a few years with a site called MyPullList (2007-2010, RIP), and had a heck of a time with ... basically all of it. I did have a lot of fun talking about the data model and its challenges during the height of the NoSQL hype, though.
bscofield··on Communication? Check
Gawande is one of my favorite non-fiction authors; I've learned a ton from his books and articles. I second (and would third and fourth if I could) the recommendation for The Checklist Manifesto here.
bscofield··on Ten days and nights unplugged
I found it amusing that going without internet access and a cell transported him "to the early 1900s," as opposed to, say, the mid-1980s.
bscofield··on Github.com unavailable due to a large DDoS attack
Sure, but that's not the point of this gem. This just allows deploys to continue when GH is unavailable.
bscofield··on Github.com unavailable due to a large DDoS attack
I'm surprised there's only one "git is distributed" comment thread so far, but as a reminder: http://rubygems.org/gems/deus_ex may help with getting deploys running during a GitHub outage. Usage instructions are at http://rubydoc.info/gems/deus_ex/0.0.2/frames.
bscofield··on On valuing people
It should: I referenced the second formulation of the categorical imperative in the post.
bscofield··on On valuing people
Had the flights been issue-free, I would have started out neutral. Had BigCo had someone watching out for me and fixing problems proactively, I would have started out with a hugely positive impression of the company. Either way, the in-person part would have done a good bit to reduce those feelings, as it was formulaic and role- rather than person-focused.

I should also mention that BigCo gave me one of the worst phone screens I've ever experienced (bad for the same lack of regard for me, personally), so I thought seriously about declining the in-person visit.

bscofield··on On valuing people
I ... suppose? I like to think that I've interviewed and been interviewed enough to know when the other side has any interest at all in having an actual conversation, though.
bscofield··on On valuing people
Sorry you didn't enjoy it! In all honesty, the travel is what stuck with me more than anything else about that entire process, though, and it's what started solidifying my thoughts about all of this. Hiring has a user experience like everything else, and in a lot of cases travel will take up more time than you ever spend talking to someone.
bscofield··on On valuing people
It's usually interpreted to mean that you need to respect that other people have ends of their own; they aren't just there for your benefit. I mentioned dating as a context where this sometimes happens, and I was thinking specifically of the pickup artist community.
bscofield··on On Ansible
To the link: are any of the major CM toolsets not backed by a company? Opscode, Puppet Labs, Ansibleworks, SaltStack... they all have corporate backing.
bscofield··on On Ansible
(Post author here) Re: agents -- yep. I should've called that out explicitly, as it further supports the provisioning vs. ongoing factor in my decision-making.
bscofield··on On Ansible
(Post author here) Absolutely -- I developed my entire setup in Vagrant. It was fantastic, especially in the early stages where I'd just share my playbook folder into the guest machine and run them locally.
bscofield··on Great Technical Talks
Talk selection varies dramatically from one conference to the next (as it should). That said, there are ways to get your content out there without going through a formal CFP process:

* Many conferences have lightning talk sessions, which are much more open to speakers (though they're much shorter slots).

* Local user groups are almost always looking for willing speakers.

* You can record yourself giving the talk and post it online.

bscofield··on Clack: Common Lisp Web Application Env (ala WSGI, Rack, Plack, Ring, WSAPI, etc)
I included code samples from several of these in a presentation I did a little while ago: http://www.slideshare.net/bscofield/great-developers-steal/2...
bscofield··on Clack: Common Lisp Web Application Env (ala WSGI, Rack, Plack, Ring, WSAPI, etc)
Hack (Haskell) - http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/h...

Paste (Python) - http://pythonpaste.org/ *

* WSGI is a spec, Paste was the original (AFAIK) implementation. Interestingly, WSGI was itself inspired by the Servlet API.

bscofield··on Installing Ruby on Rails on Windows - A new guide
Or you could just use RailsInstaller - http://railsinstaller.org/
bscofield··on Ask HN: Heroku is down for us... is this affecting anyone else?
Please check http://status.heroku.com/ for details - we've seen two issues this morning, so updates will be posted there (and to @herokustatus)
bscofield··on ShowHN : my SxSW project = Rate My Speaker to rate SxSW speakers
Not seeing the benefit of this over SpeakerRate (http://speakerrate.com), which has been around for a year and change.
bscofield··on Oxford announces new degree in Computer Science and Philosophy
Or you can approach it from the philosophy side; one of the profs in my grad program was a joint appointment in philosophy (logic) and computer science.
bscofield··on If you are thinking of getting Vibram Five Fingers this Christmas, read this
The Terra Plana Vivo Barefoot are your best bet - take a look at http://www.terraplana.com/vivobarefoot.php
bscofield··on Ask HN: Help, I need to talk in front of a big audience & I'm scared, what now?
In my experience, practice is by far the best salve for nerves. If you can give your talk cold, without slides, while being attacked by bees, a couple of thousand people won't bother you in the slightest.

Luckily, you're speaking in the best possible format for this. The neat thing about Ignite is the length constraint. With a five minute talk, you can practice properly (run through the whole thing, making notes on paper about changes you need to make) something like 6 times in an hour - that would take closer to 10 hours with a 45 minute talk. That said, don't work from a word-for-word script. Change things up a little on each run-through. That's always good advice, but it's even more important with Ignite, since it's easy to get off-track with the auto-advancing slides.

bscofield··on Heroku Users Group meetup, 11/3 @ 7pm
Join us at Heroku's offices[1] in San Francisco for the first-ever Heroku Users Group meetup - followed by a drink-up jointly hosted with Basho.

1: http://bit.ly/a1s88R

bscofield··on [dead]
Did anyone think they were?

I still say it's more harmful to dredge this up from 17 months ago, as opposed to any of the discussions that've been held since then.

bscofield··on [dead]
This article is well over a year old -- what do we gain by revisiting it now? There was a huge debate and discussion at the time, and the vast majority of the community has moved on.
bscofield··on Rethinking Rails 3 Controllers and Routes - PeepCode Blog
I was working on a framework like this, too -- I spoke about it at RubyConf in 2008, and the last version of the code (from 2009) is at http://github.com/bscofield/athena

I put it on hold a while back, though I'm thinking about bringing it back on top of Rails 3's more flexible substructure.

bscofield··on Don't become an expert
Simple? It's not like you're sit around eating snacks and thinking about a topic for 10,000 hours - that's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is hard work.
bscofield··on A cool way of finding a good web developer
Really? The skills tested here seem utterly trivial... It was fun for a few minutes, but nowhere near challenging enough to make me sit up and take notice (of course, YMMV)
Page 1 of 3Next →