What clicked about Smalltalk was a few things: one was simply the maturity, both of the community and of the technology. Smalltalk implementations have been refined over the last 25 years, and they’ve really benefited from it.

One of the major benefits, in my opinion, is that Smalltalk VMs are fast enough that it’s reasonable to implement all of the standard libraries – Array, Hash, Thread, and so on – in Smalltalk itself. So there’s no barrier where you switch from your Ruby code to the underlying C implementation; it’s “turtles all the way down”. This may not seem like a big deal but once you have it, it’s really hard to give it up.

…

In Smalltalk, you don’t have to choose one file layout or order of methods and classes in your code; you’re constantly switching views on what’s basically a database of code.

My friend Brian Marick hates this, because you lose any “narrative” that might have existed by putting the code in a certain order in the file, and it’s hard to get used to, but for me, it’s the ultimate power tool for hacking on a large code-base.

– http://www.akitaonrails.com/2007/12/15/chatting-with-avi-bryant-part-1

– http://www.akitaonrails.com/2007/12/22/chatting-with-avi-bryant-part-2

Long story short, the key to being bad and nationwide is to do something useful. Create something new, that definitely came from you, that other people value. Rails, Adhearsion, or even just a blog. This simple step is much more important than most people realize. It has to trace back to you personally, or it’s useless for your career. As programmers, we are in the position of working for people who do not have the ability to determine whether or not we are good at our jobs. Even other programmers sometimes have trouble figuring out who is or isn’t a good programmer. For potential managers and/or potential clients, the hiring and firing processes are both essentially random, unless you have some obvious distinguishing feature. That makes marketing yourself essential

– http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/10/im-bad-im-nationwide-job-security-vs.html

Ironically, “I want to be a manager” is just about the worst sentiment a would-be manager could possibly express, because the statement has absolutely nothing to do with leadership. A leader doesn’t fixate on management, which is after all just a bureaucratic framework that attempts to simulate leadership through process and protocol.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/05/not-managing-software-developers.html

also

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/moores-law-is-crap.html

In Ajax vs. REST I wrote about my ideas for a RESTful inplace editor.

Well, after a day playing around with jQuery, I present REST in Place

A small shop I’ve been writing for for fathers pharmacy was a welcome playground for modeling my domain RESTful. During my ventures, two big issues had me thinking quite hard for a while and there’s still no proper solution available. One of them was a DRY implementation of controllers for nested resources which I’ll describe later, the other one was the outdated inplace editor plugin in Rails.