Matt Yglesias quotes Eric who thinks we should get rid of maternity leave:

Maternity leave subsidizes raising children, which is unfair because not everyone wants to have kids and is also bad for the planet because we don’t need more people here … I’m not saying it wouldn’t suck to have a kid and [...]

I really like this Fast Company article about prototyping your work:

Fearing failure stifles creativity and progress. If you’re not failing, you’re not going to innovate. Do your product or service a favor: embrace failure and blueprint a plan that affords you the opportunity to do it early and often. Prototyping can [...]

Three videos about how work isn’t working. First, Daniel Pink explains what really motivates us vs. what people think motivates us. Second, Jason Fried explains how the modern workplace prevents actual work. Finally, Nigel Marsh says it’s up to us as individuals to balance work and life, and that may come with some hard decisions.

Once Elf got pregnant, we learned really fast that following everyone’s parenting advice was a sure path to insanity. There’s so much of it, and so often in conflict, that you really have to decide what’s important to you and what isn’t, what you have the resources to do and what you don’t.

Most importantly, [...]

When you write for multiple platforms, you can either create multiple native applications or write the application once using a cross-platform development framework. Which you choose depends on what resources you have and what your priorities are.

Here’s how to learn how to program in a new language. Or, for that matter, any language at all:

Pick your project. Pick your language. Do it.

For the most part programming is like other art forms — it can only really be understood by doing. This is because programming is very complicated — not [...]

Trent of The Simple Dollar on the cost of negativity:

[ Kathy ] made the office environment so poisonous through her constant negativity that I considered quitting after six months. Every day, Campbell and I were faced with criticisms without suggestions for improvement. We also were tasked on a nearly-daily basis with [...]

The answer is, it took a decade of education and teaching. The key to Apple’s success is that the company often takes the time to explain things to the consumer that no other vendor bothers to do. By keeping a laser focus on key features and introducing them one at a time over a [...]

I remember the first professional program I ever attempted. It was 1996, and I was managing a web site for a newspaper. I started by building every web page by hand, but it didn’t take long to discover this was a terrible idea: a design change to the site meant having to edit every page [...]

When I originally wrote the last post — it sat in draft form for many months — I suggested that technical people get grumpy because people assume difficult things are easy, and that any squawking from a dev is just because the dev doesn’t want to do any work.

That sat in draft form [...]