Joel’s post wonders if growing your company too slowly means your company is bound to die:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html?partner=fogcreek

David responds to Joel in his own post on his blog:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2002-bug-tracking-isnt-a-network-effect-business

Normally, I would save each one of these links and break them down in my series “Breaking Down the Game Film,” however, there was something else here in these two posts that I thought was more interesting than their primary messages.

Scroll to the bottom of each of the posts and look at the number of comments attached to each one.  I would venture to say there is more written in the comments than in the original posts.  I’ve seen this before, but there was something that really struck me oddly as I compared and contrasted these two articles.

The idea of commenting on an article on the Internet seems to be one of the founding principals of the Internet.  Take http://www.slashdot.org, for example, Slashdot is built around people commenting on articles posted all around the Internet.  I have never found this phenomenon of people wanting to comment on other people’s work too interesting before.  In fact I would spend a considerable amount of time reading each one of the comments, never posting mind you, but normally reading the majority of the opinions listed below the articles.

Then something happened, I completely stopped reading comments on other websites.

When I first stopped reading the comments I attributed it to a lack of time-who has the time to scroll through 120 comments for just one article?  After that personal revelation I haven’t given it too much thought, however, lately, after a year of maintaining a technical blog, I realized what my real issue is with comments, and it boils down to this, whose brand are you building?

::We have a blog title, J::

David Heinemeier could have just as easily added his comments below Joel’s article, but he didn’t, he brought the conversation to his own blog.  On 37signals David controls the content, and most importantly of all, he will be able to find his comments again if he ever wants to.  He has a collection of all of his content and thoughts in one location, building his own brand, and his company’s brand on his servers and under his logo.

His thoughts won’t disappear if the server Joel posted his article on ever crashes or that company goes out of business.  His brand is being built in a location he has ultimate control over, and he can assure it never goes away if he chooses to.

Jeff Atwood has covered this topic on his own blog, referring to people who provide content to websites as “digital sharecroppers”.  Jeff doesn’t call out people who comment on blog posts directly, but rather cites the larger trend of people supplying content to the Facebooks and YouTubes of the world: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001295.html.

Ironically, below his post the comments are full with the people doing just what he suggests they shouldn’t.

I agree with Jeff that one should focus on building their own brand.  I’m not suggesting you don’t comment on what you read on the Internet, but rather, if you feel passionately about something you have read take that thought or idea and turn it into a post on your own website, expand upon the points made by the author, and strive to control your own brand.

http://www.codinghorror.com

I believe I found Jeff Atwood’s blog through Joel’s Reddit feed.  Jeff’s articles kept popping up and I found my self always clicking through to read his articles.  After much deliberation I finally decided to add his RSS feed to my Google Reader.  Jeff has a very easygoing tone and relaxed style to presenting his ideas that I believe create a relaxed atmosphere around his articles.

Jeff is not without his detractors, me being one of his detractors, I should know.

I am finding he will drastically oversimplify a complex idea and then proceed to base his conclusions on the oversimplification, for me, leading to what I believe is the wrong conclusion.

A few articles I believe Jeff was off the mark:

XML: The Angle Bracket Tax

Understanding Model-View-Controller

As with all bloggers, check their facts and don’t take every entry as gospel.

A few of my favorite posts include:

Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive

My father would have cringed reading that article…he learned his programming chops on the original IBM PC.  My grandmother and grandfather both worked for IBM and were likely the reason we became an IBM household.  What is the easiest way to obtain a brand new, first ever PC?  Forget waiting in lines; know someone who works for the company.

::Actually, I have no idea how the launch of the IBM PC went, if they were hard to obtain or not.  I do remember being told we obtained one the year they were released.  My grandparents are not opposed to waiting in lines though.  I was called up in college by my grandmother asking me if I wanted a Sony PS2.  She and my grandfather waited in line overnight to get one and asked if I wanted it the next day.  They are more hardcore than me…the longest thing I have waited in line for is the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point::

My father wrote all of the software he ever needed to run his practice in BASIC on that PC.  He even bought a compiler for BASIC from IBM.  His main application was so large he had to remove all of his comments so it could compile and run.  My father knew about resource constraints while programming and worked very hard around each problem he encountered.  It was this hard work of finding out how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of a computer that made him adverse to just throwing hardware at a problem to fix it.

::The main application my father wrote for his practice and other ancillary applications he used for diagnostic purposes were impressive for their day and time.  Some even to this day exceed what is currently available in the field of veterinary medicine.  Sadly, my father passed in late 2006 and we never had a chance to sit down and rewrite his code together like we planned so many times to do.::

Avoiding The Uncanny Valley of User Interface

Jeff explores why one needs to be cognizant of not only whom one is writing an application for, but also where the application is going to live and run.  Don’t try to make a web app that looks just like a desktop application.  If you do, people will expect desktop like performance…an expectation even the best web programmers will find hard to fulfill.

Your Favorite NP-Complete Cheat

This article raised the ire of many of Jeff’s commenters, but having not thought about NP-Complete problems in a very long time this article was a great refresher back into the subject.  I am a huge fan of not ‘re-inventing the wheel’, and any tool that I can get my hands on that allows me to say, ‘”Listen, this problem you want me to solve is impossible because it is very much like these other problems that 100s of people have also said are impossible,” is my kind of tool.  Turn on your best Yoda voice here, lazy not I am, practical I very much to be.

Lately Jeff has been distracted with a new venture he and Joel started:

http://stackoverflow.com/

For my money, this is the site for programming questions on the Internet.  Think of the site as a combination wiki/forum where questions are asked and answered.  The most popular answers get pushed to the top for easy reference.  I’ve been using StackOverflow to answer my day-to-day questions that pop up at work, with amazing results.

Follow me on StackOverflow from my profile

Check out the official blog for StackOverflow

Lastly, listen to their podcast.

http://www.viewpointusa.com/newsletter/2009_january/newsletter_2009jan.html

This issue contains part 2 in my series on Test Driven Development in LabVIEW:

http://www.viewpointusa.com/newsletter/2009_January/newsletter_2009_Jan2.php

I love being the senior editor of the Viewpoint eNewsletter, and aim to talk about the production process in an upcoming post.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

Joel’s been writing a blog since December 1999, I only know this because I went back through his archives and read every single one of his posts.  Madness?  Not quite, but close.  I forget exactly how I stumbled upon Joel, but once I read a few of his articles, I was hooked.  Go back and start at the beginning of his posts, or rather, read the best of the best; they are listed in a column on the right hand side of his site.  A few posts I continually go back to:

The Guerrilla Guide to Hiring.  I have based my whole interviewing technique off of Joel’s guide, (with a few tweaks… I’ll talk about my interview technique in a later post).  This is a must read if you are doing the interviewing, and is even a better read if you are sitting on the other side of the table.  Its almost like cheating, you know what they are asking you and why.  Don’t take me for one of those to game the system, however I always like to be prepared.

Honestly, if you were gaming the system an interviewer worth anything should be able to pick up on the fact you knew a little too well what they wanted to hear.  And if they didn’t notice the fact you were gaming the system I’m not sure you would want to work for that company.

Talk at Yale Series, parts 1 – 3.  I always like to know a little bit about who I am following/reading…take a peak into their past, see if their values match up with mine.  I use the same strategy when I invest in Mutual Funds.

::I like to think I’m a bright guy with decent values…and given unlimited time and energy to do my day job and trade stocks I think I could manage my own mutual fund.  Thus, I want to find someone who thinks like me, and they have the time to concentrate on the stock market.  So far this strategy has worked…well except for this whole recession thing going on right now.::

Know thy blogger and learn from their past.

Can Your Programming Language do This? This is a hard-core article about computer science, but Joel breaks down the concept of functional programming and why you need to know/understand what it means.  Once you grasp the concepts you now know enough to create your own Google.

I plan on citing Joel in a few of my upcoming posts, so take some time, go back, and catch up on his past works.

Go a head, I’ll wait.

My plans, make millions and millions by hawking all sorts of Amazon products, like

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

::I am a huge Douglas Adams fan, I’ve read the ‘The Trilogy‘ upwards of 15 times::

If you went and clicked the link, liked what you saw, and ended up buying the book I would get a small percentage of the sale.  A foolproof plan!  I’ll have my millions by Wednesday…Thursday at the latest.

:: Insert evil laugh here. ::

Sadly, I don’t expect I’ll have the number of readers to my site to actually turn this into a money making venture.  However this is a fairly common practice with most bloggers, and I hopped on board with two thoughts:

1. Once in a while I will reference a book I’m reading right now
2. If anyone is actually into one of my suggestions why not leverage Amazon and the referral program?

We’ll see how it goes…consider yourself fully disclosed.

::We were also, with permission from our parents, allowed to read Stephen King…come to think about it we had a very progressive English teacher::

My passion waned in my early years of high school as I focused my energy on computer science and advanced calculus.  It wasn’t until my junior year that I joined the high school newspaper and my passion for writing was re-ignited.  In the vein of Mystery Science Theater 3000 I started my two-year stint as an opinion columnist, and in my senior year, was named editor in chief.  The newspaper served as the perfect outlet and break from the complex math and computer science I was studying at the time, and provided a great many laughs to the student body.

::Ok, maybe not every reader…maybe just my close friends…hey, I know what you are thinking…they were just being nice.  Well whatever, I enjoyed myself and that has to count for something::

College afforded few opportunities for me to write creatively and I have since had several blogs hosted around the Internet, however, none of them seemed to ‘stick’.  I would start out with fire, passion, and excitement for my new blog, but then it would quickly fade.

It wasn’t until I came across this series of articles by Brent Ozar, titled “How to Start a Technical Blog” that I realized what I truly wanted to blog about.  I have been reading the likes of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky for a while but was never inspired to actually start my own blog until I read Brent’s series of articles.  This past December I followed Brent’s step-by-step directions and started to put to good use web hosting I had acquired back in 2006.

As 2009 hits upon us I have decided to make this my yearlong passion.  I hope to continue past this year, of course, but first things first.  And no, I’m not calling this a blogging resolution…calling anything a resolution is a surefire way to ensure failure.

Hopefully I will be able to develop my online voice like Jeff and Joel, and be able to inspire others like Brent did for me.