http://www.unpossible.com Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:58:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm pleased to announce PublicRadioCamp, a new community event from Minnesota Public Radio and MinneBar/MinneDemo. Minnesota Public Radio produces tons of really interesting content, data, audio, meta-data and feeds. PublicRadioCamp will be a day spent collaboratively remixing and mashing up these goodies. In addition to their public feeds and data-sources, we'll ... http://www.unpossible.com/2008/06/27/announcing-publicradiocamp/ I met Pete Forde of Unspace at E-Tech a couple of years ago. At the time they were Canada's first Ruby On Rails shop and boasted their own flavor of agile development. I was interested enough in their angle on agile to make a trip to Toronto to ... http://www.unpossible.com/2008/06/02/challenging-assumptions-at-unspace/ I'm pleased to share that I've been selected as a recipient of the Business Journal's "40 Under 40" award. My heartfelt thanks to all of you who supported my nomination, especially to Lars Leafblad (a '07 award recipient himself) for thinking of me in the first place. I'm honored, ... http://www.unpossible.com/2008/05/09/40-under-40/ I'll be speaking at RubyFringe in July. Billed as the "avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture," the conference looks superb. Pick an emerging Ruby-based technology and one of its leaders -- in many cases, its outright creator ... http://www.unpossible.com/2008/02/18/rubyfringe-us-the-sex-pistols-them-kenny-g/ A beep; a pause. Another beep; another pause. Third beep; third pause. Eleven beeps in quick succession. Listening to the kid in the row in front of me reset his Timex following our flight one time-zone westward helped me understand why building web apps has been ... http://www.unpossible.com/2008/01/24/the-tyranny-of-css-and-ajax-a-timex-watch-and-a-barrel-full-of-rocks/ Minnesota can attract well-known software/IT companies to establish Minneapolis/St. Paul based "outpost developer offices." Repeatable Pattern I've noticed a pattern of well-known software/IT companies locating development offices (as opposed to, say, sales offices) in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. Adobe is, perhaps, the best known success story: they've had a presence in Arden ... http://www.unpossible.com/2008/01/10/a-plan-for-minnesota/ Most of the time labels and acronyms simplify/clarify conversations. You label something, and maybe shorten it to an acronym, and it acts as a shortcut. When I talk about "CRUD applications" or "RESTful interfaces" with another developer these terms let us skip ahead and talk about the good bits because ... http://www.unpossible.com/2007/10/17/definition-disconnect-two-kinds-of-software-as-a-service/ When a community makes an investment in you and, as a result, good things come to you then you have an moral obligation to feed back into the community that supported you. This evening, at an informal meeting of tech entrepreneurs, I witnessed a counter example of this pay-it-forward principle that ... http://www.unpossible.com/2007/10/03/pay-it-forward-not-zero-sum/