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The Git Parabale - My Take

Sunday May 31, 2009 11:30 | comment icon 2 Comments

Short URL: PLMoni

Tom Preston-Werner, one of the founders of GitHub, recently posted an article titled The Git Parable.

His assertion is that most people teach the functions of Git incorrectly, or in his words, Most people try to teach Git by demonstrating a few dozen commands and then yelling “tadaaaaa.” I believe this method is flawed. Such a treatment may leave you with the ability to use Git to perform simple tasks, but the Git commands will still feel like magical incantations.

He offers an alternative solution, which happens to be the rest of his article — all 4,126 words of it. There is nothing wrong with his article, but using it to teach Git? No way. If anything, it should be the 4th step in teaching Git; definitely not the first.

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about how information is consumed and retained (retained being the most important piece) by people. Let me explain.

WebVisions Tentative Schedule

Wednesday May 20, 2009 23:16 | comment icon 0 Comments

Short URL: OFIM5r

WebVisions, the web focused conference held in Portland, Oregon is upon us. This year, there was a special two-for-one conference pass with WebVisions and OS Bridge for 300 bucks. I couldn’t pass that offer up so I signed up.

Here is my tentative schedule for Thursday and Friday:

Thursday

9:15 Cooking Up Gourmet User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget – Jared Spool
10:30 Design for Effective Knowledge Transfer: Don’t Repeat the Same ‘Ol Same ‘Ol – Todd Hudson
1:15 Mental Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy – Indi Young
2:45 Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World

Friday

9:15 Makin’ Whuffie: Why You Should Raise Social Capital in Online Communities – Tara Hunt
10:30 How to Win Projects and Influence Budgets – Daniel Schutzsmith
1:15 Web Design: The Good, the Bad and the Future – JD Hoodge
2:45 Process Meets Presentation: Visual Design – Jina Bolton
4:15 Carpe Futurm: Building Communities Without the Blueprints

Canonical URLs

Tuesday April 14, 2009 02:09 | comment icon 2 Comments

Short URL: td8CEr

Canonical URLs are all the rage on the Internet nowadays. All one has to do is do a Twitter search for canonical to see the conversations going on.

The problem is this, micro-blogging services such as Twitter only allow a certain number of characters, so a URL like this http://eddorre.com/posts/buildin-the-blog-part-5-refactoring-part-2, is too long. This is where URL shorteners like tinyurl.com come in.

They take a long, but perfectly fine URL, and make it something like this: http://tinyurl.com/Hukjfd (this is an example – not a real link). This is much more useful on Twitter where character space is at a premium. However this has its own problems, one is trust. How can you trust tinyurl.com to actually be delivering you to a URL that you would even want to visit? Short answer, you don’t. Also, what happens if tinyurl.com goes away one day? Any search on Twitter that uses these links immediately becomes less valuable. It’s the opinion of some on the Internet, that a site should take care of its own short urls.

For example, the link http://eddorre.com/posts/buildin-the-blog-part-5-refactoring-part-2, could become http://eddorre.com/s/SQ2BAs. Notice that the domain remains the same and short url is under my control. If the link goes away it’s MY fault not someone else’s. I have a vested interest in making sure that the link doesn’t go away. It doesn’t solve the trust issue, but at least you know that it’s a link coming from eddorre.com instead of anywhere on the Internet.