fuzzylizard

According to Joel Spolsky:

management is just an annoying, mundane chore someone has to do so that the smart people can get their work done. Think of an academic department at a university, where being the chairperson of the department is actually something of a burden that nobody really wants to do; they’d much rather be doing research. That’s the Silicon Valley style of management. Managers exist to get furniture out of the way so the real talent can do brilliant work.

It’s an interesting way saying that managers should exist to facilitate and not decide (technical issues).

I recently upgraded my mac to OS X 10.5 and had some problems installing the Ruby gem Hpricot. This particular gem is compiled from source when it is installed (on a Mac at least, no idea about Windows or Linux). When I tried to install it, it kept throwing an error and failing. The problem was that I had forgotten to also upgrade Xcode, so it was being compiled with an old copy of gcc.

I found this the other day and thought it might be of interest to Ruby on Rails developers in Toronto. Unspace, a Toronto software development company, is hosting Toronto Rails Pub Nite. They have a mailing list you can sign up on for details and reminders.