When it comes being great at what you do in life, there’s no real formula. Some people have that natural talent for something, and others just love it enough to dedicate the time to get better at it. Regardless of how you ended up where you are, there is always room for improvement. I’m going to talk about some of the things that have helped me along the way become better at what I do: write kickass software. Realistically, you can substitute “S…

Lots of interesting things are afoot, and I try to keep track of them. Here's what I'm watching. Rails 3 Lots of new changes are coming with Rails 3, and it's pretty exciting. I wrote about some of the cool ones here. Rails is shaping up to be faster, more modular, and generally better and easier to work with. With all the smart people working on it, you don't have to look very hard to realize this is going to be a big release, and is only going…

FeedBurner has a new feature out, since Google announced their URL shortener. I originally had logic to shorten the permalinks with tr.im, then post to Twitter, but since FeedBurner can do this now, I'm not going to do it. I like to outsource that kind of stuff, which I'll talk about in a later post. Also in the news today, Github is having some problems, but they'll be back soon, so don't you worry. All in all, this is more of a test to see how…

Have you check out Google Sets? It's great. I really don't know how long it's been around, but it's pretty slick. If you were looking for server names, like in this serverfault question, you'll realize the power of Google Sets. Go there, and try out a few things, like characters from Star Wars. Enter in Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Oh look, the rest of the cast, and even some obscure ones! So the next time you need a set of things, like for a ne…

Google Wave Preview. Awesome.

It's for the 4.x version line, but whatever. Old but good. An Overview of the MySQL Engine and its Latest Features