Cannonball Adderley:

It's called "Fun". F-U-N, fun. That's something you can do, when everything is mellow.

Here’s to mellow times. Seemed appropriate for a Friday.

Amy Hoy interviews Ryan Norbauer. This got my attention:

"Simplification, unification, and reduction: these are the values of a great craftsperson, whether she's a tradesperson in the guild of ideas, words, paintings, or software."

Tackling complexity in software:

Programming should be about making things that seem complicated easy to handle.

The world of the programmer:

In this way, programmers are really lucky. Unlike biologists or mechanical engineers, who have to deal with the world on its own terms, programmers deal in a world that is entirely of their own making. We have the luxury of being able to re-work and re-invent our world to make it easier to understand. Physicists don't have the option of re-writing the laws of relativity in order to make the cosmos easier to understand for everyone, but programmers do have an analogous power. If something like the exchange of data over the web, or the modeling of database records as programmatic objects is too complex, we have the power to invent a new world that makes everything easier to get our head around.

Its a long interview, but worth it if any of the above resonates with you.

Adactio: Journal—Viva

I get the impression that there are really two Microsofts. There’s Ray Ozzie’s Microsoft. He’s a geek. He gets developers. He understands technology and users. Then there’s Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft. He’s an old-school businessman in the mold of Scrooge McDuck. If Ray Ozzie is calling the shots, then there is reason to be hopeful for the future. If the buck stops with Steve Ballmer however, Microsoft is f**ked.