SidesWays Blog

For my primary email account I use FastMail instead of GMail. Why? FastMail is very fast, reliable, and feature rich. GMail is fast, reliable, and feature rich. I like the features of FastMail, but the primary reason I use it over GMail is the communication that they have with their user base when there is an (inevitable) problem. Here's a post about a recent problem: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2011/05/15/outage-report-a-cascade-of-errors/ This is the kind of thing I have never seen out of Google or Yahoo and probably never will. It's an advantage of being a relatively smaller service. They have maintained a policy of rapidly communicating with their user as well with a  status blog in addition to their regular blog . SalesForce implemented a similar "communicate with the users" policy after they had a major outage. You can see what they tell you about their service at  http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ . Google Apps has a similar page at  http://www.goog...

This was just a fun diversion of hearing what it's like to work at the South Pole. If you're footloose and fancy-free, have a craving for adventure, or are very driven to be cold you may want to try landing a position in Antarctica. One Hell of a Long Day - A Summer Working at the South Pole (David Pablo Cohn) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBaQtsft2bM

I've been a fan of Jim McCarthy since I heard a recorded session of his talk at one of the Microsoft developer conferences back in the 90s. The thoughts represented are echoed in Agile practices today. There is a nice set of short videos at: http://www.mccarthyshow.com/the-23-rules-of-thumb/ which are also available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/McCarthyShow#g/u He also has a recent (Dec 2013) keynote at InfoQ: Culture Hacking http://www.infoq.com/presentations/culture-hacking-singapore Some my selected favorites: Rule 1 - Don't know what you don't know Rule 4 - Don't go dark Rule 5 - Use feature teams Rule 6 - Use Zero Defect Milestones Rule 7 - Don't flip the bozo bit Rule 8 - Beware of a guy in a room Rule 13 - If you build it, it will ship (daily build) Rule 23 - Get the team into ship mode