I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted the senior position on the tech team at the Texas Tribune, a policy and politics news outfit based out of Austin, Texas. I’m helping them round out their internal tools and data processing starting next week (the 11th to be precise). This means some big changes for me and my family. First, I’m moving to Austin. I love Lawrence, the quirky little town that it is, but it’s time for a change.

My latest book on Git, Pragmatic Guide to Git goes on sale today! I’m really excited about this new book. It’s the culmination of a year’s worth of work on an entirely new format for Pragmatic Bookshelf. From today’s announcement: Last summer, Pragmatic author Travis Swicegood proposed a new kind of book covering the popular version control system, Git. We thought it was a good idea–so much so that we’ve launched a whole new series in this format.

A few years ago I switched to an old fashion safety razor and haven’t looked back. The latest entry into the razor market has reaffirmed my decision as the right one. The new Pro Glide from Gillette only costs less than $10 to purchase. Good deal, right? Nope. The replacement blades cost $3-$4 each! Assuming you get a few weeks out of each blade, you’re looking at paying between $6 and $10 every month to use this razor blade.

David McCandless gave an excellent TED talk on visualization of data. The take-away quote from this was: Data is the new soil I love that line. Data gives rise to new ways of understanding something. Presenting something spatially gives you the ability to put it in context more quickly than trying to explain the context. Take 20 minutes, this video is well worth the time investment:

Good, or bad? Jesse Schell envisions a future where every aspect of our daily lives are rewarded by corporate gaming overlords. Honestly, how different is this than the current frequent shopper cards? Our rewards aren’t points (at least all of the time), it’s lower prices. A lot of our credit cards are already points based. “Get a million points, fly anywhere.”

Yesterday (essentially), I woke up and decide to stir the pot a little bit. I had come across this post while looking into the company behind MapBox. As I noted, I do this to get a feel for what the company is doing. What technology is important to them? What do they value? Are they funded, and so on, and so on. That particular job posting rubbed me the wrong way, however, because of it’s emphatic no telecommute policy, with them going so far as to call attention to it with a bold font.

A few years back, I’m not even sure when, I started looking at job postings of companies I found interesting. The point wasn’t to find a new job, but to understand the company a bit more. You can almost always discover what technology a company is using if they’re hiring. I found out Plurk uses Python through this method, that Twitter hasn’t given up on Ruby, and even when it doesn’t make sense Washington DC shops still use Drupal.

By now, I hope we’ve all read Is Google Making Us Stupid from The Atlantic. Here’s the quick version, which ironically makes the author’s point: People are changing the way they interact with the world, which is changing the way their brains model the world, which is changing their brains. We’re not exercising the critical, reflective part of our brains; instead, we’re using almost exclusively the parts that focus on quick, immediate activities.

I’ve spent a lot of time working on a lot of different code. I’m fortunate in that I’ve been exposed to all three of the modern scripting languages and their communities. All of them, to varying degrees, bemoan their code. All of them, way too much of, bemoan the code of everyone else. Ruby is too clever, I can never figure out what’s going on or what to expect.

I’m lazy when it comes to code. Not in a bad way, but in an efficient way. I want to get to the crux of the matter quickly and move on. Truth be told, that’s why I like TDD—I don’t have to remember anything more than I need to know right now. My tests remember everything else I knew, but I digress. When I start evaluating a new library to see if its something I want to use, code is what I want to see.