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Byte Size Gossip At SxSW

Right now, I’m in a room listening to LisaNova talk about how to quit your day job and vlog, and am watching a Zadi Diaz video, Epic Fu.

It’s day 2 of my stay in Austin, TX for the SxSW festival, and here’s a quick recap:

1) Anil Dash won Battledeck II, a parody of corporate pitches contest. His megalomaniac comment, “Give me the applause I deserve,” and his ability to not read the slides got a lot of laughs.

2) The Valleywag crew was hanging out in the back of the Battledeck II audience.

3) The Laughing Squid party changed from the Gingerbread to Six to the confusion of many.

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Blog Claiming on Technorati

WTF? Check out this pic.

To claim your blog on Technorati you can type in your username and password to your blog. I had a WTF moment when they asked for my username and password! Or you can just post a link to your Technorati Profile .

I choose the latter.

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Webby Award Nominees Announced

The Webby Award Nominees have been announced.

Here’s the server breakdown:

Apache: 193
Microsoft IIS: 96

Coming in a distant 3rd:
IBM_HTTP_Server: 5

The 51 remaining servers either didn’t give server header information, or were other web servers.

For Apache Servers,

48 running PHP
16 running mod_perl

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Welcome to the Codebelay Blog

Before a car crashed into me while walking across Masonic and Page Street, I loved to rock climb. My right hand has yet to heal to the point where I can rock climb without feeling intense amounts of pain. In rock climbing, the term, belay, refers to a technique where a spotter carefully controls the rope so that the climber doesn’t fall very far.

I’ve felt that I’ve worked on projects where although I was part of a team, the team didn’t work with eachother. Management and client demands would very often force coders to free climb without the benefit of belaying. When a coder would “take a fall,” she would do so without the benefit of a belay, and the results would often be catastrophic.

The Codebelay project is designed so that coders can manage projects simply and safely. No coder should have to work without the safety of a belay. This project is guided by 3 simple principles which allows the requirements of simplicity and safety to be met:

  • Coders should know who’s working on their project and what their roles are. This sounds simple enough, but often many projects are managed by client bureaucrats. A coder should have a list of contacts that – although reflects the sorry state of heavy management projects – will allow the coder to successfully find the missing pieces of the puzzle by contacting the appropriate stakeholders.
  • A coding project requires metaphorical building materials. Thus, perfect asset management is necessary if code is to be built and delivered on time. I’ve added an asset manager to Codebelay.
  • Coders, who develop web applications, often lack a test harness or QA tool, for making sure that a web app can “go live.” Codebelay allows coders who work on the web to store links that can be tested. A simple user interface tells the coder either “all green” for the launch of a site, or at least one, red “stopper,” to alert the coder that something needs to be fixed.

I was inspired to work on this project after reading many of the 37signals blog posts as well as Eric S. Raymond’s classic, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. This blog documents the Codebelay project, and I hope that someone out there finds it useful.