Global Nerdy

Over at Signal vs. Noise, 37signals’ blog, David Heinemeier Hansson asks Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco? Here`s an excerpt:

If your idea for a web business is more along the lines of the mundane “product * price = profit” (3P) variety, I think the culture of San Francisco and that famous 20-mile radius around Stanford is anything but helpful. I might even go as far as say it’s downright harmful.

The flush availability of other people’s money is simply too tempting. When you’re not spending your own money, it’s easy to splash on a big open office on day one, a staff of 10+ in no time, and have few worries about paying the bills on the 1st of the month. It takes away much of the urgency to make money that I think is critical to build sustainable businesses. It gives you too many resources to be satisfied building simple tools for niche markets. Everything becomes about catching that huge wave.

I can vouch from personal experience that the line about what happens when you’re not spending your own money is so true. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you about it.

Naturally, the question comes up: “If San Francisco, the Bay area, and Sillicon Valley aren’t good places to start a web business of the 3P variety, where is?”

David provides a quick list of cities where some interesting applications are being developed, which includes:

• Chicago (and originally, Copenhagen), home of BaseCamp
• New York, home of FogBugz
• Sydney, home of Campaign Monitor
• Ottawa, home of Shopify
• Austin, home of Blinksale
• Toronto, home of Freshbooks

I’m highlighting Toronto not only because it’s the city I call home, but also because there’s a strong small development shop community that’s been building up here over the past few years: we hosted one of the first BarCamps to follow the original, and created DemoCamp, CaseCamp and TransitCamp as well as the upcoming RubyFringe conference, which promises to be quite unlike any other developer conference out there. Toronto also offers some serious quality-of-life bonuses to techies, a very livable city with lots to do at night, Asian food aplenty (including three or four Chinatowns, depending on how you count ’em), a smart workforce and proximity to major cities in the United States (we’re about an hour away by plane from New York, Boston and Chicago).

Grand Theft Childhood is a new book written by Dr. Lawrence Kutner and Dr. Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team who co-founded the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media. In the video above, Drs. Kutner and Olson talk with X-Play’s Adam Sessler about some of the findings from the study documented in their book.

Some notes:

• Their study lasted several years and received $1.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice.
• In their study, they surveyed and interviewed over 1250 kids and 500 parents.
• There is “absolutely no evidence” that playing violent video games turns children violent.
• What’s more important are patterns of play — there are some that parents and teachers should note.
• In their research, Drs. Kutner and Olson tried to find out which videogame playing behaviours are normal, and which aren’t, a cataloguing of behaviours that did not previously exist in the literature on this topic.
• They debunked the experimental methodologies used by researchers who’ve made the vidogames-violence connection.
• One of the flaws in those older experiements was that it didn’t take short-term vs. long-term behavioural effects into account. He cited an example of boys’ horseplay after seeing an action film: it wears off pretty quickly.
• They found that both boys and girls who played M-rated or violent videogames exclusively more than 15 hours a week to be statistically more like to get into trouble, but they also found that boys who didn’t play videogames at all were also at greater risk.
• At least for boys, gaming is a marker of social competence.
• Consider the case of the Virginia tech shooter: although the pundits were quick to place the blame on videogames, he didn’t play them at all, and his dorm-mates said he wouldn’t play videogames with them.
• Kutner: “Kids who don’t play [videogames] at all are actually at greater risk for getting into trouble. It says something about their social relationships.”

What Makes a Great Developer? According to I Love Jack Daniels: pessimism, laziness, curiosity and being meticulous.

Why I Took the Job Title “Nerd Wrangler”: When I accepted the position of b5media’s technical project manager, Jeremy Wright said “come up with a less-formal sounding title”. I did a little Googling and figured that I could “own” the term “Nerd Wrangler”. It’s happened — I pretty much own the first page of results for the search term “nerd wrangler”, with and without quotes.

Python coding style guides. It’s hard to point to a Python “killer app” the way you can for Ruby (whose killer app is so “killer” that it’s often conflated with it). However, Python has something that Ruby doesn’t have: a “killer user”, namely Google, which has declared it one of the four accepted languages for their internal use (the others are C++, Java and JavaScript). Python’s a language worth learning, and its endorsement by Google means that you’re more likely to encounter it. Here are a couple of Python coding style guides that you might find handy, whether you’re learning Python or are a longtime Python coder: Python Enhancement Proposal 8: Style Guide for Python Code and Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python.

Joel Spolsky on StackOverflow.com: Now that we’ve heard from Jeff Atwood about StackOverflow.com, here’s what the other guy behind the project has to say.