Many Americans I meet are fascinated by where you went to college. Student loans and whose loans are bigger are common topics. The possession of a college degree is perceived as having huge social, economic1, and cultural value. That value is so high that when I sometimes criticise the US education system and question the value of doing a degree at all I get a strong negative reaction. So why is that?

Luke Kanies has a rule: Never eat food in transportation hubs like airports, train stations and bus terminals. It’s a good rule. I have my own rule based on long and often painful experience: Never eat the breakfast buffet.

I’ve been writing a lot of Sinatra apps lately and one of the things I got a little stuck with was deploying those applications in a sub-URI. For example I could easily deploy to: http://www.example.com/ But if I wanted to deploy to: http://www.example.com/myapp I found myself with URL routing issues, 404 errors and a failure to find the application’s static assets like CSS and Javascript. A little investigation and some help from the rather clever Pieter van de Bruggen and I worked out how to do some basic stuff to protect my application no matter where it gets deployed.

I love cities. I love the sound of them and the smell of them. I love the scream of sirens, the background rumble of traffic, not being able to see the stars at night and constant movement of people and vehicles. I love the smell of a city. The sour mix of food, exhaust, trash and cigarette smoke. I love rain pounding on concrete and taxis splashing clouds of water on passerby’s as they hurtle through intersections.

We’re always hiring at Puppet Labs. We’ve gone from 10 staff to 75 odd staff in two years. And it just doesn’t stop. And hiring is hard work. It’s time-consuming to find the candidates and then time-consuming to sift through the hundreds of candidates to find the gems in the rough. I don’t credit myself with overly awesome skills in many areas (y’all have seen my code…) but I think I do have a pretty good eye for talent.