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	<title>Colin&#039;s Blog</title>
	<link>http://colinsteele.org</link>
	<description>Travails of a CTO</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:02:05 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>hiring badass programmers&#8230; or, at least&#8230; trying to</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;d love to say I know a good programmer when I see him (or her).  That would be a lie.  The difficulty in predicting the performance of programmers lies in the fact that programming, as human endeavors go, well&#8230; it&#8217;s a bit odd.  We&#8217;d like to say (as a group that wants to be taken [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2010/01/hiring-badass-programmers-or-at-least-trying-to/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>RubyInline and ImageScience</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Quick shout-outs for excellent Ruby tools: ImageScience and RubyInline.  We wrestled with RMagic on and off all week and finally punted, moving over to ImageScience with a sigh of relief.  We needed a small enhancement to ImageScience which was easily done using RubyInline.  Voila.  I like it when things are this easy.
]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2010/01/rubyinline-and-imagescience/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Want to write better?  Stop using the verb &#8216;to be&#8217;.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Some years ago while studying the occult, I stumbled across Robert Anton Wilson&#8217;s Quantum Psychology, which blew my mind all to pieces.  I still pull out my dog-eared copy every year or two to reinforce my mind-blowness, and it never disappoints.  One major benefit I&#8217;ve realized from it, while prosaic, may be of some use [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2010/01/want-to-write-better-stop-using-the-verb-to-be/</link>
			</item>
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		<title>Metaphor, Storytelling, and Agreement in Software Development</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A brief essay on meaning, language, mental models, storytelling and metaphors in software development.]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2009/12/metaphor-storytelling-and-agreement-in-software-development/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Geek Bucket List</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ok, maybe Bucket List is a bit of a stretch.
But if I had oodles of free time I&#8217;d do the following geeky things:
 

Lisp.  Really learn it this time.  No.  Really.
Smalltalk too.
Build and install an active solar system and a solar hot water heater on my house.
Do an iPhone app.  Yay, Objective-C!

 
What&#8217;s on your list?
]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2009/12/geek-bucket-list/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Hiring Internet Talent and the Future of Charlottesville</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ 
 
 
As CTO, I seem to be getting the recurring question, &#8220;Can you (hotelicopter) find the tech-savvy talent you need in Charlottesville?&#8221;  It&#8217;s a valid question.  Long gone are the days of Kesmai, EA, Mr. Goodbucks, and the beloved Value America.  These days, we have influx of spooks, a smattering of biotech companies, and in the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2009/12/hiring-internet-talent-and-the-future-of-charlottesville/</link>
			</item>
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		<title>Kicking and Screaming into Programming in the Large</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m not sure if it&#8217;s a fine line or a broad one between programming-in-the-small and programming-in-the-large, but at hotelicopter, we&#8217;ve definitely stepped over that line.  Along the way, in a very short amount of time (6 months, give or take), we&#8217;ve begun moving to the cloud (aws), adopted distributed source code control (git), automated deployment [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2009/12/kicking-and-screaming-into-programming-in-the-large/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Geokit</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Quick shout-out for Geokit for Ruby, which is a most excellent and useful bit of Ruby code.  Installation is a snap, it&#8217;s easy to use, and you&#8217;ll love the expressive power of little things like this:
Store.find(:all, :origin=&#62;'100 Spear st, San Francisco, CA', :within=&#62;10)
]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2009/12/geokit/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Premature Optimization and the Role of CTO</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In system design, generally I believe there&#8217;s no such thing as &#8220;premature optimization&#8220;, but life in a startup demands profound thought into exactly when we implement our optimizations.  Spending time and money up front on making things fast (and/or scalable) comes with a hefty little price tag we like to call &#8220;opportunity cost.&#8221;  We live [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2009/12/premature-optimization-and-the-role-of-cto/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>On The Importance of Momentum</title>
		<description><![CDATA[We&#8217;re currently investigating a spectrum of new technologies in the NoSQL realm, including Tokyo Tyrant, MongoDB, Amazon&#8217;s SDB, CouchDB, Voldemort, and more.  Tis&#8217; a dizzying mix, and things are popping in the space.  From my point of view, they all end up relatively close to one another in terms of utility and applicability to the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://colinsteele.org/2009/12/on-the-importance-of-momentum/</link>
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