Apparently the founder of Kayak.com does this, in an attempt to not only prevent poisonous people from destroying teams, but to go in the other direction and create exceptional teams.

Just over a year ago, James Ward & I published "First Steps in Flex." Our goal was to make Flex easy by creating the shortest examples and chapters we could, to give you just enough to get started. We've just finished making free screencasts of all the chapters in the book.

I think my subconscious mind has been figuring this out over the past number of years.

The Java Posse Roundup Early-Bird pricing expires January 31 -- that's this Sunday.

We're cranking out MBAs 10x faster than we did 10 years ago. Is there any real value in an MBA, or is it just an irresistible money-mill for universities? I'm reading a book that makes a rather strong case that all management is built on illusions.

This year's conference will be March 16-19, with a free "Alternative Languages Hackathon Day" on March 15. It's during ski season in Crested Butte, CO, and also during a spring break so register and get your lodging early!

Malcom Gladwell's latest book is a selection from his New Yorker columns. The underlying theme is what I call "wrong correctness," which is fascinating because there are enormous possibilities to be mined, but only if we can learn how to create a new approach to business.

I finally bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner yesterday. It completely changes my cleaning experience. Design that asks and answers the right questions can completely change other experiences, too.

I drove down to Boulder last weekend to participate in an open-spaces Python conference, speak at an eyes-forward programming conference, and attend a workshop on TurboGears 2. Here's what I learned.

I'm reading Po Bronson's "What Should I Do With My Life?" which is brilliant on many levels. For one thing, it's the anti-self-help book; it's just stories from talking to people, and by no means is everyone successful.

I will be giving the closing keynote at the Developer Day conference in Boulder, CO this coming Saturday, October 10. The goal of this conference is to be cheap and local, so I'm curious to see how it works.

Our typical approach to problem-solving is to invent something new. If you've been around the block a few times, it gets harder to convince you to jump into yet another untested scheme.

I recently held an exploratory meeting with a potential new client where we needed to share a screen over the internet. Neither of us had used DimDim but it did the trick with no snags.

Guidance & inspiration vs. directing & controlling.

My coauthor James Ward was here last weekend and we managed to debug the screencasting process and produce 6 screencasts. On his next visit we plan to finish creating a screencast for each chapter in the book.