Joining and participating in one group cuts in half your odds of dying next year. Every ten minutes of commuting reduces all forms of social capital by 10% Watching commercial entertainment TV is the only leisure activity where doing more of it is associated with lower social capital. Trends over the last 25 years Attending Club Meetings 58% drop Family dinners 43% drop Having friends over 35% drop http://bowlingalone.com/?page_id=13 comments...

I have been going swing dancing at Century Ballroom every week since the start of the year. Swing is a partner dance that has leaders and followers. Before every song, it is customary for the leader, typically a guy, to ask a follower, usually a girl, to dance, and when the song ends, the leader finds another follower to dance with for the next song. For someone with social anxiety, this can be pretty intimidating....

Why should we care so much about naming as developers? Code comes and goes, but language prevails. When a team is working on a project, they must develop a shared language on how things work, how they are structured, and how they are related. A database schema or language specification is such an important document that many developers will battle passionately over what columns are called. Mental models of how things go together are at odds when there are multiple words to describe the same thing....

The goal for this year is to: “write and publish something every day.” So far I have been doing a good job keeping up with this. In my pursuit to build larger compositions of thoughts, next year will be themed accordingly; I want to write a book. How does one go about choosing the topic to write a book about? It is probably something that you spend a lot of time thinking about....

Every morning, as the first light bled into the room, the software engineer’s alarm would chirp, marking another day’s beginning. The routine was as predictable as the sunrise. Wake, stretch, sip a coffee, and sit before the computer. The screen springs to life, revealing a grid of familiar faces. Standup meeting — the daily ritual. Each square held an expression; some were tired, some eager, but all were familiar. Pixels and bandwidth conveying nuances, the raise of an eyebrow, the half-hidden yawn....