Jim (Hyphen) Nielsen joins Jerod & Nick for a fun conversation about language-level toll roads, when (and how) to quit, the stratification of social networking & the state of the world in publishing your thoughts on the internet.

Jim Nielsen:

I heard Paul Ford, a professional writer for Wired and other publications, say something on The Aboard Podcast, Episode 3 that resonated. Referring to a moment when lots of folks online were looking for the perfect writing environment, he said the software tool, workflow, environment, whatever, it didn’t matter. You could do it with pen and paper if you want.

The only technology that you need is deadlines.

Ooff. Yup, that resonates. That’s been the best piece of technology for making me productive too.

See also arbitrary deadlines are actually awesome by yours truly.

This short piece by Jim Nielsen resonated with me (much like Manu’s post resonated with Jim). He says:

I like this idea of beginning to notice and bring attention to people or creative works that intentionally bring closure, even when you’re left wanting a little more.

When it comes to open source software, people often see a lack of activity and proclaim that a project is unmaintained. Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes the project is merely finished, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay. It’s downright successful.

There’s a big difference between quitting and finishing. Quitting is in the realm of failure, but finishing is in the realm of success. The key is to define what finished means before you get there, lest you feel like you’re merely quitting.

The art of knowing when to quit? Sure. But how about the art of knowing how to finish?

Thanks to Jim Nielsen, TIL that:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true
defaults write -g WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool YES

Lets you trigger Safari’s Web Inspector on different system views that are built with web tech. Nifty!

Any debugging story that includes the phrase, “My Mom’s verbal JIRA ticket was right” has a lot of promise. This one by Jim Nielsen delivers the goods. Here’s the culprit:

In my brain, I always thought of Safari and Chrome as “modern” browsers. But even Chrome, an “evergreen” browser, failed because it wasn‘t on an “evergreen” operating system (or hardware).

and his takeaway:

The real-life impact of our technical decisions really hit home to me once again: my Mom had trouble volunteering and participating in her local community because somebody shipped the optional chaining operator in their production JavaScript.

Be thoughtful out there.