Created by Groovy.MN, and really driven (and narrated) by Hamlet d’Arcy.

Hamlet wrote more about this presentation over on his blog.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I am one of the 416 Chosen Ones. Are you?

So, I get this random e-mail this moring. It’s from some guy whose e-mail is “pradipta” something something, but it’s signed by “Max Archie”. No biggie: standard outsourced headhunting spam, I figure. Except there’s 70+ other e-mails following it.

See, the guy used CC instead of BCC in his e-mail, which meant that he not only spammed 416 people, but he shared everyone’s e-mail address. This caused the inevitable droll Reply All responses, and the requisite Reply Alls Tell People Not To Use Reply Alls, and that was going to be the end of it — until someone kicked off with this:

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:15:39 -0500
From: “Mark [lastname]”
To: “Zack [lastname]”
Cc: [416 people]
Subject: Re: Ruby on Rails position…

this is fun. it’s like a message thread i did not subscribe to. please no more ‘reply all’s. thanks.

Best Regards,

Mark [lastname]

Other quality highlights included the guy who came out of the woodwork just to say “WTF - I’m not even a programmer.”, and another who said: “Hi Max, I am a recruiter who has an opening for a top-tier recruiter such as yourself. I need someone who can unwittingly set off the fury of *at least* 400 people, while ignoring all basic email etiquette. Would you be interested? If not, do you know anyone else who is currently looking for such an opportunity? Sincerely, Thanks for the mile long email thread out of freakin nowhere”.

People took the opportunity to start chatting about OSCON, RubyFringe, and whatever else. And now there’s the Pradipta’s Rolodex Google Group (with two quality threads: 1, 2), the Pradipta’s Rolodex Facebook Group, ThePradipta416.com, a Complainy.com topic, Pradipta on Twitter, the “acts_as_pradipta” Rails plug-in, and the Pradiptas Rolodex FriendFeed room. Plus a fair number of people on Freenode hanging out in #pradipta. We’re even talking unConference.

More of the story at Reverberate.org’s coverage (Reddit comments are quality), Geoff Lane’s coverage and at myShoggoth.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out Max Archie on YouTube.

Edit: Hampton Caitlin (of make_resourceful and Haml fame) apparently just did a presentation at FAILcamp on the Pradipta 416. DHH was also hit up in the original mailing.

It’s like people were annointed by Google’s great prophet, Pradipta.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Since Brian and I are both busy and distracted, I thought I would share with you some of my favorite blog posts in the past. Some of them are from me, some of them are for Brian — check the byline to figure out which. There’s definitely a lot of them, but that’s just because there are a lot of quality blog posts on this blog: just scroll over them until you see a quote that catches your eye. Hopefully this keeps you satisfied for the time being.
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First, I’d like to apologize for not writing more for this blog. Actually, I’ve been writing quite a lot recently, but it’s mainly been in Ocaml, not English. More on that later.

But one thing I’d like to do is lay out the design for an application that I’d like to see someone do- although it’s not something I’d be really good at. The topic came up of how you would do a distributed development tool. Yes, all you really need (as demonstrated by a large number of open source projects) is a mailing list and a remote version control repository. But why aren’t all software projects run this way? Because there is a huge cost to having development distributed to that extent in terms of efficiency, and thus a huge advantage to having all the members of a team in a single office. A cost which open source projects are willing to accept- but which many businesses are not. Thus, while open source seems to be just fine with email and subversion, business wants all of it’s programmers under one roof, generally. But does this have to be the case? I don’t think so, but to understand why, we first need to understand why the common office is still so popular for programming teams.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

By popular demand, here is my Ruby.MN presentation: “Why Rubyists Should Learn OCaml”, recorded and edited by Hamlet D’Arcy.

Slides (they’re a bit hard to see on the MPEG)
Main Presentation
Q&A After Presentation (Very interesting: don’t miss it.)
Main Presentation, Q&A, and Slides in a handy .tar.gz

Note: It was just pointed out by “bluestorm” on #ocaml that on the “Complex Data Types : Lists” slide, I write the string list as ["2", "false", "Hello, World!"]. That should be ["2"; "false"; "Hello, World!"]. The pain of bouncing back and forth between OCaml and Ruby/Groovy…

Note 2: Another site with an introduction to OCaml is http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/.

Note 3: I also presented a bit of a hands-on OCaml session at Groovy.MN as a kind of follow-up to Ruby.MN. The hand-out is at http://smokejumperit.com/ocaml_for_groovy_mn.pdf.

Popularity: 2% [?]