Top all-time · #444
Giles Bowkett
Personal blog · gilesbowkett.blogspot.comprogrammingwriting
Giles Bowkett's personal blog at gilesbowkett.blogspot.com covers programming and writing. Since 2007, 127 different Hacker News readers have linked it 304 times, most often “Giles Bowkett: Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?”. The last post was in 2019, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Giles Bowkett's blog for his critiques of HN and tech culture, practical tricks like dotjs and the Seinfeld chain method, and his self-published ebooks on programming topics.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called recommended reading, helpful, an instant classic, much more thorough, much funnier and entirely correct.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
half-disavowed old blog. new blog at gilesbowkett.com
Most-linked posts?
- Giles Bowkett: Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2008-05-21
- Programmers: What To Do If You Get Fired6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2010-03-09
- Never Hate. Only Ever Destroy.5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-05-28
- /2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-04-14
- Do You Believe In Magic?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-07-22
- Giles Bowkett: Why Scrum Should Basically Just Die in a Fire4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-09-18
- Facebook apps, the Facebook trap3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2007-12-13
- Blogs Are Godless Communist Bullshit3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-12-04
- Rails Went Off The Rails2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-02-24
- Let the Asset Pipeline Die2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-06
What Hacker News says?
I've overcome this. TLDR: the Seinfeld "don't break the chain" approach, as described here: http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se... much more detail, from my blog: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/11/time-management-two... http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2012/08/my-gamified-life.ht... http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/02/calendar-win-rapid-... good luck.
Comment linking /2010/02/calendar-win-rapid-course-correction.html
on “Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma”Submitted One Major Difference Between Clojure and Common Lisp as a story · 119 points
HN discussiondesign flaw. http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope... hate to carp on it, nobody likes hearing I told you so, but a design flaw is a design flaw.
Comment linking /2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html
on “New users: Welcome. Please read the site guidelines.”Submitted Why Hacker News Thinks PHP Won Something as a story · 99 points
HN discussionReally, the issue is that the news feed is broken. Absolutely. I coded up a replacement using the GitHub API: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/10/node-miniapp-minima... It broke when they changed the API, but by then I had found http://defunkt.io/dotjs , which allows you to execute any code in a ~/.js file for a given domain. So I put $("div.news").hide(); in my github.com.js and instantly had a more relaxing,…
Comment linking /2010/10/node-miniapp-minimal-github-dashboard.html
on “Dear Github, please fix the Watch-Button”Submitted What Killed Smalltalk: My Balls as a story · 83 points
HN discussionCompare: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...
Comment linking /2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html
on “Hacker News is depressing”Submitted How To Be Fucking Awesome as a story · 82 points
HN discussionI used Erlang before Elixir and it was awesome, albeit with a syntax that required getting used too. I've often looked at bridging the gap between Ruby and Erlang, and closely watched and tested solutions like Reia [0], Erlectricity [1] and Ernie [2]. I was delighted when Jose started getting involved in the space and released Elixir. Thanks Jose! [0] http://reia-lang.org [1] https://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/0…
Comment linking /2007/05/erlectricity-erlang-ruby-bridge.html
on “Twenty Years of Open Source Erlang: A Retrospective from the trenches”Submitted Programmers: What To Do If You Get Fired as a story · 78 points
HN discussionI since stumbled upon Giles Bowkett's variation whereby he uses a colour-coded horizontal line for each task. I like it. It emphasises the "chain" aspect and works well within the space constraints. http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/02/calendar-win-rapid-...
Comment linking /2010/02/calendar-win-rapid-course-correction.html
on “Jerry Seinfeld's Productivity Secret”Submitted Blogs Are Godless Communist Bullshit as a story · 59 points
HN discussionYou might appreciate Giles Bowkett's Hacker Newspaper ( http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/ ), which among other things skips all links to TechCrunch. See Giles' post about it here: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news... .
Comment linking /2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html
on “At My Wit’s End: Jason Calacanis Threatens To Sue Us”Submitted Why Your Startup Will Fail as a story · 58 points
HN discussionAgreed. Recommended reading to counter the entrepreneurial laissez-faire idealism, bombastic techno-optimism, and general Silicon Valley cheerleading: - Michael O. Church's latest: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/07/18/technology-i... - Giles Bowkett on the decadence of the current consumer software industry with regard to QA: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/07/actually-no-stuff-u... See also his tak…
Comment linking /2015/05/my-skepticism-re-uber-continues-unabated.html
on “Breaking Smart”Submitted Never Hate. Only Ever Destroy. as a story · 53 points
HN discussionThis is not a new phenomenon. When I first found HN, I conducted an experiment: Along with ordinary attempt-to-contribute comments, I made a couple of content-free remarks whose only attractiveness was the shared premise that "startups are awesome". They immediately received nearly an order of magnitude more upvotes than anything else I had written. That was all it took to convince me that Giles Bowkett's original c…
Comment linking /2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html
on “Commenting, community deterioration, and Hacker News”Submitted Giles Bowkett: Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die? as a story · 53 points
HN discussionCreate something that a potential client could actually find useful for his/her projects. If that something solves a problem a decent number of people are facing, quality leads will reach you without you even trying. I wrote a Ruby gem[1] because it was a fun project. It was in a problem domain that interested me. A developer found the gem, saw that it would be useful for his project, and soon became my first client…
Comment linking /2010/03/programmers-what-to-do-if-you-get-fired.html
on “Ask HN: How do I start freelancing?”Submitted Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't) as a story · 48 points
HN discussionGiles "Goatboy" Bowkett: I even say (sic) DHH enter the fray, which is absurd hypocrisy, given that the first time I ever saw this guy, he was putting a giant "Fuck You" slide on a screen and explaining how he wasn't going to add features to Rails that he didn't agree with, because it was his framework, and he didn't believe that anybody who disagreed with him on that merited any other response but "fuck you". What…
Comment linking /2010/04/its-his-platform-not-yours.html
on “Five rational arguments against Apple's 3.3.1 policy”Submitted People will pay for content as a story · 45 points
HN discussionI think this is ultimately caused by developers not quite knowing where and how to place their ambition. It's easy to look at the big legacy app and be like, "I can fix that!" Then they roll up their shoulders and go to work, management be damned. Management can't see or understand what he does, and they're paying him for his expertise, so they give him the benefit of the doubt and let him do what he thinks he needs…
Comment linking /2013/03/new-ebook-unfuck-monorail-for-great.html
on “The Lava Layer Anti-Pattern”Submitted No New Language In 2009; New Habits Instead as a story · 45 points
HN discussionhere's how I solve this problem. (ironically Chris Wanstrath, GitHub co-founder, created the technology my solution uses, and apparently did it in response to a random comment by GitHub engineer Ryan Tomayko.) the tech is called dotjs. you can check it out at http://defunkt.io/dotjs . if you use Chrome as your web browser, it runs arbitrary JavaScript you define for any domain in your ~/.js directory. my ~/.js/githu…
Comment linking /2010/10/node-miniapp-minimal-github-dashboard.html
on “Github is making me feel stupid(er)”Submitted Giles Bowkett: Why Scrum Should Basically Just Die in a Fire as a story · 37 points
HN discussionY Combinator is right to be mad, but wrong about the target. Smith also attempted to expand the DMCA in 2006, again pushing for new wiretapping privileges for police. It's a question whether this guy is trying harder to destroy the Internet or the Fourth Amendment, but imagine how awesome it would be if that was just an academic question about a guy who didn't have a career in politics any more. The bad news is he's…
Comment linking /2012/01/lets-end-lamar-smiths-political-career.html
on “SOPA sponsors return: "think of the children"”Submitted Turning Hacker News into Spam as a story · 37 points
HN discussionDo Ruby on Rails devs also get the same treatment? I know Giles Bowkett talked about Rails/node.js back in 2012 [0], but is the situation now reached a point that JS devs haven't even heard of Rails? [0] http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2012/02/rails-went-off-rail...
Comment linking /2012/02/rails-went-off-rails-why-im-rebuilding.html
on “Django 1.9 alpha 1 released”Submitted Jerry Springer For Programmers: Only A Matter Of Time as a story · 37 points
HN discussion
