Closer To The Ideal

Awful and sad. Rogers Cadenhead writes Why Leslie Harpold’s Sites Disappeared. We are often misunderstood by our family, and they often hold a worrisome power to censor us after our deaths.

I sent an email yesterday to Leslie’s niece, asking if it would be possible for some of her friends to reprint her work as a book and web site. Today I heard back. They will not allow anything to be republished. Because I’ve been told that some of her writings might be a sensitive issue for her family, I replied to her niece that if this is indeed the case, those particular works could be excluded from reprint.

This did not go over well.

I was told that it’s none of my business why her family doesn’t want her work republished, which is absolutely true, and that her legacy “is not dependent on websites or books; her legacy is with every person who knew her and loved her.” This is only partially true. Leslie was an early pioneer in the creation of autobiographical content and experimental web design. She left behind thousands of web pages, many of which are as memorable as Possible Scenarios for Heaven from 2003.

Leslie’s family appears to have decided to let her entire body of work disappear and be forgotten completely. The only things that are left online are articles she wrote for other sites, such as The Morning News.

This raises an important question for those of us who create work on the web that we publish ourselves. When heirs decide to bury a web creator’s body of work by shuttering sites and rejecting all republication requests, can anything be done to save the material?

If the heirs of Charles Dickens had decided that his novels were not his legacy, they could have spurned all publishers and let the books fall out of print, but the existing copies would not have vanished entirely. There still would be physical copies of the books to read and some would’ve survived long enough to fall into the public domain.

It is a sad story where one’s career fails after one has died. The worst thing you can do to a pioneer is erase any trace of their innovations. That she had a big impact on a lot of people is obvious from what was written about her, This Is Not a Eulogy

Todd Levin: Leslie was the Internet’s den mother. She adopted me in 1996, after discovering my Web site—perhaps you were familiar with its very memorable URL, http://users.interport.net/~toddl—and presented me with her plan to launch a web zine called Smug. It was to be both a repudiation of the early Web’s Whole Earth Catalog brand of sincerity, and a big Midwestern embrace of everything we hold dear. It was going to be amazing. It was going to change the medium, and maybe even the world.

I thought she was full of shit, and that Smug would never be seen by any eyes other than Leslie’s. I also honestly thought she was using this fictitious zine as counterfeit currency to purchase an online friendship, because I didn’t trust anyone I met on the Internet. But no one else had shown any interest in my writing, and there’s something very intoxicating about someone who wants to create something new and explosive and world-changing, and wants you on her team. So yes, fuck yes. Smug was going to change the world.

…Liz Entman: I knew Leslie only through her writing, which reveals a woman I would very much have liked to meet in person—sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, and deeply, quietly hilarious. Her writing is fresh and very, very good. She wrote an article for us before I came on board that is especially poignant to read now—“How to Write a Thank-You Note”—which seems to reveal her wit, warmth, and humor as much as it explicates a problem of modern etiquette. It is fitting, then, to give thanks here for Leslie and her many gifts. She will be missed.

…Liz Entman: I knew Leslie only through her writing, which reveals a woman I would very much have liked to meet in person—sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, and deeply, quietly hilarious. Her writing is fresh and very, very good. She wrote an article for us before I came on board that is especially poignant to read now—“How to Write a Thank-You Note”—which seems to reveal her wit, warmth, and humor as much as it explicates a problem of modern etiquette. It is fitting, then, to give thanks here for Leslie and her many gifts. She will be missed.

Anil Dash wrote, Leslie Harpold: Always Fearless, Never Smug

If you didn’t know her work, you might fear that someone who owned the domain names fearless.net and smug.com might be a bit, well… prickly. But more than 10 years after Leslie Harpold helped start some of the most clever and intelligent personal sites on the web, and just a few short months after her untimely passing, the lasting impression of Leslie’s life, on and off the web, is of surpassing kindness. And as we look at 10 years of blogging culture this week, her impact and legacy in the world of blogging is well worth revisiting.

The sites that Leslie helped create are legion. There’s The Historical Present, her blog. And Harpold.com (formerly Hoopla.com), which acts as something of a gateway to the rest of Leslie’s legacy on the web. The Smug archives still bear witness to the early experiments in design and writing which Leslie shared with us all. And each year, Leslie shared with us her Advent Calendars, (see 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005) making explicit her desire to give a gift to the entire web.

Clearly, Leslie Harpold had a big impact on the early web, and on the early pioneers of the web. Her life, and work, is now a part of history. It is all together tragic that her family wants to erase her memory, just because they are uncomfortable with some of what she wrote.

A Shout Out to My Pepys writes about their experience at dom com startups:

The dot coms I have known were all doomed. Almost all of them were the classic two-founder startups going after a niche in the market. All of them needed outside money to achieve their goals, and in every case the outside money wrecked the company. Uncontrolled hiring wiped out the competence and the culture of these places within months. Executives who came in with the outside money were out of their depth and resorted to arbitrary decision-making and tyranny, and sometimes deliberately failed at their fiduciary responsibilities.

Here are some examples of things I saw at dot coms: People hired to do nothing to make a company look bigger; openly racist senior executives allowed to carry out their prejudices; nonexistent products fraudulently sold by salesmen who then left with their money; stolen patents; illegal or impossible business plans designed to fail just after an executive had left for a better job; and indecision actually written into the procedures of the company to resolve differences between founders.

These things happen at bigger and better-organized companies, but it’s possible for all of them to occur at once at a startup dot com without any consequences for anyone involved. Too many of those places were all the boys playing the treehouse, complete with NO GIRLS sign, with the difference that being pushed out meant real broken bones down below.

In particular, the “two cofounders” startups were disasters. I’ll make an exception for the last one I worked at, where both of them were smart nice guys who knew what they were doing and cooperated. Everywhere else it was a disaster: Beavis & Butthead meet Leopold & Loeb. They were all white college grad males. Almost always one was technical and the other was business. They were inevitably rivals and often boyhood friends. Neither one could be completely in charge, and neither one could be seen defeated. I’ve seen situations where the two actually alternated between winning and losing the argument, so that the company sailed along zig zag for months.

I won’t ever work for a two cofounders startup again, unless it’s the last two. The rest is just the whole company as fifth wheel in the meltdown of a friendship.

I’d add sexism to the list of complaints. The last startup I worked had a project manager whose behavior seemed straight out of the 1950s. At one point, when we were trying to hire designers, I set up a lunch where the project manager could meet the 2 most talented designers I knew. These designers just happen to be one male and one female. The project manager spent the whole time talking to the male designer, the existence of the female designer was barely acknowledged. Embarrassing for me. I apologized to her later and explained that I had no idea that he was like that.

Still, I don’t think startups are uniquely awful. In the comments of the above post, someone writes:

A lot of my friends and I talk about the mythical “just a job” job as a way to be able to pursue outside Interests (like sleep) instead of struggling with being assimilated by a Very Friendly Startup. I half-tried it once, but I didn’t have anything to take the place of my emotional/personal investment, and the company in question had a monstrous work environment (really openly-hostile; people didn’t throw chairs in meetings anymore, but the people who used to throw chairs in meetings were still around and everybody knew it and “what am I going to say to X?” was used as a way of intimidating one by proxy) so I found myself a corporate nihilist with no work ethic or fear of being unemployed or whatever to drive my participation — in short, I just didn’t put up with the shit and left.

I’m left with the feeling that unprofessional behavior is common. It’s a sad fact, but there is a lot of it.

My last post was a link to a post by Wez Furlong. Since he gave props to Sara Golemon for the work on PHP streams, a subject I want to know more about, I decided to look her up. Google highlighted a post on her blog about a surprising incident of homophobia, which I’ll link to here. She tried to accompany a friend to her mother’s funeral, but her step-father hired an off-duty police officier to keep the friend out of the funeral, because she was gay. I think it is really disappointing that these kinds of things still happen.

We landed together at CLE on friday night and headed over to her dad’s house (her parents had been long divorced). He greeted us, filled her in on the past few months and her mother’s last days, and we left feeling the weight of the occasion, but ready to grieve. On the way out, her sister called saying, “Some of the family have asked that you don’t show up to the viewing. They say you can come into the funeral home for a few minutes afterward, but not during the general viewing.”

I know, take a minute to absorb that statement. Who are these family members? Vague mumbles always answered this question, but they were certainly not going to tolerate my friend’s presence. We resolved to call around the next day…

It was Saturday and the obituary had come out. Anachronistic newsprint mourned the loss of a sainted mother to my friend’s sister, “special mother” to my friend’s ex-spouse, but no mention of my friend. They had simply erased her, with a nod to her ex as a special kind of insult.

My friend called her sister back, wanting to understand how so much animosity could survive and flourish like that. She wasn’t going to be erased, so she told her sister that the family could just deal with the fact that she would be present at the viewing. It was her mother that’d died, and she intended to say good-bye. A few hours later, news had filtered through to her step-father who called and delivered a matter-of-fact edict. “Here’s your options, and I’m only going to say this once. You can come at 7, after everyone else is done, and take your 15 minutes to say good-bye, or you can not come at all. I’ll have a cop at the door to make sure of that. *click*”

Yes, you heard that right, he was hiring an off-duty police officer to keep her out of her own mother’s services.

And before you ask, yes, her step-father had that legal right, as the funeral home was private property contracted by him. So it was, that the next day, we (My friend, another friend of her’s, and myself), drove to a shopping center near the funeral home and parked where our cars couldn’t be identified and vandalized, and we walked to the funeral home at the official start time. Sure enough, a uniformed police officer stood guard at the entrance.

Seriously, how twisted with fear and loathing do you have to be to keep a person out of their own mother’s funeral?

People who attempt suicide, and survive, see big gains in their income:

Last year Dave Marcotte, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, pushed the field forward when he wondered what happens to people like Jones who attempt, but do not achieve, suicide.* There are about 20 attempts for every successful suicide. (Approximately 2.9 percent of the U.S. population has attempted suicide—1,760 attempts per day.)

…Marcotte couldn’t test the relative “life improvement” of successful suicides—since they were, of course, dead—but he could study those who had failed at suicide to determine if their lives improved after the attempt. The results are surprising. Marcotte’s study found that after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. In fact, the more serious the attempt, the larger the boost—”hard-suicide” attempts, in which luck is the only reason the attempts fail, are associated with a 36.3 percent increase in income. (The presence of nonattempters as a control group suggests the suicide effort is the root cause of the boost.)

Robert Hoekman is writing about the death of “Tyler”, a pit bull dog. I find it unusual, and uncomfortable, to see this much anger in a public forum:

We were all so confident that Rachel, his would-be new owner, was the right person for him. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Less than nine hours after leaving him in her care, she did the exact thing we explicitly told her not to do, the one thing that most blatantly defies common sense: she let him off of his leash. In less than nine hours, she took away everything we did, everything we hoped for, and every chance Tyler would ever have at living the life he deserved.

Tyler was depending on Rachel. We were depending on her. She failed at her commitment to love and support this wonderful, sweet, and loyal dog so miserably and so quickly that it has absolutely stunned each and every one of the amazing people that have volunteered their time and energy to bring Tyler home safely. Even worse, Rachel opted out of continuing to aid in the search, citing her outrageously absurd belief that Tyler would simply go back to doing what nature designed him to do best: be one with the Earth through his nomadic and migratory instincts.

People who never met Tyler, my wife, nor myself came to the area night after night, morning after morning. They hiked through the preserve. They walked neighborhoods. They posted flyers. They talked to everyone they came across. Every last one of them did so much more than Rachel could be bothered to do. Every one of them cared so much more than she ever could.

I wish more than words can say that last Saturday had never happened — that we had decided to keep Tyler ourselves and not brought him to his new owner’s apartment and said goodbye. I wish we had been able to see her naivete and arrogance before it was too late. I wish so many things were just slightly different than they were.

I will never forgive Rachel for her foolish and fatal decision. Tyler will never have the chance.

Even if “Rachel” is a fictional name, I assume that if I made an effort, I could find out this woman’s real name.

I’m curious if it is ever wise to express this much anger in a public setting? I’d be angry as hell if someone’s lack of responsibility lead to the death of an animal that I cared about, and I might even vent about the incident in public, but I don’t think I’d give enough details that other’s could figure out who I am talking about.

Jason Calacanis on stress:

Stress is a real issue. You can love what you do and have a problem managing the stress. I’ve watched friends work themselves into such anxiety and stress recently that it’s scary. You really need to be a centered person to not internalize the stress that comes from building a startup company. It’s not for everyone, and if you’re going to play in the startup world you have to learn to look at what we do as one giant game.

Some amount of stress is good, because it alerts you to things to focus on. When you’re ridding down the road and a deer jumps in front of your car you feel stress. Hopefully that stress makes you take action. The key is to be able to calm yourself down after the near miss and keep driving down the road.

Now, when I was a younger entrepreneur I would sweat it, but now that I’m older I really don’t get stressed out. It’s not that I don’t care about the things that cause stress, I do. I just don’t let that stress internalize. If a deer jumps out in front of me I respond quickly, but my heart doesn’t jump out of chest for two hours like it used to.

The people who don’t feel stress are the ones who look at things with perspective: Our lives in technology industry are really easy. We’re blessed to play in such a dynamic space that is, at the end of the day, one big fun research project. It’s a big, fun game we’re all in here–nothing more. Don’t take it so serious… play hard and enjoy it!

We get to build huge products that can become big businesses. If they don’t, you can just move on and do it again. Let’s face it, very few people have it as good as us in the technology industry.

Blaine Cook has either been fired or has quit Twitter. Most people assume he’s quiting/fired because of the difficulties that Twitter has had with scaling. Twitter has been a favorite weapon in the hands of Java’s defenders – they use Twitter to bash Ruby On Rails. The media attention given to Cook’s departure reminds me of an incident from a year ago that I wanted to blog about, but didn’t at the time.

The incident last year started when Radical Behavior interviewed Alex Payne, who was one of the developers at Twitter. Alex said:

By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues – issues that any growing site eventually contends with – far sooner than I think we would on another framework.The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases, neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can['t] reach your site.None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the inventor of Rails, had an extremely defensive response:

Rails makes the act of developing such a pleasant experience that when you need to follow the same scaling path as every other shared-nothing stack, the contrast can feel stark. And perhaps it’s a natural reaction to feel a need to blame something for that contrast, however natural it is.

[…]

Second, when you work with open source and you discover new requirements not met by the software, it’s your shining opportunity to give something back. Rather than just sit around idle waiting for some vendor to fix your problems, you get the unique chance of being a steward of your own destiny.

[…]

Once the stress of having to deal with that in the moment subsides, I’m convinced that the team will grow beyond the blame game, get their hands dirty as full participants in an open source community, and contribute back their advances to the framework.

Gluttonous had what was, by far, the best reaction to David’s post:

The conversation shifts from where bottlenecks come from when scaling Rails to “you’re saying it’s Rails’ fault, but it’s not”. This is where we start to slide down the slippery slope. It’s easy to argue about blame. David pulls out his “I’m not a vendor, I don’t owe you shit” speech, and says that because of the beauty of open source, Twitter is in charge of their own destiny.

He’s absolutely right. He’s also a big jerk about being right. David seems to imply that Twitter has been sitting on their hands, doing nothing, refusing to solve their own problems, and not contributing back to the community. This is false. It’s also completely beside the point.

Early in the discussion we started to imagine blame where it didn’t exist. Alex never says that Rails should support doing 11k requests a second. He simply said it doesn’t, which is something no one will dispute.

So, we’ve moved into rough territory, but someone goes and does something nice (Woo hoo!). Dr Nic writes a plugin to use multiple databases with Rails. Way cool. Really way cool. Awesome job Nic. This is the part of open source that I love, when people help each other just because it’s an interesting problem and they’re a nice person. Hugs and kittens all around.

DHH tosses down an ”I told you so”. David, what are you doing man? Yes, Dr Nic is awesome, and yes, Ruby is wondrously hackable, and yes, Rails allows plugins easily, BUT why do you keep beating this dead horse? No one said anything about a critical flaw. No one said Rails is inherently flawed and can never be adapted for high traffic sites. Just the opposite is true! Alex and the other guys at Twitter are those who are pushing Rails further than it’s ever gone. These are the pioneers. They’ve gotten to the hard part, and they’re still going, despite the difficulty. Really, does anyone think that sites at that load are running out of the box copies of Rails? It’s just not the case. That’s ok. The fact that Rails can be modified is one of its strengths. There’s no need to be defensive here. That’s the big problem we all need to face.

People often say that DHH has a big ego. That is no crime in itself – in some situations, having a big ego is healthy and even useful. But this behavior – where someone points to a weakness that needs to be improved, and their remark is interpreted as an attack that needs to be counter-attacked – is a major problem. This is the kind of behavior that cripples organizations, leads to pointless in-fighting and turf wars, and saps the energy out of projects.

The solution? People (especially those in leadership positions) should welcome attacks. That way, even when no attack actually exists, as in this case, the original speaker will still get a welcoming response. There are 3 advantages to maintaining a welcoming attitude to attacks:

1.) When an attack really does exist, a welcoming response will often soften the attitude of the person making it.

2.) An open attitude to criticism can not be demonstrated in the face of praise, it can only be demonstrated in the face of criticism. Every product or idea, no matter how good, will have some flaws, and so it is important to be open to negative feedback.

3.) Welcoming attacks saves you from the embarrassment of reacting in a defensive way, when, in fact, no one was ever attacking you.

 Zed Shaw has posted a rant about everything he hates in the Ruby community. The rant is so over-the-top that is impossible not to find it entertaining. It is rare to see anyone with 21 years experience post anything like this in public. Most people in his position would be worried about their careers. He, apparently, is beyond the point of caring.

At times, the rant is almost incoherent:

Alright people, time to get a huge grip on reality’s collar and hold on tight.

Ruby on Rails is not a mother fucking industry!

Jesus fucking christ on a goddamned pike you absolute mother fucking donkey dick sucking morons get a fucking grip!

You are not in an industry. You are a bunch of people barely scraping by in a tiny little sector of a moderate sized piece of the economy. Gaming alone makes you all looks like the pathetic little crumbs I brush out of my toaster when it smells bad.

He makes a few good points though:

Where I work the company is willing to blow huge amounts of money on a consulting firm or hardware, but ends up firing people when times get tight. It’s a universal mass hysteria that paying $100 – $200 per hour for a group of consultants is preferable to simply hiring good employees. At the rates companies pay these consultants they could hire 4 full time employees.

Consultancies used to provide a service by managing the entire project so you didn’t have to do much. Now with Agile and Pair Programming the consulting firms can dupe clients into helping them make the sausage, provide little to no services, yet still charge insane rates. What’s impressive is these consulting firms somehow charge rates that are 5 or 6 times what they pay their employees.

…

Let’s take ThoughtWorks as a classic example of the hysteria. They decided to get into the Ruby on Rails game and went full bore. I was telling people right when Rails came out that doing it for internal projects at big companies would be a huge money maker. Nobody believed me, and now rather than all my smart friends working on cool applications for big money I have ThoughtWorks fucking up my party.

Before you continue this part of the rant ask yourself a question:

How did ThoughtWorks go from 0% Rails business to 60% Rails in just a few short months, but somehow didn’t hire that many top notch Ruby guys? Remember, if 60% of your business is Rails then 60% of your people need Rails training or else you have to hire more people. If they didn’t hire any more people than that means…the people they had were retrained. With two week training courses. Huh? How does that make them experts?

What happens if you do that is you have a group of former C# and Java guys running around writing shitty Ruby code and training on the client’s dime for huge fees.

Some of the post seems to border on libel:

In the two projects I’ve taken from ThoughtWorks I found mountains of horrible, horrible code. They of course try to pull the classic “there’s many ways to do everything in programming” but this time they kind of get caught because Ruby on Rails means stay on the Rails. There is an established best practice way to build web applications with Rails and that’s the entire point of the system. When ThoughtWorks fucked up these projects they did it in such a completely deviated way that it was impossible to defend.

Additionally, the people they placed on these projects were not well trained at all, had no idea about simple Ruby idioms let alone good design, and spent more of their time drinking and having fun than actually getting shit done. At the last project they actually had bottles of Pedialyte in the fridge to help with their hangovers after wild nights partying.