Veteran's Day is an ideal time to hear from one of those rare folks who combine corporate and military careers. Dan Cross, a software engineer at Google (GOOG) and a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, took a leave to serve active duty in Afghanistan, came home a year ago, and brought back lessons that he couldn't have learned in business. While he had never seen himself as the military type until a personal tragedy made him reroute his career, he's a better man for it. Cross, 34, is now an active member of the Google Veterans Network (VetNet), a community of some 400 veterans and other G...

What is the dirtiest word in business? Chances are that the word ‘outsourcing’ comes to mind. Many Americans despise it, many business owners shy away from it and many entrepreneurs depend on it. Regardless of what side of the issue you are on, it is important to know that it exists and will continue to exist. Why? Because there are a lot of things to love about outsourcing.As a business owner and tech entrepreneur who exists in a hyper-competitive market, I have used outsourcing to accomplish a variety of tasks. Whether it is data entry, design, research or basic programming, the...

Two years ago a small team at Google went public with their fledgling project - the Go Programming Language. They presented a language spec, two compilers, a modest standard library, some novel tools, and plenty of accurate (albeit succinct) documentation. They watched with excitement as programmers around the world began to play with Go. The team continued to iterate and improve on what they had built, and were gradually joined by dozens - and then hundreds - of programmers from the open source community.The Go Authors went on to produce lots of libraries, new tools, and reams of documentatio...

The Berlin StudyIn the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to study the violinists.As described in their subsequent publication in Psychological Review, the researchers asked the academy’s music professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.We’ll call this group the elite players.For a point of comparison, they also selected a group ...

Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. I put out an article most days and up to 3 per day when I was experimenting with new channels.It has been fascinating.That being said, this is not a post about blogging tactics. It’s about what the experience has taught me about startups.Find the customers first, then build for themIt took me a long time to understand YC’s motto that you should:Make something people want.The first time I heard that, I thought it was the single dumbest piece of advice I’d ever received from such a credible so...

In Firefox 8, we’ve added support for insertAdjacentHTML(). It’s an ancient feature of Internet Explorer that has recently been formalized in HTML5 and then spun out into the DOM Parsing specification. The bad news is that Firefox is the last major browser to implement this feature. The good news is that since other major browsers implement it already, you can start using it unconditionally as soon as the Firefox 8 update has been rolled out to users.Basic UsageinsertAdjacentHTML(position, markup) is a method on HTMLElementDOM nodes. It takes tw...

There’s a popular post on Hacker News about writing confident code by, among other things, overloading Object#nil? and returning “null objects” instead of nil itself.DO NOT DO THIS.In Ruby, all objects (except nil itself) coerce to the boolean value true. Your object will be nil and true at the same time. Bad things will happen. Your coworkers will cry. Sad people from around the world will ask bewildering questions on your mailing list.Here’s what happens:1234567891011class NullObject def nil? true endendo = NullObject.newo.nil? #=>...

An emacs keyboard macro is just a recording of user input into emacs, which means that most anything you can do in emacs can be recorded as a macro. Read that again. Pretty powerful.Here’s how it works. To start recording, typeC-x (and input the commands in your macro. Then typeC-x )to stop recording. Then typeC-x eto apply the macro once, orC-u 0 C-x eto apply the macro until the bell rings or end of buffer is reachedKeep in mind that you must not ring the bell when defining a keyboard macro (by accident, or with C-g). If you do, you’ll have to start all over defining your keybo...