Obsessive Learning

I do the learning thing pretty obsessively.
 
~Mandla Magagula

Mandla Magagula and I spoke via Skype yesterday morning. Mandla is a software developer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. When he’s not at work, Mandla and his team teach software craftsmanship to local youth. Mandla and I met at Ruby Fuza 2015 in Cape Town. His passion for teaching and learning radiates for anyone he meets, as you can see in this 20-minute video:

The Business of Parallelism

The Business of Software Conference is a gathering for people who run software companies. This year marks the tenth year for the conference.

Thank you BoS organizers for inviting me to present The Business of Parallelism.

Slides appear below. Video will be posted when it becomes available.

8th Light Acquires WisdomGroup

We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
 
~Police Chief in the movie Jaws

After 21 years of independent operation, WisdomGroup has been acquired by 8th Light.

WisdomGroup’s two-decade history has been an adventure of growth and change. We started with network and server installations, morphed to the web, and tightened our focus to Ruby in 2005.

Buffett on Diversification, Risk, and Focus

Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing. I can’t be involved in 50 or 75 things. That’s a Noah’s Ark way of investing – you end up with a zoo that way. I like to put meaningful amounts of money in a few things.
 
We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it. In stating this opinion, we define risk, using dictionary terms, as ‘the possibility of loss or injury.’
 
~Warren Buffett

The Chicago Polyglot Mingle

Members of Chicago’s Python (ChiPy), Java (CJUG), and Ruby (ChicagoRuby) communities launched The Chicago Polyglot Mingle on July 28, 2016. Purpose: To bring Chicago’s software development community together for an evening of networking and socializing. Here’s a 3-minute recap.