Berkshire Hathaway's 50th

Hi, I’m Warren. He’s Charlie. He can hear, I can see. We work well together.
 
~Warren Buffett,
at the start of the 2015
Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting

Berkshire Hathaway held its 50th annual shareholder meeting on May 2, 2015. The company is a lesson in successful capitalism. Chairman Warren Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger have built the most successful investment partnership in human history. The list of wholly-owned Berkshire subsidiaries includes GEICO, Fruit of the Loom, Brooks Shoes, and See’s Candies. The company also owns large percentages of Coca Cola (9.16%), American Express (14.9%), IBM (7.82%), and Wells Fargo (9.01%).

Over 40,000 shareholders attended Saturday’s annual meeting. What draws so many shareholders to Omaha every year? The opportunity to learn.

pgcli - Command Line Interface for PostgreSQL

Debugging is a fact of life when building apps with Rails or any other set of tools. All troubleshooting is easier when we can see what’s going on inside.

pgcli is a command line tool that lets devs examine PostgreSQL databases from the command line. pgcli offers more powerful features than psql (the default terminal front-end for PostgreSQL) such as:

• Autocompletion. In fact, pgcli autocompletion is smart enough to only show table names after FROM in a SQL statement.
• Syntax highlighting. Find gotchas quicker, just like you would in a text editor.

Debugging is easier when you can look inside the black box.

ChicagoRuby Expands to BLUE1647 and 1871

When smart people
challenge each other to grow,
great things happen.
 
~The ChicagoRuby Motto

If you’re a developer itchin’ to ramp up your Ruby skills, Chicago is a great place to be. The local Ruby user group, ChicagoRuby, continues to expand in time, space, expertise, and numbers. The group is over 3,200 strong, with six events each month plus the annual WindyCityRails conference.

The newest locations on ChicagoRuby’s monthly list are BLUE1647 and 1871.

Amazon Dash and Instant Gratification

The Amazon Dash Button is for customers who crave instant gratification. We might think of Dash as a brilliant blend of the Staples Easy Button, WiFi, and Amazon’s existing database of credit card numbers.

Bloom's Taxonomy for Learning

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework that breaks the learning process into stages. According to Bloom, learning begins with rote memorization and the process progresses upward until we can apply what we’ve learned in creative new ways.

Youthful Bias

Most of my formal education was science or engineering oriented. I regarded science and engineering as the pinnacle of learning. The extreme position of my youth: All logic fell within math and science, while history, language arts, and other non-science areas were just memorization.

Bloom’s research pushed me beyond my original thinking. Memorization and creativity are vital to all areas of knowledge. Here’s how.