Brent Yorgey says that to teach, you must start with examples and then extrapolate out the principles:

Advanced Rails Recipes by Mike Clark is now shipping. I’m pleased to have contributed to the chapter on nested resources.

Tiny projects keep it new, for sure. It seems to tie in a little bit with proof-driven development and personal projects - in each case, you’re escaping the mental cage of a monolithic, mature product to start something new. (Even if the “something new” is a component that’s going to plug in to said mature product.)

If you’re a hacker that has thought about (but not yet attempted) creating your own startup, you might want to think about attending Startup School in April. It’s in the Silicon Valley area, but even if you’re not local, the list of speakers may be worth the trip. I’ve heard most of these guys speak at some time or another and each of them had extremely valuable wisdom to share.

A chapter in Virginia Postrel’s book Dynamism asks the question: What classifies something as “work”, and other things as “play”? This is one of those trick questions which seems like it has an easy answer. The first thing that pops to mind - “You get paid to do work” - fails right away. I don’t get paid to do my dishes at home, but that’s definitely work. I do get paid to build software, but quite often a lot of that feels like play.