In line with my last blog post, I am re-evaluating my relationship with the people I follow on Twitter. I started out on the right track by following those people I was genuinely interested in and then I started following anyone who followed me because I thought it was the nice thing to do. I came under the impression that it was rude not to follow someone who so kindly followed me and then I started thinking that to get more followers you have to follow more people. This has resulted in me never reading anyones tweets no matter how interested I am in them because I have to wade through a swamp of random, useless (to me) tweets.

I am now going on a twitter followee cleanse and un-following anyone I am not actually stoked to hear from. This may result in a backlash where I lose followers myself, but I don’t really care; quality not quantity eh?.

I am torn on how I should handle comments on this blog. Should I disable comments all together? Should I only show the positive comments? Should I reply to comments? It is also difficult to tell which comments are authentic and which comments are from people who really don’t care about what you write, they just want their comments picked up by search engines or get a comment approved so that they can then spam you.

What is the point of blog comments? Are they just badges to hang on your site that say, “Look at how important I am, people are commenting on my blog”? To be honest, I think that is how I have been treating them up until now. After giving the subject some thought, blog comments in my opinion are for turning a one way dialogue (blog post) into a 2 way conversation; be that between blog author and commenter or between commenter’s themselves. With this in mind I am now going to make an effort to reply to every comment on our blog. After deleting the obvious spam comments I simply do not want to spend the time contemplating whether a comment is authentic or not, so I am just going to accept and comment on them all!

Let’s see how this experiment goes. And please don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate the time that anyone takes to comment on something that we write.

Last Monday I had the horrifying experience of having my wisdom teeth removed. I was out of commission for two days straight and when I tried to come back to work on Wednesday I was confused and useless, after which I promptly developed dry socket and was again incapacitated. Suffice to say, it was as if I had vanished from the office for a week with no warning and no contingency plans in place. The effect it had on our company was of epic proportions for a company our size; absolutely nothing!

Do you know what this means? It means that we are one step closer to nirvana and passed a test that could have easily been very detrimental to Base-10. This does not mean that we can all go on sabbatical, but it does mean that what we have created is stronger then ever and will continue to grow. It is not about the individual, it is about the team. I spend more of my waking hours with Ramin, Thorsten, Negar, Fredrick, (anyone else I work with) etc, then I do with my family and I do not regret it, for they are also my family. In my mind Base-10 exists to enrich the lives of the people around us because this is what they have done for me. Who would have thought losing my wisdom teeth would give me such wise insight?

In my opinion, far to many people continue to reinvent the wheel. There is nothing wrong with building a better wheel that is suited for your specific task, but don’t start from scratch just for the sake of starting from scratch. To continue my trend of hemorrhaging proverbs, suck it up and stand on the shoulders of giants. You will still be respected as alpha geek and your boss will be impressed because what really matters is doing it right, doing it well and getting it done. Chances are someone out there has already done what you are trying to do and they might have even done it better then you could yourself. This means that if you have the right tools and resources you don’t need to and should not sacrifice quality. Here are some tools we have used in various projects for a solid foundation to build from or even just use in our concepts and working demos. I have also included tools we use for debugging, development, design and other such tasks. I will continue to update this list as more come to mind: (more…)