Blogs are cool. Blogs can be awesome. Blogs allow you to participate in this amazing thing we otherwise refer to as the internet. The content from Blogs feeds Google, keeps it alive and helps it grow.

From a personal aspect; blogs are important because blogs allow you to continue jabbing and help you hone your writing talents; and we all know how important writing talents are; even if no-one reads what you write.

Seek blogging advice from anyone who has blogged for more than ten posts and the advice you’re going to get is: pick a schedule and live by that schedule.

It is the single best advice anyone can give a young and budding blogger.

It works; till the time it doesn’t work and then you need to tweak it.

Think about this advice in terms of plain old mathematics. It’s like this; you become a better writer by reading more and writing more and given that you are reading as much as the other person; if you are cranking out four articles a week your chances of getting better at the craft of writing are four times more than someone who cranks out one article a week. Right!?

Well, the statement is moooostly right.... for you.... if.... you are starting out a blog or want to get into the flow of writing consistently. A regular stream of blog posts on a well-established schedule gets you in the flow for writing.

Besides it makes life simple for the Google crawler and your readers because they know exactly how much content to expect from your blog and when to expect it.

It forces you to show up even on the most depressing of days.

Like I said, the advice of writing regular blog post works.

At-least till the time it works.

And then comes a point of time in your life when the advice stops working and you need to tweak your schedule.

Here are some reasons why you might end up tweaking your publishing schedule:

1. You’ve done enough jabbing for a couple of years and now you want to move into deliberate practice of writing by producing articles, books or relatively longer essays which will need your concentrated effort for a week, sometimes more than a week, sometimes a month and sometimes even multiple months before you can publish them out to the world. Posting four posts every week might not be possible here.
2. You’ve done enough writing about code and now you’re going to be writing even more awesome code or doing something life changing. A classic example of this being Jeff Atwood who is the primary proponent of the “one step success” for your blog which was blogging regularly. Jeff started Stack overflow (now called Stack exchange) and slowed down publishing posts on his own blog.

Like I said, the advice works and it has it's own benefits while it works.

Then you reach a point in your life when you realize that just jabbing is not taking you to the next level in practicing your craft. You realize that just doing a given number of posts a week isn't enough deliberate practice of your craft.

When you have that realization it is time for you to slow down and focus on what is most important to you.

I’ve been blogging about three posts a week for months now. I've been contemplating the idea of longer articles on topics I feel strongly about, working on the book I said I would be working on, trying out some serious humor and doing some serious bullshit busting.

With those intentions in mind I am going to relax my publishing schedule down from three posts a week to sometimes two and sometimes even just one post a week.  On any given day the writing I do is probably going to increase. The frequency of publishing however might slow down a little in the weeks to come.

What that means that while the quantity of the posts might go down the quality of the posts that you see here might shoot up.

These posts will be edited much more meticulously. Some of them might be long enough to warrant turning them in articles that you can download in PDF or Kindle formats. You might also continue to get a full blown eBook or Kindle book every few months.

In the fitness world they say that nobody ever gets stronger by doing the same exercise again and again.

In the world of neuroscience they say that nobody gets smarter by solving the same kind of math problems again and again.

Continuously publishing three posts a week was a commitment I made to myself for months and it was a commitment that taught me a lot of things. It has now become a part of my life.

Having said that however, I feel I have grown out of and it is now time to master other aspects of writing. Even if that means reducing the number of posts I publish every week.

Long story short, the blogging frequency of this blog ‘might’ go down from three posts a week to two and sometimes even one a week. But I will hopefully continue to show up without fail. Every week! Consistently. And with lesser number of posts and more effort the content is expected to get better.

Expect to see posts with more content, more research, more fun and more takeaways. Expect to see PDF or Kindle versions of articles and occasionally also expect to see some eBooks once or twice each year.

Now, if you are a young and budding blogger seeking advice on how you can become a better blogger, here’s my advice:

1. Pick a schedule that you are comfortable with and stick to it!
2. And Do NOT change your schedule frequently.

More often than not any temptation to change the schedule is out of hidden laziness and your lizard brain playing tricks with you so be very careful before you decide to change yours. And when you do reduce your frequency; make sure you double your efforts.

That by the way is EXACTLY what I intend on doing on this blog; so do keep reading.

There is something to be said about saying something you believe in without feeling the need to defend it or argue for it. Controversial arguments are generally very interesting and hardly ever productive.

Most online flame wars (through email, facebook comments, twitter comments, blog comments etc.) work on the premise that person posting the last response wins. In most online flame wars, your decision of not replying is often considered synonymous to your not having a reply.

The online heckler often expects you to shout back to quiet him down. Once you do that, you have started a controversial argument and it doesn’t matter what the logical outcome of the controversial argument is, the heckler wins.

All a heckler needs is a lot of free time and the persistence to keep replying.

You cannot win this game if you play it by it's conventional premise.

But you have an option of not playing the game to begin with; or taking a decision of not replying even when you have a reply; or quitting the arguments in the middle even when you’re not the person with the last response.

Just say what you truly believe in. If that triggers an argument; make your points. Once you’ve made your points (or voluntarily chosen not to make them) leave the topic and the argument. Say something else. A brand new post. A brand new thought. A brand new idea.

The hecklers can continue heckling about what you said. They will eventually get tired and stop when they realize that you’ve already moved on to something else. After all, In the long run the hecklers and the critics just don’t matter as much as you think they do.

Hiring young and budding teams that can kick some serious ass has always been one of my life long passions; something I consider much more important than any process out there.

If you don't screen and pick people like the life of  your organization depends on it, you won't have an organization soon.

Jarka on the Project Management site of stack exchange has a question on "The most effective attractors and motivators for young highly skilled people".

My answer there pretty much condenses a lot of what I have talked about on this blog as far as hiring is concerned, in eight simple bullet points.

You can read the answer here.

If you are a young and budding entrepreneur or a budding manager these eight points should give you a head start at hiring and building teams that can kick some serious ass.

Here's wishing you good luck with attracting and motivating teams that kick some serious ass.

Every airline is like the other. Same ticketing, same announcements, similar good looking cheesy air hostesses and stewards who are busy smiling and getting you stuff you ultimately end up paying for.

The aviation industry is also the only industry that has your complete attention when you are flying.

Why not make most of that attention?

Why not build systems that allow people in the same plane to connect to each other?

Why not allow them to play video games on a network? You know who you are playing with by their seat numbers.

Why not have a separate channel with a live stream of the cockpit with someone from the crew providing explanations on the basics of what the pilots are doing which you can listen to on your head phones?

Why not have an on plane chat room where you can connect to crew members and passengers?

Why not let your cabin crew engage with customers, talk to them and collect first hand feedback about what they liked and disliked?

They say that you meet some of the most interesting people when you fly. 

Most airlines go out of their way to avoid that.

Procedures? Security? Safety? Cost? None of the ideas I talked about are expensive. None of these pose any threats.

Except of course a threat to the convention of what airlines companies are supposed to do: which is to take you from one place to another and treat you like very expensive and fragile cargo.

And that is exactly why most flights are boring; even for someone like me who enjoys flying.

The world of software development today is very different than what it was when we started programming. Back in those days if you asked a question like this one the so called Java experts would grill you, nail you and crucify you publicly on the forum. Those were the days of the purist.

Then; Microsoft happened.

Languages like GW Basic allowed the existence of the hobbyist programmers who would then move on to more serious languages like C / C++ master those and move on to MFC or Win32 API on VC++.

That; or these programmers would pick simpler and much more productive languages like Visual Basic.

Both paths that would later converge to a .NET language which would hugely just be a matter of preference, C# or Visual Basic.NET. Back then however most purist found it inconvincible that any business worth their salt would run a Microsoft Stack on their production servers. 

The purist of course; were wrong.

When you're a geek grinning at how stupid Visual Basic is or passing comments like "Oh but Ruby on Rails doesn't scale!" or when you are busy reminding someone on a forum how stupid his question was, what you often forget is that the survival and the success of languages (both human and programming) depends on the adaption they receive. It is eventually the community behind a language that builds or breaks a language. Something that a huge part of the Java community completely missed out on in the old days.

The Java community and the other communities of purists decided to keep the bar of entry high and look down on all who were not born with an out-of-the-box IQ that met their standards of intelligence.

The hobbyist programmers in those days were pretty much expected to forego their self respects and keep getting booted from forum to forum before they found the answers to the simplest of questions that someone could have helped them in ten minutes or they were expected to move to a simpler language with a vibrant community of similar hobbyist programmers where no question was stupid.

Back in those languages like Visual Basic which were easy to learn, easy to pick up, fun to work on and fairly productive created a whole community of hobbyist programmers who were smart, passionate about their art and were willing to go that extra mile to build successful applications. Yes these languages may have been responsible for creating programmers who cannot program but they also created passionate communities of programmers who would make big and small dents in the world of software development. What these programmers lacked in talent they made up in intensity.

Needless to say that these programmers and communities reciprocated back. As of now, the Microsoft developer communities are by far the richest, strongest, loudest and most fun loving communities out there.

Languages that evolve survive. While the purists were busy grinning about the fact that Microsoft was copying ideas from Java, the java language, which was hardly changing in years except for introduction of new API's in their JDK (there were hardly any changes to the core of the language itself), was running out of ideas to copy from. Microsoft of course was moving over to languages like Ruby to introduce ideas like Closures and Lambda expression right into the core of their own languages.

The idea was simple: keep your languages simple and do everything you could for your developer communities and to make their lives productive. In the process, if the purist shouted, bitched and whined, so be it.

This is not a Java Vs. C# blog post and I have no intentions of starting a never ending discussion controlled by Zealotry here but if you are a programmer one important lesson to take away from this rift is that you have a responsibility towards the language of choice that you use to make a living. Remember, the success (or even the existence) of the language you use in the long run depends on the community of programmers that program in it. And you are a part of that community. So go on and talk passionately about the language of your choice; make you tube videos on new features; blog about new tools around your development platform.

Stop being the anal purist who has no respect for starters. Stop giving us that stupid grins about how Linux is more reliable than windows; how Java is faster than C#; or how J2EE scales better than RoR because thanks to the ignorance and the arrogance of the purists, none of those statements are remotely true in most real life scenarios anymore.

The purists are dead. Long live the purists. Just don't end up being one of them.

Move over to a pragmatic side, try your level best to learn and respect all languages and when you see someone trying hard but asking questions which seem way too simple or even slightly stupid to you, treat the person with empathy.

That would be the biggest favor you as a developer would be extending to your developer community and the platform that you work on. The days of the technology purist are over so try practicing a little bit of humility the next time you are in a forum answering questions.

Kole McRae of Office Buddha, talks about getting rid of 15 blogs that he owned:

Four months ago, I had 15 blogs. I had blogs about net neutrality, writing tips, technology news, and more. They were all things I was passionate about and loved writing them but one day I deleted them all.

All but one.

I didn’t back them up. I didn’t think twice about it. I simply clicked Delete and never thought about them again. Each one had an audience. Some of them even brought in a little money. But none of that mattered.

That day I discovered a simple truth about myself—a truth that expands to absolutely everyone. The idea was simple, which is kind of the beauty of it.

The idea that Kole is talking about works on these basic premises:

1. The less you spread yourself the better you work - you have less time for each additional task that you take up, so focus on one thing and do it well. Dedication to a single cause is often better than many.
2. Do one thing at a time - work on only one thing at a time and focus all your energies on that single thing. Once it meets your definition of complete move on to trying other things if you must. But keep the number of projects running on any given time to the lowest number possible.

Of course, the idea isn't just limited to your blogs or your side projects. Most young startups and mid-sized companies make this mistake. Go on and take a look at how many open projects your organization has right now.  Are you truly developing a Niche as an organization or jumping from one branch to another like a drunk monkey? More often than not, doing one thing and doing it really well will not kill you or your organization. The psychic weight of trying to do too many things at once and the desire to multitask both as an individual and an organization will.

How many products or projects do you have running in your organization? How many initiatives do you have running in your personal life? Maybe it's time to get rid of some of them and focus on the ones you really love working on. Deleting something, dropping something, stopping something or even putting something you started, on an indefinite hold is a really hard thing to do. It involves closing doors; something which we as human beings are not hardwired to do. But then, it's your only shot at being really good at something.

Go on. Pick a few stale projects in your work life or a few initiatives in your personal life and shut them down. You'll feel better and chances are you'll end up being much more happier and much more productive in the long run. I wish you good luck.

Al Pacino's Inspirational Speech from Any Given Sunday about the game of football and the game of life, is a life changer.

You know when you get old in life things get taken from you. That's, that's part of life. But, you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out that life is just a game of inches.

So is football. Because in either game life or football the margin for error is so small. I mean one half step too late or to early you don't quite make it. One half second too slow or too fast and you don't quite catch it.

The inches we need are everywhere around us.

They are in ever break of the game every minute, every second.

On this team, we fight for that inch On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We CLAW with our finger nails for that inch. Cause we know when we add up all those inches that's going to make the FUCKING difference between WINNING and LOSING between LIVING and DYING.

I'll tell you this in any fight it is the guy who is willing to die  who is going to win that inch. And I know if I am going to have any life anymore it is because, I am still willing to fight, and die for that inch because that is what LIVING is. The six inches in front of your face.

Joel's take on building commercial software in similar:

Commercial software—the kind you sell to other people—is a game of inches.

Every day you make a tiny bit of progress. You make one thing just a smidgen better. You make the alarm clock default to 7:00am instead of 12:00 midnight. A tiny improvement that will barely benefit anyone. One inch.

There are thousands and tens of thousands of these tiny things.

It takes a mindset of constant criticism to find them. You have to reshape your mind until you're finding fault with everything. Your significant others go nuts. Your family wants to kill you. When you're walking to work and you see a driver do something stupid, it takes all your willpower to resist going up to the driver and explaining to him why he nearly killed that poor child in the wheelchair.

And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens. The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you ship a truly great product. The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away.

Michael Lopp calls writing a game of inches too:

Writing is a game of inches. No author I know sits down every morning in their home office and steadily produces three pages a day. I’m sure they’re out there, but these annoyingly efficient and profitable authors aren’t doing this on the side. They’re doing this because they’ve written enough to make it a career.

While the idea of writing books for a living is appealing, my impression is that if I stopped being a software engineering manager, my voice would quickly become an echo of how things used to be rather than how they are. Thanks, no.

You have time. In fact, you have lots of time. There will be weekends where all you will find is a paragraph. There will be a week where all of your progress will circle around finding precisely the right title for chapter 12.

In writing a book, you’re going to find all sorts of interesting ways to mentally beat yourself up. You’re going to consider new tools and different writing schedules. You’ll discover that inspiration can be encouraged, but never created. You’re going to find constructive ways to procrastinate and your friends are going to stop talking to you because all you talk about is that damned book.

You move an inch ahead when you decide to stop whining about how your job doesn't give you enough opportunities and you write just a few additional functions of code on your side project.

You move an inch ahead when you decide to skip that movie and write that blog post that you always wanted to write.

You move an inch ahead when you switch off the television and spend that one extra hour adding a couple of paragraphs to that book you are writing.

You move an inch ahead when you logout of online chat, facebook and twitter and read a book on how to get better at your craft.

You move an inch ahead when you decide to open the IDE and refractor just a little bit of code,  or open the word processor and edit a chapter of your book, on a depressing day where you thought you were not going to be able to do anything.

You move an inch when you reach out for a tiny tool that lets you practice your craft when you're in a meeting or in commute.

The inches are all around you and in the long run they are going to add up.

The hard question that you need to ask yourself is, have you given up to the television, the facebook, the twitter, and the countless excuses about your not making it or are you willing to work your ass off for those inches?

Just a little something to think about.

Of all the MBA's I've worked with I respect a handful of them and find the rest of the majority hugely amusing. If you've ever sat there and wondered what it is that those business schools out there really do to suck empathy and common sense out of people, you are in good company.

David Heinemeier Hansson at 37ignals and the writer of RoR goes expresses his thoughts on MBA students gives wise advice to young and budding MBA students at Stanford:

Before you can even get started I think the most important thing for you to realize is that you have to unlearn your MBA. And I am treating MBA here as a sort of a general grab bag for business school management theories. I spent three years and Copenhagen business school and I would probably say that according to my estimations 96.7 percent of the time was completely wasted. It has NOTHING to do with what I actually do today and it has NO impact on what I actually work with everyday.

In fact, I came out slightly damaged. I came out with a head that had been soaking in management theory for three years and it was actually a little off. It was not very well suited for the real world of just building a product, pleasing customers and making profits as a business because that's really not what you learn and you have to just sort of readjust and recalibrate when you come out of school to that reality.

Nobody cares about a 20 page report on five forces. It just doesn't matter. There is none of your customers that's going to think, "Oh well did you do your five forces for this setup? No? Alright then we're not going to buy your product. So all of these tools that you've learnt are only for you. They are not going to impress anybody else when you start your own business. And what you learn is, when you are starting your own business.... and all businesses start small.... is that none of it is relevant.

The context of the talk resolves around fundamental flaw of business schools which are all about teaching students everything that is big and clunky. Big words, big reports and big documents, big plans, big clients, big projects, big teams.

When these students end up starting a business which has to start small or joining a small yet innovative organization they invariably find themselves fumble and going round and round in circles too proud to admit that they are fumbling.

David's advice is sound: before you start your own business, do yourself a favor and unlearn your MBA.

But then the real question you have to ask yourself is, do you see yourself running a small yet effective organization that makes a dent in the universe or do you see yourself working for the big blue?

If your answer is the former and if years of business school management theories often make you delusional and dysfunctional when it comes to running a small kickass profitable organization, why enroll to begin with?

Just a little something to think about.