1. With your cursor over the thing that’s highlighted in a bad color, hit the ,hi. Say I don’t like the way this describe keyword is done in pink:

2. Note the info displayed in the status line, it will look something like:
hi<rspecGroupMethods> trans<rspecGroupMethods> lo<Todo> FG:#d33682

These are the color highlight groups, in brackets. The leftmost one is the one with highest precedence, and the one we want to override.

3. Look at the list of available colors using :hi. Note the names of the groups on the left, and their displayed colors. Find one you like. The list will look something like this:

4. Create a link between the group you want to modify and the one you like. Let’s say the one I like is Identifier, and the group I’m modifying is MatchParen. I would link them like this:

hi! link rspecGroupMethods Type

Reload your vimrc, or the file in which you placed the statement. The easiest way to evaluate the current file is :so %. And voila:

You can place this in your ~/.vimrc, or in a subfile under ~/.vimrc/plugins. If you liked this example, be sure to check out my highly customized dotfile project called YADR, which offers the ,hi functionality, well organized vim snippets and plugins, and other handy shortcuts to save you tons of time.

As software developers, ops guys, designers, it is a known evil that we sometimes choose shortcuts, accruing tech debt with the knowledge that we’ll pay for it later with considerable interest. However, there are a few categories of design choices that we make every day that will make software easier or harder to maintain for the next guy who comes after us, which are specifically evil and malicious forms of tech debt.

Here are a few basic categories that most non-Maintenance Driven decisions fall into. Please don’t be that guy :)

• duplication – This is the cardinal sin against Maintainable Design. If you duplicate code, it will instantly grow into piles of subtly divergent crap. It would have taken you an additional hour to figure out how to do it in a non-duplicated way. It will take your maintainers half a lifetime to understand why and how the code has diverged. My own anecdotal experience says that duplication has about a 1000% tech debt interest rate. That is, 1 hour saved by committing duplicated code will cost you 10 hours down the line. And this interest is compounded over time as the code diverges further.
• clever code – Clever is the enemy of Maintainable. Every time you cut and paste a really cool hack that you found on a blog in 2006, a unicorn dies. Follow conventions, and use existing and accepted practices instead of reinventing the wheel.
• personal aesthetics – Having a strong sense of personal style is awesome. You like snakeskin jackets and neon green pants? Sweet. But leave it out of the code. If you have a personal style that goes against accepted conventions, and you choose to prioritize your style over that of the community, you are not Maintenance Driven. When in doubt, look at the source code for a large community supported project (i.e. Rails) for style ideas.
• poor naming – Single letter variable names are impossible to grep for effectively. Names based on your favorite ninja turtles, though they will win you points with me, are bad for business. Same goes for commit messages – don’t write something clever and witty at the expense of clearly explaining your changes.

My policy of buying stocks is simple. I pick the companies that are market makers, and are or will be the market leaders ten years from now, and then I hold them, and buy more when they go on sale.

This post – it’s just my view of the future. I’m going to start by analyzing one company we all know and love – Amazon (AMZN).

This is a company that permeates our lives (even my grandpa has ordered things from Amazon), but most people have only a vague idea about their real business. Amazon has two core businesses (again, this is all my opinion and understanding and has no specific basis in financial data).

The first business which we all know and love is their retail store network. You can get anything under the sun there — and I have. I live in a city and I don’t have a car. It may drive the mailman nuts, but I get packages delivered almost every week. When I lived in a big apartment building with mostly older people, I was known as the package guy. They thought I was running some kind of shady business – but I was just shopping for my daily essentials. Whether it’s some knicknack I need for one of my many hobbies (photography, music, etc), household items, art supplies, and of course books – it all comes from Amazon.

Now let’s look at my generation – Millenials, Gen Y, Echo Boomers, whatever you wanna call us. Second largest generation in history (after our Boomer parents). More of us live in cities. We’re more affluent. We drive less. We lead busier lives. We’re phenomenally Internet savvy, and thus empowered to be market mavens. We’re connected 24×7 — some of us through multiple mobile devices. We desire customized shopping experiences. We carry a strong sense of entitlement combined with a lack of patience and an expectation of on-demandness (I want it now!)

Shopping online, whether at a desktop or on the go is the perfect solution for us. It wastes little time, it offers vast choice, and it gives us a customized experience based on the recommendations of others. What this adds up to is lots of money lining Amazon’s pocket as we choose to do our shopping with one click. And let’s not forget that many of us are starting to have kids. And that these kids are going to be ten times more connected than we ever were.

The second business, which most consumers just don’t know the first thing about – is cloud computing (cloud infrastructure, to be more precise).

Somewhere between 2007 and 2008, the traffic through Amazon Web Services (this is all of their APIs, or interfaces for programmers who build services on top of Amazon infrastructure) exceeded the traffic of their entire global retail network. Read that last line again, it’s important.

Is this (going to be) a *huge* business for Amazon? You bet your sweet behind. Amazon has been expanding its cloud business by leaps and bounds, providing many a startup and a few very savvy enterprises a way to save significant money while gaining lots of flexibility, by moving their infrastructure into the on-demand cloud.

With four years in the running, Amazon is pretty much the undisputed heavyweight champion of the cloud infrastructure market. Now, yes – Google is probably building something to truly compete with Amazon’s offering (App Engine was just a taste of things to come). But with enough lead time, market presence, and enough cash on hand (more than six billion) to buy up and coming startups in the space, Amazon is looking strong to remain the leader in cloud infrastructure, or at the very least a very strong second if it starts getting more heat from Google.

Amazon is up 338% over the last 5 years (that of course includes the recent financial crisis and recession). How’s your index fund doing?

Update 10/26/2011: I sold Amazon right around $220 because despite my continued belief in everything I wrote above, it’s P/E ratio is just way out of control, so I felt it was ripe for a correction (and in fact, it corrected recently quite a bit). You can own AAPL for less than 7 times the P/E (amzn PE at 104, appl at 14). I’m not stock analyst but amazon has one of the highest P/E’s in the tech industry, and Apple has one of the lowest. Meanwhile Apple is now the biggest company by market cap in the world and continues to deliver quarter after quarter of incredible performance. If AMZN comes down to a P/E in at least in the 50′s, I will probably buy again. This page has some more information on why AMZN’s P/E is so high, and maybe they’re right, I just don’t think it’s worth the risk when you have such a tasty low hanging fruit (AAPL).

I’m standing outside in the rain, sick, coming from the doctor. I dial yellow cab. Can I please get a taxi at 14th and Castro? Sorry sir, I need an address. I don’t know the address, I’m at the corner of 14th and Castro standing out in the rain trying to catch a cab, can you please send a cab here? Sorry I need an address. Click. They actually hang up on me.

Yellow cab, you’ve permanently lost me as a customer. I don’t get it. In an industry where pricing is fixed, why not optimize for excellent service to get customer loyalty? Do you think there’s an infinite number of customers who will always dial yellow cab because of its name? A couple more blog posts like this, and that name won’t mean a whole hell of a lot.

To those looking for reasonable cab service in San Francisco, I recommend DeSoto cab, which apparently has no problem sending a cab to a well known intersection. Good to know that there are places where common sense still prevails.

(I also apologize to my readers for this blatantly self-promotional post, but you know how the SEO game goes…)

To land your dream job, you need to target your employer. Pretend to work for them and do something that proves you’re the person for the job. Show them your thought process by keeping a blog and being active in online communities. Show them your work by participating in projects and displaying them to the world.

At the same time, employers need to start getting more creative to find the talent they seek. Posting your job requests on monster with the same dry templated “5 years of experience with these 15 things” speak isn’t going to get you very far.

Why did I go to interview at CohesiveFT? It was their craigslist post that got me interested. They were quick to spot emerging trends (three years ago that was Ruby on Rails, and using Macs as dev machines), and used creative language that showed me that they were thoughtful and had personality. They stood out from a sea of dry and robotic postings produced by HR departments listing unrealistic requirements while sorely lacking a clue. And why did they hire me? I was an early adopter, I wanted to use exactly the technologies and platforms they found exciting, I had a blog where I shared my thoughts, and I had a project that demonstrated my skills in a way a standard resume could not.

Here’s the thing – it’s still early days for personal branding. Most of your peers are mass-blasting companies on Monster with the same resume template. Most of them don’t have much of an Internet presence beyond Facebook and LinkedIn. There is still a ton of room to stand out and get employers to notice you.

How to get a competitive advantage over your peers and land your job 2.0:

• Know what job you want and tailor make a website/resume/portfolio for it.
• Participate online – blog, tweet, etc.
• Get your name all over the interweb – would your employer rather hire/interview someone they know nothing about, or someone they can get to know in advance by googling?
• If you don’t know about SEO, ask a friend or use a blog platform like WordPress which does much of the work for you. This will help you get in the top ranks on Google for your name.
• Update your site regularly to get more Google juice.
• Look for job opportunities in unlikely places, where fewer people are looking (facebook, twitter, linkedin, craigslist, niche job boards like jobs.37signals.com). Forget about Monster and the other big job sites.
• Follow the companies you want to work for – their blogs, their tweets, their employees etc. Start conversations with them.
• Create things that are of interest to your future employer. Pretend you work for them and execute a project that would make them envy your work.

• 30 second spots interrupt you right as you’re watching a show so your annoyance factor is high.
• With a 2 minute spot, the advertiser has to work to capture your attention. This is a key aspect. One recent commercial I saw was a 2 minute short film about Honda racing. The film was actually relatively interesting to watch and a lot more palatable and engaging than a 30 second spot involving jingles and a radio announcer voice.
• The 2 minute spot will give advertisers more creativity to deliver content that is actually interesting to users, rather than resorting to traditional 30 second spot limitations of drilling messages into your brain.
• I am more likely to associate a positive experience with a brand if they’ve earned my respect. By showing me an interesting clip and then leaving me at peace to watch my show, the brand wins.

I found one blog that claims an 88% response rate in favor of the 2 minute ads. They also talk about how it would be potentially hard for advertisers to come up with good content, making a point that a 2 minute long commercial about Wal-Mart may be hard to swallow. This is a Good Thing. Advertisers should work for our attention. If they can’t muster up an interesting 2 minute clip, then they don’t deserve our attention.

The age of push marketing is coming to a rapid close as our primary content delivery method shifts to the Internet and on-demand technologies. We’re not going to sit there and wait for our shows to come on, we’re just going to click a button and watch what we want, when we want.

But we need to make ads just as pullable as we do our content. If I’m gonna have to watch a 2 minute ad, why shouldn’t I choose which ad I want to see? If I’m presented with 2 or 3 choices I might click on an 2 minute long ad about rock climbing because I’m really into that, or a funny short advertising The Office, but I’m not really into shopping at Wal-Mart so I’m going to ignore that one whether they like it or not. With pull advertising, the publishers also get my attention data, because I chose to watch their ad over several others. They get data about how they’re doing demographically, and they get data about how they stack up against competitors.

Hulu would also get an interesting idea about advertising demographics and determine ad popularity. Eventually they could use this data to figure out which ads people would like based on ads they’ve watched in the past and attention data from the rest of the community. This could usher in a new age of advertising where crappy uninteresting ads float to the bottom and out of sight, creating a competition for quality of ads by the publishers.

When the ad content gets interesting, user attention is captured, users aren’t annoyed by bad and irrelevant ads, everybody wins.

The book presents lots of interesting evidence for this, and even throws out a number – you need 10,000 hours of practice at something to achieve expert level. Gladwell says getting started young and having access to the environment they needed to spend those ten thousand hours perfecting their art helped Bill Gates, Mozart, and the Beatles to become great.

The other key notion in the book is that you have to be just good enough. For example, to win a Nobel prize, statistically you need an IQ of about 130. But it turns out that having an IQ of 150 or 200 does not increase your chances of getting the Nobel prize. In other words, there is a particular threshold above which you are good enough to get a Nobel prize. The rest is up to how hard you work, the hours you put in to practice and get great at what you do.

Not all of us can be Nobel prize winners, but most of us are probably good enough in our areas of specialty to have a chance at greatness. So the only thing standing in our way is practice. There’s my inspirational thought for the day…time to go practice :-)