tpdi

And have a healthy disregard for rules. There are way too many rules, and they usually have only one effect: to slow down those [who] are active.

Sometimes slowing down is good.

I have a guy on my team. A diva. He's very fast at what he knows well, and almost as fast on what he doesn't. But on what he doesn't know well, subtle mistakes accumulate because he's going so fast, and disregarding the rules.

His response when asked in a code review to move a constant out of a function and into a file of constants was to refuse to do it, because the rules don't apply to him. "it's good enough; if you don't like it, you can change it."

To me, his manager, this is infuriating: while I have the ability to check out his code and modify it, I don't have the time to play janitor to an self-proclaimed Einstein too brilliant to clean up after himself.

For me, the guy who is three times slower -- but who spends his time paranoically considering all that could go wrong in his code, and who turns in something that doesn't subsequently break, or cause his colleagues a lot of head-scratching, is much more valuable. But that guy watches the speed demon, and then denigrates himself as too slow.

And I'm saying that as a guy who used to be something of a diva myself.

it's due to my vegan diet and daily fitness regiment

There are lots of vegan diets, some better than others. What's yours?

A few weeks ago Alex Ebert (aka Edward Sharpe) and I encouraged Reddit to hack democracy by trying out several civic engagement apps.

Waaiit. The founder of the app finds it convenient to use a pseudonym, but you demand your users give you something that links back to their real name, and could be used to dox them?

Anonymity has been an integral part of American politics since Tom Paine published The American Crisis under the pen name "Common Sense", even before "Publius" authored the Federalist papers. You're making a mistake to ignore that tradition.

I need to store a lot of grain. How can I build a pyramid?