This is a bit of digression, and I hope nobody thinks I’m calling p0wned on them or anything, but has anyone else noticed how many blogging articles are about how to write blogging articles? More whitespace. Less whitespace. Use pictures. No, use bullet points.

Good geejebus.

You want to know what Anthony Trollope said about writing? “Just sit down every day and write something you plan to keep.” He’s one of my favorite authors - a more popular contemporary of Dickens (there is a Facebook lesson in there for MySPace) who also was post-master general of Ireland and invented the post-box. (Yes, it was invented.) He also wrote more than 40 long novels.

So my advice, if anyone besides my children were to ever ask my advice, is to not try to write the best post ever at any point, but to just write something you plan to publish.

My best post ever was on a non-work related blog about something very strange that happened to me on vacation. It got several thousand hits in the first day and now, more than a year later, a dozen or so people show up to read it. Who knew.

I often notice anxiety in our more junior guys - when we hire junior guys! - about the quality of their work. I think they somehow believe they should be Andresson’ing the next Linux or something. “Dudes,” I say, putting on my really bad fake Indian hipster accent, “that was totally a gnarly hack.”

It appalls them, in a grandfather-in-board-shorts kind of way, but sometimes they understand: mostly at work you are doing a pretty good job if you produce production code.

Last week one of our guys started dancing around like a drunk Scotsman on ruffies. Apparently he’d solved a performance problem with some Ajax grid/tree thing that was taking seconds to load for small data sets on a website. Now he can load a 1,500 item grid/tree thing in under a second. Weeks of poking a sorta-solved problem in his spare time.

Total home run. He’s happy. Things run better. We’re all smarter.

But he wasn’t trying to write the best code (or post) ever. Just to do something for production that was as excellent as he could make it.

So say we all: you choose the team pizza today. But no jalapeno’s!