New York’s business press like the WSJ and Forbes are classically slow on the draw… :)

Nice!

And there you have it – with one free download and a few minutes of configuration work, you can snoop all of iOS’s web traffic for fun and/or profit.

View tutorial: Inspect iOS HTTP traffic without spending a dime

Don’t use Cucumber unless you live in the magic kingdom of non-coders-writing-tests (and send me some fairy dust if you are!)

— 37 Signals

Honored awesome collaborator, culture commentator, and friend. You acknowledged me here:

I acknowledge you, here. Thank you for all the awesome things you did.

Yours with notes of celery and anti-matter,

jm3

Had a great time last night at Ignite: Lean Startup, a collection of speed presentations patterned after the Pecha-Kucha style in San Francisco, organized by Eric Ries

Everyone did a great job. Public speaking scares most people, and timing your presentation to slides that auto-advance is tough. These were the best of the bunch:

Gleb Budman (@GlebBudman) from Backblaze

Gleb shared an awesome walkthrough of how Backblaze created a 70 TB server in a plywood box.

Jess Lee (@jesskah) from Polyvore

Jess gave a great talk on agile product development using “Fake Doors”, a technique that we also use at 140 Proof to evaluate demand for a feature before building it.

Shivani Khanna (@sk_shivani) from Fliptoast

Shivani gave an inspired, funny talk about the advantages of being lean without a full dev team.

Paul Howe (@phdc), from BlueSpark

Paul shared an awesome example of lean startup prototyping using GreaseMonkey, which is a favorite trick of mine.

“Your Business Card Sucks!”

“Don’t let not having the tools be your trepidation!” — The Business Card Guy, at your fingertips.

Prank calls will never be the same again.

businesscards.jm3.net

Internet nerds will be familiar with the classic “Business Card Guy” video, a bizarre Youtube cult classic of a motivational speaker- type guy berating some bozos about the low quality of their business cards, and the high quality of his own ridiculously glossy business card.

Now the best quotes from this internet classic video are yours, for free, and are just a click away, for all your prank-calling and office hijinks needs. Introducing:

The HTML5 Soundboard for the Business Card Guy

Featuring:

• Full HTML5 sexiness
• rspec tests
• Capistrano deployment
• works in Safari, Firefox, iPhone Safari, and Google Chrome (sorry if you use some horrible windows browser thing)
• includes tiger blood
• built on my totally sweet Sinatra-Template site boilerplate code
• Code available on Github.

Check it out, share it with friends, amaze your mom, baffle your dog: 

The HTML5 Business Card Guy Soundboard

If you haven’t seen the original video, you can watch it here:

License:

The Unlicense (aka: public domain)

• Learn to use Vagrant to manage local virtualized dev environments
• Found and fixed an internal performance bug using NewRelic
• Deployed 3 Rails migrations

All are highly recommended. I read a few others but these are the ones you care about.

1. Strong Motion
2. The Corrections
3. Rework
4. The Paypal Wars
5. The Immortal Class
6. The Selby is in Your Place
7. Winner-Take-All Politics
8. Richistan
9. Griftopia
10. The Big Short

Bonus 3:

1. City of Thieves
2. Zero History
3. Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confession of a Hedge Fund Manager

Please read any or all of them, and let me know what you think.

I have the rare pleasure of working with Jamie Wilkinson at 140 Proof, and Jamie has the rare talent of being an expert on ”internet fame.” He gave a great talk at the Vimeo Festival on promoting your work online, and I’ve summarized his presentation for those of you who are too lazy to watch the whole thing. Link and the full video follow at the end.

1 - Write Blog Poetry

Encourage many interpretations of your piece by combining multiple catchy headlines (some used in post), pictures, video w/music.

2 - Ride the Wave

Make work that’s relevant to existing online things that that are already popular and trending (remixes, riffes, parodies)

3 - Publish Early and Often

It’s impossible to predict what will become a hit, so don’t bother — instead, release as quickly as possible — ideally spend less than a day on a project — in order to increase the chances of pick-up.

BONUS 1 - The “Eggbasket Theory”

There are no “influentials”; anyone can launch an awesome project that goes viral, don’t focus on being the “influential” guy, focus on making LOTS of projects.

BONUS 2 - The “Min. Effort / Max. Output” Curve

Strive to hit the fast, valuable left side of the curve, quantity is better than quality.

BONUS 3 - “Pre-Document”

Telegraph your intent first with a page / blog post / video (ala Kickstarter), and you might even get press even before you start

WATCH FULL VIDEO HERE:

THEN GET FAMOUS.