Ben Scofield

Ben Scofield

… rarely updated

11 Dec 2013

Problems with self-organization

I just listened to the November 21st episode of the Freakonomics podcast , on what economists call “spontaneous order .” It’s an interesting …
20 Sep 2013

On valuing people

Ernie and I are going through many of the same experiences right now, so his post on how interviews are broken resonated with me. In …
13 Sep 2013

On contact management

I have a problem: every time I open up an application that has a contact list, I find something confusing or frustrating. With Skype, it’s …
11 Sep 2013

On interview coding

Oh hey, I’m unemployed again (this time was, sadly, involuntary – my company shut down). That means I’m doing a lot of talking, to hiring …
08 Sep 2013

On Ansible

In my post on flexible infrastructures, I mentioned in passing that I was managing my ops work with Ansible rather than the more traditional …
05 Sep 2013

On a flexible infrastructure

I’ve been having a lot of fun over the past couple of weeks shading into the ops side of things – I’ve been experimenting with an …
02 Sep 2013

On GitHub, DDOSs, and deploys

When GitHub goes down, you can almost hear the wailing in the streets. GitHub has cemented itself as a central part of many development …
08 Aug 2013

On a schema.rb mystery

Imagine, if you will, a database table with your average, everyday foreign key. It’s an INTEGER column. Now, imagine a coworker opens a pull …