I literally haven't sat in a meeting room since 2005 or physically seen anyone from my company in a business capacity since 2005. At our company we all telecommute. Ninety percent of stuff can be dealt with by agreement over email or work tickets. The remaining 10% is handled by highly focused conference calls and Goto Meeting sessions which is at most around 90 minutes worth of business spread over a week. I do sometimes miss the free tea and biscuits though.

Blimey. I was going to write a up a longer post reflecting on the history of Stack Overflow and the goodness it's brought to the internet by re-shaping and re-framing Q&A sites and how they work, but I think it's enough to say thanks for rolling this ball down the hill. Good luck Jeff and and all the best in your next adventure. Kev

I couldn't agree more, these books are mind poison. Self help books, business or personal, seem to appeal to individuals who need to identify with whatever psychological malaise is currently doing the rounds. They buy these books, satisfy that desire to "identify" then move onto the next one. They never get a proper fix, they generally don't want to or don't have the will power. I watched this up close and personal. Unfortunately there is a large market of lifestyle hypochondriacs that these vampires^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H authors appeal into, sadly these books don't get put on the Fiction shelves in the bookshops. Success is about personal ambition and will come about of your own ingenuity and inventiveness, not some quack telling you what your ambitions should be.

I have to admit that I can't see past Chrome - it's serious browser crack. I keep trying FireFox 4 and IE9 but Chrome is so slick, fast and lightweight compared to those bloaters. Chrome loads in the bat of an eye but FireFox's startup time is pretty unspectacular, even from my SSD, and I'd say lags behind even IE9. Can't say I've ever been nagged to restart Chrome after an update. I like that no fuss way it gets on with keeping itself up-to-date whereas out of the box FireFox is just downright annoying and IE, well do I really need a reboot to update a browser? Whatever trust issues you may or may not have about Google, Chrome is doing it more right by a long shot with regard to deployment and updates.

The company I work for doesn't have an office as such, we all work from home. I've worked from home since early 2003 and would find it very strange to go back to working in an office full time again. What is also important is that your remote team members are provided with separate business telephones, broadband and computer(s). This provides a ring fenced work environment within the home office and the mental flag that "this is work stuff". You also don't get hard feelings where folk feel they are providing a freebie to the business of their own phone, connectivity and hardware. One of the things I do miss is white boarding sessions in person with other devs and general office banter. But that said, we're still a fairly sociable lot over MSN and the phone anyway.

Nice article and I feel your pain. Whilst Less and SASS solve some problems you still need that deep understanding of CSS to make it work well, something that not all developers have the time to acquaint themselves with. What we need is a jQuery for CSS :), something that abstracts away the pain points such as CSS behavioural differences between browsers for most tasks, but at the same time allows low level CSS knob twiddling when required.

Nice article spoiled by the 'aren't I so alternative/idiosyncratic/eccentric by declaring my hate for email' attention seeking. Makes as much sense as me declaring my dislike for light switches, return-keys and cups with bottoms to keep the drink from falling out. I really don't see what the problem is with email. 99% of the time it just works. How about proposing alternatives?

Nice article Jeff and something to get our teeth into. I have a data aggregator and roll-up application that's been behaving badly. It uses Linq to SQL heavily (the queries themselves aren't hellishly complex, they just operate on single tables and there's no joins) and I've been meaning to get time to profile it (code and SQL) properly. This article has given me the boot up the backside to go do something about it. More of this kind of thing please! :)