Only a few of the people who work with me have publicly discoverable weblogs. But I enjoy them and you might too. Benjamin Pollack, a developer.

Now, in my book, when it comes to breaking standards, there are a lot of different ways to do it. There's breaking the standard by adding features in odd ways that no one else supports, but everyone needs (NVARCHAR and friends in SQL Server, and arguably AUTO_INCREMENT in MySQL); there's breaking the standard by not implementing features everyone else has (sequences, views, triggers, etc. in MySQL); and then there's just totally going off and doing your own thing even though the standard already solved the problem you're having.....

That's impressive, fellas. What exactly was wrong with SQL92 there? Too plebeian?

Eric Nehrlich, the other software management trainee.

However, in a Latour-ian collective world, the market does not exist just out there waiting to be discovered or reached. Such a market has to be created. It is up to the marketer to make a series of connections between the potential buyers of the mousetrap and the mousetrap itself, to form a sticky networked web that envelops the buyers. Like the last post, it's the difference between publishing an org chart and doing the footwork necessary to reify the org chart.

Tyler Griffin Hicks-Wright, a developer.

I was walking around lower Manhattan last night, and I ran across this huge hole in the street. I've seen similar areas where they've been doing work, but I always love seeing it. It's amazing how much is going on less than a foot below the surface of the asphalt. Sewer lines, water pipes, gas pipes, cable, phone, internet, electricity, everything right there. Considering it all supports over 8 million people every day, I think it's one of the most incredible, and most overlooked, engineering accomplishments in history.

Joel Spolsky, a honcho.

"Aargh!" I said, and went off to study why there was a checkbox in the options dialog called 1904 Date System.

Michael Pryor, a honcho. A logic/math puzzle blog, featuring puzzles that now appear in Make Magazine.

The FogBugz blog, mostly by Michael Pryor.

We've considered supporting PostgreSQL but I'm not convinced this doesn't open its own can of worms. Of course MSSQL has its own share of bugs, as well as Access, but for some reason the problems with MySQL seem to be more severe and more problematic. It's been said that using the InnoDB tables is less likely to cause problems, but of course the MyISAM format is the only one that supports full text indexing, thereby removing InnoDB as a candidate for our table types.

SQL Server is around $7500 per server. For me, the price is worth it.

The Fog Creek Copilot blog, mostly by Tyler Griffin Hicks-Wright. A sequel to the Project Aardvark blog from last year, where an intern wrote:

I find that I've been learning the most from all the little things. The choices I have to make every day that, when run by Joel, get, "you decide; it's your call," as a response, teach the most in the end. In more ways than one these choices are just as, if not more, important than the huge decisions that come up only a few times during a project. A big decision is of course crucial, but you can stress over it, get a lot of outside advice, and even sleep on it before settling on what to do. The small ones come up all the time, every day, and collectively steer the entire product over the course of the launch.

Jacob Krall, an intern.

I'm now officially a big fan of Zidane-do Martial Arts. Erik has a feeling there will be a huge gain in popularity of this particular move; he's investing in it in the Flippin' Sweet Futures market here in New York City.

Alice Tang, a graphic designer.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of having your superiority and significance torn down when faced with something as vast as The Sahara, and thrown into the world that is Morocco. Experiences like these are humbling yet necessary.

Stefan Rusek, a developer. (I now know to call Stefan "Megatron.") He wrote an essay about teamwork similar to the intern's thoughts above, plus:

DO NOT USE THE TECHNIQUE THAT MS SUGGESTS IN THE ARTICLE. You would expect that the company that wrote the classes would be able to tell you how to properly use them, but here they don't.

Some of these folks almost never blog, and I chose non-representative quotes using standaloneness as a criterion. Caveat lector.