Ben There, Done That

I used to read Joel on Software religiously. (I recently saw a film with Ed Norton and Naomi Watts where he plays a doctor who goes out to China where there's an outbreak of cholera. Anyway, Naomi Watts, who plays the wife, was trying to use the phrase "religiously" in the same way I'm trying to, but of course, she's trying to say it to a nun, and wants to use a different phrase instead. But, I digress).

I'm sure reddit had as much to do with my distractions, and that I've started to peruse sports, and even Gabe's Techmeme.

If I were cool, I'd have an RSS feed, but I find it clutters up way too much, and most of the articles I see seem like crap. I just don't bother. Thus, Joel, who these days writes rather infrequently, is someone that's generally fallen off my radar.

Recently, as in today, he reviewed two books on management. It's intriguing that management always has time to read books about management, but the commonfolk developers rarely find time to read about development. You can read into that as much as you want, as there's certainly many ways to read it.

One of the books he's reading is by a fellow named Ben Casnocha, who had a startup by the time he was 19. I've only met a small handful of people that have been that driven, that young, and still, many of them don't try a startup.

You'd think I'd say something intelligent about his book, or what it must be like to be that young and come up with ideas.

No.

I fixated on something far more inconsequential.

And believe me, it is inconsequential.

It's Ben's name.

A little over a year ago, I met with three of the guys working at Fog Creek. One of the three is named Ben. Ben Kamens graduated from Duke, did an internship, and now works full-time. He's also pretty tall. That's incidental. He's now one of two Ben's at the company, the other one apparently writing a Smalltalk book (I had sent an email to Ben K. and he said no, no, it wasn't that Ben, but the other one. And that one's from Duke too).

Now, Joel's company, is what, maybe 15 people? I had thought he ran 30-40 people, but you need a fair bit of cash influx for that kind of business. Instead, Joel is more frugal, thus requires no VC money. He tries to pick his developers carefully. (One consequence tends to be that you have few to no women). Given that Ben is already an uncommon name, and then having two of them, then to say the phrase "Ben, Ben, Ben" as if he were Jan Brady complaining about the adoration of her older sister, makes you think, does Joel utter this phrase often?

I'm sure he can divide his mental faculties between making a comment about the Ben he's talking about, rather than his employees. And c'mon, the venture-some Ben, who he says is good looking and smart (two qualities that tend to work well together, unless they become insufferable in the process), has a webpage that seems like worship to Ben. Really. Check it out. Looks a little like Tom Brady. Great orthodontics, eh? People who smile too much seem a bit weasly to me.

For some reason, I've taken a perfectly legitimate article of a potentially wunderkind entrepreneur, and blogged about the guy's name. And that it coincidentally is the name of two of Joel's employees. Heck, I bet that other Ben is good looking too!

Of course, it gave me a great excuse for the punny title of this blog entry.

And I feel, as this is the end of the month, I want to catch up to the number of blog entries from May. Got one more day to do it too!