Dave Fayram sits in with Cote this week on his podcast talking about Rails backends. This was all interesting, but what really caught my ear was the last 11 minutes or so of the podcast, where Cote and Dave start talking about using OS X in businesses, and Dave describes his all Mac office and brings up the use of Bon Jour as “their own personal twitter server” and the use of dashboard widgets to perform work in context, much of what I was thinking about when I wrote Metrics As a Side Effect last week. Its cool to see that other people are thinking about this stuff, and a shame that businesses are so stuck in the “business use” of Windows that we cannot take advantage of some of the ultimately cool things available on the Mac to increase personal productivity, such as the dashboard, Growl, and Rendezvous.

It was interesting to hear Dave talk about how “beautiful” their infrastructure is, because they have been able to focus on things aside from security, VPN, notification frameworks and the like because a lot of the things that infrastructure folks spend most of their time on are taken care of already on a Mac network.

I have to say, I am at least 5x more productive at home on my Mac than I am waiting 15 minutes for my Windows machine to boot and log into the network in the office. I tend to do my most important work off hours now, just to be able to work on a more intuitive and easier to use machine. I feel like I can concentrate more on the problem I am working on than how to do it, which again, tied into the whole Rails conversation for me.

Very interesting discussion. Excellent content. I highly recommend this one.