Verbal Judo by George J. Thompson and Jerry B. Jenkins.

Excellent at teaching how to understand a situation and diffuse conflict. How to employ empathy (not necessarily sympathy). Even how to talk to customer service and remain calm.

A useful and entertaining book!

My preferred solution is Waxx https://www.waxx.io - It is Ruby and very fast. Mostly functions, no classes. Deploy like this:

waxx deploy stage or waxx deploy prod

The deploy script can be as simple as:

cd /path/to/folder && git pull && waxx migrate && waxx restart

Disclaimer: I am the author of Waxx and I wrote it to be as simple as possible yet still high performance and flexible.

First time I've heard of it - how would you say it compares with Rails? Is there much of a community behind it?

There is not much community yet. It is pretty new. It is very different than Rails. It is more of an RPC/Rest system than an MVC system. In my testing on FreeBSD with Postgres it is close to 10x faster than Rails. It is a bit faster than Go and a bit slower than Node. It is quite simple to write and the code itself can be read in a few hours (at most). I'll be posting some sample apps this summer.

FYI: My neighbor developed something similar in the 70s. It was purchased by a large pantyhose company for many millions with additional revenue promised from royalties from future sales. As soon as they owned it they killed the product to maintain their revenue stream from short-lived hose. The inventor lost millions from sales that never happened. Don't let this happen to you. If you are successful, they will come knocking.

I'm always looking for evidence of planned obsolescense [1] but I didn't realize how effectively it has been implemented by "Big Pantyhose" and that move to buy out and phase out a superior product - deviously brilliant!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

There are some other examples from Bill Gates/Microsoft in this reddit thread [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3aicvf/what_vill...

I have another one for you: Google >> Aadvark

How is this a good example ? What's the quickly obsolete thing Google pushed to effectively kill Aardvark ?

I'm with you that I'd like some better question answering service, but I don't think it's fair to blame Google for not trying ...

Maybe, you have gathered some info about planned obsolescence ? I find that subject very interesting too.

Thanks for the tip. I could totally see them doing something like that. Anything to hold on to the legacy business, even if it means killing innovation.

Unbound Booking http://unboundbooking.com connects performers (musicians, educators, storytellers, puppeteers, etc) with libraries, schools, community centers, etc. Email dan@ the domain for more info.

dynadot.com is my preference for domain names and they have hosting plans too.