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I wanted to watch Michelle Obama’s speech last night because I was curious to see how she decided to portray herself, her husband, and her family. Obama is, relatively speaking, unknown to many of our nation’s voters. Further, his background falls far outside the American norm. All this has given significant fuel to the Republicans, who have painted Obama as nothing more than a sweet talking celebrity out of touch with core American values.

So I expected Michelle Obama to communicate her family’s values on her terms. But I was surprised and delighted to find something I didn’t expect: as a speaker, Michelle Obama rivals her husband! Her passion, her thoughtfulness, and her candor all shone brightly last night. She delivered the kind of speech rarely seen from most mainstream politicians these days—let alone from politicians’ partners. (Indeed, I would argue that we won’t see anything as inspirational from the Republicans during their convention.)

Let’s hope that, as Michelle put it (I’m paraphrasing here), we can come together as a country and listen to our hopes this time around, rather than our fears! If we can make this happen, then maybe, finally, we can get out from under the thumb of corporate America and set our own agenda for once. A big thank you to Michelle Obama—your speech thrilled and inspired me.

I love finding little ideas that I can put away in a box and remember later to guide my way. This is why I like 37signals’ idea for establishing product vision.

Here’s one: write code so expressive it requires very few comments.  In Coding Without Comments, Jeff Atwood points out that seasoned programmers, in general, adhere closely to this statement.  Grasshoppers, meanwhile, are still picking up their chops.  They need comments to support their funky constructs.

This line of thinking reveals something deep about computer programming: a programming language is a real language.  Compare writing in a programming language to writing in, say, Spanish.  Could you imagine resorting to English in side notes, to explain what was going on in the body, simply because your Spanish was so bad that it would be difficult to understand otherwise?