Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

via http://waxy.org/links/

“The consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn’t aid in your development. The truth of the matter is that understanding development comes from failure.”

via Swiss Miss

It only takes a few tools to make homemade candy. A good sturdy bottomed pot, a measuring cup, something to stir with, and a thermometer. If you’re really good, you can even do without a couple of these…

Heated sugar goes through lots of stages. An astute eye can see them, but most of us need to use various methods to discover what stage it’s at. At roughly 230ºF sugar forms thin gossamer stings like a spider web when you drip it into cool water. At just 5º more it will form tight little balls. From here, the balls of sugar when dropped into water will just get harder in increments as you approach 265ºF. At around 270ºF something cool happens. The sugary strands and balls you drip into water will remain plyable, and soft when removed. By the time you hit 300º the sugar when retrieved will be hard like a jawbreaker.

At 320ºF something really magic begins to happen; the sugar begins to caramelize. “Caramelize” being just a pretty word for burn. But like a steak on the grill it’s the little black bits that make the flavor. If you heat the sugar to 338ºF give or take a couple, it breaks down to form complex compounds that create an unbelievably rich mixture of flavors. Above 350º and the sugar isn’t caramel anymore, it’s bitter, black, and disgusting.

Just 12º exist between perfect caramel and sticky ashes. If you’ve ever made anything on a stovetop you know it can be tough to control heat in 50º increments, more/less 12º. You might also know that acceleration of heat matters, -things keep cooking when you are done. It’s a challenge of talent, patience, reaction, and intuition to get it right.

I’m not a candymaker, but this whole thing sounds familiar to me. As a graphic designer I work on projects that go through stages. I struggle to add enough heat in the beginning to get to the next stage. I work sometimes days on end to keep evolving the design through stages of hopefully increasing quality. Midway through, it seems that the changes I make start to affect the overall design more dramatically. Really late in the game, it’s all about knowing when to quit.

Design, like sugar, requires talent, patience, reaction, and intuition. I’ll be honest-I’ve been burning lots of designs I work on lately. I take some consolation in hoping that it might be as easy as backing off the heat just a tiny bit to get it to turn from black to golden yummy brown.

Last night I was reading around on the internet and came across the Charity Water campaign that Cameron Moll has been running to celebrate Authentic Jobs’ 5 year anniversary. It’s not the first I’d heard of it, but it was the first time I paid much attention to it.

I was instantly taken by two things:

• What a great cause Charity Water is.
• That despite being backed by some of the biggest names in our industry, the camapign had still only netted just over half of the goal amount of 20k.

I hatched an idea in about 2 minutes to donate our daily earnings to the cause. I threw together a quick temp campaign page, and Brian assembled it. We hacked some code at the top of all our app pages that would display the promo once to each of the site visitors. We also followed up with the usual couple tweets, and a blog post to talk about the idea.

Decent idea?

We’re a small niche app studio. We count good days when we get hundreds of dollars in new subscriptions, not thousands. We knew this wouldn’t make a ton of money for the charity… But how much has it made so far you ask?

zero dollars.

We’re about four hours in, and not only has nobody signed up for a paid account, but our signup rate for free accounts is about a third of normal rate from what we can tell…

So what’s up? Was it a bad idea? Are we ignoring some bit of human psychology? Did the campaign popup scare everyone off?

In support of the quite excellent Cameron Moll, and his Charity Water campaign, Paste will be giving 100% of the money earned from new signups today to the campaign. We sincerely hope you love the apps, but we really hope you love that warm feeling you get inside knowing you’ve helped someone in need.

Visit one of our app sites to participate:
http://jumpchart.com
http://staction.com
http://getpaprika.com

I was watching a documentary on Thomas Jefferson the other weekend. This one to be specific: http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/

We all know he was a polymath who had a strong influence on the basic foundation of the U.S. that is still relevant today- hundreds of years later. But he was cool to me for another reason.

Despite his sometimes obvious shortcomings, Jefferson knew one thing. He knew how to study.

In school, I was a smart kid who had been taught by the system to do the minimum. Studying never occurred to me; I either absorbed info while I was doodling, or throwing things at classmates, or I crammed, cheated, and faked my way to a C. Jefferson had it right though. To pseudo-quote the documentary, Jefferson lived life to its fullest, he had no fear of learning, and no fear that he could not be good at everything. Keep Reading

Background

Sites like Dribbble, and FFFFound are part of a new class of websites on the internet. The difference is subtle, but important. They have a user base that is a very limited subset of the internet at large.

Lots of sites control their growth through beta codes, invites etc. We do this with every app we launch. it helps us scale slowly, test things, and to be honest it’s a great way to build buzz.

But Dribbble and FFFFound don’t work this way. They’re out of beta at least in the way we typically perceive it (not like the Google ever-lasting beta) but they still offer limited access.

Everyone can look, but only a few can create the content. The idea is that this leads to a curated experience where spam, and bad quality is less likely to exist. There are a fair share of self aggrandizing posts that border on spam, and an equal share of sub-par posts, but to a great degree the theory works.

Getting access.

Access for both sites is based on “who you know.” It’s tough to get in. I’ve posted to Twitter twice on 2 different accounts to get a Dribbble invite. We were even an advertiser once, and still didn’t get access. I’ve asked around a bit for a FFFFound invite with no luck as well. Admittedly I haven’t worked all my connections, begged, pleaded, or prostrated myself to get in. But as a casually interested person, I’ve had no luck.

I’ve seen blog posts and tweets that offer invitations. Usually there is some sort of contest, or “show me your work so I can judge it” type string attached. I’ve never responded to have my work be evaluated in this way.

Other examples.

Sites like Twitter and Digg operate quite differently. Anyone can participate, but high profile members still get a larger share of the voice due to their status in the app’s community. For example you can follow @simplebits on Twitter and feel like you are participating in a conversation with a high profile designer. Or you can use the same tool to keep up with people nobody has ever heard of. You curate your own experience by choosing who to keep up with.

Both Digg, and Twitter recommend accounts to “follow”, offer a calculated feed of what they consider to be the “best” posts, and allow these recommendations to be ignored.

Wrapping Up.

So the scoop is this. I don’t like elitism. I’m a simple, hard working designer. I don’t give speeches, write books, or do much social networking, so invitations for sites like this don’t automatically land in my lap. I hope Dribbble, FFFFound and any sites like them in the works choose to be more open. I hope access isn’t greedily hoarded, or held up like some trophy only for the chosen.

What I love about the internet is that everyone can participate. It’s what makes it so strong, and useful. Whether you’re a lowly designer in the midwest (like me!) or a college student half way around the world you can stand on equal footing. Sites like Digg show that it is possible to have a curated experience while still allowing everyone to participate. “Open” is a beautiful system, and I think sites who don’t embrace openness do so at their own peril*.

*I do love both FFFFound, and Dribbble, and look often.

About two years ago, Jumpchart was already a bigish app (for us) and Staction was growing fast after its release. We realized we would need to do something to increase performance so that our users wouldn’t feel our growing pains.

Besides the easy approach of just getting faster hardware, we also decided to dive into database tweaks – and couldn’t have been happier about the results. Or more surprised.

Like many (probably most) applications for the Web, all of our apps run on MySQL. And while we’re old schoolers at it, we never really worried much about how fast each SQL query was. When your app is small, it hardly matters if you have poorly written queries or inefficient table indexes. Once you start getting the first thousands of daily hits, bad code comes back to bite you. Hard.

The first step we took was to develop code that would tell us exactly which queries weren’t performing well. By adding some timers to our OO database handler, we easily had after the first few days a huge log of all queries that were performing poorly in our MySQL server. It’s really a great way to keep track of how database performance evolves in your app.

The death of Google Wave got me to thinking about what all Google is into these days. Here’s a list I threw together: Keep Reading