Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

via http://waxy.org/links/

via Swiss Miss

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.

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?

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

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.

He woke before sunrise each day and wrote letters to famous scientists, poets, statesman, and architects. Then he read books, sometimes 8 at a time. He was a consummate gardener, author, father, grandfather, vintner, astronomer, and of course politician. He just did not quit.

I’m 34 now. I only wish I had learned early on what it meant to apply myself instead of skate by. There is a sort of nobility to minimizing your effort through school. It demonstrates that you’re too cool to have to work hard. But once you hit the real world, (which I did about a decade ago) doing the minimum is decidedly uncool. I’ve been learning that lesson yearly, monthly, daily. Sometimes to the minute.

You can do more. Are you the best at your profession? Why not? Do you want to be? What are you doing to get there?

Oh. I’m sorry, that episode of Futurama kept you from reading about HTML5 last night. And last weekend when you had a near 60 hours to brush up on your early swiss design grids, it just didn’t seem to get done because you needed a nap and to catch up on your Netflix Q. Aw. Too bad.

Jefferson himself would not have told you to sacrifice family time, or the love of those dear. He was a devoted lover of life and those around him. He was a gentle and engaged father, grandfather and husband. But he just did not F* around with anything that was not enriching his own life, or that of humanity. He wasn’t perfect; he failed often at politics, fidelity, and even contradicted the very tenets he laid down. But he worked hard regardless of his successes and failures. He tried desperately hard to be good at everything. Like… everything. He was better at more professions than most people who practiced an individual trade all their life. Jack of all trades- master of all trades.

So you have no time. Kids, family, a chest cold, hobbies, whatever. Have you ever totaled up what 30 minutes a day adds up to over the course of your average life expectancy? For most of us that’s almost two years. How much do you think you can learn in two years? Now what if you found the five hours a day that Jefferson found each day (7 days a week) usually before anyone else in his house was awake- to read, think, and study…

Let’s put it this way. At the age of 83, Jefferson didn’t count being president of the United States among his three biggest achievements.

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.

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 next step was to actually improve things, and we started that by reading O’Reilly’s High Performance MySQL, which is the best book to get you started on all things database performance – the authors have a nice blog also. It walks you through the very basics and low-level aspects of each storage engine and the internal query parser, and then shows you multiple ways of improving performance.

Table indexes are probably the most important aspect of performance in a MySQL server, and also the easiest to actually implement. It’s nowhere near the complexity of replication or load balancing, but it can give you amazing performance improvements. Here’s a good example of a query quite common that we use in Jumpchart.

SELECT * FROM pages WHERE parent_id=428230

Running it without any use of indexes, our server takes 6 seconds to return the row we’re looking for. Given that each page load requires multiple queries to be properly built, you can imagine how unusable the app would be with performance like that.

Now’s the interesting thing. By indexing the parent_id column in the pages table, the server runs the exact same query in 0 seconds; that’s right, it doesn’t even blink to fetch the results!

This happens because an index in MySQL works just like the one from a book; it lets the database go straight to the “page” it needs to go instead of flipping through all pages until it finds what it’s looking for. The 6 seconds the initial query took was basically due to MySQL going through 400 thousand rows until it found what we asked it to find. In the second approach, MySQL just looks at the index and knows exactly where to go.

We’ve altered dozens of tables within our app this way. Not every adjustment is as dramatic as the one above, and most are more complex. Sometimes you get a few milliseconds, sometimes you win several seconds, but every little bit helps.

If you’re an app developer, you should really find some time to research the ins and outs of MySQL performance and what affects it. Besides the joy of making your app run faster, the process you’ll go through can be very fun, surprising and inspiring. Not to mention that you can save money by getting the same hardware to do more for you.

• Advertising (online/offline/mobile)
• Mobile phones
• Desktop computing
• Music
• Video
• Books
• Search
• Social networking
• email
• File storage
• Document management
• Spreadsheets
• Presentation software
• Social gaming
• Translation
• ecommerce
• Mapping
• Health records
• News
• Blogging
• Photo sharing
• Instant messaging
• Telephony
• 3D Modeling
• Browsers
• Code sharing/ storage
• Hosting
• Calendars
• Scholarly documents and articles
• RSS reading
• Website statistics
• DNS
• Patent search
• Application hosting
• Encyclopedic information (Wikipedia like)

Being into that many things as a company is surely going to create some duds. So is the “Make lots of stuff, and see what sticks” a viable way to run a long term business? Does it eventually create frustration, and mistrust in your users when you don’t wholeheartedly commit to everything you make?