Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Playing Left Handed.

Joe 12/14/10
Uncategorized

Two nice quotes from Shigeru Miyamoto, the genius behind many of Nintendo’s best games.

“There’s a big difference between the money you receive personally from the company and the money you can use in your job.”

“So sometimes I ask the younger game creators to try playing the games they are making by switching their left and right hands. In that way, they can understand how inexperienced the first-timer is.”

via kottke

Getting On With It.

Joe 12/03/10
Uncategorized

I’ve been reading Richard Feynman lately. Although my brain feels battered by his brilliance, and his grasp of far reaching ideas, I keep bumping against something else about him that I find fascinating.

Feynman accepts facts. Light moves as particles and waves? Maybe this is true, or maybe there is a more elegant answer. Why does it seem this way? What machine drives it? Feynman seemingly doesn’t care.

The fact that it can be described this way is what matters. If the description he has of something is sufficiently accurate enough to get him to the next step, he has no reason to challenge it till it brings about a fallacy.

I think I have a lot to learn from this attitude. Getting on with it, moving to the next thing and course correcting only where necessary.

A good example is our programming language of choice, PHP. It’s a mess of a language. It’s strength lies in it’s breadth, but it’s width is a spiraling spaghetti mess.

I’m a “why” learner. When I understand the reason why something exists, and how it is supposed to work, I feel that I can begin to “think” within the system. I can anticipate the way that something should work. I can reason without knowing.

PHP offers very few opportunities for this. Very often it asks you to have faith in libraries without knowing why they work. Very often it asks you to grant it exceptions to syntax, just because. Almost always it tells you that there are several ways to achieve the same goals. It is in effect the result of many brains thinking many different ways.

I struggle with this continually. I’m someone who can explain to you how historical events relate to each other, but I often cannot give you specific dates or facts. I’m a reasoner, not a memorizer.

It’s time for a confession. My first professional programing languages were ActionScript and Coldfusion. Outrageously bad picks for having your past efforts translate into future success. Both are becoming increasingly obsolete in cool web dev circles. (not sure Coldfusion was ever cool)

I can say this for these languages though. They were constructed on purpose,, and with a methodical effort. You could think in them. Even if you had no experience with a thing, you could often trial it out without cracking a book.

While that feels good, I think there is something greater to be yielded from a larger, more open system. Trusting that things work, because they do. The idea that I don’t have to dig down to bedrock to do something great is liberating.

So besides the fact that orbiting objects are essentially falling perpetually at a fixed rate and speed towards a round object, I’ll take away something else from Feynman. Maybe it makes no sense why a function, or pattern works the way it does. Maybe I disagree with why something is built the way it is. But if my wishes are not what is true for the rest of the world, I need to get on with it and try to do something great with what does work.

“I started a design business, not a marketing business!”

Kristin 11/05/10
Uncategorized

“If you have your own business, you are in the business of marketing.”

- Quicksprout

Neil Patel (Quicksprout) tells the sad story of Roger. Roger had great aspirations for his design career straight out of college, but failed when he started his own business because he forgot about the whole marketing thing.

I don’t think a lot of people realize how time consuming marketing is when they decide to go it alone. You think to yourself- hey, I can handle this. After all, it’s my skills that are going to make me money. And that might be true… eventually. But your audience has to know you exist, and what’s more- they have to like you.

That’s why I think marketing works best on a personal level. Don’t have a lot of money to spend on print ads, web ads and other promotions? There’s an easier way. Start conversations with people. Networking is the best thing you can do that doesn’t cost any money- and I think it’s the most profitable over time. You never know who can point you in the right direction. We do it ourselves- when we come across a project that isn’t a good fit for us, we’ll recommend someone we think is. Those kinds of personal relationships have, in turn, brought us some really cool projects- and recurring business.

We’re not experts on social networking, but in the age of Twitter, you have no excuse not to reach out. Start talking. Even if your forte is programming or design (read: not marketing!), you can still let your voice be heard. What’s even better is that people will see you for who you are. Personal touches don’t get more genuine than that.

Adjust Your High Standards for the Better.

Kristin 10/25/10
Paste, Uncategorized

“Dave Navarro wrote recently that worrying about what you’re doing (or not doing) is the surest way to keep you poor and unsuccessful.

It’s a cracking article with a heap of good points, one of them being that the key difference in the way successful people operate is that they see failure as an integral part of the process of achieving success.

That’s true. Unless you plan on spending all your time underneath your duvet, failure is in your destiny. Trying to minimize or avoid failure will not help you be successful.” – Steve Errey, Copyblogger

Of course failing isn’t your goal. But taking it with a grain of salt, and figuring out what you did wrong is, in my opinion, a fantastic way to learn. And look at it this way: unless you fail day after day, without seeing any successes whatsoever, you’re probably not going to lose your job or repel a client. (And at that point maybe you should re-evaluate the line of work you’re in…) We’re human, and humans understand humans.

You have high standards for yourself and that’s great. But the occasional mistake should be included in those standards.

Lists Like This Give Lists a Good Name.

Joe 10/21/10
Uncategorized

“2,500 years ago, a Greek writer told us something about creating software: Thucydides wrote, ‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.’ The optimal society is one that mixes scholar-warriors and warrior-scholars. The same is true for companies that schism their designers and engineers. The most important trait a team can have is empathy. Without it, the implementers will not care, and the designers will not be realistic. When companies complain of specs and code being “tossed over the fence”, a lack of empathy is to blame.”
An excellent article by Aza Raskin. I bet family get-togethers at his house are a real trip.

Spend your time on tomorrow, not today:

“The percentage of our time we spend on DVD by mail [still Netflix’s biggest revenue source by far] is tiny. We’re entirely focused on streaming.” Most newspaper companies’ organization and usage of staff time is focused on print. That means it is facing today, if not yesterday. Expend as few resources on the current operating model as possible, says Hastings, and run to the future. Put your best minds there — and most of your company. ‘We knew that the DVD business was temporary when we founded the company. That’s why we named it Netflix and not DVD by mail. We wanted to become Netflix.’ Whatever the brand name, aspire to what and who you want to become.”

- Reed Hastings Founder of Netflix

How Not to Help a Charity.

Joe 09/30/10
free ideas, Uncategorized

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?

I Don’t Get “Startups”

Joe 09/15/10
Uncategorized

It’s a business. But we haven’t started it yet. Well, maybe it’s an idea, but we have people to implement it. Well, the people aren’t on board yet, -we need to offer them a lucrative salary. And we need an office, and about 6 months of operating expense to get going. And we might not be “profitable” for a while…

WTF ever happened to Ramen Noodles, and working till 3am? Where’s the passion? Where’s the drive?

Nobody needs an office these days. Nobody needs “operating expenses.”

You know what software to develop a million dollar company costs today? Zero dollars. Or if you want to splurge you can spend, maybe, $1000 on software that can do amazingly incredible things. Hard work + cheap tools will beat lazy + great tools every single day.

You need an Aeron, and a conference room? You need a company car, and a secretary? F. U.

We started out with a 3 year old laptop, and financed Macs. Apartment coffee tables, and care packages of beef stew from our parents. Our girlfriends scrubbed the floor of our first filthy office on their cute hands and knees. Our “conference table” was an old restaurant booth we found at salvage. We worked late, and worked hard.

We’re not rich now. Far from it. We’re still scrapping, and working our butts off. But we’re living on our own 2 legs, and working for nobody but ourselves. Even the people who were not here at the beginning know that we survive on nobody’s benevolence or wits but our own. It is the only, only way that makes any sense to us to live.

So go. Go suck off the corporate teet if you will. Maybe you’ll get lucky, and not ever have to care about anything in your life, – because caring about postponed success is a hard and sucky endeavor. But we little “startups” who are self funded go to bed at night late, exhausted, modestly employed, and happy as hell.

How it Usually Evolves.

Joe 09/09/10
Uncategorized

“Apple is like a mutant virus, escaping from the traditional structure of the PC industry, but the industry will still eventually build up immunity, thus further blocking this trend, and we believe the size of the non-Apple camp will exceed Apple’s, because this is how the industry normally evolves.”

- Acer founder and retired chairman Stan Shih

If you’re basing all your business plans on how things “normally evolve” you’re about to become extinct.

Less is Still Just Less.

“Complex” apps are usually a mess. Look at any Adobe app, or Microsoft app. Most of them (not all) are a catastrophic mess. They look like the drawer in your laundry room. The one where disparate items like flashlights, rulers, sewing kits, giveaway pencils, off-sized screws, and IKEA pieces, and half-used batteries come to rest. Not purposefully lain, but because no force but apathy, and gravity could hope to contain them.

Complex apps “do more.” But they do it at the expense of crashes, and a manual in seven languages. Users use them, they hate them. They’re trapped by some function that no other app has, but that they need.

Take Photoshop for example (please take it!). No other app does RGB/CMYK, and compositing as elegantly. It’s amazing with it’s bezier curve handling and it’s simple yet incredibly powerful layer management. Keep Reading

Paste Interactive is a small app studio that makes cool, smart tools to help next generation workers work better, simpler, and faster.
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