“Let’s all talk about this stuff in public, so that we can teach each other how to get better at whatever the heck it is we love to do.” – Jeff Atwood
Love it! When you write about what’s going on in your company, it can be scary putting your experiences out there for the world to read. You never know what you’ll learn from the occasional transparent blog article- whether you’re the one writing it, or reading it.
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
Not the least bit productive, they’re not the states of mind you want when you’re trying to, well… do anything. How do you get out of your slump? I think the first step is simple, although often overlooked.
First things first
Think about it this way. When you realize your problem is just a state of mind, you’ll realize you have the power to change it. Mentally take control of your actions- and know that you’re bigger than they are. Yeah, actions speak louder than words, but actions don’t happen without your willpower leading the way.
Here’s how it goes for me. There’s an internal battle going on in my head: I think about the thing I have to do. I realize how difficult this thing is going to be. I decide to do it anyway. Keep Reading
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.
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.
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.
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.
Occasionally we publish support emails on the blog. Usually if one person asks, – more people want to know, but just haven’t asked yet.
QUESTION: (referring to the boss)”...The time entry feature will be great for us, but he will want to know if can it be integrated into his billing process. Basically, does it have the ability to go beyond project communication and management to reporting and billing?”
ANSWER:
I think a lot of this answer depends on your particular workflow, and tools. Here are a few random thoughts that might help:
“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
We think preferences suck. We tend to be positive about most things, -but we really do hate preferences…
Preferences are:
Make sure the list is small, and deal with them gracefully as possible.
When do you get your ideas? I mean literally, in the middle of the night? During your work hours? While eating dinner with your family?
My husband snorts at me every time we’re in the car and I turn my purse inside out looking for my notebook. I’m usually in a panic to jot down the idea I just had- but that’s me; if I don’t get it down in a hurry, who knows if I’ll remember it later. (I quite possibly have memory issues…)
My ideas aren’t always directly tied to work- in fact, most of the time, they’re not. (I’m one of those who has to really step away from the monitor a few hours a day.) But if I try, I can steer them in that direction eventually. Keep Reading
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.
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There were an apparent 23 versions before this, but this is when it really started to take shape.
