A lot goes in to learning something new. There’s not always someone who can show you the ropes- you have to muddle through it yourself. If you’re doing it for the first time, it might be rough, and you might second-guess yourself. It’s truly awesome to know you can constantly get better and smarter, but it ain’t easy.

You’ll probably go wrong a time or two. You’ll probably mutter a few choice words you hope your cube buddy didn’t hear. You’ll might even want to throw your computer right out the window. But you’ll be glad you didn’t. ‘Cause what comes next makes all the frustration worth it.

Victory.

It’s that moment when you know you’ve done it. When you sit back, look at the completed project, and smile stupidly because you’re so dang proud of yourself. You went through hell to get there- and it took twice as long as you hoped, but the end result is right. Now you know, and you can do this new thing you learned over and over.

This thing might be relatively insignificant, and it might be something your co-workers already know how to do… or it could be something cutting edge you can teach those around you.

Small victories are a big deal, so don’t brush them off, or downplay them.

The web is truly in a great place right now. Every day you can see dozens of new applications launched that required countless man hours to make. The nuances and specificity of them is beginning to boggle the mind. The sheer quantity of people on Earth capable of writing a web application is amazing.

In fact, as a web developer it’s somewhat daunting. You can have a thought like “what if I made a tool to keep track of when my next oil change comes due?” and a few seconds later realize that dozens of apps have beat you to the punch.

Sure, you could maybe improve the interface, make it prettier, promote it better, integrate it with Twitter, etc. But it seems like there’s nothing left in big chunks that isn’t a minute improvement on a small facet of something else.

Let’s skip to another subject for a second.

In 1997 NASA, in conjunction with the European and Italian Space Agencies, launched the Cassini-Huygens space probe. It had a far-reaching set of goals, most of which seemed more optimistic than legitimate. It’s track was outward from Earth- taking a layman’s tour of our solar system as it became accessible by coincidentally calculated orbit.

After near-space tours of Earth’s moon, Venus, and Jupiter, Cassini was en-route to one of Saturn’s moons named Enceladus. By this time it was 2005, and Cassini had already discovered three new moons of Saturn, tested General Relativity and made countless other minor discoveries leading to better understandings of our close corner of the universe. Keep Reading

Being the nerd that I am, a good percentage of my Christmas gifts were books. Since I’m always on the hunt for good books myself, I thought it would be cool to share a few of my gifts on the chance they’ll provide a spark for somebody else.

501 Bento box lunches.
My family knows I’m interested in both cooking and Japanese culture, so this one wasn’t a big surprise. I totally dig the idea that even something as mundane as packing a lunch deserves the care and attention to detail that bento requires. If you ever feel bored, remember you could be doing a better and more interesting job of even the small things.

100 Classic Graphic Design Books
I wanted this book to be amazing. It turned out to be only good. I share it just so you don’t get suckered in by the cover like I did. It’s a good book, but mostly it’s just a bunch of pictures of spreads that are too small to really do any justice. You’ve been warned.

The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams
I’m near obsessed with Apple hardware, and it’s common knowledge that Jony Ive, Apple’s lead designer is obsessed with Dieter Rams. This book is an incredible tour through Rams’ amazing design portfolio. Early sketches, great interviews, and tons of photography. Keep Reading

During the Holidays, we take a little time off to enjoy friends, family, and frankly, a break from work. For this reason, we’ll be in and out over the next week- so support might be a little slower than usual till we’re back full-swing on Jan. 3. If you have an emergency during that time, though, e-mail us- we’ll do our best to get you taken care of as soon as possible.

Happy Holidays!

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

Next time I just have to have that book on Amazon, I will remember this. My already crowded bookshelf will thank me.

“Coveting possessions is unhealthy. Here’s how I look at it:

All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free.

When I want to take something out of storage, I just pay the for the storage costs for that particular thing up to that point, plus a nominal shipping fee, and my things are delivered to me so I can use them. When I am done with them, I return them to storage via Craigslist or Ebay, and I am given a fee as compensation for freeing up the storage facilities resources.” – via Jackcheng in The Office of Frank Chimero

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.

In 1899 Charles H. Duell, was quoted as saying, “everything that can be invented has been invented.” To our ears, he sounds like an ignorant old hayseed. You could fill oceanliners with the gobs of stuff that has been invented since then.

But I have to admit I can relate to the statement. Everywhere I look on the internet I see the same old crap. Recombinations of old ideas. Mostly minor improvements on “old” ideas that were created only just months ago. I suppose as an industry we’re just iterating on our own ideas. I suppose it’s healthy.

But I can’t help thinking it’s getting a little old. I’m not pretending we’re above this criticism. Some people have said that Staction was just Twitter+Basecamp. Jumpchart was called “a specialized wiki.” Paprika is probably an even smaller evolutionary leap.

We’ve been working for seemingly endless months on tweaks to our current apps. In the background we’ve been dreaming of new apps. I have lists of ideas. Many lists, -big lists. I can pretty much summarize them for you, -they’re all essentially just a different way to collect data from form fields and process it. That’s what all productivity apps do.

So what can you do to invent? Someone types text on a keyboard, and you store it. Or use rudimentary processing to try and understand it. Or attach meta information to it to try and make it more useful. Ad infinitum.

So have we as an industry maxed out the number of ways we can creatively combine todos, milestones, text, and files? What’s the next thing in productivity apps?

A lot of people think the moment of discovery is a loud, bright, crash-bang thing that happens all in one instant.

I think that’s wishful thinking.

As humans, we can be guilty of sitting around, waiting for the next big idea to hit us. We reactively reflect, think about things, expose ourselves to relevant material and hope to have some sort of epiphany that will make us the next Alexander Graham Bell. But it’s just another excuse for not producing. Is waiting for something to be revealed to us just divine laziness?

Think about some of the biggest inventions in history. The telephone. The lightbulb. The computer. The inventors of all these things worked their butts off over a period of time to get the results they ended up with. They pitched their ideas. They got rejected time after time. But they made progress, then made improvements on their progress. They got to their finished product in increments- not all in one day.

So, instead of waiting for greatness to strike and our names to go down in the history books in the blink of an eye, we should spend our time improving on the baby steps we’ve already taken…. The path less traveled.

Interesting related reading: Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun

“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.