With The Band

I touched on this before, but Marc Andreesen’s essay about careers and creating and accepting opportunities rather than having a definite plan really resonated in me.

I believe a huge part of what people would like to refer to as “career planning” is being continuously alert to opportunities that present themselves to you spontaneously, when you happen to be in the right place at the right time.

And with that in mind, effective May 2nd, I will be Chief Technical Officer of JESS3.



I couldn’t be more excited. Jesse has already built an amazing team, a huge and exciting client roster, and has the passion and drive to realize our dreams.

Plus I get to play on the web all day. Who can beat that?

Jesse had posted about this the other day, but I wanted to give my current employer proper notice before I started talking about it.

People often trash working for large companies, especially anything government related. I loved it. But, in the end, I knew where I wanted to be, and a stepping stone formed around it.

Real World, Stage 2.

This popped up on a picture I posted… Completely unrelated, but I wonder how they are doing it.

I doubt it’s any kind of recognition. My bet is it saw that I was attending these two events (or supposed to) at around the same time, and thought I might have taken it there.

May be more useful in the long run… if you’re the type that posts pictures during or immediately after events.

And yes, that’s a Macbook Pro. More on that later.

Happened across this - Apple Human Interface Guidelines, along with having the standard instructions for developing a product that looks, well… Apple-y, has some great content in their Characteristics of Great Software section.

When making design decisions regarding features in your application,
it’s important to weigh the costs, not all of which are financial,
against the potential benefits. Every time you add a feature to your
application, the following things can happen:

• Your application gets larger.

• Your application gets slower.

• Your application’s human interface becomes more complex.

• You spend time developing new features rather than refining existing features.

• Your application’s documentation and help become more extensive.

• You run the risk of introducing changes that could adversely affect existing features.

• You increase the time required to validate the behavior of your application.

Choosing
appropriate features and devoting the needed resources to implement
them correctly can save you time and effort later. Choosing poor
feature sets or failing to assign appropriate design, engineering,
testing, and documentation resources often incurs heavier costs later
when critical bugs appear or users can’t figure out how to use your
product.

The following sections present several additional factors to take into consideration before adding features to your product.

This still remains my favorite music video of all time - nowadays they are all junk.

Facebook applications are awesome - and a good number of developers and agencies have committed to themselves full time to developing applications for themselves and for clients. We all see huge potential for being able to interact with users on such a personal level, so easily. Relying on other services is a big component of this generation of web applications in general. The ability to import and export data out of other services freely using publicly available APIs really lit a fire among coders, hackers, and entrepreneurs. I’ve used other people’s APIs to create a few things of my own (including a bunch of FB apps).

The problem is, it’s not yours.

* You’re running your business on other people’s property - They can kick you out an any time, for any reason (or none whatsoever).

* When it goes down, you go down - I’ve encountered periods of extreme frustration when something goes down (say, the Facebook Platform), and thus, your application breaks or disappears altogether. Good programming and redundancy can mitigate that **some** of the time, but otherwise, you’re stuck whining “it’s not me!”

* Who says they’ll stick around? - Similar to above. Unless they are an established and stable company (and what company is in the current economic state), they have to be concerned with their own profitability. Who says they won’t go belly up, leaving you SOL?

* You have no control - A slight change in the way things work can throw everything off-kilter for you, and you have no control over that. That happened to me last week, and, as responsive as they may have been, I still had no technical ability to stop it or change it back. You just deal with it.

* There are no guarantees, and no responsibility - You’re using a free service, most of the time with no SLA. While they may have you agree to something, there’s nothing on their end.

* You are just a feature - All too often, I’ve seen things that rely so heavily on external systems that it’s really nothing more than a nice little feature, a tool that helps someone use the primary service.

* You are replaceable - If you really are just a feature, who says you can’t be replaced. Everyone was yammering about social.im a few weeks back - so much for that. (there’s a rumor that they were acquired by the big blue giant, but I highly doubt it).

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t ever develop an application that relies on any external system. But you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket - diversification is the only free lunch.

This is a bit of a stream of thought, so bear with me.

One of the topics that really interests me is the last mile.

We have electronic devices that store and deal with pretty much any type of information. Phone numbers, addresses, messages, people, etc. Fridges that keep track of our food, even.

But how do they all connect? They don’t.

When will all of them communicate? When will, the moment I accept an appointment, show up in my phone, calendar, GPS, e-mail, etc? I can think of a million more examples.

Will microformats make a difference?

I can’t believe I missed it!

Late last year I mentioned that Yahoo was coming out with it’s own location management platform. They launched it last week in private beta. At this point - it really is just that, a platform. Very few applications exist. Seth Levine was kind enough to send me an invite.

I wrote a quick application using Fire Eagle. Birdwatcher shows recent location updates on a nice pretty map (using the Yahoo Maps API, of course…).

The bummer is that I can’t get a feed of recent updates platform-wide that twitter offers, even if I’m not displaying any identifying information. So if you want your updates to be added, click the “Add yourself” link in the top right corner and the application will start showing your locations as you add them.

I see location as an upcoming feature in online interaction. As our technology usage grows more transparent and better integrated in our lives, including while mobile, where we are will play a role.

My ideal application is something that will automatically update itself on my location, and notify me if my friends are near me. From the screenshots on Fire Eagle’s site, it looks like they are planning a Facebook application that will do that. If they don’t come up with something soon I may do it myself…

I’ll eventually post up the source code for BirdWatcher, so others can see how it works + improve.

Some Overall Thoughts

• The geocoder is pretty robust. Just like Google Maps, you can type in a lot of crap and it’ll figure it out.
• The platform isn’t that stable yet. Was down for a while today.
• Don’t launch a platform with a total of zero demo applications (other than a very basic walkthrough).
• Don’t launch a platform with incomplete libraries (the PHP api had about half of the functions, and didn’t fully work).
• Fire Eagle is touted as heavily privacy focused - in face it’s about the same as Facebook. Once you grant permission to an application, they can see and do whatever they like.

UPDATE: I encountered some issues with the API yesterday, but they are resolved now.

UPDATE 2: Yeah, they changed their API around. Thanks for telling me… NOT. What has two thumbs and is really annoyed right now? THIS GUY. The app is broken right now. Fire Eagle is taking a ride on the FailBoat.

I love Craigslist. You see a lot of decent gigs, but there’s also a ton of crap.

And every once in a while, someone lashes out.

Reply to: gigs-585642542@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-02-24, 9:19PM EST

Looking for someone to design a new company logo - the logo will be light-infused, modern, edgy, clean, and professional. Please link to examples/portfolio of past artwork done. Offering $80.

Oh, dear Gaahhhhdd.
Pardon me while I laugh until I wet myself… there, that’s better.

Twenty-five years I’ve been an illustrator, designer and art director — thirty, if you count my college paper — and everytime I think I’ve heard the stupidest, most otherwordly boneheaded requests ever, along comes one to top it.

Is this the same doorknob that wants his Web site redesigned for — what, a hundred bucks? Jeezus Christ on a Segway. Eighty bucks for a logo? I don’t mean to give you a heart attack or anything, pal, but logo/corporate identity/branding design that’s “light-infused, modern, edgy, clean, and professional” runs into the thousands of dollars, easily — sometimes more, depending on the scope of your campaign and how many different ideas you want and how many revisions you go through.

When I see shit like this in here, sometimes, honestly…I don’t know whether to laugh or cry (or stick a shotgun in my mouth).

Somebody drop a piano on this dope, and wake him the hell up.

There are two great days in a person’s life – the day we are born and the day we discover why.

William Barclay [via Guru Gilbert]

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