At it again, the Debate Hub

When I first made the jump from a big consulting company to a tiny creative agency, I was worried I would be spending most of my time doing small boring web projects. Yeah, right.

As if I the C-SPAN Convention Hubs that I wrote on earlier weren’t successful enough, we at JESS3 teamed up with C-SPAN and New Media Strategies again to launch the Debate Hub. I served as lead developer. Not only does this have the same great features as the Convention Hubs, like embeddable video, Twitter coverage, and blog content from all over the web, we added in some really killer features.
The Timeline is one of the best features. We’re pulling in transcripts as the debate progresses, and have it segmented out by speaker. Click on a piece of the timeline, and magic happens. This is built off of MIT’s SIMILE project.
The Transcript Treemap is another awesome feature. It shows the most used terms of each candidate, based on the transcripts, along with sparklines (more appropriately, the jQuery version). I even managed, thanks to some more jQuery magic, to allow you to dynamically filter what debates/candidates to show. Of particular importance to me, as the Treemap was created at my alma-mater’s Human Computer Interaction Lab, where I was a researcher for a short period of time (more on what I did there later).

It’s received a ton of press coverage, including ZDNet, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, RedState, and a number of other sites. It’s been a wild ride.

I’m not a very politically involved person. For me, I make sure I vote when possible, care about the issues I choose to care about, but never get more involved. However, I like to think that, when working on projects like these, we’re giving more people access to more information than they previously had, and allowing them to make more educated decisions when it comes to electing their leaders. It may only make a small difference for a small group of people, but that’s all that matters.

Hard to believe I graduated college two years ago…

Look Mom, I’m on TechCrunch!

JESS3 has been working on a not-so-secret project for C-SPAN in the past few weeks.

TechCrunch, the best tech blog out there, just reported on it. C-SPAN is still ironing out some last issues, but IT’S ALIVE!

Read it.

A very big moment!

Much more to come about it later.

AppInADay Round 1: FriendCompare

Stemming out of an heated conversation about who knows what, an idea was born. Jesse and I decided to hold off client projects for one day (just one, calm down!) and set out to build an entire Facebook application from scratch. We had tossed around different ideas in the week before, but by the time we set marker to whiteboard on Monday morning, we had locked down an idea – Facebook friend-based statistics. Jesse is a huge fan of data visualizations, and I like discovering information and patterns out of existing data that I didn’t realize.

So we started from scratch, and by the end of the day, we had the wireframes, full design and a functional version. Jesse was blogging during the day about it.

And now, it’s a full app! Say hello to FriendCompare! We still have a LOT more we want to do with this – even at 1 AM the next morning, Jesse and I were on the phone brainstorming on different things we could do. However, we had to cut it off somewhere!

Development-wise, the application didn’t turn out to be as easy as we thought it would be . Hence why, for the past week, among with working with all our clients, I’ve been working like crazy to get it out.

Some Development Notes:

• Having all the information about the users – their friends, events they attend, education information, is AWESOME – and digging out the interesting nuggets of data poses a really cool challenge.
• FQL, Facebook’s own version of SQL – the language used to access information from just about every modern day database – gives you access to what you think would be a great wealth of today, but also poses HUGE roadblocks, besides the privacy restrictions. You would think that for a statistics application, you would need lots of standard SQL functions like COUNTs and JOINs, but as Facebook had neither, we were left pulling huge amounts of data down onto our server and analyzing it there. This makes any good web developer cringe in pain.
• Additionally, Facebook’s API is horribly slow. If you try to make more than a couple FQL/API calls, Facebook starts timing out, rendering the application useless.
• Enter Preload FQL. Rather than you calling the API from your server, you can specify ahead of time what information you’ll need from the Facebook databases, so when Facebook calls your application, all the data you need is already there. However, developing in that method tripled the amount of time necessary.
• We needed a LOT of different pieces of information, so bearing in mind all the above issues, it took a lot more than a day’s work to get it done.

So, in hindsight, maybe this particular idea wasn’t the best to try and tackle in a day. We were offered an existing codebase, however I turned that down, as it seemed a better decision at the time to write from scratch.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, including Eric and Jay from Lookery! Not to mention all the people who blogged about it and sent messages of support, and our clients for letting us take the day off!

Work/Life Balance

My first job out of college was working for a major consulting company. As is common in large companies, corporate principles and values are conveyed through long-thought out materials… standardized presentations, decks, and emails.

One of the values that was always conveyed to me was creating and maintaining a standard work-life balance. At that point in time, I couldn’t understand what that meant. Don’t you just come in the morning, do your work, and after eight hours, go home? As I was working in the government-consulting sector, with strict laws limiting the amount of hours I could legally work in a week, that wasn’t an issue. I was forced to maintain a work-life balance. My work-life balance heavily favored life – with a clear barrier delineating work time and personal time, and a set quota on the former.

As I moved on to my new role as a core member of a startup creative agency, the world flipped for me. I find myself at the extreme opposite of the spectrum, where work becomes such a dominating factor that it has all but eliminated the aspects of life one takes for granted. Eighteen or twenty hour work days. Six or seven day work weeks. Fighting for that little bit of time to go out and even grab groceries. It’s all self-inflicted, of course. I chose this path.

When you are working for yourself, or in any kind of environment with no set roles and an endless flow of both possibilities and deadlines, the work never stops. You can’t see a project and assume one of your other fifteen thousand co-workers will take care of it when you are the only one out of the three of you who can handle it. There are no timesheets, no rules.

Enhancing productivity becomes even more important.

Isolating problems.

And sometimes, leaving things on the table and getting a good night’s sleep!