Biz

Advice for First-Time Attendees to MicroConf

In April, I attented MicroConf. The talks and conversations were invaluable to my business. As the tickets for MicroConf 2016 are going on sale shortly, I wanted to write up advice for first-time attendees, especially those who are early in their business and want to learn a lot.

Y Combinator News

A few weeks ago my RailsConf talk on writing better web apps when they outgrow MVC was posted to Y Combinator News. It hung out on the front page all day, spending some time at the #2 slot. Over 35,000 people visited the page and 3,700 watched the talk video, which thrills me.

Acceptable Errors

I really liked Adrian Holovaty’s suggestion that Chicago stop trying to be the Bay Area and focus on bootstrapping. Chicago will always be an also-ran as long as it’s running someone else’s race.

Hiring Apprentices

Lately I’ve been talking with students at programming bootcamps about their overwhelming fear that they’re not learning quickly and thoroughly enough to find employment afterwards. I think it’s generally produced more by the intensive crunch-time atmosphere of the schools and growing recognition of how big and complex programming is than by an actual deficiency in skills.

So Play We All

Peter Harkins, Jim C. Gadrow, and Luke Hutscal are each building an online game as part of a contest between us. Every week we’ll pick a new area of our games to code on and budget how many hours to spend on it. Every week, someone will be judged to have done the best. Anyone who doesn’t put in the time pays the price by funding the others’ games. Anyone who quits has to delete their entire codebase and all backups.

Interview Questions

When I got my first jobs, I didn’t know that job interviews should include the candidate interviewing the company. I learned from the experience and, in talking with others, have slowly accreted a list of interview questions I’ll bring (yes, really, print out and bring) to learn interesting things about employers and avoid dysfunctional workplaces.

Freemium and Segmentation

How do games on Facebook make money?

Domain Registration Survey

I’ve had all my domains registered at Name.com for a few years - great price, decent control panel, and competent support. Last week I went to renew some domains and found that Name has quietly doubled their prices by charging for the whois privacy protection that used to be free.

Admitting Diminishing Returns

In 2009, I acted like this equation is true:

Efficiency Replaces Autonomy

I’ve been pondering the rise of metrics-driven game design — from the sites I follow it sounds like the game industry at large has been as well. The makers of retail games are realizing they can make more money with less risk by careful analysis of how they directly charge gamers in the free-to-play (F2P) model.

Survey of Conference Attendees

If you have attended a conference this year where people have used Twitter, IRC, or similar tools to carry on conversations during the live event (a “backchannel”), I’d appreciate it if you would take this brief (5-15 minute) survey:

As Difficult as Possible

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

Announcing ListLibrary.net

ListLibrary.net is officially launched.

Done at the Post

Yesterday was my last day at the Washington Post. I don’t have a lot to add to my update 6 weeks ago; aside from some updates to the database of Guantanamo Detainees all of what I’ve done has been internal improvements to start the upgrade to Django 1.0 (80 apps take a while), tidy up templates, and make sure all my code and projects are smoothly transitioned to other newsroom employees.

Web Game

The big project I’ve mentioned is a web-based game: in 5-20 minutes per day, you recruit and send out your roster of secret agents on operations from secret bases in an online world made up of your friends and hundreds of thousands of other players.

NearbyGamers To-Do List

NearbyGamers has been growing steadily without a lot of direct action on my part. I’ve been bugfixing and moderating, but aside from some performance improvements in November, it’s been quite a while since its had any user-visible improvements. Mostly this has been because I keep distracting myself with side projects: they’re deceptively simple to start but always have some area(s) of significant non-obvious complexity and a need for time-consuming polishing and refinement. I’m going to finish them off and then give attention to NearbyGamers.

Small Plans

My last day at the Post is Feb 20, and I’m headed to Chicago on the 22nd. I’ll be helping a family member recover from surgery, so my schedule (both day-to-day and how long I’ll be in town) is pretty vague, but I’ll be around at least a few weeks before returning to DC.

Giving Notice

Today I gave notice that my last day at the Washington Post will be February 20. The primary reason is that I need to take time off to help a family member convalesce. I’m not taking a leave of absence because I’ve long wanted to work for myself.

Linearization of the Playing Field

It bugs me when people say that tools like Amazon’s EC2 and S3 “level the playing field”. They really don’t, the playing field is still as tilted towards the large players as ever.

Free Shipping From Amazon Merchants

I read a post today about a guy who bought a camera from an Amazon Merchant and left negative feedback after it was shipped poorly (via BoingBoing). They offered to refund the shipping cost ($75) if he’d take down his negative feedback. This caught my attention, because it’s happened to me.

Improvement and the Hawthorne Effect

37Signals decided to experiment with a 4-day work week and announced last week that it had been success in improving productivity and employee satisfaction. I saw it linked from a few places, and the most common comment was “Wow, they should try a 3-day work week, they’d be even more productive, right? Wait, how about a 2-day!?”

Choose Your Candidate

I haven’t posted a work update in a while, because mostly I’ve had a lull between projects and a new coworkers, so we’ve been cleaning out the bug and minor feature list. There’s a really neat project I want to link to called Choose Your Candidate that I was only peripherally involved with (I gave advice for how to do the ranking math).

Post: Politics and Blogs

The Politics team has kept me busy the last two weeks at the Post, so I’ve got plenty to mention here. The 2008 Campaign Tracker has gotten some big new features. Pull up Barack Obama (my former-hometown’s hero) and look at the column on the right side.

Post: The Moby Quotient

On Friday I put up an app to let folks calculate and share the Moby Quotient of songs — a measurement of how much an artist sold out by allowing their work to be used in a commercial. The app is a companion to a story in the Post.

Post: Politics Glossary

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WashingtonPost.com

Today I added code to the Washington Post’s 2007 Presidential Field to show campaign events by type. I’ve joined Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive as a web developer (Python with Django) and this is my first code to go live.

Sociable 2.0 Released

Sociable 2.0 is out!

Sociable 2.0 Tomorrow

Hey everyone, I know I said I’d release 2.0 today, but I have to delay until tomorrow. I’m waiting to hear back from one of the sites supporting Sociable development confirming their commitment and sorting out last-minute arrangements. I should’ve scheduled a little more time for this process.

Sociable 2.0 Beta 2

The long-awaited Sociable 2.0 release is at hand! Before I do a full release and announcement next week on 2007-02-01, I wanted to do a beta release to shake out any bugs. If you don’t mind the risk that Sociable might smoke a little, please download the beta and let me know how it works for you. (Yep, we’re already on beta 2 -- I got an updated site icon just before I finished writing this blog post.)

Announcing NearbyGamers

I’d like to invite you all to check out my newest project, NearbyGamers, a service for tabletop gamers to find other players. (As I mentioned earlier, it’s a Rails site.) It’s for people who play RPGs, CCGs, TCGs, wargames, board games -- basically any game where you need to have a live human on the other side of a table if you want to play.

Freshwater Live and TechCoffee

Last night I went to the invite-only Freshwater Live, a meeting for entrepreneurs of all experience levels put on by Freshwater Venture. FV is a neat blog that profiles Chicago tech companies and is run by consummate nice-guy Keith Schacht and Eric Antonow (who is probably also a nice guy but I don’t know him).

Bar Camp Chicago

I just got home from Bar Camp Chicago and it was awesome. Two days of geeky topics.

Leaving Hostway

Earlier today I gave my two weeks’ notice to Hostway. I’ve worked at Hostway since April 2005 as a maintenence coder on RegistryPro and, since last month, part-time on the web frontend of an internal monitoring system. I’m not going to be posting about why. There’s no exciting scandal, it’s just a case of mismatched needs and goals.

Cambrian House Party

Cambrian House, the startup I snuck a peek at and got a hat-tip from has opened for a public beta test. They’re sort of an open-source business incubator: folks submit ideas, the best of which become projects; folks submit code, art, and copy, the best of which go into the finished project. Cambrian House (or a spinoff company, perhaps) runs the project as an online business, paying royalties back to the folks who contributed.

Cambrian Development

Since I posted about Cambrian House last night, they’ve responded to me. I sent a heads-up mail to them (because I saw their blog didn’t pick up the trackback I sent) and got a brief thank-you note back from the CEO/founder saying they’d fix their permissions problem.

Pre-Cambrian House

I was poking around reddit and followed a link to CambrianCode.com, an all-Flash (ugh!) puzzle game. There’s a few of these “guess how to get to next level” games online and they all just annoy me. Yes, you’re so clever. No, I find patronization alluring. Yes, I’ll spend my time on this for no discernable reward.

Sociable Makes Blogs Happy

I just read a neat blog post on one guy’s experience using Sociable. It even has a nice graph. That’s a nice spike in traffic.

NDAs: Fear and Shame

The two fundamental reasons NDAs exist are fear and shame, and that’s only halfway a bad thing.

Sociable Is The New Black

One of the problems Sociable has is that it can be incredibly tacky. Yes, speaking as officially as possible, I'm saying lots of links to social bookmarking sites at the end of your posts are ugly. So let me address why I wrote a plugin that's easily used to make blogs ugly.

GoJobby Launches - Web 2.0 Job Site

Found a neat job site through Ajaxian and filled out a profile to check it out. It's a neat site, but I've got a few concerns/suggestions and a big warning.

Sociable 1.2

I've just fixed a few more WordPress 1.5 bugs to create Sociable 1.2. There are also some css changes so that weird themes do fewer weird things to the display of Sociable (and man, do they do a lot).

Sociable 1.1

I'm pleased to announce Sociable 1.1, a bugfix release.

Sociable 1.0

I've been quiet the last week because my free time has been taken up by finishing Sociable, a plugin to the WordPress blog software. It's the reason there are the cute little icons down below this post.

The Best Filler Ever Written

If you're building a website and don't have filler text for "About" pages or product descriptions, don't use lorem ipsum.