Work Archives
It has been nearly two months now since me and the rest of Refactr LLC have been out on our own and participating in the great experiment that is virtual officing. We have been using spaces such as coffee shops and libraries to meet and conduct our business. We have tried many locations and it works well when we have meetings in one part of the cities or another to just move around like nomads. It is very nice to have low overhead costs and use the three things we need: Internet access, electricity, and a table - all for the cost of a few lattes and maybe a bran muffin.
We find that it is great to get out of the house and work together, and have not missed a day of meeting, usually at 8am once we went out on our own.
However, like many things in life, the little jagged parts - issues that at first seemed pretty minor, begin to rub you the wrong way (or the same way but in the same spot repeatedly) until finally you can't take it any more. In actuality, coffee shops are not free as each of the three of us has consistently spent between $25 and $50 per week on coffee, tea, and snacks. That adds up ($300-$600/month). Then we have to always cart all of our stuff in and out each day. We can't bring too many books in our our good headphones. Bringing outside food is also, either awkward (rude to the establishment) or impractical (no refrigerator or microwave) so there are additional costs for lunch (both monetary and time-wise).
No wonder, so many start-ups or freelancers look to get together in a more permanent space using ideas described and put into in the form of things like CoWorking and Bucketworks.
These endeavors haven't been easy as the headlines show - Saint Paul's "Ren Box" in need of rescuing. I think that a primary problem is a lack of a person who devotes most of his/her time to it. I believe it really takes a lot of administration to do something like this, and people don't get into this to be administrators.
Garrick wrote a summary of this topic a while back as well.
Now my friend Justin Grammens at Atomic Objects, is restarting the discussion for the Twin Cities. I am excited to see what comes of it.
Tonight was the 2nd meeting of what some* are terming the Twin Cities Social Capital Collective (SCC) and I want to give props to Jake Saba for getting this ball rolling. Between minnebar, SCC, and minnedemo, in September my little web and business communities in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are alive and brimming with excitement.
*Ok I was brainstorming ideas, and this was one of the ideas that came out of my brain but it was one of many :)
I have a feeling many good things are going to be coming out of these events and opportunities and am glad to see them growing. If you are interested in any of these events let me know in the comments and I will post more and/or write privately.
A couple housekeeping notes to clear up: 1) I temporarily launched a new version of Alt Text but then rolled it back when there was some bad mojo with IE. Stupid IE! 2) Some colleagues and I have put up refactr.com - a site devoted to the discussion and encouragement of the Agile method. That's a good little Agile method. Yes you are! I hope to start actively promoting the site soon, as soon, that is, as we fux some broke ass shit that's still there.
3) We have our fence up now at the house and are looking to get a 2nd dog any day now. Just trying to find the right pup on PetFinder.com. My preference would be a dog that is mid-to-large sized, scruffy and doesn't shed much.
Signing Statement: As producer of this weblog, I reserve the right to make shit up, ignore your requests for features and reports of bugs, treat you like children, make an ass of myself, and basically do any damn thing I please. I also reserve the right to drink while posting up in this bitch.
Just completing a couple days in Chicago meeting with users of the products I help create. It has been very useful and I have enjoyed my time here, despite being wiped by travel and "glad-handing". I am going to suggest to the “higher-ups” at my company that we hold online product-specific user sessions a couple times a year to solicit direct, actionable (I do have a business degree) feedback that we can use when defining and designing new products and features. Another clear theme I heard was a desire to have software tat is simple. Perhaps 37Signals is on to something; of course they are. Maybe I should look Jason and the boys up while I am in town. Simple, Powerful, Accurate. It may not make for a particularly original idea for developing software products but it is most assuredly what I will be looking for on each screen of future development work.
Jesse James Garrett's recent short essay: The 9 Pillars of Successful Web Teams complement nicely the book I am currently reading: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. (yeah that is a bit overdue). Garrett suggests there are 9 basic competencies that come into play on successful projects: 1. User Research, 2. Site Strategy, 3. Technology Strategy, 4. Content Strategy, 5. Abstract Design, 6. Technology Implementation, 7. Content Production, 8. Concrete Design, 9. Project Management.
What follows if you read the extended text of this entry is a rambling piece of writing that attempts to describe how I am generally involved in each of these 9 "pillars" and then some attempts to pull all the ramblings together. When I started this post yesterday I am almost certain I had a point. I am just sure there was some underlying, message that I wanted to convey. I warn you now, however, you won't find it in the extended entry.
Continue reading "Succsessful Web Teams"
I have a lot of explaining to do. I have yet another project that has me working 14 hour days or more. Arbitrary deadlines are fun!
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Is
Fear.com not the worst looking movie you have ever seen? And is it really a good selling point to say it is from the creators of House on Haunted Hill? That movie reeked. Plus how lame is it that they could get the actual domain, fear.com? Of course none of this means I won't see it. I don't think there can be anything web-related that is scarier than looking at nearly 2 full weeks gone by without a post at AltText.com
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One good thing about being so busy on projects is that I don't have time to surf other sites ... oh wait that is a bad thing.
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My house is finally going to be built. The date of the ground breaking is now set for this Thursday.
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I just got back from a recent trip along the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota and Canada. No West Nile symptoms yet.
The new look we developed for the new
client website was approved at 4 pm yesterday afternoon. After giving the "go ahead" to develop the site, the client asked that it be completed and launched sometime the next day. Needless to say I wasn't thrilled. The 3 weeks of design revisions/scope creep that led to the designs not being approved until a day before this previously unmentioned deadline wasn't fun. Of course then I went ahead and put the design in place anyway.
This was made possible by the letters "C" for content (being the same as it was and not needing changes), "P" (for the client promising that they will do a "real" redesign soon and that we can fix all the garbage and assorted poor aspects of the site later) and by the number "2" (the number of templates - more or less - that were needed)
It remains to be seen if we can ever get our hands on totally reworking the Galyan's site, but feel free to look at it as is - just remember we didn't get to touch the content (defined here as anything in the white area) this time around.
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Getting my "hands dirty" and coding pages again breathed a much needed life into my work life. I needed that fast-paced, deadline-driven project to get my mind going and in the process my project partner and I came up with some ideas for cool technologies that should be available to us now.
1. The first thing we thought of was a need to be able to compress and optimize different parts of the same image in different ways. I don't necessarily mean that there could be jpg compression in one part while using 16 color gif optimization on another (though that would be nice) - I guess we were just looking for a way for images to be smarter. Good news is the png format is now supported in Mozilla/Netscape and Internet Explorer and so I am going to start using them soon. Watch out now!
2. The second thing we thought would be cool and make QuickTime VR movies more realistic is if you could have layered QuickTime movies where different elements of the scene could be placed at different depths and so would "move" in relation to the viewer at different rates like they would in real live. I think that this could be done - I wonder if anyone has done it yet?
I should be doing my timesheets right now, but I just can't bring myself to do them. I haven't been too terribly busy the this past week and it is very hard to figure out how I should record my time. Ugh!
I should probably be looking for a company where I will be busier. Inertia.
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Ninjas are real and they are totally AWESOME!
Things I value from my employment have been listed below in no particular order:
- Respect
- Dependence (see number 2 below)
- Opportunity to Grow/Change
- Open lines of Communication
When related to the list of things that make me like a job (in order of importance to me)...
- Smart, Interesting Coworkers that I enjoy working with
- Feelings of being needed
- Interesting work/projects
- Dynamic Environment
... we can start to see how hard it might be to find (regain? ) that perfect job experience.
Man am I feeling wiped out lately! We just got our first snow of the season (very late for Minnesota) and I have been doing a lot of freelance work. Now I know why it's called freelance. I seem to be putting the "Free" into freelance lately. But it's all good. I really like the client. Now if I could just find time to sleep, and post.
I need to get me one of
them chairs!
I am finally getting settled into the new office. (except for that chair thing) It has been really fun so far; moving, "Fun Friday's" and DVD's/Dreamcast in the theater make for a fun workweek. Plus if I ever can't take it I can go upstairs and pound a punching bag or play basketball for a while to blow off steam. Outside of the 2 coasts, I doubt you'll find a better web firm working environment. (minus the chairs of course)
