Nick Wynja

→ Maker’s vs. Manager’s Schedule

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:27:40 EDT

Paul Graham, of Y Combinator on the difference between how manager’s and developer’s schedules work:

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

For a developers, meetings cost much more than the hour they span. Keep this in mind when scheduling their time.

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Deploying Second Crack

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 20:43:55 EDT

Install Marco Arment’s Second Crack in a few simple steps.

I’ve been interested in Second Crack ever since I heard Marco Arment discuss it on Build and Analyze. After writing more frequently both here and at Hack/Make, I became frustrated with the workflow of writing in Byword or BBEdit then having to copy and paste into Tumblr. I was a little hesitant getting into hosting my own blogging engine since my sysadmin skills aren’t great but I was familiar enough with it that I thought I’d give it a shot. When I set out to implement Second Crack, I wanted to do it in a way that could be replicated so that other who aren’t total neck-beard Unix nerds could roll out Second Crack on their own and benefit from it’s simple publishing without struggling with the worst parts of server administration. What I came out with, after a weekend wrestling with shell scripts, folder permissions, and Dropbox daemons, is deploysecondcrack—a simple four step process that anyone who can copy and paste can use to roll out Second Crack on their own server.

If you’re familiar with servers, jump straight to deploysecondcrack on Github. deploysecondcrack is optimized to run on CentOS 6. I chose this since Marco is running CentOS and will probably provide the best long-term compatibility.

If you’re not familiar with servers, let’s go through the set up process in a little more detail than what’s in the README on Github.

1. Get a cloud server account

Second Crack is self-hosted so you’ll need your own server. For this, I suggest Rackspace Cloud. A Rackspace account is free and you pay for servers by the hour. The smallest CentOS instance on Rackspace (which is likely enough for most low-traffic blogs is $0.015/hour. This adds up to about $10 a month. They provide amazing support, which is a great thing to have if you aren’t very comfortable with servers. Amazon Web Services would work fine and prices are generally comparable but Rackspace’s fanatical support is a great thing to have.

2. Create a second Dropbox account (optional)

I have about 40GB of data in Dropbox that I don’t want syncing to my server. I created a second Dropbox account specifically for my blog and shared the folder that will be created automatically later in the process with the other Dropbox account I use. Now’s a good time to create this account before we get too deep into the server stuff.

3. Launch a cloud instance

Once you’ve created your account and it’s been verified over the phone by a cheery Rackspace employee, you can go into your control panel and in Hosting > Cloud Servers, add a new server. Here, choose CentOS 6 then name your server and chose a size. Pick a server based on your needs and how much you want to spend but a 256MB or 512MB box will probably be enough. Second Crack serves cached static HTML files which doesn’t require a lot of memory to be quick and handle a decent amount of traffic. When you click “Create Server” it’ll start spinning up a cloud instance and then email you with and IP address and password for you to SSH into your shiny new server when it’s done building. If you’re unsure whether you want to commit to using Second Crack, you can spin up a server with very little commitment since you’re billed by the hour. If you can’t get things running or get it going but don’t like it, just delete the server and you’ll only be out a few cents.

4. SSH into your server

Once you have the IP address and password for your server, we can access it from the command line to install Second Crack. Open up Terminal (or PuTTY if you’re still on Windows) and SSH into your server with the command ssh root@12.34.56.78 using your IP address. Type yes when prompted to add your RSA and then the password you were emailed. When you see the [root@servername ~]# prompt, we’re ready to go.

5. Deploy Second Crack

Head to the Github page for deploysecondcrack where you’ll find the steps to install and configure the server environment, all dependancies, Dropbox, and Second Crack. These steps are mostly copy and paste, but there are a couple places you’ll need to use the command line text editor Vim. There’re a few basic commands you’ll need to know to use it. You can look at the full Vim cheat sheet if you need, but you’ll be able to get the job done with a few commands. You can move around the file using the arrow keys. To edit the file, press the i key to enter into insert mode. Make any changes you need the press esc to leave insert mode. You can jump to certain line numbers by typing :42 and pressing enter to jump that that line. You can search by pressing / and then typing in your term and pressing enter. n will jump to the next result. Once you’re done editing a file, press esc to get to the command mode and you :wq to save and exit the file. If you screw up and want to start over, :q! will close the file without saving. You shouldn’t need it in the standard set up, but a few basic commands if you run into troubles and need to troubleshoot: pwd (print working directory) will show you the path of your current location, cd /path/to/folder will change the directory you’re into the one you specify. If something happens and you aren’t give the command prompt (the $), hitting ctrl-c should usually get you there. When you’re done with the steps on Github, come back here to finish things off.

6. Configure your DNS

You’ll need to set up the DNS for your domain name to the IP address of your server. If you don’t have a domain, use a service like Namecheap to register one. To point your domain to the server, add an A RECORD that points to your IP address and wait a few minutes. You should be able to then access your new blog from your domain.

7. Post something

Posting is really easy with Second Crack and the main reason I moved it it. All you need to do is save a markdown file in your Dropbox in the _publish-now folder with the formatting as specified in the Second Crack documentation on Github.

8. Add some styling

deploysecondcrack includes a very basic stylesheet to get you started. There’s enough there to dive into and start styling your blog. If you don’t know CSS, now’s a great time to learn.

Notes

I’ve tested this fairly thoroughly and I’m hoping it will work for you but I can’t guarantee it. If you need some help, let me know on Twitter but there’s no promises I’ll be able to help.
As outlined in the Github README, this install does not include any security or firewall. Be aware of this.

→ The Google James Whittaker Left

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:38:22 EDT

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Whittaker recalls Google’s shift away from a company focused on making great products. It looks like they not only turned on their product users but their own people.

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Wiping User Data for Local Development

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:41:45 EST

Developing locally? Care about your users data and privacy? When you do a database dump of production data for use in local development, be conscious that you have thousands of people’s names and emails on your machine. If your laptop is stolen, so is your user’s data. To avoid this problem but maintain a healthy amount of real data for use in development run a query like this to obscure their personal information:

update users set name='name', email='email@yourcompany.com' where lower(email) not like ('%yourcompany.com')

This only cleans the data for users other than your team if you used your company email for registration so you don’t kill test accounts. By doing this, you not only protect user information but you avoid silly things like emailing users by accident when building features. Whether it’s in production or local, your users information is of utmost importance and you don’t want to lose their trust.

Darwin’s Law of Failure

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:08:32 EST

This post is in response to Jonathan Kochis’s article, The Disturbing Culture of Failure. Kochis lays out the how a culture that encourages failure negatively impacts business—and he’s right—but let me add my perspective on why I think this culture is in place and why it’s necessary. Let’s call it Darwin’s Law of Failure.

It seems to me that the attitude of accepting (or worse, expecting) failure from the outset is a step toward making it happen. Failure is something that should be dealt with as it happens and is decidedly reactionary.

The “fail fast, fail cheaply” mantra exists mostly from the startup generation that we’re living in. Most current startups are formed around terrible ideas and ran by either nerds with no idea how to run a company or Type A personalities with no idea how to run a company. This combination of bad ideas and no execution breeds failure. Failure to ship, failure to attract users/customers, failing to capture investor attention, and failing in the wrong direction.

Failure is something that has become a part of the startup culture and in-turn, embraced. In reality, failing is inevitable but this culture encourages pushing harder and faster in spite of fearing failure, even when pushing harder and faster makes failure more likely. There’s two reasons this happens: competition for investor attention, which these companies feed off of, is more often grabbed by companies who build products faster and cheaper, and secondly, that failure needs to happen because the markets can’t bear more than a few startups actually taking off.

VCs control the startup world and startups exist in a distorted reverence of them, their attention, and money. Without VCs, the startup’s cute little website will shut down so they are driven to the capitalists’ promise of wealth and glory in exchange for their half-baked idea to be built faster and cheaper no matter the cost to the founders integrity, product, or emotions. To mask the pain that comes from pouring everything into an idea that won’t go anywhere, the startup culture has embraced failure and shaped an acceptance caused by its abundance.

With so many awful startups, Darwin’s Law of Failure needs to come into play to maintain a balanced market. Without the startups failing, good talent who are blinded by bad ideas can be locked down long-term and companies would stay afloat longer, sucking up more capital. Just as in nature, startup death is necessary. With an overabundance of startups, the culture of failure pushes the weak startups over the cliff in a culling of ideas.

Smart people know that planning, designing, accounting for unknowns, and having foresight into your direction takes more time up-front and can mean not building as soon but leads to more successful implementations of products, features, and relationships.

To foster the entrepreneurial culture that I believe is the backbone of a solid economy we should really be trying more things more often. None of these things, however, should be treated with such insignificance that failure is a suitable outcome.

Approaching things with the significance that they deserve comes from believing that what you do is a long-term cultivation of relationships, learning, and ideas and if your approach is that of a disposable startup where you “fail fast, fail often” then you’ll take the bruises of a disposable startup. Don’t take the easy way out where you accept failure but build an economy of value by “trying often and trying harder”.

Ikea Hack Standing Desk

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:56:00 EST

When we moved into a new office this past summer, I had a chance to Ikea hack the perfect standing desk. I’ve been using this set up for about 6 months and it’s been ergonomically sound and I’m quite happy with it. I’m taller than most people at 6’ 5” so it was a bit more of a challenge to get the exact height I needed, but this desk is adjustable so will work for nearly anybody. Here’s my desk and some of the thought that went into building a desk with my perfect working height ¹ of 45 inches.

The most important part of a standing desk are it’s legs. Being much higher than a standard table makes it tough to find something solid and adjustable. The Vika Artur trestle has a max height of 36 5/8” and a wide base which makes them surprisingly sturdy for how lightweight they are. The shelves help structurally but also give organizational space. The trestles are adjustable and can work at a variety of heights including a normal sitting desk if you find yourself needing to go back to sitting.

The table top I went with is the Vika Amon that is 59” wide by 29 1/2” deep. Don’t go with anything smaller since the trestles have a depth of 27 1/2”, but you could likely get away with going larger. I would recommend a solid wood top like the Vika Furuskog over the Vika Amon since it’s extra weight would provide more stability and the solid top will allow you to securely screw, drill, or attach anything into it—which I did.

I had to add a small hack to get just a few more inches to my ideal keyboard height. I found some decent looking doorstops at the local hardware store and used them in between the trestles and the table top to add a few inches. I screwed the end of the doorstop into the table top and, after removing the plastic cap on the doorstop, put the metal piece that remained in the holes in the top of the trestle, which fit perfectly and was secure enough to hold the top in place.

I added the Ekby Alex wall shelf on top of the desk for storage room as well as to gain a few extra inches height that I needed for my perfect vertical keyboard position. The size of the shelf provides just enough depth at 11” to comfortably host a keyboard but isn’t quite long enough to store a piece of 8 1/2” x 11” piece of paper lengthwise inside the drawer, which is frustrating. The shelf just sits on the table and isn’t fastened because on long days, I can slide the shelf back on the desk and move my keyboard and trackpad down onto the table top which is the perfect typing position for when I pull up a stool.

Between the 36 5/8” tall trestles, the 1 3/8” thick table top, the 4 1/2 ” drawers, and the 2 1/2” doorstops, I had my perfect working height of 45 inches. Now I needed to get my monitor high enough.

I wanted to have a solid, functional riser that could work with any monitor configuration even though I was planning on getting the yet-to-be released Apple Thunderbolt Display. I made the riser with a Lack wall shelf on top of the Capita bracket. This gave me enough clearance that I would have decent monitor positioning and wouldn’t strain my neck looking down at a display.

This build gave me adjustability to get the ergonomic working height I needed, the stability to pound away at a keyboard all day without the desk wobbling, and all together a great looking and functional standing desk.

Here’s the total parts list for my Ikea standing desk build (with the better table top, since that’s what I recommend):

Grand total = $205

For ideal ergonomics, you need to have your elbows bent slightly greater than 90 degrees. To get your ideal working height, measure from the floor to where your wrists wrest when your elbows are slightly obtuse of 90 degrees. ↩

Add Instapaper’s Read Later Button to Your Tumblr Blog

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:28:00 EST

I really love what Marco Arment is doing with Instapaper, so when I was working on alterations to the theme for my new blog Hack/Make I wanted to include Instapaper’s Read Later button. I went over to the documentation to see what I was getting myself into. The “one-click button” that I was interested in is a simple iframe with a few variables specific to your post. Luckily, the URL and title for you tumblr post are kept in the easy-to-access {Permalink} and {Title} variables. All you need to do to add Instapaper’s Read Later one-click button to your tumblr page is to add follow code into your theme wherever you want the button located:

<iframe border="0" scrolling="no" width="78" height="17" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" style="margin-bottom: -3px; z-index: 1338; border: 0px; background-color: transparent; overflow: hidden;" src="http://www.instapaper.com/e2?url={Permalink}&title={Title}"></iframe>

If you need to add some padding, simply put the iframe into a <div> and apply the appropriate styling. Now your readers can easily take your article on the go with them on the wonderful Instapaper apps for iPhone and iPad.

Alfred Extension: Convert Unix Time to Readable Format

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:42:52 EST

I hacked my first Alfred extension together to solve a pain that I run into sometimes at work. Unix time is about as nerdy of a measurement as you can get. It’s a count (in seconds) since the arbitrary date of Thursday, January 1st, 1970 UTC which is used throughout Unix environments as a timestamp. It’s often used in databases as unique timestamps for rows of data and often enough (before adding human-readable columns into our tables) I need to convert epoch time into something I can read. In comes Alfred. The simple extension contains one line of Ruby (which I didn’t even write myself) and takes the input of your Alfred query.

Copy the unix timestamp.
Activate Alfred and use the keyword “epoch”.
Paste in the timestamp.
The extension puts the human-readable timestamp in your clipboard.

The current output of the extension is in the YYYY-MM-DD_HH:MM:SS format and can be configured however you want in the settings.

If converting Unix time is something you have enough nerd-cred to do, download the extension here.

Ineffective Design of “Crazy Ones” Poster

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:12:21 EST

The Apple tech community is still adjusting to a world without Steve Jobs. People are finding ways to continue on his ideas of design and beauty. This poster is one of those projects. It is designed by Jared McDaniel and quotes “Crazy Ones” from the famous 1997 ad campaign . It was created to commemorate Steve Jobs and be a piece that can hang in the offices and studios of passionate artists. The poster is beautiful but the design isn’t effective.

McDaniel’s “Crazy Ones” poster focuses on the beauty of the individual words which distracts visually and emotionally from the quote. The goal of design is to empower the message. Steve Jobs was a fan of beautiful typography and enlisted Susan Kare to create the first uniquely digital fonts, but “Think Differnt” isn’t about typefaces. Another philospohy Steve Jobs employed was one where design, functionality, utility, and usability are each strands of one common thread to reach a product’s goals. This philosophy isn’t realized in McDaniel’s design.

So, what are the goals of this poster? From the poster’s site, crazyonesquote.com:

Like so many, we’ve been deeply inspired by this quote.  With the recent passing of Steve Jobs, we decided to create something that could hang in the office, commemorating an innovator and challenging us daily to “think different”.

The poster is meant to be art, to inspire, and to challenge. For being art, it’s effective in that it would be beautiful hanging on my wall. Art should be aligned (or strategically misaligned) with it’s intended message for greatest effect. As in anything artistic, interpretation is left for you but I believe great artists solely express and leave their work unadulterated of personal interpretation as to not influence yours. In this case, the design skews the message of the quote. It makes it about beauty, when the words say nothing of that. The poster was also created to be inspiring but the essence of the design makes me think the shot of motivation is to “make beautiful things” which again is irrelevant of the quote. Both the poster and message are meant to challenge. One of the greatest challenges I see for designers is the ability to design holistically, following the intent of the message and not infusing their own interpretation into it—something this poster is quilty of.

The quote itself is beautiful, inspiring, and challenging and the designer who’s crazy enough to keep the design out of the way and let the words make the impact are the ones who embody Jobs’s philosophies.

Blank Page

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:37:35 EST

A blank page is scary but it’s also something to be thankful for. A blank page is opportunity and opportunity is a chance at success or failure, learning, and heartbreak. It’s an essential part of a creative process. These are all things to celebrate. Over time the blank page will fill up with a story, one that you’ve scribed line by line, through your everyday motions. You’re choices, actions, and indecision are the prose. The punctuation settles in spot matching pauses, exclamations, abrupt stalls, and questions we encounter and embody.

Along the way, you’ll go back and reread the novel that’s unfolding under your pen to examine that the narrative has a thread running intricately through characters and themes. At any time, a good book will break away from its main theme and follow the characters individually into a dark, downward spiral or fruitful ascent to success, but in the end the author will thread these back into unity. You’ll go back to your story and correct spelling and continuity errors but this is a luxury in which our metaphor doesn’t lend to life. In and of themselves, those mistakes are not negative; they are a part of the creative journey. We desire to improve on our mistakes and by doing so we better the next chapter of our story. The mistakes and themes of the past are definite but can empower the script of future stories. You can’t rewrite the past but you can write the future.

This path of creative iteration should be celebrated as you experience the writing, the editing, as well as the struggles and glorious highs that come with it.

The blank page is the beginning and the next step—both the empty notebook and the new chapter. It’s simply what’s ahead of you. For a new chapter to begin, what’s before needs to come to an end, or atleast pause and wait. This ending could be a strained march, grasping to complete a tattered thought. It could also be the neatly wrapped conclusion of a moving story. Either way the chance to start something fresh is on the next page.

A new start. The next chapter.

Sometimes you just need to turn the page and let the pure white sheet of snow before you inspire the story. Be a curious and excitable child who opens the door to the potential of a snowy playground and not something frigidly oppressive. Opportunity will rouse or paralyze.

Despite paralysis the story continues whether you’re the one writing it or not. It’s up to you pick the pen back up and choose how the story turns out. Know that through these circumstances not reaching the heights of your expectations—turning your dreams onto what’s on the page—isn’t failure, just a step in the creative process. Keep writing even when you don’t know how the pieces fit and especially when you don’t know where the story is going. Be roused by what the story could become and excited by how what you create could turn out more interesting than anything you’ve known before.

And again you edit.

When you think most certainly you know the direction of the story, introspection can keep a clear path defined. Under the strength of your convictions, stories will swiftly fill the pages. Meditating on your course isn’t to slow you down but to make sure your compass is well directed. Move to this direction with gusto.

Being truly thankful is about examining what we are given, not what we take. In that essence the blank page is what we should celebrate. Possibilities are offered up to us continually, indifferent of their outcome. Our foolishness to let these possibilites go (or lack of awareness that they’re even in front of us) shouldn’t stop us from recognizing where they came from. Be thankful for opportunities and celebrate the successes and gains in your creative path. Be grateful of the blank page for you to craft your story.

Engineer Creativity—Create Ingenuity

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 21:09:58 EST

Design, plan, and direct the ability to create.
Make, cause, or become the power of creative imagination.

Adam Lisagor on Steve Jobs

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:00:53 EDT

On the 5by5 “Thank You, Steve Jobs” special:

Hi Steve,

How great is it that you’re one of the most influential people in the history of the world and we all call you Steve. How great is it that you’re famously reclusive and private but you read all of your email and answer it on a whim. That’s something I’m taking from you, by the way. It’s a testament to what kind of a man you are; one that holds himself personally accountable for his decisions, who will answer for himself, and is always the most apt representative of the company he created. I’ll tell you something about what I’ve learned from you, something that’s now more clear in the last day or so than it’s been even before. That’s it’s OK to say no to the things in our lives that add no meaning. That by doing so, we set the context within which to be our greatest selves. In the way you began at some point to wake up each day and confront yourself with your mortality, I’ll from here on wake up and ask myself how many things am I doing that add no meaning and whatever that number is is how many things I’ll strip away. Because I want to be my greatest self, like you. So thank you, Steve. You brought into the world a real honest love for the promise of humanity. You saw the greatness in us and helped build us the tools to see the greatness in ourselves.

I haven’t been able to articulate much on Steve’s death. Adam’s words, delivered in his solemn but engaged tone, are some I’ll never forget.

Like A Disaster

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:46:39 EDT

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.

—Franz Kafka

Culture Curious to Create

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:30:00 EDT

Maker Faire was hosted at the New York Hall of Science this weekend. The “Maker Culture” has been growing both in size and recognition in recent years. Be it hacking Arduino or knitting; geeks, eccentrics, and creatives are making things and sharing them with the world in a more apparent way than ever before. Events like Maker Faire and connected online communities are exposing this ‘movement’ that historically has been recognized as people making stuff in their basement. Makers are now able to share a create together.

Whether it’s perceived or not, it’s thought we create less and are forming habits of consumption which alter perspectives on the impacts of manufacturing on our world. Makers are trying to turn this around by showing how acting on creative curiosity can make better people, families, and communities.

Somewhere along the path of growing up many of us lose the desire to build things. We blame it on our busy schedules usually, but we’ve lost the curiosity to be making things. As kids, we’re curious about how things works so we poke at them, tear them apart, and try to build them ourselves in search of answers.

Seth Godin, from his “manifesto of starting”:

Initiative is a little like creativity in that both require curiosity. Not the search for the “right” answer, as much as an insatiable desire to understand how something works and how it might work better.

Making is the beginning but what happens is a rediscovery of childhood curiosity and a desire to create. Let this curiosity run wild and go make something. It doesn’t matter what you make, but that you are creating.

Code is Communication

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 19:17:26 EDT

MoMA’s Talk To Me exhibit ended up giving me the spark I needed.

I’ve been faced with a struggle where my intrinsic nature to create has been parked by an inability to choose a path or method in which to produce—I want to make something with impact, but what? My career has taken me into the world of web technologies but I’ve never been excited or curious enough to jump into discovering the language of the web.

“Talk To Me” helped me discover something. Though it’s were my friends and colleagues focus their creative efforts, there are plenty of other playgrounds for me to build in. Communications have always been an interest for me. Lately, I’ve thought that without a knowledge of code or the curiosity that’s required to put in hundreds of hours of learning, I would be relegated to the old-fashioned device of communication through plain English. What I saw on that afternoon in the “museum” ¹ wasn’t surprising from a technical standpoint but helped me discover a key element of what I was passionate about but hadn’t acknowledged. Creating ideas was one thing but I needed to be able to communicate those ideas in a way that was captivating and relative to what I was sharing. No one wants to read an essay on the impact of digital communication but visualizing it through applications or converting those digital conversations into an analog (or real life, not on your iPhone) exchange.

Create ideas through words. Proliferate ideas through technology.

It’s not about code being the building blocks of some thing but the nouns and verbs of tomorrow’s language. Code is communication and technology becomes the medium to tell stories. That’s what media has always been about. As evolution in how we read, listen, and watch these stories occurs, I need to continue to produce the platforms in which we communicate. I can do that in ways other than building responsive web sites or APIs. Maybe it becomes something like Arduino projects or turning statuses into stories and sharing what our generation has to say. That’s enough to inspire me and instill a level of curiosity to learn tomorrows languages.

I’ve always thought museums were for antiquated but not forgotten treasures. ↩

Decision Fatigue

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:40:27 EDT

John Tierney in his piece for the New York Times:

The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways.

The first shortcut is to act on impulse. The other? Do nothing. Timely after I wrote about how indecision results in mediocrity.

Humans have a limited capacity to make decisions. The more we face the likelier the easy choice is made, not necessarily the right one. When paralyzed by indecision, any choice is better than postponing but focus—tightening scope—avoids decision fatigue and results in more appropriate choices.

Roy F. Baumeister’s studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. […] Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

Design your processes to reduce decisions you have to make. Build a team that you can trust to make choices. Conserve your willpower to decide and execute when you’re needed most.

“We”re building a business that builds a business.”

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:33:00 EDT

“This sounds like a thing to say when you are building a business that doesn’t make money. It’s such an easy thing to say and makes you sound so much greater that it’s being used by more and more startups that don’t know how to ask for money.” —Foursquare Team

Jack Layton

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 15:05:00 EDT

“Always have a dream that is longer than a lifetime.”

Focus, Indecision, and Mediocrity

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:20:00 EDT

Horace Dediu’s lede from the piece titled “Why Focusing on a Few Products is Hard” :

“Focus is about saying no.” This quote is perhaps apocryphal but it’s accredited to Steve Jobs. It’s not a novel idea.

Dediu continues to discuss the Portfolio theory and how in concept, spreading across horizontals can be strategically beneficial but in reality (unlike for street vendors in New York City selling hot dogs and umbrellas) it is hurtful to technology companies.

Technology startups have to make many critical choices early in their development, but none is more important than the scope and vertical they choose to restrain their products and services. Where this scope falls depends on many factors including audience, distribution medium, cost of operation and price for product. Feature creep is one reoccurring example of the importance of defining scope and staying within it, but many aspects of business that are far away from feature sets and product roadmaps still need to be defined and managed within restraints.

Focus creates clarity, and clarity eases decision.

During cycles of idea, code, measure, and learn, indecision can stretch out the process, create tension in the team, and ultimately end up causing more waste than if you were to just make the wrong decision right away. The data and learning that could have been collected after your right or wrong decision is valuable. The time you waste and stress incurred when paralyzed by indecision will hurt your company and product.

Many startups are doomed for failure because of non-viable ideas and even worse implementations. Others have products that stagnate on mediocrity not because of product ideation but a team that is debilitated by indecision. Focusing your product — being able to clearly say “that’s not what we do” when pitched a feature — will enable you a clearer vision and path, making decisions easier, liberating your team to build the product you know best.

Orwellian Truth

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 12:14:00 EDT

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

—George Orwell