Submitted by greggles on
I realized a while ago at work that when you ask someone to do something you have to include a few key elements if you actually want it to get done. This is particularly relevant in a work environment.
Submitted by greggles on
I'm writing this so other developers can share in the laughter (ha!) and designers/managers can learn.
I've seen this a few times. It feels like there's a mad-libs form that designers/managers use to communicate things in a software project.
Hey:
$normal_behavior_of_our_product_for_the_past_year, $insulting_phrase, $client_need_never_mentioned_before_this_month, $high_stress!!!!!
Thanks,
$designer_or_manager
So, an example letter:
Hey:
Submitted by greggles on
We started watching the tv-show lost a while ago on netflix streaming. This is great because we can watch episodes back to back which gets rid of the anxiety over what will happen "next week."
We found a few occurrences that were uncommon enough that they could be used as a pretty decent game.
Submitted by greggles on
I recently accepted a position as an employee at Acquia. I have been "my own boss" since about 2006. I had a brief stint as a part-time employee at a company that has now ceased operations, but for the most part I've been the "owner" of GVS.
I founded GVS with a few goals. I wanted a company that mirrored open source values of do-ocracy and collaborative decision making. In part this was to make it easy for us to hire community rock-stars and have them feel right at home. In reality that didn't work perfectly though it worked pretty darn well. In part this was because I don't really like being a "manager" and wanted to have an empowered independent team. That mostly worked :)
GVS has had a ton of amazing clients and projects. Some of my personal highlights I'm most proud of are the work on Economist.com, California Closets, and the Drupalcon Chicago site which really helped push forward the COD platform. Not everything turned out perfectly. We had our fair share of mistakes but I think in the end we at least were honest and did our best to deliver what we promised and what the client wanted.
One of the real highlights was that working at GVS allowed me to take a 9 month long trip through Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru with my wonderful wife. We visited 30+ wineries, drastically improved our Spanish, and had an amazing time. I've asked every employer I worked for to support me in doing that and none really did. Working for myself I could do that. Of course, it was a lot of work to make that a reality. I had to be aggressive about accepting certain clients that would be flexible with me while I was abroad and on flakey internet connections. I also used that time strategically by investing much more than normal in my community work which has had long term marketing benefits.
Submitted by greggles on
I haven't written nearly as much on this site in the last year or two in part because I "blog" less and in part because I'm just doing it in more specialized places. I realized that by writing about all sorts of different things on knaddison.com I was creating 1 site with no focus when instead I could create 12 sites each with singular focus. The latter form is, of course, more useful to readers.
Here's an introduction for one site Nikki and I have been working on that we really enjoy: Ice Cream Denver.
Nikki loves Ice Cream. I don't mind it ;) And especially with our little daughter we were looking for a new project that would be a fun weekend errand. We started the site in September of 2010 and immediately posted a bunch of store locations. Shortly after we started posting photos of the various shops.
A few of my favorites:
Chalk board menus are common in the restaurant industry and definitely deliver a cutesy feeling at ice cream shops. For liks south it's painted on and cutesy, but not so practical (in spite of their hundreds of flavors). At sweet action it seems purely practical: they are often adding and removing items from their menu. Menus are a popular item on the site, so popular I created a listing page.
Submitted by greggles on
And not a day too soon. Holy cow, after literally years of waiting and begging the IKEA in South Denver is finally opening on July 27th. I predict massive traffic jams. I plan to go there and sell tiny meatballs with tiny swedish flags in them accompanied by iced-lingonberry-juice-like-beverage.
Submitted by greggles on
I am an early adopter, packrat. When people need an extra phone charger or connector cable they come to me.
So if I throw something out, that means it must be old as dirt. Here is a list of things I threw away today.
