I need to be more compassionate.  I need to do better at recognizing when to be compassionate.

For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator. We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds. She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl. Sometimes she’d ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing.

From: The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I've been in the industry a while now, have had numerous jobs and side projects and have repeatedly demonstrated that I am a good programmer, manager and employee.  Today I came across a post titled Github is your new resume and immediately thought, how ridiculous.  Let me do a quick breakdown of my daily professional life:

Weekdays

• Work on redditgifts for about an hour before I go to work from 8 - 9am.
• Work at my paying full-time job from about 9 - 7pm.
• Catch up on my redditgifts emails, bugs, etc. from about 7 - 8pm.
• Hang out with my family from about 8 - 10pm.
• Sleep from about 10pm - 8am.

Weekends

• Work on redditgifts or my paying job for about 4 hours per day, spread out, non predictable.
• Hang out with my family for the rest.

So, why do I think it is ridiculous to have github be your new resume?

1. I don't have enough time to contribute to open source code.
2. My paying job and side projects are not open source projects.
3. Evaluating a programmers coding abilities are only a (small) part of what should be evaluated when hiring someone.

In summary, is it a bonus for someone to have a github account full of code? Of course.  Is it required?  No way!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

For the first 12 years of my programming career I became successful due to my work ethic.  Not only did I work long hours, but I worked off hours learning new technologies and programming languages.  For any programmer to be successful and maintain a high level of success, they must do this.

My ritual tended to go in year long cycles.  At the beginning of the year I would reflect on what I had learned the year prior, what I was using, what I wasn't using and figure out what exactly I wanted to learn in the coming year.  I would then buy a book and spend my nights and weekends going from cover to cover and doing exercises along the way.  If I had done my job right, I had picked something that was applicable to my current job and I could use it in practice.  Sometimes I would get halfway through a book and realize I wasn't enjoying it, put the book down and buy a new one.  I'd say over those first 12 years, I learned at least 1 new language a year and would throw in programming theory and concept books along the way.

Then nearly 2 years ago something happened.  I had an idea for a new website that I became excited about.  So excited that I spent nights and weekends (and an entire thanksgiving vacation) building and successfully launched what is now known as redditgifts.  This was one of the most exciting projects I had ever worked on.  For starters, it was my idea, my execution and its success or failure rested on my shoulders.  I was immersed in the community behind it and was taking constant feedback and iterating at a rate I had never done before.

Redditgifts was not my first foray into entrepreneurship but it was my most successful.  The effect of this success was interesting and unexpected.  Instead of spending my nights and weekends learning programming stuff, I was now spending my nights and weekends coming up with and experimenting with new ideas and projects.  With every idea I would experiment with, I would get 10 more ideas that I wanted to experiment with.  Luckily I happen to work at a company (Focus.com) where they realize the value and power of programmers having business ideas and have fully embraced this.  Not only do I spend my nights and weekends coming up with cool shit, I now get to do it during the day and get paid for it!

I'm sure that up till now this all seems like a good thing, and don't get me wrong it is a good thing.  It does however cause me to look to the future and wonder if what I am doing is the right thing for my career.  I am still programming, just as much as ever in fact, but I am not learning at the same pace as I was.  Let me rephrase that a bit, I am not learning programming at the same pace I was, I am in a steep learning curve of product design and business strategy and that is great.  But what does this mean for my future?

I'm not going to pretend I know the answer to this.  I think this could easily transition to me doing a startup and owning a good stake in a product's vision (and implementation).  I also think this could easily go away and I could go back to my old learning ways, but if this is the case, what does this say to the year or two that I have slowed my learning?  I haven't had the time to learn node.js or clojure and i'd love to mess around with scala and the Play framework.  True, I could do my next project with node.js but it would be much quicker for me to just do it in python and get it out the door!

So, that is my current dilemma.  I know there are plenty of people out there who have dealt with this, how should I look at this?  Please advise!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Recently a colleague of mine has become interested in the startup industry and entrepreneur world. She asked me what she should be reading so I spent a few minutes putting together a few links and twitter feeds that I find valuable with a bit of commentary. Feel free to comment with what you use and I'll add it to the list.

Links

reddit - If you can wade through the memes you will find stuff here first, or second depending on if hacker news got it first.
hacker news - Mostly stuff about entrepreneurs and startups, occasionally some programing stuff.
techcrunch - Judge for yourself
techmeme - I put this here cause people seem to like it, frankly I have never seen something on here that I didn't see on reddit or hacker news first.

Twitter Feeds

@reddit - Twitter feed for front page reddit stories
@newsycombinator - Twitter feed for front page hacker news stories
@TechCrunch - Twitter feed for techcrunch stories
@Scobleizer - Tech/startup enthusiast, covers new stuff. Good coverage, smart guy
@timoreilly - O'reilly media founder, all around smart dude
@msuster - Entrepreneur/VC smart mofo
@kn0thing - Reddit founder, smart dude, visionary
@scottalbro - Founder of Focus.com, very smart business insights
@pud - Fuckedcompany founder, industry entrepreneur
@joshuabaer - Austin startup guru
@benparr - Mashable editor
@jowyang - Social media evangelist
@ericries - Lean startup guy, questionable twitter feed, mostly promotions of his book
@arrington - Founder of techcrunch, sometimes good tweets, mostly retweets of questionable techcrunch stories
@fredwilson - Venture capitalist, very smart dude
@micah - Smart colorado startup dude
@hueypriest - Reddit community manager
@davemcclure - Smart, outspoken (sometimes to a fault) venture capitalist.
@Jason - Industry dude focusing on startups, controversial for no real reason.
@acangiano - Canadian technologist, smart tech blogger and enthusiast
@waxpancake - Waxy.org blogger, tech evangelist, overall smart dude

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Today I sat down on the couch to watch TEDxSanJose and was excited to watch a presentation by Robert Scoble.  He gave a great presentation talking about visionaries and their importance.  Early in the talk he put a slide up that ended up being the theme of his talk, it said simply:

Visionaries are douchebags

I laughed when i saw this.  I've met a lot of people throughout the years that I think are visionary, in fact I think Robert himself is a kind of visionary.  Then I remembered that a few weeks ago Robert paid me a very kind compliment over twitter:

I'm pretty sure Robert Scoble was just trying to call me a douchebag!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I wrote this post today that involved some tweets that I wanted to embed.  I could have used a screenshot but that seems cheap to me, I like the hyperlinks to work and whatnot.  The first thing I did was go to twitter's blackbird pie, entered the status id of the tweet I wanted to embed and it generated a bunch of HTML for me.

I then took this HTML and went to the wysiwyg editor on my posterous.  I hit the HTML button, pasted the code in, toggled the editor back to visual mode, then toggled it back to HTML mode to see what the editor was stripping out.  Turns out that they stripped out all the <style> tags that make the tweet look like a tweet -- Sucks.

At this point it was clear that I couldn't just embed the HTML into their tinymce, so I figured I would use some of my RedditGifts code and embed an iframe.

Luckily I have the django flatpages app installed on redditgifts.  So I took the twitter html and created a flatpage at a url like this.

Then in my posterous editor I toggled to HTML mode and put the following code in:

Wow, that is a ton of work to just embed a tweet.  I'm new to posterous, I mainly am using it cause I haven't enjoyed wordpress and didn't want to look much further.  I think it would be nice if posterous would create some type of widget format that you could use for standard things like this.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I have no intention of spending my sunday afternoon writing a comprehensive post about SEO and black hat SEO practices, but I would like to say a few things that I have a hard time expressing in the confines of 140 characters on twitter.

This morning I saw a retweet from Dave McClure:

When I see the word SEO I automatically cringe, so I responded:

Dave didn't seem to like this much so he responded:

Sure, my post was heavy handed, but so was his response.  That's ok, it's two opinionated people having some sunday banter.  I would like to explain my view of this matter though, so as not to come across as a troll.

I believe there are two types of SEO these days.  One of them is innocent enough with good intentions, the other is trickery and something I consider a type of spam.

SEO type 1: Construct your site with best practices involving link structure, semantic markup and enough meta information that search engines are able to make sense out of it.

SEO type 2: In addition to everything in the definition above, try to get as many quality inbound links as possible to keyword rich pages in an effort to overstate the pages relevance to search engines to boost search engine traffic.  You know this approach as black hat SEO.

I know that both of these definitions are totally over-simplified but I think you get the point I'm trying to get at.  I have absolutely no problem with type 1 and employ its use in my development processes on a daily basis.  I also know that the best practices here can be a moving target and you need to be analytical when making decisions.  On RedditGifts I look at search referrals quite a bit and make changes with just about every release that go unnoticed by everyone other than google (I hope).

I do feel that over the past number of years, when people refer to SEO they are talking more about black hat SEO.  I'm all for finding ways to get your content in front of people with the hope that people enjoy it and link to it, I am completely against people buying links, or otherwise tricking people to link to their content.

So, is Dave right when he says I'm being idealistic? In the context of my 140 character tweet, yes.  I know it is hard to get your site in front of people, that isn't lost on me.  I do however think that if you employ shady tactics to fast track your way to the first page of google search results, it will backfire in the long run and there is a big possibility that you will piss off a lot of quality visitors in the process.

So what do you think? Is SEO a bad word?  

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Over the last number of years I have become used to 2 ways of hiring developers:

1. Hire someone in my network of friends.
2. Spend hours wading through resumes from craigslist and if you don't find anyone, turn to a recruiter.

I have always had the most luck with number one, but it doesn't always work out.  Number two is my least favorite way to hire someone.  At the best (craigslist) it takes many, many hours, at the worst (recruiter) it takes many, many hours as well as 15% of the new hire's first year salary.  Either way it costs a ton of money and time to hire someone.

About two months ago it became clear that we were in desperate need of a new developer at Focus.  I decided this time around I would try a few things before I turned to craigslist or a recruiter, so I turned to reddit.  I made one post in the r/django subreddit 

I'm hiring a django dev in San Francisco

I work for focus.com which is doing pretty damn well right now. I am also a redditor (I run redditgifts.com) so redditing in the workplace is required.

Want to work with me? You know, django/jquery/etc - looking for a mid - senior person, I will most likely be your boss. We are in the financial district of San Francisco. PM me!

Within a day I had received 4 private messages on reddit, all of them for perfectly qualified people who were genuinely interested in the job posting I made.  There was one however that stood out, it started out like this:

Hey kickme,

I'd like to apply for your django position. I'll be upfront, I'm not at senior level at this point, but I learn absurdly fast and am smart enough that you should at least offer me some consideration. I've got experience working at all levels of the stack, am already living in San Francisco, and have experience working at an early stage startup. 

This private message from @jburkhart was more effective than any standard cover letter for sure.  He was honest about his seniority but also kind of cocky about his brains and ability to learn quickly, I liked that.  I sent him an email and we had coffee later that day.  It was clear over coffee that he had the desire and the technical skills that I was looking for, so we brought him in for a full interview and a few weeks later we made him an offer and he accepted.

I know that not everyone would have this kind of luck, if I did it again I might not have this kind of luck, but it is interesting and I was pleased with the experience.  Thanks reddit!  

What are your tips for finding developers without a recruiter and without craigslist we might be interested in finding another developer.  Interested?

TL;DR - I posted a job listing on reddit for a developer and everything went better than expected.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

It's no secret that there are a lot of thinkgeek gifts sent for secret santa. On my lunch I went into my sql shell and did a few queries to figure out as close as I could exactly how many thinkgeek gifts were sent and how much $ was spent on thinkgeek. (let me note here that we got no money at all from thinkgeek)

For the queries I looked for presents only from the most recent secret santa exchange that had the word 'thinkgeek' in the title or the body of the present. These numbers aren't scientific of course, but they are interesting.

There were:

615 gifts that contained the word thinkgeek

557 gifts had an average of $27.01 per gift with an average of $9.29 shipping.

If you do the math that is somewhere around $16,611 spent on thinkgeek gifts with $5,713 spent on shipping!

To refresh your memory here are the similar totals for the whole secret santa exchange:

17294 gifts were sent

$502,902 total was spent on gifts

$163,097 total was spent on shipping

Reminder, have you signed up for the most recent gift exchange on redditgifts for r/books? You should!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

When I started here at The Bay Citizen we had less than 2 months to figure out what our site needed to do and get it running.  The first days and weeks were spent in impromptu meetings, in front of whiteboards and furiously coding what would quickly become what you see in front of you now.  This is exactly what I love about my career.  I love coming into a new organization and translating ideas to the web.  I like this so much that it is what I have built my career around.  In 12 years I have done this exactly six times, not including the countless side projects and experiments. As a result, my resume reads a bit differently than what I consider standard --  my average tenure is 2 years and you probably haven't heard of any of the companies I've worked for.

Maybe this is normal and fine, but I have done a fair amount of hiring over the last 12 years and I think when faced with a stack of a hundred resumes with limited time to review, you need things to make yourself stand out.  It seems that if you have a known company on your resume, along with proper skills and experience, you might have a leg up on the competition.  However, I know that I am not the only one with this issue, in fact many developers have an average tenure of a year or less.  This isn't to say they are bad developers, but the industry has a way of chewing up developers and spitting them out, coupled with the fact that nearly 90% of start ups fail and you have a recipe for resume disaster.

I decided it might be interesting to reach out to some prominent technologists and ask them what they thought of this issue.  My question to them was simple: Is employer name recognition important when you are reviewing resumes?

Emmett Shear, CTO, justin.tv

I think employer name recognition can definitely help your cause, but it depends a lot on exactly what your position was at that company. If you're the guy who architected Google Search, ok, that's huge. If you are one of the original YouTube engineers who scaled that site up, that's really impressive. If you're the program manager who wrote the spec for Access, I'm going to pay attention. But if you were just Some Programmer at a big company (or small company) with no particular claim to fame, it's not going to help or hurt you much where you worked.

Mike Schiraldi, Member of the Technical Staff, reddit

When reviewing resumes, I consider recognizable employers in the experience section to be roughly as significant as a recognizable university on the Education section. That is, it's not absolutely essential in this day and age, but it certainly helps.

Michael Abbott, VP of Engineering, Twitter

I am interested in hiring the best engineers - independent of the recognition of the name of their prior employer.  Having familiarity of a prior employer may facilitate conducting background checks for that particular candidate.

Rajiv Pant, Vice President, Information Technology, Conde Nast Digital

It is one of over a dozen factors that are considered while reviewing resumes. What's most important is what this person has accomplished as a team member that is relevant to the job we are hiring for. If someone has had a job at a company that has an excellent brand and is a very big, famous and respected company, that does not necessarily mean this person was a good employee. Even if the person was a great employee, it does not necessarily follow that they'd be a good match for the job we have to offer.
For example, someone who was one of only two engineers in a successful startup indicates that there is a high likelihood this person was a good engineer since it is not likely that he/she did not contribute much. On the other hand an engineer coming out of a big company, even if it has a good reputation for having engineers (e.g. Google or Yahoo), could have been someone who didn't contribute much and rode along on the success of the overall large organization.
So we give far greater emphasis to what the person did, what his/her role was and what experiences this person gained in the previous job. That doesn't mean that employer name recognition isn't important. Name recognition of the employer can give an indication of relevant job experience. After all, as employers we are likely to know the names of many companies that do work similar to the work we do.
In summary, it is just one of over a dozen factors to consider in reviewing a resume of a potential candidate.

Andrew Mosson, CTO, focus.com

A brand name employer helps - certainly when reviewing a large number of resumes. If you have a 100 resumes to look at you probably want to make fewer than 20 calls and you need a quick way to filter.  If I see something like Search Engineer at Google, I'd probably have a sense of what the employee is capable of and the sort of work environment he has been in, I'd be inclined to reach out.  On the other hand, if I see a resume that looks interesting  but has no brand name employers, I would at least research some of the employers to see the quality of the work.

Andy Baio, CTO, kickstarter

Name recognition never hurts, but I factor independent work -- open-source contributions, side projects, code/design experiments -- far more than previous work history.  It's a good gauge of their passion for technology, and it can be very difficult to evaluate an individual's contributions to a project when they're working in a large team.
 

After reading all of these responses, I think it pretty much boils down to, yes.  It is a good thing to have name recognition on your resume.  I'll also infer from these responses that what everyone is looking for in a resume is a sense of passion in career and that name recognition is just one of many ways that people look for this passion.

This post originally appeared on The Bay Citizen

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

It's my birthday today. Birthdays bother me--every year around this time, I start worrying over things I can't control and are probably inevitable. So let's just get it over with, shall we? This year, I'm worrying about the future of my career and my passion as a web developer. I'll come right out and say it: I have a fear of older programmers. And now, I'm worried about becoming one. What will my programming career will look like in, say, 14 years, when I'm 50?

I've had six full time jobs in the last 12 years, plus countless side projects, and I've worked alongside just a few older web developers. Now, I've worked with some damn amazing middle-aged managers, architects, DBAs, and software engineers, but I have never worked with a good middle-aged web developer. (By "older web developer," I mean programmers pushing 50, who were around 40 in the bust.) Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are good web developers that meet this criteria--I just haven't been lucky enough to work with (and learn from) them.

So today, I feel like I'm standing in the middle of the road, facing a crucial decision. I could stick to my current path, and remain a developer. I know what lies ahead on this road: a constant battle of long hours, hustling to staying fresh, adapting to new technologies and languages as they pop up--and overcoming the prejudices of younger developers, which I know too well. On the other hand, I could head in the direction of management--an equally scary proposition. That's a new and semi-unknown skill set for me. I may be great at it, but I think it's a hard choice to undo.

Someone else out there must share these fears and biases, or have faced this hard decision, and I want to hear from you! This is a topic I hope to explore over the coming weeks and months and hopefully, 14 years from now, I'll still be blogging as a happy, gainfully employed professional of whatever stripe. Until then, I'm going to try and enjoy my birthday.

This post originally appeared on The Bay Citizen

Permalink | Leave a comment  »