Fall of 2007: I was on the phone in the parking lot of Yahoo!’s San Francisco incubator, Brickhouse. My job was fantastic. We had an incredible office, incredible location, great people, extremely flexible hours, the flexibility to work on what projects we wanted to, and the healthy pay that came with being a part of Yahoo!. On the phone with me was my younger brother, Jamie, who had started his own game company up in Vancouver. We were discussing whether I should take an offer to join a startup as an early, pre-Series A employee. A lot of pros and cons were thrown around: the commute, the risk, the industry, the economy, etc. Then he asked me,
Which job would you learn more from?
And it became immediately clear which choice was the right one. While Brickhouse was enjoyable and fulfilling, I knew that I was not learning much with each subsequent project. The growth was incremental.
In the past few years, I’ve been approached more for career advice. The problem with career advice is that everyone’s goals, personalities, risk profiles, and priorities are very different. But assuming you’re looking to build a career which involves professional growth (as opposed to having it only as a means to an end), then my one piece of advice is always the same:
Do what scares you
Some might call it “getting out of the comfort zone” but I feel the term is almost a euphemism. It doesn’t convey the base emotion you should feel. You’re scared because you care a lot about the consequences. And if you care, it’s probably the right thing to be doing. When you think about the next thing you’re going to work on, you should feel that nervous, excited energy you get when you know you’re about to do something crazy, and you might royally fuck it up, but if you put everything into it, you might just come out with something amazing and even if you don’t, you know you’ll have learned more everyday than you did in the last year.
A little while ago, I received a notification that a domain I owned was about to expire and set to auto-renew. This reminder prompted me to start a search to replace the incumbent registrar I was using, Go Daddy, with something else. I asked around on Twitter, looked at relatedblogposts, and read some old threads on Hacker News and Metafilter. After exploring my options, I’ve finally landed on Namecheap.
Why I Switched
I was always unimpressed with Go Daddy’s marketing strategy. As a leader in the space, it was clear that “sex sells” was a mantra working well for them. Super Bowl ads and spokeswomen featuring fast cars and scantily clad women were the main selling points of the “service”. I felt that supporting Go Daddy was equivalent to supporting this tactic and confirming that the quality of the product mattered less than how much boob you could fit in a Super Bowl ad. This belief is further reinforced by the fact that it’s actually a terrible product. At every turn, Go Daddy’s site feels like a Las Vegas casino while every interaction feels like you’re buying from a used car salesman who wants to up-sell you two cigarette lighters with your vehicle.
The last straw was the video Bob Parsons, CEO of Go Daddy, proudly posted on his site earlier this year. In it, he proudly depicts a trip he took to Zimbabwe where he shot and killed a “problem” elephant, stood gloating next to the corpse, then carves up the elephant and hands it out to villagers wearing Go Daddy baseball caps. Even if there were “problem elephants” (which is untrue), it’s very clear from the footage that Parsons was rationalizing an expensive hunting trip as a “rewarding” thing to do in life. Indicatively, the original video has been edited. Though the poor grammar remains, the AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” overlay, the close-ups of villagers with Go Daddy hats, and the focus on Parsons making the kill have been removed. Thankfully, the internet, like elephants, always remembers: [Read more →]
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of presenting at WordCamp San Francisco. The presentation is the latest incarnation of of a talk I’ve iterated on since 2006. Back then, it was called Communicating Concepts With Comics. Now, it’s nearly a book called See What I Mean: How to Communicate Ideas With Comics (I’m working on the final draft and you should subscribe to be notified when it comes out) and has been augmented with many more examples from industry.
Thanks to WordPress.tv, there’s an HD video of the talk available. It’s a short presentation—just 30 mins excluding Q&A—and is a great overview of the topic. In that respect, it’s quite different from my workshops, where I spend a full day teaching participants of all skill levels how to use comics to communicate ideas. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful and entertaining.
About a month ago, I was let go from Twitter. Everyone has their own view of what happened and why and I’d rather not add to the speculation. What I’ll talk about is my experience there, what I’ve been doing, and what I am working on. [Read more →]
When Google+ launched last week, one of the most discussed features was Circles. In case you haven’t read a single blog, Tweet, or Google+ post in the last week (and yet, somehow stumbled into this dark corner of the internet), Circles is Google’s way of allowing you to group people. You can put anyone into a one or more Circles such as “Friends”, “Acquaintances”, “Co-workers”, “People I Eat Brunch With”, “Cyclists”, etc. And you have to put a person in at least one group.
Many discussions have ensued about how people are organizing their Circles. Many have also praised Google’s elegant and unique implementation as a clear answer to Paul Adam’s research entitled “The Real Life Social Network“.
I’ve been thinking about grouping and organization of friends for a long time. As an information architect, it’s in my nature to want to organize and tag everyone I know. I even wrote a post in 2004 about the organization of my instant messaging list. In thinking about this for a little while, I’ve decided to try to document my thinking so far on Google Circles, as well as the larger context of digitally grouping people.
It’s been over 6 months since I last blogged. What better time to start than the halfway point in the year? And what better topic than—New Year’s Resolutions. Luckily, mine wasn’t “blog more”. As in years past, rather than set New Year’s Resolutions, I’d adopted the practice of defining a theme word for the year. I did in fact choose one in January but had not shared it. Now seems like a good time.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended Brooklyn Beta, a new two-day intimate web conference put on by Cameron Koczon of Fictive Kin and Chris Shiflett of Analog. I had the honor of being invited to present on some of our thinking and process behind #NewTwitter, the redesign of twitter.com.
Smaller, Smarter, More Intimate
The conference had only 150 people but all the speakers and attendees were incredibly bright and talented, working on a lot of great projects. By comparison, Twitter seemed like a large company which is amusing as we’re a mere 300 people working on one of the largest services worldwide. I’ve never once felt like I worked in a large company while here and in talking to the others, I understood why. Much of our approach and practices are identical to three-person startups and agencies and, if anything, our execution time is at least as fast if not faster.
Though there wasn’t any explicit theme, the talks all centered around having passion in the work you do. Christ Shiflett even said the conference itself was crafted out of love and you could tell from each presentation how much love was put into each project.
This talk was given at Interaction ’10 in Savannah, Georgia on February 6, 2010. Normally, I would put the slides up on my SlideShare but because so much of this talk was in video form, it seemed to make more sense as a post.
Update: The video for this talk is now online thanks to IxDA and I’ve included it here. If you’re in San Francisco, we’re also doing a redUX on March 6th, 2010 for free at Adaptive Path. There will be a number of local speakers that spoke at Interaction ’10.
When Coley and I got engaged in late 2008, the first question people asked us was, of course,
Have you guys set a date yet?
We got to talking about dates and initially felt that 09/09/09 would be a good date. We’re not mathematicians nor numerologists but a date like 09/09/09 just has a good ring to it. With the Indian Summers that San Francisco has, a wedding in early September would be perfect. And though neither of us are superstitious, there was the added bonus that “9″ was considered by Chinese people to be a lucky number in weddings.
Alas, 09/09/09 also fell on a Wednesday.
So, at our friend Diana’s suggestion, we looked at 10/10/10 to see if that fell on a weekend. As it turned out, that was a Sunday. Then Diana suggested something which made both our geeky ears perk up:
You could have a binary themed wedding.
Indeed we could.
The next natural step was to determine what 101010 in binary equated to in decimal. Let’s see … 2 plus 8 plus 32 …
