Apple’s FaceTime ads are really beautiful. They emphasize emotional connections we can create with (and through) our technological artifacts. The critical mass isn’t there yet (needs to be about 20% of my address book having an iPhone w/ FaceTime) for this to be a realistic way for us to communicate regularly.
I’m sitting here, alone, on a Sunday afternoon at DINO’s studio. It’s cold and wet outside, a perfect day for reflection.
We’ve been doing projects together, as DINO, for the past couple of months, but Em has only been able to put in part-time hours as she completed her obligations with her prior employer. Her last day of work was the 15th and she started full time at DINO last Monday (although she couldn’t help herself and came in the weekend before her first DINO day to get caught up on project work and set up her space).
Today marks the end of our first week where all 3 of us are doing DINO — so in my mind, this is truly the first week of DINO, regardless of what’s happened before. I feel like something powerful clicked now that we can physically locate ourselves in the same place during the day, finally.
It’s been a busy week, indeed. I haven’t had things this intense in a VERY long time. What’s encouraging is that I’m not feeling burned out (well… yet). If anything, the intensity is giving me an energy I’m feeding off of.
A great moment from this week:
I was really excited by how quickly we were able to mobilize to put together a proposal for a kids’ iPhone game; we went on that sales call together and it was a lot of fun and satisfying to come together as a team. I think we all stepped it up to squeeze in what amounted to a decent sized set of projects in between all of the other work we had on our plates.
There was some basic office reconfiguration as Em got her second monitor installed on her drafting table and we managed to hook up the printer so we can all actually use it rather than emailing documents to the one machine that was configured correctly. Aaron consolidated a lot of extra craft supplies so that we could donate those to our friends and landlords at Sprout.
Em and Aaron made multiple trips to Pearl to stock up on some great paper and art supplies (an incredible sale!).
Em has been a powerhouse all week – business cards, document templates, and an initial set of designs for our website. She’s been helping with project management and will be doing PM for upcoming clients.
I pulled some long hours trying to finish off a couple web projects that have persisted through the New Year while also handling a few sales leads and getting a contract out to a new client.
Aaron continued his solid track record of hitting milestones and getting great compliments from clients about communication; he’s building playables and solving some memory issues for the codenamed “Awesome Safari” project.
And as if that wasn’t enough, Aaron’s Meta-Nixie Clock project was featured on the Make blog and CrunchGear.
I can’t speak highly enough of Pipelinedeals.com. I have a dozen or so opportunities at various stages being tracked through this service, and I would say I haven’t even scratched the surface of its utility. As I refine some of the funnel processes, I should be able to scale up my efforts in business development and really start to take advantage of having a central, simple tool to manage strong communication with both potential and active clients.
In fact, over the past few projects, we’ve been developing processes and templates which, over time, we think will both increase our capacity but also help us move projects along efficiently with a higher quality client experience.
Upcoming Week
We’re technically operating through my old consulting business (where I was sole proprietor), but we have a couple of pressing potential contracts of a larger size that we do not want to sign w/o at least an LLC in place. So Em is handling setting up our business structure and administration (legal registration w/ the state, bank account, etc.)
We have a number of client projects coming due in the next couple of weeks, so that’ll be dominating Aaron’s and my time. In particular, we have 2 web projects that are due this week, an iPhone app to be submitted for a client on Monday, deliverables for 2 other apps, and a kick-off for a new client. The iPhone game we’re developing (“Awesome Safari”) is due in a couple of weeks (can you say “Crunch time”?) We manage our projects in Basecamp and it’s been a lifesaver.
The encouraging thing is that if we can deliver some results for our active clients this week, our February is looking strong – the pipeline is full and converting better than expected, and we have a couple of interesting opportunities that may allow us to focus on fewer and bigger projects.
We do have a speculative project we’d like to work on, but we had to have a conversation about what’s currently on our plate, on our radar, and what we could realistically accomplish in a short time. We’ll be making a final go/no-go decision this week and we’ll definitely blog about it, etc.
Finally, we’ll be putting in some effort on getting our website live and blog posts flowing.
Parting Thoughts
Last night we all went out to celebrate our first week. We toasted the long adventure ahead over margaritas and delicious burgers at Christopher’s.
I’m very happy to be taking on this journey with good friends; the upcoming year will be filled with uncertainty, really awesome successes, and some terrible letdowns. We can’t know when those high and low moments will come, but when they do, I’m confident in my partners’ capacity to celebrate and survive. If the upcoming weeks are anything like this past one, we’re in for an amazing ride.
Events & Announcements
We’ll be attending the Mobile Monday, MassMobile, Drinks On Tap developer’s meetup tomorrow night. Come say hi!
Topics for upcoming weeknotes:
- What did we learn in our first 2 months of DINO
- How we met and how we became DINO
- More about our studio space
I’m currently in Pittsburgh at the Art&Code Mobile event.
We arrived last night and came straight from the airport to attend the Rossum’s meetup. The group is an Art and Robotics collective that meet regularly to host speakers, collaborate on projects, and promote their work.
This morning, I particpated in the OpenFrameworks and iPhone workshop taught by memo akten and Zach Gage
The project we were working on was, essentially, pong for the iPhone. It was a great starter project for those that needed an intro to OF because it exposed the basic structure of an OF program (memo and zach did a great, patient job of going through the IDE and the file placement idiosyncrasies of OF). The class proved that OF can be quite cross-platform right out of the box. There are some obvious exceptions (ex. multitouch isn’t available on all platforms). These unique features are handled as addons to the basic OF project.
As expected, the most difficult part of getting an iPhone OF project to work is the whole provisioning / signing process. Luckily, I’ve done quite a bit of iPhone work before, so this was somewhat smooth for me (once I made sure that the correct SDK was selected in XCode — that messed me up a bit).
I didn’t realize that iPhone OF creates ‘legitimate’ iPhone apps that are acceptable for app store submission (and sale). What’s especially exciting about working with something like OF for iPhone is that the platform encourages building art / toy / pretty apps… so the scope of interestingly designed applications that can be offered is small enough that you could iterate through many experiments with ease. That being said, in my experience, since OF can also be essentially use any library that compiles (c++ or objective-c on OS X), you can use it as a framework for more complex applications.
Tonight, I’m spending evening at HackPGH – very cool do-oriented space. somebody’s soldering near me, somebody’s crocheting. I’ll be trying to build an iPhone toy using OF.
Special thanks to Matt Mets for letting me couch surf at his apartment this weekend.
Good times.
Tonight there is a dorkbot-boston as part of the CHI2009 conference.
“What do glitter and glue, needles and thread, batteries and wires have to do with Human Computer Interaction? What can makers and crafters teach technology researchers and designers about the world and technology? How can CHI researchers engage with Do-It-Yourself communities? This session will be a dialogue about the relationships between academia and DIY communities. It will include presentations from the workshop organizers and participants who will demo and discuss their own DIY projects and then use them as springboards for open discussions with the audience. Come to see some interesting projects and to share your own insights and experiences.”
I have the pleasure of making some opening remarks; it’s a little bit of “what is dorkbot,” but I’ll be mixing in some of the call-to-arms rhetoric I’ve used before with a DIYist slant:
Read More Post a comment (1)I giggled out loud, had a brief moment of “Wow, I can’t believe this is what I get to do for a living right now,” and then came crashing down when I realized that it’s 330AM.
I just listened to Eurydice Aroney’s radio piece, “The Dribble Down Effect” – (listen at http://www.thirdcoastfestival.com – Re:Sound #44)
The story is a “mockumentary” done in the style of a radio documentary you might hear as a 30-minute special on NPR. While parts were definitely funny, it didn’t seem to be presented as a slapstick humorous production (a la Chris Guest’s movies).
Instead, this was speculative fiction reported on in a very serious manner, peppered with the sound collages you come to expect from well-engineered radio stories. This particular story was about childcare in the near future. Robots watch kids (cheaper than university-educated babysitters), children have implants that provide biodata like “I’m hungry,” and society faces all sorts of questions about class differences, feminism, and the ever-present abundance of overbearing parents.
Read More Post a comment (0)I’ve recently upped the font sizes in Textmate and the terminal.
It makes me feel like my code is more beautiful, somehow.
Maybe it’s because whenever I watch a brilliant hacker give a technical talk, they put their screens up on the projector and live-code with super-large type.
Perhaps it reduces the amount of stuff that fits on my screen to a more elegant “that which matters.” Too much text via smaller font makes it difficult to focus.
It’s a cognitive hack for creativity.
Monoco 18pt – Vibrant Ink color scheme for Textmate
This Sunday I partcipated in DevHouse Boston. It was fantastic, exhausting, and maybe even inspiring.
Dev House convenes a group of people who all are working on or wanting to work on interesting projects for one, short day. At a strict time after the hack session, everyone shows off what they’ve finished. The scope of each project is necessarily small since the emphasis is on completing something.
Mac demo’ing the project we worked on
There were no sponsors (aside from the venue itself, betahouse) nor after-parties; these were just smart, energetic people putting in a good day’s work on mostly side-projects. Pizza and coffee and wifi flow freely and everyone has an impressive skill set and/or project history.
Simple and effective. The organizers weren’t egomaniacal pseudo-celebrities in an insignificant web 2.0 universe. In fact, while there were provably high caliber brains with large profile track records in the room, egos seemed to have been checked in at the door.
The hangers-on that tend to flock to your average barcamp who have little substantive input to offer and just get off on going to tech events would have been really out of place here.
You’ve met these people? Their cards say “Social Media Consultant,” but you still have absolutely NO idea what they actually have accomplished in their lives to enjoy such self-importance.
They somehow show up at every technology conference and happy hour, flitting around and constantly twittering and traveling and collecting “friends” on facebook like points in a game. They name drop other, bigger narcissists with @’s on twitter as if you are supposed to be impressed by their ability to weasel into places where they are hopelessly outclassed.
Engage them in their one-way conversation at an unconference (one of 20 they helped “organize” that month) and they kvetch about how they don’t ever have time to sleep and how their many podcasts and video streams and guest blogging gigs and Uber-secret, open-source coalition of boards and specification architects is just about to launch and change the universe forever.
The have to wear costumes… COSTUMES… to SxSW so they are noticed and photographed since you have never heard of anything they’ve actually shipped before.
You fall for it once or twice or a few years. You may even chase the glory. Then the veneer fades. Then you meet people who are actually smart and are producing projects daily that chip away at real world, observable improvements in our human condition. Then you get angry or bitter or jealous at the “evangelists” and “connectors.”
You look around and wonder what the hell happened and how did so much time disappear.
Not at Dev House.
Everyone was working and the socializing was all in the context of real effort. I suspect that there would have been very little tolerance for the BS that we generously call “expertise” at your typical tech conference panel sessions, for example.
“Tolerance” overstates the case. Valueless people would probably have just gone home on their own because they would have been ignored.
Coding notes
I also got a glimpse of what I’m missing as a lone wolf freelancer. I’ve not really participated much in pair programming sessions, and realized that there are some practical advantages. For example, watching somebody’s terminal commands might reveal a new shortcut that can shave precious seconds off of trivial operations.
With somebody looking over your shoulder and simultaneously working on the same problems, you tend to be on better behavior.
There wasn’t time for much architecture or even goal-setting at the session. We just kind of went forward as fast as we could. The day before, I created an initial framework that was refined pretty quickly by the others’ input and it did the job for the day.
In this team coding environment, you have to constantly think about what you’re doing and be prepared to explain or justify your approaches. So for better or worse, I found myself slowing down– I was coding at maybe 60% efficiency.
This was maybe my second or third effort using ruby-processing (although I’ve done dozens of things (including production work) in processing, proper). It was definitely the most involved ruby-processing project I’ve done. We chose ruby-processing since more people were used to doing ruby work vs. java, and frankly, it just seemed more fun. Processing will ultimately not be sufficient for this project. We didn’t even get into “real” graphics stuff.
I got stuck on some of the issues that “just work” in processing like file inclusions that were a result of our ruby-processing choice. Nevertheless, I do think that using some of the ruby idioms, combined with the ruby expertise in the room made for a more rapid development.
The last version control system I’ve used w/ more than one coder was subversion. I’ve migrated all my active projects to git lately. Git merges, etc, are something I don’t usually deal with as I’m almost always a lone programmer on a project, so I needed some reminding on how to address those in git.
Criticism was constructive, for the most part. There were some people who took conversations off on digressions, but that’s to be expected (reminded me of some of the better undergrad comp sci classes)
Get something done in a day, and you get the respect of at least a few minutes of attention and genuine questions or suggestions.
Most normal people took Sunday off.
I had a meeting this morning which I think will help seed a nice, grand project over the next year. We discussed creating an augmented workspace to be used in a laboratory setting. This is the brainchild of Jason Morrison and Mac Cowell of diybio.org. (see the Seed Magazine article featuring Mac and his work)
The concept, called SmartLab, looks to be a fun way to reapply and improve on some work I have done previously in interface design, multitouch tables, and creative workflow research.
The project will involve prototyping a physical workbench (with integrated projection, multitouch screen, and image capture facilities), writing some system software, and developing a user interaction that will stretch my imagination in strange and useful ways.
Read More Post a comment (1)I moved to Boston right after July 4th of this year and have had the opportunity to introduce myself to lots and lots of new faces.
I took for granted that Austin was a relatively smaller town and that I could go to just about any tech-related meetup and find at least one person that I knew.
So the question, “what do you do?” has had me stumped for a while now. When most people ask that, they really want to know “how much money do you make” or “can you even relate to my self-important world?”
I’ve been doing web and software development of some sort or another for the past decade with an occasional foray into non-profit organizational work and things like dorkbot and robotic puppets. There are also many things I aspire to and am working towards. I looked at web stuff as bread and butter.
I no longer introduce myself as a web developer or Rails guy. Ballast. All of my current gigs involve art or robots or innovative software. It’s a good place. When I consciously made the decision not to pursue web stuff as a source of income the universe rewarded me by presenting just enough non-web opportunity to keep my income pipeline fuller than it’s ever been while keeping the stress level way down.
I’m happier when I’m doing work that’s more creatively fulfilling.
I’m also realizing that if I keep all of my creative work closed up in a box out of fear or relentless tinkering, then it’s as good as “never done.” Nothing is more unflattering than trying to convince someone of the value of a perpetual “closed beta.”
As a side effect, I find that the people I’m wanting to meet deal in the currency of provable accomplishments and not vaporware ideas. Nobody cares about the network of people I know (since nowadays, it’s super easy to reach anybody via social media tools). Spinning multiple plates badly is not attractive. They aren’t even interested in what I can do.
The only thing that matters is, “What have you done lately that’s remarkable?”
Cal Newport defines Grand Projects as
any project that when explained to someone for the first time is likely to elicit a response of “wow!’”
There is a huge difference in multitasking because you are disorganized and consciously multitasking so that you accomplish interesting grand projects.
Interesting people are often involved in multiple grand projects, but they really only can get one completed at a time.
So the better question is “What project are you working on right now that fires you up the most?”
I’d like to live a life of prolific creativity. I’d like to introduce myself with infectious enthusiasm over some project I can literally put into somebody’s hands.
I’m working on a meta-grand project, then. I’m fired up about figuring out what creativity framework I need so that I and lots of other people can have a relentlessly creative output of accomplishment.
I won’t spend all of my time ruminating over the creative process rather than actually creating things. That’d just be procrastination. I am spending quality time doing research and building infrastructure that facilitates creative output. These ideas are to be field tested by me and eventually others.
I’ll probably blog about that research on occasion, but only when I have something provable to say or an artifact to share.
Most of the time, now, I want to talk about the projects that result from my creativity experiments.
I may, at some point in my life, call myself a technology artist or creativity expert. For now, I’m a guy making things.
This post is a response to the Holidailies writing prompt “Introduce Yourself.”
