I just launched Tinyproj, the latest in my line of web service experiments. Tinyproj is simple: it helps connect developers, designers, copywriters, and illustrators with respectful, interesting, and paid short-term projects. These projects go out every Saturday to almost 1,000 over 4,000 rad folks. It’s just $25 to get started if you’ve got a project to offer, and free to sign up if you’re looking for work. I think this fills a real need and will hopefully be of great use to people on both sides of the equation, especially given that it’s a more ethical alternative than asking people to work on spec. Nonetheless, check it out, sign up if it sounds interesting to you, and stay tuned — I think great things will come of this.
PS. Discussion on HN
I’ve been pondering this question for a while, and I thought it could spark some interesting discussion. 10 pin bowling is a huge part of my life: I’ve been a ball driller, coach, and at my peak was throwing 50-100 games a week, and was gearing up to start bowling professionally (those were the days!) What’s interesting about bowling is that a lot of folks I drilled equipment for didn’t really care about the physics behind it — the how and why; indeed, there are a ton of aspects to a proper drilling, but most of my clients just didn’t care about that — they wanted to see the ball hook, and they wanted to score well. Beyond that, it was of little concern what layout I used or why, so long as the ball was getting the desired reaction. Bowling is a combination of mental and physical routines greatly impacted by a number of variables that one can tune — it’s like a giant equation. As a ball driller, there are numerous tweaks I can make to how I drill a ball that will subtlety (or grossly) affect how the ball works on the lane (there are also a number of physical things you can do, like tweaking ball speed, hand position, etc.) In striving to improve my own game, I learned everything I could about the variables involved, and how I could tune them to maximize my scoring potential.
Now, if you’re actually still reading this, you’re probably asking yourself how this could possibly relate to development or design. Well, my friends, it does more than you think: When was the last time you stopped to truly understand what was going on behind the scenes in your code, gems, plugins, libraries, your CSS frameworks, and your design tools? Have you ever spent a significant amount of time pulling apart your tools in an effort to understand not just what the do on the surface, but how and why they do it? This is something that I’ve been making a concerted effort to do the past few years, and it’s helped me grow immensely in my craft, not to mention it’s so much easier to understand what’s going wrong if you understand what’s going on in the first place.
So, my question to you is this: do you strive to deeply understand your tools, or is getting it working good enough?
psql:
We’re adding a shipload of new fun things to MindSnacks, so we need the help of some fresh, creative brains. We’ve got some early openings in our Art-Design department.
Check out our careers page for more information, and spread the word! It’s a truly exciting opportunity.
It’s actually blood!
But anyway — check out our openings. It’s going to be exciting to work with some additional whacky brains.
Any questions can also be telegrammed to pasquale(at)mindsnacks.com.
Pud's Blog: Why Must You Laugh At My Back End -
Disclaimer:
I’m not a trained engineer or sys admin. Never even finished a book on it. But I’ve launched (and sold) a few things that have become popular, so sometimes people ask me about my back end. Which ends up in blank stares, or worse.
OS:
Windows Server 2008. As for why not linux, I…
Nailed it. Using the right tool(s) for the job will usually win over using what’s hot this very second.
Fun fact: I used to write ColdFusion, too.
Everybody likes stats, so here are some neat/awesome/boring stats about Forrst.
Since launching about 14 months ago:
- 31,000 registered users, 40% of whom are active each month (and that’s more than just logging in)
- nearly 90,000 posts across four types (code, screenshots, links, and questions)
- 350,000 comments
- 17,000 folks waiting for an account (something we’re working on reducing, e.g. with GitHub-powered signup)
- almost 1 million pieces of content liked
- between 50 and 100 people request an invite every day
- 640 paid accounts
- we grew by 1,200 users in January 2011; we grew by 2,700 users in June 2011
It’s been awesome to see Forrst grow from literally nothing into the awesome community it is today, and we’re all seriously excited about what’s next for us.
And we didn’t need to raise enormous amounts of money to do it, either.
Ted Roden: Meet the new boss -
About five months ago I left my job at The New York Times. When I left, the plan was simple, I was going to work part time at betaworks/bit.ly to help get news.me out the door and part time on Fancy Hands. News.me is out the door and Fancy Hands is still “up and to the right” as Tony Haile…
Congrats, Ted!
From: XXXXX
Date: Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 2:07 PM
Subject: Hello From YouTube Engineering: checking in
To: XXXXX@gmail.com
Hi XXXX,
It’s a new year — already halfway over! and I thought I’d check in to see if you may be interested in exploring engineering opportunities with YouTube? I hope…
Gotta love recruiters.
“Tumblr is a truly unique hybrid. It sits squarely in the center of the Media Cloverleaf. It’s highly social, with an incredibly engaged community and connective tissue to the aforementioned hubs. It offers most of the benefits of the large blog platforms (eg Owned media). And, last but not least, it is being used by dozens of traditional and ‘tradigital’ media brands like The Next Web and Sports Blog Nation. It became clear to me in recent months that there is no other platform has the full Media Cloverleaf in its wraps the way Tumblr does. So moving to Tumblr seemed like the perfect way for me to walk my talk and engage across all four clovers with a maximum return on my time.” —
I Adopted a Scorched Earth Policy, Closed 2 Blogs & Jumped to Tumblr by Steve Rubel (via thenextweb)
interesting perspective on tumblr as a platform
(via khuyi)
“Tradigital”? I want to vomit.
(via caterpillarcowboy)
Barfing across a field of four-leaf clovers, all the way to the end of that glorious social media rainbow.
Just kidding. I weep for the future.
(via caterpillarcowboy)
psql:
ASTEROID BELT!