It’s been very interesting to me to see how some folks are re-evaluating their work/life balance in the wake of reading Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography (most famously, this story). I’ve been making some of the same evaluations over the last few years following the birth of my daughter.

This isn’t a new thing for me. I’ve always worked hard, often with long hours – mainly because I love building things. Finding a good balance that provides for both a rewarding work life and a rewarding home life isn’t easy.¹

Enabling this balance is something that’s been important to me in the Crowd Favorite team culture. I’ve been through the 80 hour week startup environment and seen how it burns out great people. I want an environment where people work hard and build great stuff, but are able to do so while maintaining balance. I want to keep my team engaged long-term, I don’t want to burn them out and use them up in the name of meeting some unreasonable schedule.

Saying you believe in a healthy work/life balance is one thing – lots of companies say they value it; for Crowd Favorite I’ve taken a pretty big step to back it up. As of last week, Crowd Favorite has a mountain retreat in Breckenridge.

Everyone is pretty excited about this. Each team member gets exclusive use of the place for one week a year (with their family, friends, etc.). When it’s not spoken for, anyone on the team can claim a bedroom and head up. I’m hoping that it will be an opportunity for the team to hang out together outside of the office (which, in turn, leads to working together better when in the office).

Not only does this reinforce that we’re a team that believes in a healthy work/life balance, but it also encourages everyone to get out and do something active. I’ve got a great team, and I’m really pleased to be able to provide this as a reward. Hopefully it will help with recruiting as well – did I mention we’re hiring?

The basic pitch? Work on great projects with a great team in beautiful Colorado. Use the latest and greatest technology and techniques. Work with and contribute to Open Source (particularly WordPress). All in a collaborative developer-centric environment and without the 60-80 hour work week you get with the typical “startup” environment.

In the menu area of Mountain Lion, you’ll see a new option to push your entire desktop to an Apple TV via Airplay. This will essentially turn your television into a massive monitor.

This is exactly what I was trying to pull off for our conference rooms last fall. We ended up with wireless HDMI at the time, but I expect we’ll be replacing that with Apple TV units this summer.

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No approach is without risk, but doing nothing at all, or pretending there is no problem, is riskiest of all because it merely lets the WebKit mobile web monoculture worsen. The last time we had a web monoculture, it set the open web back for years.

This is a great interview – smart questions and solid follow-up between two people that really know the material.

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Awesome to hear @joelbush and @amplifierinc given proper kudos by @danbenjamin on the latest “Back to Work”. http://5by5.tv/b2w/54

Stoked to have been right about this http://alexking.org/?p=7665 but a bit surprised that the beta download isn’t through the Mac App Store.

I don’t understand how folks that advocate for custom fonts on websites get past the horrible visual when the fonts “load in” late.

I saw this the other day when I loaded up the store – looks like a classic “CSS not loaded” view to me. Quitting and re-launching returned things to normal. I found this interesting because I remembered that iTunes didn’t use Webkit; however that seems to have changed.

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The main reason for the change is to be able to support a branch driven development workflow (using Git Flow). We were already using this for newer projects (including some of our Open Source WordPress plugins that we host on GitHub), and we were seeing lots of areas where this approach would be a big improvement to our SVN workflows. We think it will especially pay dividends for our ongoing retainer clients.

With our ongoing clients we are commonly engaged in building new features and functionality while also needing to be able to make smaller changes (hotfixes) that are pushed up immediately. With Git it is easy for us to maintain development of more involved functionality in feature branches and still being able to push up quick changes as needed.

We’ve been following a modular development methodology for years, so we have a large number of libraries, plugins, etc. that are shared across various projects. Converting these from SVN externals to Git submodules was a good bit of busy work, but more importantly it required everyone to get comfortable with the difference between SVN externals and Git submodules. The biggest changes are that the submodules default to a detached head and don’t auto-update to the latest code in a branch. These are generally positives, but require changes to how you think about things. More on this in a future post.

We are using GitHub to host our Open Source projects, but we choose to host our own Git server for our private repositories. We are using Gitolite for repository management, GitPHP to provide a hackable web interface and we’re planning to use Gerrit for code reviews.

One of the other challenges was setting up a repository structure that we were happy with for our WordPress sites. We settled on the following:

/index.php
/local-config.php (unversioned – has machine specific settings)
/wp-config.php (define WP_CONTENT_DIR and WP_CONTENT_URL here)
/wp/ (WordPress core as a shallow Git submodule or SVN checkout)
/wp-content/ (plugins, themes, etc.)

This works quite nicely for simple and painless WordPress core upgrades, local development environments, and scriptable deployments. With a standardized structure, we’re also able to create scripts to automate the creation and data seeding of local development environments. We’re still working on the local dev set-up script, but I’m really excited about it. It should make it much easier for any developer on our team to quickly spin up a project and be able to contribute to it.

Does this sound like fun? We’re hiring! Come help us define and implement best practices that make developers effective; and work on interesting and challenging projects.

Julius explained to me that Washington runs on a compromise mentality. You propose something and then begin negotiating from there. Innovative companies, where I spent almost all of my time, run on a problem solving mentality. You have a problem – you solve it. When I reflected on the panels during the day, the engineers and engineering heavy panels were problem solving and the policy / lawyer heavy panels were fighting over polarized positions which, if they converged, would be a convergence based on compromise rather than problem solving.

Very interesting insight from Brad here. Also, worth considering how differing “modes” affect our day to day interactions with others.

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I can of course make no authoritative claims here, but I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions. When someone explains something new to me, I’ll usually just nod my head like I know what they’re talking about. If I don’t understand something, I’ll just Google it later. After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron. Smart people are different. If they don’t understand something, or even if they think they understand something, they’ll ask questions.

Another reason I think many smart people ask questions (besides to understand something better) is that they are engaged listeners and tangental thinkers. The new ideas they are receiving spark connections to existing things they know; help them see areas where they are missing the necessary details for a connection to something else, etc. This process and natural curiosity makes it easy to come up with questions. (thanks Rands)

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Everything on this list is important. Absolutely no chance of getting through them all in the foreseeable future. 2012 is kicking my arse.