A thoughtful post by Ethan. Company culture is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit over the last few months. I’m happy with where we are, but definitely have some areas I think we can make better.
February, 2012
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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
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Stoked to have been right about this https://alexking.org/?p=7665 but a bit surprised that the beta download isn’t through the Mac App Store.
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I don’t understand how folks that advocate for custom fonts on websites get past the horrible visual when the fonts “load in” late.
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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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I had a brief moment of panic after upgrading to 10.7.3, but of course Adam had me covered! Can’t recommend this highly enough.
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A couple of weeks ago we shut down the Crowd Favorite office for a day and a half to do a migration from SVN to Git. This was not a small undertaking. We had nearly five years of code in a single SVN repository that was then broken out into literally hundreds of Git repositories.…
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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.
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If you’re planning to apply for TechStars Boulder for this summer (2012), make sure you’ve got your application ready to go for the early application deadline in 2 weeks. It’s been amazing to see TechStars grow and thrive as it has. The experience offered to the teams and the quality of the mentors is remarkable;…
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I realize that it’s a punchline to most of my peers, but I’m rooting for the Samsung Galaxy Note. I’d love it to be a great device with elegant software to act as a “pants computer”, a digital sketchbook (the iPhone is too small for this), etc. However since it’s not a “Google Experience” device it’ll be effectively a dead end for upgrades…
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I was in Austin last week for a few days and took a few photos (all with the iPhone). It’s a very cool town; and a much different vibe without the SxSW craziness.
