advocacy

By Accident : Red Kite Prayer

By Accident : Red Kite Prayer:

I got hit by a car and learned how large my ego had become, learned that, more than anything, I was in my own way, and that the best way to get where I wanted to go, i.e. everywhere, was to let myself be small and let the world be big. I can, if I squint, see the accident again. I’m riding along. A Volvo passes me on the left. Its brake lights blaze purposefully. I back off on the pedals. A turn signal. I brake. Nothing to prove. And then the car turns in front of me. Its shocks make a hiccuping sound as it bounces into the driveway of the grocery store. I glance over my left shoulder and then guide my bike out into the open lane to glide past the Volvo’s bumper.
And then I ride home. Whole and well.

[The world is always ready to humble and caution us. It’s why “no fear” is a mantra for some. But none of us leave this world undefeated. I for one accept the path to smaller in everything I do, even if some parts of me will fight it until my final defeat.]

inessential.com: Pub Rules

inessential.com: Pub Rules:

Almost of the above stuff is easy. Most of it is just avoiding stuff that’s stupid, but that lots of publications do. (And that make their jobs harder, for no gain.)

The challenge belongs in one place: the quality of the writing. And that’s it.

If the articles were poorly-written or not interesting or both, the site would fail.

But I believe, though I can’t back it up with numbers, that such a site with good, interesting articles would succeed very well.

[Noting for myself. Good stuff.]

How to take advantage of Redis just adding it to your stack

How to take advantage of Redis just adding it to your stack:

However one thing I like about Redis is that it can solve a lot of problems just adding it to your stack to do things that were too slow or impossible with your existing database. This way you start to take confidence with Redis in an incremental way, starting to use it just to optimize or to create new features in your application. This blog post explores a few use cases showing how people added Redis to existing environments to take advantage of Redis set of features. I’ll not report specific use cases with site names and exact configurations, I’ll just try to show you class of problems that Redis can solve without being your primary database.

[It’s the way I got Redis in the door with a team very wary (and weary) of adding anything to the stack.]

Opening up my calendar

Opening up my calendar:

I’ve freed up ~an hour/day in my calendar to help advise early-stage startups and young designers — Office Hours style. I chose the time slot 4pm GMT to be convenient for a range of time zones – that’s 8am in SF and 11am in NYC.

I’ll see how it goes and tweak as necessary, but for now if you’re a pre-money startup, or a (prospective?) design school student feel free to RSVP to one of these slots with your Skype or iChat username and we’ll go from there!

My availability on Google Calendar

[I’ve done this as well recently, although I’m more hesitant… maybe I should just leap in and see what happens.]
Source: Jon Gold

No, Michael Arrington, you are not Jack Sparrow

No, Michael Arrington, you are not Jack Sparrow:

“But the real payoff is the pirate life itself!” The argument for doing the insane startup work is the slim potential the team sells for $100M or more, but really, you’re in it because you love risk. You love the lifestyle! You love the sailing around the world and visiting exotic new ports of call and the rum and the wenches and oh wait we’re not actually talking about pirates you idiot.

Real pirates tended to be out-of-work privateers who had nowhere else to go, criminals trying to escape the law, or the desperately poor; their careers at sea rarely lasted more than a few years and usually ended in death. The number who retired comfortably in their mid-30s to start investment funds to back new up-and-coming pirates is roughly zero. But in Arrington’s “fantasy pirate world,” they’re all Jack Sparrow.

There may well be an “entrepreneur lifestyle” which roughly corresponds to the pirate lifestyle. I know a serial entrepreneur who seems to always be traveling to meet with high-power executives and VCs, to make deals over lunch and dinner and wine and bocce, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he puts in 80+ hour weeks or that it isn’t genuinely hard work. But the lifestyle that people are “crying and whining about” is, ultimately, not the entrepreneur lifestyle. It’s the first-hire lifestyle. Arrington may genuinely believe that all hard work is roughly identical, but it isn’t. The hard work he put in building TechCrunch was finding and managing employees, writing, and a lot of meetings with Internet movers and shakers. Surely that is hard work, but it’s no more comparable to an 80+ hour week of sitting at (or under) a desk coding until you have RSI than it is to tomato farming.

What brought on Arrington’s righteous anger was the complaints that people like, well, me had about Zynga reneging on stock options. He thinks that’s just whining. Bullshit. Zynga is whining. And let’s not pretend that Zynga is a Google or Twitter or a JWZ-era Netscape—or even a TechCrunch. They’re a Skinner box. I won’t go so far as to say that Mark Pincus should be first against the wall when the revolution comes, but he should be sleeping under a desk.

Pincus started—started—where Uncle Mike is now: as a venture capitalist. The material wealth both of them enjoy came from work very far removed from first-hire engineering. Arrington may fancy himself a pirate, but he hasn’t ever had to worry about scurvy.

[Too brilliant for me not to quote so heavily. It’s worth reading the entire piece. There’s another confusion taking place as well. The one where someone writes code or has an idea they’re so passionate about that they can’t stop doing it. That happens as well, but it’s only slightly more common than winning the lottery, hitting it big with a startup, or becoming a rock star considering how hard it is to maintain that level of intensity over any length of time.]
Source: Coyote Tracks

Apple to Allow Subscription-Based Gaming on App Store

You download one Big Fish app, and the games are all available within that app. Like what the Netflix app is for movies, the Big Fish app is for games. This is an interesting change in policy from Apple, to say the least.

 ★ 

[This was exactly the sea change I discussed elsewhere about apps being the new channel, or books.]
Source: Daring Fireball

[A follow up, that it looks like Apple allowed this by mistake and the app has since been pulled… We’ll see what happens next. But ultimately, apps as channels will happen IMHO.]

The Pummeling Pages

The Pummeling Pages: I’d like to think so. If you’re appealing to readers, remember that you’re appealing to people who like reading black-and-white words on a page, more-or-less.

Because for now it’s insane. Presenting good articles in the hope of attracting readers, and then making the site do everything it can to shoo away those readers, is plumb nuts.

[I’ve said this for years in my previous gig. I did not have a large impact.]
Source: inessential.com

Stop Censorship

Stop Censorship:

Today, Congress holds hearings on the first American Internet censorship system as part of SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act. There are a lot of different ways to characterize these bills, but the thing that sticks out to me is that these even though these bills were designed to protect big copyright players—people I have no love for even though I make part of my living by making content—they go one step further and enable massive censorship tools, the kind of which would be valuable to any totalitarian government.

(watch on Vimeo)

We’ve already got enough of those tools, such as the Patriot Act, which have been abused to our detriment. We don’t need another one, no matter what the good excuse. Not to mention that protecting big copyright holders is a piss poor excuse. Make no mistake about it, these provisions do nothing to help the creative class. Instead, it puts sites like Vimeo and Flickr at risk. It puts FaceBook and YouTube at risk. It puts any blog at risk.

Learn more. Now. Act now. Quickly. Call your congressfolk. Don’t leave it to somebody else.

[Righteo. Done. Join!]
Source: James Duncan Davidson

Steve Jobs: The parable of the stones – Fortune Tech

Steve Jobs: The parable of the stones – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech: That’s always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.

[Earlier I wrote about trying to focus the passion and limit the drama that goes with reaching for high levels of execution. But I was referring to the mean dismissal of people’s attempts to accomplish and deriding their work. Not the impassioned reaching that I feel is described here. This stuff is gold.]