Day 2923.
On April 1st, 2005 I founded Linking Paths. By that time I didn’t know almost anything about running a company, especially after the main idea behind it fell apart seven days later. And I’m still not sure about what is this all about, but that’s another story. I’ve an announcement to do today and felt this birthday a round date for it.
This is something that some of you, dear readers, already knew. A few of you guessed it since I haven’t write any weeknote for the past months. But today is finally becoming formal, public and final: yesterday was my last day at Linking Paths.
But this is not its end. Aitor has taken the lead and I’m sure he will do many memorable things in the coming time. That’s is what he has always done since he joined me in 2007. I made this decision for personal reasons, I really feel it’s time for a change. For me and for Linking Paths.
I would like to use this last post to thank you all of you, friends, customers and occasional readers, for your support all this time. It has been a long and worthwhile journey and I really appreciate it. I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved together in this eight years, even with its not-so-funny moments. Thank you very much for being there.
That’s all. Take care.
Alberto.
PS: To satisfy the curious. I’m taking a couple of months off while closing the transition for some customers that took longer than expected. No plan after that yet.
Week #415
Another week finishing… and more work done in multiple fronts. This week was rough in Iceland due to weather conditions but as with the postal carriers neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays us from our deploys.
Support and some billing in Stage. The week started on Sunday’s night with some issues related to our fees. As we state clearly in our product’s homepage our fee for free tickets is 0. The reason for this policy is that we’ve always supported people organizing open, community-oriented, free events providing them our service for free. However many organizers promote their events giving discounts and coupons to customers that sometimes cover the full ticket price and we think that is purely a marketing decision, a good one probably but marketing nonetheless and therefore the 0 fee doesn’t apply.
Alberto met with Bazaar’s founders during the week to push the project further and continue development in the first shop powered by the system. The shop is designed to interact with a central catalog system (Bazaar) and one of the main challenges is to ensure a good performance and stability for this interaction.
In the last weeks some testing on Foundation 4 was done. Although the new version has been a complete revamp and there are obviously some small bugs to be ironed out in the coming weeks, experience has been quite solid so far. It’s well structured, configurable and mobile-first. It’s a very interesting tool for us: you can prototype an app in no-time, there is a good number of add-ons and the documentation is clear and simple.
Facebook integration in Verkami is basically done. The internationalization process is madness and Open Graph custom actions must be manually approved by Facebook, but now everything is in place for slowly rolling out the feature to users. Most of the implementation is transparent to users and not terribly complex but I’m happy with it because is configurable (letting users to share more/less info in their timelines), extendable (allowing verkami staff to add new sharing options in the future) user-oriented (detecting and connecting new facebook users with their old verkami users, conserving contribution history) and multi-provider (enabling other OAuth platforms -eg. Twitter- to be used as extra identity in the future).
The recommendation for the weekend is a little wink to all the nerds in the audience that -like us- spent many hours in the 90’s playing with a very special type of cards: Friday Night Magic.
Have a nice weekend!
Week #414
Resist discouragement. Your own and the one you acquired from others. Resist the sleepless nights and the after-hours work, especially the one that doesn’t make sense. Hold that unnerving feeling when something inside your brain says what the hell am I doing. Grit your teeth and move on, specially when it would be easy to turn around and do something else. Assume that things will not be right the first time, probably not even in a second try but trust that, still, hard work and do-the-right-thing are almighty tools.
Accept that the encouragement of your family, wife and friends is a gift too precious to allow yourself to fail when facing adversity. Resist the thought of failure, the though of “shit happens”. Be true to yourself and don’t let yourself be impressed by the pyrotechnic flaunting of fops and supernovae. Hold on to the dream, the enthusiasm, the primal desire that started everything in first place, beyond all logic reason and beyond all doubt. Persevere and work hard to honor the people who support you.
When things go wrong, rectify and keep fighting. This will put you in the same group in which the greatest humans in history are; no one is remembered by never been wrong. Build something you can be proud of with trust, honesty, transparency and dialogue. Resist the lie of work-life dichotomy: improving our work improves our lives and 8 hours per day is a lot to put them in a corner at night. Prove that profitable and human are not incompatible terms.
Resist. Resist. Resist.
If you would like to know how to make a company work you just have to learn what that word means.
I wrote this five years ago.
Have a great weekend.
Week #413
413 Request Entity Too Large: The request is larger than the server is willing or able to process.
The HTTP is wise and universal: that is the perfect definition for this week. Is easy to fall into despair when you try to cope with many projects and fail miserably doing it… but one must move forward. A few things done this week (very similar to what has been done during February):
- Integration of the front-end in the Bazaar’s shop project.
- The usual support and maintenance in Stage.
- Estimates and inquiries for multiple project propositions.
- The first private alpha integration of Facebook OAuth & Open Graph in verkami has been deployed.
To research this last point, we’ve tested many well known sites doing similar stuff and discovered that most implementations are really poor. One small example: most apps don’t try to correlate new identities coming from Facebook with existing users in their sites (with the consequent confusion and loss of historical information for the users). Additionally this precludes users from disconnect their facebook accounts in the future if they change their mind. We’re working hard to build a better approach.
My recommendation for this weekend is to cook. Yes, you’ve read correctly: cooking. I could write pages and pages about all the links I can see between cooking and programming but that is probably material for a special post and not the weeknote. If you want some nice inspiration be sure to check this three examples of great gastronomical tips and recipes:
- The Perennial Plate and Saveur’s channels in vimeo and
- Tastemade channel in Youtube.
They are mainly a collection of short, super-high production quality videos made by a small team of enthusiastic foodies. Very inspirational.
Enjoy the weekend!
Your job is going to suck.
Not all the time, of course. But some of the time. You’re going to do things you don’t like, sometimes. You’re going to do things you don’t love, most of the time.
Week #412
Late again, tired again but quite happy to end the week in a good mood. Some things were done this week:
- First private beta Facebook features in Verkami. In happy related news a verkami powered project (L’endema) became the biggest crowdfunded project in Spain. It’s the biggest project in Europe too if you leave aside Indiegogo (that has a model that is not exactly what most people understand for crowdfunding).
- With our work in those features we discovered and fixed a few bugs in the open source project omniauth.
- Integration of Swwweet’s design for Bazaar’s shops in the app.
- The usual support and development in Stage.
For this weekend I’d like to recommend “A Most Peculiar Test Drive”, a blog post by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla:
You may have heard recently about an article written by John Broder from The New York Times that makes numerous claims about the performance of the Model S. We are upset by this article because it does not factually represent Tesla technology, which is designed and tested to operate well in both hot and cold climates.
In the quoted article, the NYT journalist made some comments about the car’s battery life and performance but failed to mention some details that were discovered when analyzing the Model S logs. Yes, the car’s logs. The post is full of nerd awesomeness and highlights some effects of the very interesting phenomena created by the IoT as referred by our friend Manuel G. Noriega:
As more HaaS (hardware as a service) appears, people will have to learn fast about side-effects as monitoring and logging.
For a much-needed counterpoint, I’d like to bring your attention on CouchCachet, an app that helps you improve your social life by simply faking it. In a world where social reputation is constantly improved or threatened by technological proxies and agents… what kind of strange consequences we’ll see in the way we keep track of History or even reality? If you find this topic as amazing as I do, please come to the MMConf, where I’ll be talking about it.
Enjoy the weekend!
Week #411
Another week I can’t publish the weeknote on time… apparently the planned re-scheduling to thursdays was a easier to think than to implement. Anyway, here is a short description of the past usual-but-mildly-less-stressing week:
- Work in PayPal and Facebook features in Verkami. I’m always sadly surprise by the incompetence and negligence of the technical and commercial departments in PayPal… horrible communication.
- Development in Bazaar and its different parts (specially the first shop) keeps going.
- Support, small fixes and some features in Stage.
This week one of my favorites conference has been celebrated in Geneva: Lift. They always pick a nice mix of topics (Democracy in Distress, Resilience and Resistance, Adult entertainment, etc.) and speaker’s quality is very good (Bruce Sterling, Oliver Reichenstein, Kate Darling…).
Additionally they live broadcast all the conference and that means you can virtually attend it and that right now you can already see all the talks here. I want to specially recommend the talks of the previous mentioned speakers:
- The charming Kate Darling talking about IP on the adult entertainment industry.
- Olivier Reichenstein (of iA Writer fame) on craftsmanship in a digital era.
- Mind-blowing Bruce Sterling on design fiction.
Enjoy the weekend, be happy.
Weeknote #410
Exhaustion: psychic, mental and physical. That is this week’s main feeling. Tons of emails, fighting and not-funny discussions that erode all your energy and leave you empty. A big source of stress is how personal some customers and so called “professionals” in all disciplines get about anything related to them. Hours and hours were wasted this week answering to people that felt personally attacked when someone makes even a mildly critique of their work.
Ironically, instead of taking their time to reflect in what is useful about the critique, this often results in ad hominem attacks to the person that questions the validity of the work. People get so emotionally attached to their work, they’re unable to see they’re not their code, design or emails. A legitimate question or even the display of clear facts is taken as a recrimination and from there it’s all downhill. Even ignoring the “offended” person trying to finish the fight becomes impossible. So. Mentally. Exhausting.
As we announced in this blog we sold Qstion a long time ago. Unfortunately the buyer is still figuring out how to launch the product. As the product had be transitioned to the actual owner, the sale’s payment was agreed to be split in multiple small portions, last ones being made on the service beta/production launch. As you can imagine we’re now in a very uncomfortable situation: our work is done, the product is not ready for launch and we can’t shelve the issue. Lesson learned: never sign a partitioned sale without establishing clear time limits for all the payments.
On the bright side, a lot of work was made in SSE, Stage and Verkami. Specially, as stated in previous weeknotes, we’ve been working in Open Graph and this included the implementation of Twitter Cards in Verkami, that we’ll extend to Stage soon. Once the application for our integration was accepted by twitter, all tweets containing verkami.com links became a much nicer experience:
Hemos superado los primeros 1000€. ¿Aun no sabes que es Embrion? embron.es-verkami.com/projects/3725-…
On the sales side, we were forced to say no to a few proposals with deadlines that were, unfortunately, impossible to meet. Fortunately there is a big event that is evaluating Stage for selling its tickets… who knows. My talk for MMConf was published and I’m now a official speaker. I’m looking forward to participate in this conference located in the beautiful city Kraków.
Week’s recommendation: Relax.
Grab your kindle or a book from your shelves and read some good fiction like LoveStar or The Embedding, have a cup of coffee and a good portion of cake.
See you next week. Have a great weekend.
Weeknote #409
This must the mythical never-ending week… I’ve been working on Friday until 10pm and I’m actually finishing the weeknote on Saturday’s evening. I’ve been feeling for a few weeks now that friday’s evening is usually the wrong moment to publish our weeknote: many people is already enjoying the weekend, I’m usually finishing and deploying things and in some cases I’ve to postpone the publication. Additionally my weekend feels much shorter because of the delay and the work I’ve to do to write it. I still think is a great way to wrap the week’s work but starting next week I’ll move writing them to thursday’s evening and publication to friday’s morning. Hopefully that will be better for my arterial pressure and we’ll reach you more easily.
What happened this week? Well… lot of work in the usual suspects. In Verkami we started the design and implementation of their Facebook integration. There are a lot of small details we want to polish in this mini-project, covering all the edge cases that appear when you add multiple login options in a busy, popular platform as Verkami. Additionally we want to improve our Open Graph implementation to help you share all your contributions and favorite projects more easily.
I made and sent multiple proposals for expansion of current and new projects. A potential customer contacted with us this week. After a conversation on Skype, in order to be able to make a proposal, we asked for the briefing on the features to be implemented. They asked us to sign a NDA and as we’ve commented a few times in this blog we don’t sign NDAs. Period. Why? There a few reasons:
- They usually contain disproportionate and surreal conditions, like lifetime legal bindings on everything even slightly related to the project’s business domain.
- We don’t know what we’re accepting -because we know near-to-nil about the project in this stage- until it’s too late.
- If we’re signing something legally binding we need lawyers confirming every step. This just slows down the process and makes it more expensive.
- Such documents infer that by default you’re not treating your customers’ information confidentially.
- If you don’t trust me to estimate the development costs of your idea… how can you actually trust me to implement it? Seriously… how?
So fuck NDAs.
We had some activity in Stage, not only the usual support but commercial contact from a company considering our service for a big multi-venue event. We’ll see.
Finally MMConf confirmed and publicly announced my spot in the conference. I’ll be talking about mobiles, quantified self and History and I’m very excited for to take part in this event. Additionally a few days laters, in the same city, by the same organizers, it will take place Railsberry, another great conference I’m looking forward to attend.
My recommendation for this weekend is Scammed:
> A new kind of computer con has emerged in the past few years. It’s technically mundane but psychologically brutal: using false threats of arrest, scammers trick low-income victims into repaying debts that do not exist. And one rainy day last January, they accidentally targeted one of the smartest hackers around.
It’s the last edition of MATTER, a new digital-only experiment in long-form journalism that I think is worth a read.
Have a great weekend!
Week #408
I’m back in Iceland. Back in the darkness, in the silence, back in this wind that is always blowing in your direction, in the cozy cafés, back in the winter palace.
My monday was paid as tribute to the gods of international traveling, landing in Keflavík with strong sidewind in the middle of a storm. After a few hours of sleep, I stepped on the gas on tuesday, and the rest of the week flashed before my eyes.
We’ve implemented a new statistics module in Verkami and defined the initial key metrics for their business in just few days. For the visualization, we’ve started using Ducksboard. There is a lot of space for improvement on their service (eg. basically they don’t have any computational tool, not even basic ones like mean, median,etc.) but the interface is nice -matching Verkami’s own style- and the API is simple and clean. I’m very excited about creating more transparency for my customers, so they can better see and understand the key metrics of their business, and I think this a step in the good direction.
Three more things in my outbox for this week: work in Bazaar and the shop’s frontend we’re developing with our friends of Swwweet, some business work with proposals and the usual support work in Stage. I’m really looking forward to ignite Stage’s development again in 2013.
I wasted a few hours too collecting and submitting documents to the RSK -Icelandic Directorate of Internal Revenue- to demonstrate that I’m an honest citizen and that I’m not laundering/generating black money. Governments have a real problem trying to adjust their bureaucracies to current times and a software based civilization. The very frontierless nature of the web and the rise of pure digital services and products is going to create the most bizarre situations in the next years, stating with painful blatancy the increasing meaningless of the idea of ‘country’.
My recommendation for this weekend: Connecting, a 18mins long documentary on the increasing important role of software, design and user experience in our daily life.
Have a great weekend.
