Week #407
Last days in the Basque Country. I’ll be back in Reykjavík next week and I’ll miss my family and friends for sure, but I’ll recover some of my routines too and I’ll stop this 4-weeks gastronomical orgy, so I’m happy to finally step on the gas for 2013.
This week we had what I’ve named the Pandemic Rails Upgrade of 2013, a serious security vulnerability affecting every Rails app created in the last 5 years, so I had to upgrade a good number of personal and professional apps, services and products. Given I started developing Rails apps professionally with version 1.0, there are a lot of different versions and states we’ve to support.
In the middle of the week, I flew to Barcelona to meet Verkami guys in their headquarter. We talked about the new features to implement in the first quarter of the year. The platform is working better than ever and there are a lot of good things to come in the roadmap. More work in Stage and the usual suspects filled up the rest of the week.
The week finished with very sad news: Aaron Swartz committed suicided yesterday. I started working on the web in 1998 but I still remember the excitement about one of the first shiny toys he created: the RSS. Well known hackers were starting blogs every day and his invention was a big piece in the initial success of the movement.
He was 14 years old only then and continued to create and cofound more awesome stuff: Creative Commons, Reddit.com, Jottit.com… Lately he was working to bring more transparency to politics with projects like watchdog.net. The possible influence in his ending of risking 50 years in prison thanks to a stupid prosecutor is even more sad and disturbing. Without knowing him personally, I admired him as a true web pioneer and I still do.
At the same time I’ve been mildly obsessed about the dissonance between digital and physical death for years now and would like to recommend you the following articles: The Internet of the Dead and Your Digital Ghost. The future is weird.
Week #406
The first week of the year in Spain is, unlike other countries, a very slow week. On Jan 6th, most families celebrate the visit of the Three Wise Men to Jesus after his birth. It’s a national holiday and many people is still on holidays -or recovering from the massive New Year’s Eve hangovers- so it feels like the end of the party more than the beginning of a new cycle.
Anyway, I found the way to do a few things last week:
I sent the proposal “Tap to write History” to MMConf and got accepted. My attendance is still not confirmed since they don’t know if the conference can cover the traveling costs, we’ll see. If your company is looking for a good talk to sponsor, send them my way :).
Exchanged a few emails about new projects/estimations; nothing confirmed yet but some things keep appearing on the horizon.
I went to Madrid for a physical meeting with our friends of the Bazaar project, and enjoyed a lovely lunch with some of the friends living abroad that were, like me, at home for Christmas.
Usual work in Stage and Verkami, including the preparation for our quarterly physical meeting.
My recommendation today is a bunch of great talks. XOXO organizers just published all the talks of the last edition and there is a lot of inspiring bits: Makerbot, Etsy, Indie game developers, small artisans… You can feel the tons of love and caring passion they put in their respective companies. Find all the videos here.
So this is the dirty little secret in our industry. The best designers and developers rarely have more talent. They simply have more time.
Week #405
2012 is basically done, finished… exactly what has happened to the week #405.
In this last week of the year we’ve been working with our friends of verkami on small features, like copy/UI improvements and polishing the Open Graph tags we use, for improved rendering in Facebook. Verkami is working at full speed now, just two years after the launch and I’m meeting them in the beginning of the year for another highly focused workday on the next milestones.
I spent the rest of the week answering requests for a few project’s estimates, Stage’s support tickets and in meetings with different clients like our friends of La Personnalité and Steel Stock Exchange. Recover from the -delicious- food blitzkrieg my mother perpetrated on Christmas Eve was another not negligible task.
We’re still reviewing projects, events and small incidents of the year to create a mental image of how good/bad has been this year. It has been better than 2011 for sure (professionally the hardest year of my life) but there are a lot of shadows on it too. I’ll try to write a wrapping post for the year next monday but I don’t know if it’s realistic to expect I’ll succeed given it’s Dec 31st.
My recommendation for this weekend: relax, think and meditate. Take your time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished in 2012, but more importantly on the goals for 2013. Do it thoughtfully and it’d be the best investment you’ve done in months.
Have a great end of year.
Week #404
Sit on a couch and pour the whisky. The most-popular-of-the-HTTP-codes week is done!
My week had a false start because I flew to Bilbao last tuesday for Xmas holidays and, you know, when one is flying with incompetent airlines like Vueling, a day of international connections is a day of your life basically -and sadly- wasted.
Still recovering from the previous exhausting day -and with one of our suitcases disappeared- I resumed my work in the verkami front, finishing the initial draft for facebook integration (I’ve huge expectations for the effects of this), making a small tweaks in the backend scheduling system and finally managing to fix some weird browser dependent bugs before the end of the week.
Alberto worked on Bazaar and deployed some changes in SSE while he was trying to be attended by doctors (that has been on strike in Spain for several weeks). I continued reviewing the finishing year to contact project pitches still in the air, removing not needed anymore repositories and other small invoicing tasks. For Bazaar I briefly discussed with Swwweet the possible implementation details of topics like resolution dependent image bundles and Microdata/Open Graph validness for our use case.
As the end of the year keeps getting closer I’m trying to find the time to take a deep breath, clear my mind and focus on making of 2013 the best year ever. It turns out is not so easy.
My reading recommendation for this week is The web we lost, a devastating review on missed opportunities and the increasing control exerted by Facebook et al over their users. For watching pleasure I suggest you to view the 14 min. of We will forget:
Fueled by his religious beliefs, Robert Fitzpatrick spent over one hundred thousand dollars of his life savings on subway ads warning that the world would end on May 21st, 2011. ‘We Will Forget’ follows Robert in the weeks leading up to the 21st, and ultimately to Times Square where he awaits the rapture with fellow believers, onlookers, and naysayers.
Have a great, great, great weekend.
Week #403
Friday evening and week #403 is coming to an end for Linking Paths.
I started the week at a hospital and I’ll end it quite tired after a few nights with problems to fall asleep. In the meantime I’ve been working on Bazaar mainly, closing small issues reported in the last meeting and stuck for a while with elasticsearch and its indexation of special and accented characters.
Aitor has had a more productive week improving some Verkami minor features -password recovery- and designing their strategy for a tighter integration with Facebook. He also reviewed our work during this year and is preparing us for 2013. We have a lot of open fronts in form of pitches, small customer projects, Stage features and SAAS services we use that needed a clean up to start the new year with a fresh feeling.
This week my recommendation is The Inconvenient Truth About SEO by Paul Boag for Smashing Magazine. It’s not that I believe SEO is irrelevant, because I don’t, but I firmly believe that there are no shortcuts to delight your audience. So, please, read the article and think about it the next time someone promises you the Holy Grail just tweaking your website’s indexation. SEO is a hard and long term task, not a silver bullet you shoot one time.
Have a nice weekend.
Week #402
Hard week… I’m broken. I’ve been fighting like a dog to ship stuff and, at the end of the week, the effort is taking its toll.
In the Verkami front, I’ve deployed multiple improvements to the project submission process. Given the stateless nature of the web, multi-step workflows are always more painful that they should be. Additionally Verkami is experimenting with different UI elements to promote the multi-language features authors have to internationalize their projects. In Stage, multiple support tickets and some development sums up my work. Finally, a review of the company’s yearly figures -not very good- added extra weight and fatigue to the week. Alberto had a meeting with Bazaar’s founders and kept working in the project.
Well, enough with all this talking about we. What do you want? Some inspiring link? Here we go: this teenager from Sierra Leone really kicks ass!.
He is a self-taught hacker that creates useful tools with electronics founded in the wastelands of one of the poorest countries in the world. I can not help but feel ashamed of myself when I see how little I do with all the opportunities that life has given to me, when there are people like Kevin that are incredible enough to accept their situation with a smile and become a role model for others. Rock on Kevin!
Have a great weekend!
Week #401
Week #401 is done. This has been one of those weeks when you do so many little things that you feel you haven’t done much. Stage support, different work on customer’s projects, my son has been sick a couple of days, etc.
On Tuesday I visited Otogami’s office and spent most of the day working there with David and Jerónimo. We also found time to share experiences and our products’ current situation and future plans. Building a product company is far from easy and having someone to share your fears, doubts and to celebrate small victories is always helpful.
After spending most of the week working on Verkami’s multilingual support (and some improvements caching API calls), Aitor spent Thursday in a couple of interesting events. First he was in Seth Godin’s first conference in Europe since 2010. The conference was organized by Icelandic Marketing Association and besides Seth, they had as speakers Lazy Town’s founder Magnus Scheving and George Bryan of Brooklyn Brothers. If you follow Aitor in Twitter you may already know that this was one of the best conferences he has attended lately. During the afternoon he attended a meeting from The Open Knowledge Foundation on one of our beloved topics at Linking Paths: Open Data.
And finally my recommended reading for the weekend. This week I have had a few conversation on startup strategic, so I want to recommend you a post written by Andreas Klinger, founder of LOOKK: Founders lie about comfort zones.
That’s all for this week, have a nice weekend.
Go fail. And then fail again. Non-profit failure is too rare, which means that non-profit innovation is too rare as well. Innovators understand that their job is to fail, repeatedly, until they don’t.
Week #400
Four hundred. Twenty times twenty. Almost eight years that look like a whole life. Sometimes an exciting adventure, sometimes a heavy burden, just like life, Linking Paths has endured this round, magical, stunning number of weeks. Phew.
In a nice coincidence Alberto’s birthday is today too: happy birthday! He has been slightly disconnected this week (a time without contact lenses following medical advice) but still he found the way to make some commits to Bazaar. In Verkami I’ve been quite busy extending a calendar view I introduced a few weeks ago as part of the scheduler to include more business related events (start, ending, funding status, etc…) and implementing a few other small features. Stage support and research for a new, responsive design for our product filled up the rest of my time.
The link for this weekend is multimedia: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong, text and video. The reason I find Chomsky and this interview interesting is the same one that motivated the conversation between him and Yarden Katz:
The motivation for the interview was in part that Chomsky is rarely asked about scientific topics nowadays. Journalists are too occupied with getting his views on U.S. foreign policy, the Middle East, the Obama administration and other standard topics. Another reason was that Chomsky belongs to a rare and special breed of intellectuals, one that is quickly becoming extinct. Ever since Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, it has become a favorite pastime of academics to place various thinkers and scientists on the “Hedgehog-Fox” continuum: the Hedgehog, a meticulous and specialized worker, driven by incremental progress in a clearly defined field versus the Fox, a flashier, ideas-driven thinker who jumps from question to question, ignoring field boundaries and applying his or her skills where they seem applicable. Chomsky is special because he makes this distinction seem like a tired old cliche. Chomsky’s depth doesn’t come at the expense of versatility or breadth, yet for the most part, he devoted his entire scientific career to the study of defined topics in linguistics and cognitive science.
Enjoy the interview and have a superb weekend.
