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.
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.
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 #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 #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.
Week #395-396 Special Edition
The observant reader will note that we missed our appointment with the weeknotes last week. I travelled to Spain in the middle of the week and the amount of work and meetings made very difficult to publish the weeknote. Anyway, we’ve compiled last two weeks in this special, small, cute edition.
First day in Madrid was spent in a meeting with Bazaar’s founders. We’re close to the internal/beta launch of the component that will be the backbone of their e-commerce system and there is a lot of small details to close, tweak and fix.
Next day we travelled to Basque Country to have a 2 day intensive workshop with Verkami founders. We met in a beautiful country house in the middle of the Goierri. We talked about new features, operations improvement and how to make Verkami even better for authors and patrons.
This kind of highly focused countryside retreats always work wonders on us. No matter if it’s a hackaton, a few days workshop or a product design session, we’ve found that committing yourself to just one thing in unusual, beautiful physical surrondings is always a refreshing and very productive experience. Of course, the fact the Basque Country is packed with amazing restaurants and Michelin Stars is a plus.
This last week was the normal continuation of the previous one. I worked in Stage and Verkami’s new features while Alberto made progress in Bazaar’s last steps. Additionally I was forced to present the ritual offerings to the bureacracy gods in the form of a few mornings spent filling up forms and renovating different IDs.
But enough of talking about us. You want the links, right? Here we go, double edition, double recommendation. This time links that are loosely related to another of my favorite topics: digital rights and digital property.
- Philip Roth was shocked -for very good reasons- after discovering that according to some wikipedia administrators he “was not a credible source” on his own book The Human Stain. Here is the open letter he wrote to reply the editing Ayatollahs. Next time you hear the Wikipedia is one the biggest achievements of humans in the last decades, please remember we’re still learning how to deal with the toy.
- A few days ago Amazon sent us the healthy reminder that “you don’t buy ebooks, you rent them” and that they can do basically whatever they want with your(their) books: (unless the case become popular and they feel forced to fix it).
So that’s it. Have a great weekend!
Week #391
This week Alberto has been working in Bazaar and in the last steps of the selling process of Qstion. Additionally he keeps talking with providers in the payment processing industry.
I’ve been working in the redesign of one the main features Verkami’s authors have, image/video manamagent. The implementation of the new design has been quite straightforward but includes a migration that affects all the projects (current and past) in the platform and dozens of thousands of S3 files.
We take availability of our products and projects very seriously. Accordingly we’ve put extra effort (the reason for this weeknote being published late) to run a multi-step migration without a single second of service interruption. For good or for bad, that is the way we made software.
This week I’m giving you not one but 150 awesome links: The Electric Typewriter’s 150 Essential Science & Tech Reads list. In the list you can find some of my favourite essays like Mother Earth Mother Board, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race and Atoms Are the New Bits or just-discovered interesting articles like A Physicist Solves the City or In Defense of Distraction that I’m really looking forward to read.
Be happy, make love and enjoy the weekend in all the possible ways you can.
Week #389
Regular week… and I say that as a compliment. Given the last months(years?) a week where I can just work, make progress in multiple areas and find time to make croquetas and a shepherd’s pie is a good week.
Alberto is enjoying the last days of the summer and having a lovely time with his family as you can see in the header of this post. I’ve been working in the usual suspects (stage, bazaar, verkami, sse), coding and designing new features for them. Utilitarian, not super-exciting but necessary features that demand from you stamina and professionalism. I’m happy to oblige.
This week instead of giving you the usual references I’ve already seen/read, I’m going to try something different: trust my gut. I want to share with two of the links I’ve written in my notes for enjoying this weekend. The first one is a documentary about design and education:
This film is about patient and dedicated teaching, about learning to look and visualize in order to design, about the importance of drawing. It is one designer’s personal experience of issues that face all designers, expressed with sympathy and encouragement, and illustrated with examples of Inge Druckrey’s own work and that of grateful generations of her students. There are simple phrases that give insights into complex matters, for example that letterforms are ‘memories of motion.’ Above all, it is characteristic of Inge that in this examination of basic principles the word “beautiful” is used several times.
The second one is a long (+7.000 words) essay about the raise of open hardware, one of the topics I’m really interested about these days. From the article:
Open source software as an industrial process grew out of the culture of free software development, but departed from the latter’s political focus on the value of sharing and the maintenance of a knowledge commons, and instead focused on the efficiency of open source processes for software production. Within the software production industry, open source is broadly perceived as creating more democratic, ‘free’ and ‘open’ innovation structures. Following this, attempts are now being made to replicate the process in other fields of technology production, notably the production of designs for electronic hardware and other physical objects.
I hope they are good enough but if not, please don’t shoot the pianist.
Have a great weekend.
Week #388
Horrible week, my friends. The kind of week you try very hard to give your best and it seems to be simply not enough… what a miserable feeling. The atmospheric pressure apparently agrees with my mood, as autumn and the rain are already present in Reykjavík.
Alberto came from a one week vacation and was working in Bazaar and doing a few more tests in different payment gateways. I was working in Verkami to ship more features for the admins and for the authors while managed to make a db migration in the process. I fought to design two whole features in Bazaar: UI design is still hard as hell to do for me.
My recommendation this week: buy a plane ticket to Brighton. The Brighton Digital Festival will be celebrated during all September:
Brighton Digital Festival is a month-long celebration of all things digital bringing together the city’s vibrant arts and digital communities. From small-scale meet ups to big name conferences, from digital artists’ experimental ideas to fully mounted exhibitions, the Festival promises something for everybody and because most events are free, plenty of opportunities to discover something new. Hands on, participatory, exciting, challenging, wondrous, fascinating, the Brighton Digital Festival has it all and it uniquely reflects the spirit of the city.
I can’t describe how awesome is the festival. Not specially because what it is, but because what it means and what it implies. Next time you hear a politician or institution in your country to say “We’re going to build the next Silicon Valley”, please forward them this note:
Estimated Elected Idiot(s),
I’ve heard you are trying to build the next Silicon Valley. Stop. Stop saying it. It made my ears bleed. Stop. You don’t have the faintest idea what that means. So stop pretending you know. You can’t build ecosystems. Even to fake them is difficult. They are complex, dynamic, disembodied, decentralized, emergent creatures. So shut the fuck up.
The only thing you can do with ecosystems is inhabit or nurture them. Pay attention to the small signs of change and take care of them, encourage their growth, give them the needed resources. Learn from the Earth: be the background that gives support and stay out of the way. And wait. Just wait. Please, don’t mess the whole thing with “innovation”, “networking”, “co-entrepreneurship”… these are the effects, not the causes.
FOR GOD’S SAKE STOP BEING A COPYCAT.
Then, one day, if you keep doing the right thing you’ll have something like http://2012.brightondigitalfestival.co.uk/ and it’ll be a fucking gazillion times better than your mythical promised techland.
Yours sincerely,
X
PS: My business still have to use Windows to talk to you in the web. Fix that too.
Have a good weekend.
