links for 2008-11-28
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Crazy, someone blogged recently about Fiartunes. Really need to write that Wikipedia article one of these days.
Comments(3)links for 2008-11-26
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Marketing 2.0: "Clients are not saying, “Make us ads” or “Make us Web sites,” they’re saying, “Create interaction between our brand and our customers.” That’s our job now."
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Their video makes it look so easy!
links for 2008-11-25
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"You can plugin a URL and the system will render that page on a server farm (many browsers, cross OS) and show you the results. It can visually layer these results so you can see the differences. It was awesome."
Debugging My Mondays
I generally hate Mondays. And they’ve been getting worse because of a certain Monday afternoon meeting and an every-other-Tuesday morning meeting that I never feel prepared for.
Good news it that I think I know what I’m doing wrong… The problem appears to be that on Friday’s I don’t finish the week. I usually leave work Friday with a number of projects or emails still in an unknown state with the intention of determining their state over the weekend. While I usually, casually, chip away at those things over the weekend I usually never buckle down and get everything in order. This means the week is never over and all weekend I’m thinking about work but not actually making progress. And then on Monday morning I’m trying to clean up last week instead of getting off to a good start on the new week and then spend the rest of the week playing catchup.
My new plan is that on Friday I will plan to determine the state of everything before I leave the office. Yes, I may work on the weekend but only on discrete projects that I understand ahead of time. Not nebulous projects like “answering email.”
Of course, this all seems obvious now that I’ve thought about it and I’m sure you all do it religiously and I’m just an idiot.
In other news there were two articles recently in the New York Times business section that I enjoyed.
The first was, It may be a good job but is it good work?
And the second was, The upside of a job done well enough.
But I Want to Rent a Coder
Recently Jeff Atwood and Dan Appleman both wondered Can You Really Rent a Coder? And conclude, no, not really.
I have no experience with the current batch of sites but I know that I definitely have (side) projects where I would like to have someone code something for me. Now I do have some experience in offshoring coding projects (while at Microsoft this DVD driver my project depended on wasn’t outsourced but was being developed by a non-Redmond campus) and definitely don’t want to repeat those experiences.
So what would be nice if there was a site for “professional programmers” to be matched with serious projects. In other words a site that attracted the best and brightest from Stanford/MIT/Waterloo either in need of side projects or as a way of earning a living. Yes, I could post on Craigslist but by the time I screened resumes, put the good ones through an interview loop, developed a short list and then have them bid the projects the time involved on sides would be significant. If there were a site that could short circuit that and let me browse profiles and portfolios of top talent from good schools and good companies and submit a project to three of them I think everyone would be happier.
Would the top talent want this? Watching my professional programmer friends “grow up” many of them take long sabbaticals after two to five year stints at companies like Microsoft and Amazon I’m sure a project now and then during their sabbatical would go a long way in terms of replenishing their piggy banks as well as keeping their skills current. Especially if they weren’t competing against $1/hr folks and instead were competing with their peers for $75/hr jobs.
links for 2008-11-21
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Approved.
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Tear it down!
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"So far this year, through the end of September, the median price for sold chalets has been 1.295 million Canadian dollars ($1.059 million) and, for condominiums, 349,000 Canadian dollars ($285,481)"
links for 2008-11-19
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"The site also says it had 15 million uniques in October, up 200 percent from the same period in 2007, and has now gathered four million reviews."