Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail, and the medical findings that red wine is actually beneficial for one’s health will pave the way toward adopting the red wine consumption on a larger scale.
— Alex Bunardzic in Ruby On Rails Is Like Red Wine (lesscode.org)
‘Tis the time of the year, so I’ll contribute my effort, too. These are my goals for 2006.
The last 6.5 years of simultaneous studying, sports training and running a business have been great and giving, but there comes a time when you just got to cut the air. My thesis should be ready this spring so hopefully by the summer I will be carrying the propeller hat of an MSc.
Which leads to the next goal…
In the ongoing winter the only reason I haven’t done full-time Ruby on Rails development has been my thesis. I love Rails. I love running my own business. Heck, I’m even writing a thesis about small businesses in open-source communities. I used to buy the “work a couple of years for someone else first” statement, but after being more than a year very close to the heart of the Rails movement and reading a lot about startups (most importantly, many essays by Paul Graham.), I believe I will learn more by doing it myself. Besides, running free is currently the only way to work on Rails in Finland.
This is a goal very close to my heart after being without running for a month because of ITB. I changed my orienteering club for the next season and my training motivation has been very high, so getting rid of the injury is on the top of my wish list. If the recovery goes ok, I’m awaiting some very fine moments during the next summer.
I’m looking for less things, not more. Less but better things. Things done better, to satisfy the maximizer in me. Finish the GTD. Make my business more than a hobby. Reaching goal #1 is a major part in making this happen.
This is a corollary from all of the goals above. Doing what I love and know best (sports and web/Rails development) must mean even more fun than before. If you say “Unprofessional”, I say “Bullocks”. I’m holding strongly of the opinion that happy people do the job better. #1 goal of my consultancy is to always have fun, whatever I do. Being happy and having fun also means that I will be a nicer person towards others.
So, that’s pretty much it. I probably forgot something greater than life, but bear with me.
Oh, and one more thing:
I hope reaching the other goals will allow this, because my ’88 Ford Escort might not stand another winter anymore. I was recently left with a broken handle in my hand after trying to open the left back door, and a jumpstart pack is a constant visitor under the hood, so some kind of update is more than due.
“Do you know any Jason Frieds”, asks Lars Pind. Just one, unfortunately. Lars is looking for interaction designers. However, I’d like to extend the question a bit. Where have all the (good) web designers gone? I recently missed a project because the client couldn’t find a talented freelance web designer to work on the ui side of the application. The gig went instead to a larger corporation that could “take care” of the interface design, too.
Now my definition of a web designer is maybe quite strict. A graphics artist sending a Photoshop comp to a developer is not a web designer. A designer that slices her comp to 26 level nested tables in Dreamweaver is not a web designer. So who is?
A web designer who calls herself professional should both have and use all of the following skills:
Both good eye and knowledge of the principles of graphics design, especially typography is crucial for any designer, and web design is no exception. The skills also need to be put into production so the usual graphics programs like Photoshop should work as a natural extension of one’s arm.
Many extremely talented designers fall short on this point, as seen in the recent Disney Store UK debacle. Web design is much more than meets the eye.
How should the site be structured, what about the search? In my opinion information architecture can not be separated from web design.
Long neglected, often forgotten. The latter now often needs to be taken care of by the law, if nothing else rings a bell.
Pure static websites are slowly becoming history. Almost every designer needs to be able to work with some kind of template languages. Also, a web designer with no JavaScript skills whatsoever will soon be obsolete.
Whether Web 2.0 is here or not, web applications are becoming increasingly common, which calls for a lot more disciples of Alan Cooper, just like Lars’s post implies.
No kidding. Just like in almost any other territory, writing skills are essential for a web designer. Markets are conversations. Good designers decorate, great designers communicate. Even in written text.
Pure selfishness, I don’t want great talents to drown into corporate behemoths.
In A Recipe for Learning Web Design, D. Keith Robinson tells how he’s worked with fresh university graduates whose skills have been out-of-date upon graduation. This is not something that applies only in web design, but it is characteristic of it. It is no coincidence that top web designers are very active in writing and reading blogs.
The problem with finding people with all these skills is that they are all self-taught and thus anything but abundant. The current offering in university class education is far from great.
Often enough, it’s not even clear who should teach web design. Art colleges teach design but many of the technical aspects go far beyond their scope. CompSci departments tend to think web design and development is not real software development and thus not worth much effort. The one unit in my university teaching HTML+CSS is the Hypermedia Lab, but again, they work under the department of mathematics and are much more interested in semantic web than web design.
So the field is about as fragmented as it gets. In fact, I only know two institutions that teach such a broad curriculum (Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario Canada, with the unparalleled Lisa McMillan holding the threads1; and Hyper Island in Sweden).
What am I missing here? Are all the (few) superstars coming from one field and then self-taught in other parts of the puzzle, or is there more real contenders in the academic field that just haven’t learned their SEO? A niche for new private universities, currently very rare in Europe? What’s the situation in your country?
1 See the November 2005 issue of the Treehouse Magazine for an illuminating interview with McMillan.
“Do you know any Jason Frieds”, asks Lars Pind. Just one, unfortunately. Lars is looking for interaction designers. However, I’d like to extend the question a bit. Where have all the (good) web designers gone? I recently missed a project because the client couldn’t find a talented freelance web designer to work on the ui side of the application. The gig went instead to a larger corporation that could “take care” of the interface design, too.
Now my definition of a web designer is maybe quite strict. A graphics artist sending a Photoshop comp to a developer is not a web designer. A designer that slices her comp to 26 level nested tables in Dreamweaver is not a web designer. So who is?
A web designer who calls herself professional should both have and use all of the following skills:
Top-notch graphics design
Both good eye and knowledge of the principles of graphics design, especially typography is crucial for any designer, and web design is no exception. The skills also need to be put into production so the usual graphics programs like Photoshop should work as a natural extension of one’s arm.
Standards-based (X)HTML and CSS
Many extremely talented designers fall short on this point, as seen in the recent Disney Store UK debacle. Web design is much more than meets the eye.
Information architecture
How should the site be structured, what about the search? In my opinion information architecture can not be separated from web design.
Usability and accessibility
Long neglected, often forgotten. The latter now often needs to be taken care of by the law, if nothing else rings a bell.
Programming
Pure static websites are slowly becoming history. Almost every designer needs to be able to work with some kind of template languages. Also, a web designer with no JavaScript skills whatsoever will soon be obsolete.
Interaction design
Whether Web 2.0 is here or not, web applications are becoming increasingly common, which calls for a lot more disciples of Alan Cooper, just like Lars’s post implies.
Writing
No kidding. Just like in almost any other territory, writing skills are essential for a web designer. Markets are conversations. Good designers decorate, great designers communicate. Even in written text.
Entrepreneurship and project management
Pure selfishness, I don’t want great talents to drown into corporate behemoths.
Ability and will to learn new things constantly and fast
In A Recipe for Learning Web Design, D. Keith Robinson tells how he’s worked with fresh university graduates whose skills have been out-of-date upon graduation.
The problem with education
The problem with finding people with all these skills is that they are all self-taught and thus anything but abundant. The current offering in university class education is far from great.
Often enough, it’s not even clear who should teach web design. Art colleges teach design but many of the technical aspects go far beyond their scope. CompSci departments tend to think web design and development is not real software development and thus not worth much effort. The one unit in my university teaching HTML+CSS is the Hypermedia Lab, but again, they work under the department of mathematics and are much more interested in semantic web than web design.
So the field is about as fragmented as it gets. In fact, I only know two institutions that teach such a broad curriculum (Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario Canada, with the unparalleled Lisa McMillan holding the threads1; and Hyper Island in Sweden).
What am I missing here? Are all the (few) superstars coming from one field and then self-taught in other parts of the puzzle, or is there more real contenders in the academic field that just haven’t learned their SEO? A niche for new private universities, currently very rare in Europe? What’s the situation in your country?
1 See the November 2005 issue of the Treehouse Magazine for an illuminating interview with McMillan.
Oh brother PB, where art thou?
Attempting remote installation of ‘rails’
Successfully installed rails-1.0.0
…with a new web page and all.
Congrats, David and the whole community!
I’ve now officially joined the path of many and ordered me a new PowerBook today. I’ve been happily trotting along with my 15-inch, 667MHz, TiBook until this fall. However, there seems to be some magic connection between expiring AppleCare (or maybe it was the update to Tiger) and slowly deteriorating performance, and the last straw was the dying battery two weeks ago, just before an excruciating 16-hour bus drive to Lapland. Waiting for an Intel model really isn’t an option since a) I need the damn thing now, and b) I don’t think there’ll be a stable Intel Inside version of PowerBook until 2007.
So I gave up. I guess the 15-inch model would’ve done it for me, too, but being a living-off-the-powerbook type and after reading about the overheating and horizontal line problems of the 15 inch models, I decided I would go all the road with the 17" beast.
I chose the 100GB 7200RPM hard drive option since I noticed clear speed improvements when I upgraded the hard drive of my current machine. The option was free so it really wasn’t a hard decision to trade the extra 20GB of space for the additional speed. I just hope I will get the Seagate Momentus drive (see a discussion about the drives here), otherwise I’m going to get the drive replaced for too much noice.
My PowerBook will come with the standard 512MB RAM which I will replace myself with a pair of 1GB Kingston Value RAM modules. They sell here in Finland at around 90€ each, so my DIY work will be worth almost 400 Euros!!!
Of course there’s no escaping of the robbery 450€ for the AppleCare extension, but I feel it’s better to play safe with this kind of machine. With a replaced display, power adapter and dvd player, the plan has certainly been worth it for the current round.
The whole bunch will be decorated with a Marware Screen Protector and a stunning Freitag sleeve. One of the creators of map.search.ch had such a sleeve in The Building of Basecamp workshop in Copenhagen, and I fell immediately in love with it.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to scrap my current €I think I’ll eventually get a new battery for it from Newertech, along with a second battery for the new beast. It’s still too good a machine (with a brand new display, too) to get retired, it’s just that my current needs for a work horse are a bit over its capacity.
Phew! Talk about a Xmas present.
Lars and Christina finally reveal some information on their secret project #2. The name of the game is PublicSquare, a platform for citizen journalism, we media in the current jargon.
Knowing the skills of the people behind PublicSquare, I can’t wait to get my hands on the real thing. It’s already running behind Boxes and Arrows, so the golden rule of frameworks being extractions seems to be holding true. Needless to mention, PS is running on Rails.
In case you hadn’t heard before, here’s some serious news: Joyent is acquiring the ground of my virtual home, TextDrive. At the same time TextDrive has broadened its buffet and is now also offering hosting for Business and a wide range of Dedicated hosting plans. This all is decorated with a brand-spanking new website redesign.
The obvious question is: what’s in it for me? For starters, the business plans sound tempting for someone (like me) who hasn’t got the dough to go dedicated but still would prefer a bit more stable environment than the traditional shared hosting. The second thing I can hardly wait is that the Joyent Mail will become the standard webmail client for TxD before the new year.
One consequence of this acquisition is that Dean Allen and John Gruber are joining forces. Or, as Gruber self says:
You know something’s weird when the authors of Textile and Markdown now work for the same company.
Indeed.
And from an eco-effective perspective, the greatest innovations in energy supply are being made by small-scale plants at the local level. For example, in our work with one utility in Indiana, it appears that producing power at the scale of one small plant for every three city blocks is dramatically more effective than more centralized production. The shorter distances reduce the power lost in high-voltage transmission to insignificant levels.
- William McDonough & Michael Braungart in "Cradle to Cradle-Remaking the Way We Make Things":http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
It seems that the world wide web is not the only environment where there are significant benefits in not only being but also acting small.