Standing on the shoulders of giants
Learn from the best then apply what you’ve learned.
I’ve been enjoying 37Signals’ book Getting Real and wanted to share this thoughtful line from Manage Debt:
Hack together some bad code that’s functional but still a bit hairy and you’re building up debt. Throw together a design that’s good enough but not really good and you’ve done it again.
This quote resonated deeply with me. Know that this debt will get passed on to your predecessor if you leave the project and at some point, the debt has to be resolved.
Side projects and summer time
Now that Sale season is over, I typically spend the summer scrambling to complete the next round of changes. The Auxiliary went live with their revamped look and a few nice little widgets. I have 4 major projects running in tandem: building new web forms instead of asking the users to download and print .doc and .pdf files; testing the .net framework; converting sites to .net; and yet another site redesign. The last one will be the shortest project.
Building forms has really opened my eyes to the issue of Simplexity. I understand how a form should work and I have an idea of how to present it to a user so it’s easy to fill out. (Simple aspect). I get that it should look Simple to a user. Getting my code to check form fields and make the form run in a logical manner is incredibly hard. (Complex aspect.) The good news is, I know when I feel pain that I’m growing my skills.
Re: Should You Be Allowed To ReSell Your Backupify Account On eBay?
In response to a tweet posted by @Backupify:
Someone is reselling Backupify accounts on Ebay. Should we allow it to continue? http://bit.ly/afHpGj
That is an interesting conundrum. My answer is No. Before I get to the why, here are a few Pros I considered.
The positive side of allowing reselling
First: many non-techie people use eBay as a discovery device. Much like randomly moving through iTunes to find and buy new music, many of my family members and friends found online services through browsing on eBay.
Second: from experience with my non-techie friends and family who regularly use eBay, I expect many of them would say the same thing: if they found out about the service on eBay, and it interested them, they’d ask their techie friends about it. Meaning, they would get directed to the service’s website long before buying it on eBay.
And one aside: most experienced eBay users would completely dismiss this offer (as far as buying it on eBay anyhow) because the eBay user has a reputation of 0.
Those were the only positive points I could come up with.
Aside from the obvious negatives to allowing reselling,
the passionate NO! comes from my views as a Backupify customer. To see someone so blatantly abusing the generous offer that Backupify gave to its first set of customers, greatly disgusts me. I want to smack this person for their greed. To let it continue means Backupify devalues its own services. Also, knowing the [techie] friends I would refer to this service, if they saw this on eBay, it would lower their opinion of the company greatly. While eBay is a great discovery device for the non-technical crowd, right now I’m going to guess that their main customer base is tech-capable. You have to have some degree of understanding of the web to be using Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Gmail and others; you have to have enough personal data invested in them to motivate yourself to protect that data by backing it up.
In summary, the emphatic NO comes from my personal concern that it could cause future reputation damage to a company I am just beginning to enjoy.
Inspiring Youngling
While playing with Google Wave I came across a neat little extension called the Word Network Gadget. It’s a text-only mind mapping gadget. The author has also created 7 other gadgets for Wave, as of October 20th. Pretty impressive.
Created by antimatter15
Take a look at some of the other work antimatter15 has done. Truly inspiring work!
