Yey! Singapore National Day!

Thanks Google Singapore!

A decade ago I started a web design company. We grew and grew, and after ten years of hard work, I’ve finally been able to get rid of it.

Don’t get me wrong – we were successful, had fun and did good work. At our peak we had over 200 clients and 15 full time staff, making us the largest such company in our city. We’ve worked on great projects for some big name clients and we even made some money too.

Little by little however, the years ate away at my soul. This year we finally left it all behind and moved onto our own products, and I’ve never been happier.

...

...

Not a great business

It’s not easy to make a lot of money in web design. It’s decent sustenance, but a poor investment.

...

...

So what did we do?

For at least 5 years I knew I’d need to leave web design behind eventually. 4 years ago we started to split Silktide into a web design division and a software division – and gave them separate brands. We had our first product – originally called SiteScore – and our first clients.

The mistake I made was continuing to feed the web design monster, whilst trying to get our product side up and running in my spare time. In reality, despite ultimately delegating command of the agency to others, the web design business always consumed 90% of my attention.

When the recession came our web design sales were severely hit, and it took all our efforts just to dig ourselves out of the financial hole that put us in. Ironically our products were keeping us afloat, but our web design was consuming all of our time.

A year ago I set a 12 month deadline to get us out of web design; in the end it took us 9 months. It cost us a fair slice of income, but we gained a monstrous amount of our time. And finally our products – now SiteBeam and SiteRay – are starting to get the attention they deserve.

It’s too early yet to know if this decision will pay off – right now, we feel like a startup all over again. But whatever happens, we only have ourselves to answer for. And that feels pretty damn great.

...

It's been always good to have a competition.

The real reason the Valley wants designers who can code: they’re better

Jared Spool over at UIE just published an article about “why the Valley wants designers who can code“. In it, he asserts that startups in Silicon Valley want to keep teams small and therefore look to combine critical roles within a single person, while established players in the industry can afford to spread those roles out over more people.

This is partially true. But there’s more to it. Silicon Valley startups are on the forefront of internet technology. The companies that want designers who can code are the ones that are developing cutting edge applications: Quora, AirBnB, Facebook, etc. These apps need to be lean, functional, and scalable. They can’t afford to design an interface that gets in its own way because the designers and developers couldn’t agree on a balance between functionality and good looks. What’s the best way to make that happen? Have the designer and developer be the same person.

The new design constraint is being able to code

When a designer can code, she makes decisions based on an understanding of design and of the result that design is going to create. If that design is too complicated, as a coder, she knows it’s going to make her life harder: getting it to work in all browsers (including IE7), scaling to mobile with techniques like responsive design, being able to quickly iterate when design elements don’t meet functional requirements or usability test results, etc. Her design is going to be easier to implement and lead to better results by virtue of her knowledge in this area.

On the other hand, designers who can’t code aren’t constrained by that wisdom. And that’s a weakness, not a strength. Sure, if you’re designing an amazing-looking promotion or pamphlet, you might want to focus more on the bling and less on the quality of interaction. But for an app – Silicon Valley startups are putting out web apps and mobile apps faster than we can blink – the number one metric of success is whether it works well. Pure designers won’t be able to do that as well as hybrids who can also code.

“Whoa”

Is Neo a designer who can code?

Designers who can code are like Neo in the Matrix: they can see through the world around them (the app) into the underlying code operating beyond everyone’s vision. That affords them a greater understanding of their environment, allowing them to successfully bend the rules where necessary and possible. But they know their limits, and they know when to depend more on their coding or design abilities when required.

Designers who can code are the future

The reason Silicon Valley startups want designers who can code isn’t just because it’s easier and cheaper. It’s because they know where things are headed. They’re building the next wave of great apps and discovering a more efficient way of doing so. The established companies aren’t – they’re called established companies for a reason. And they need to step up if they don’t want to get left behind when designers who can code  become the norm.

There’s a reason leading designers like Rebekah Cox, Glen Murphy, Wilson Miner, and Ryan Singer all said designers should be able to build what they design. It’s not because they’re cheap. It’s because they’re the best.

Jared calls designers who can code “super designers” (and in a previous talk, referred to them as “the Holy Grail” and “unicorns”). Perhaps today we can refer to ourselves that way. But in a few years, being able to write code will be required for any web or mobile app designer worth her salt.

We built Handcraft for designers who can code. It’s the best way to create real HTML prototypes not by dragging widgets around, but by writing the code yourself. Check it out if you’re one of Jared’s fabled super designers – we use it ourselves every day.

By @Rahul on May 31st, 2011 at 21:05 • Posted in Design in the Browser, Peers and Punditry, The Status Quo

I never thought that designers who can code poses a big deal.

Web designers needed to code right?
How can you design a house if one don't know how to build it.

This Guy Has My MacBook

On March 21, 2011, my MacBook was stolen from my apartment in Oakland, CA. I reported the crime to the police and even told them where it was, but they couldn't help me due to lack of resources. Meanwhile, I'm using the awesome app, Hidden, to capture these photos of this guy who has my MacBook.

Update: (May 31, 8:37 PM PST) ARRESTED! An Oakland police officer just called me to let me know that they arrested the guy in my photos! BOOYA! The police used my evidence (email which pointed to a cab service) that he was a driver and tricked him into picking them up. Nice work OPD!

Update: (May 31, 7:38 PM PST) Thanks to the power of the Internet, I have the attention of the Oakland Police, who are tracking this guy down RIGHT NOW! Follow @jmk on Twitter for updates!

Thank gad, Apple can minimize the crime rate.

The Rapture is upon us, or at least for the Mongrel2 project, because I moved mongrel2 to github officially now, as well as moving Tir. The original fossil repositories will be decommissioned soon and I'll have a new website up in their place. In case you missed the links they are:

• https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2
• https://github.com/zedshaw/Tir

Thankfully fossil has a good git export that let me move everything over to github in one day. Also, thanks to all the mongrel2 hackers who helped me today since, holy crap I still hate git and would have never been able to get this done so quick.

Why The Switch? Will The World End?

I try to be pragmatic and objective. No matter how much I like an idea or technology, or how many people use it, if it doesn't work for me then I don't use it. I could love a piece of tech, but if it gets in the way of my work or doesn't live up to its expectations then I'm done. Life's too short to struggle with something when I could use something better or just write my own.

In this case, I woke up today to fossil removing all my files, putting my repository in a bad state that required me to revert it and lose all the work I'd done over the last two days. What caused this? Someone did a branch. Yep, that's it, just branch and then boom whole world ends.

What. The. Fuck. Dude.

To fix it I tried doing an upgrade to a newer version of fossil, but then that broke all authentication and I was then finally and totally stuck. I couldn't commit anymore because the authentication was broken, my repository was toast, and I lost 3 days of work.

And with that, I was done with fossil. There's no way I can use a project that totally destroys my source repository like that. I absolutely loved fossil's all-in-one design and it's still much, much, better designed than git, but if the implementation nukes my world then it's gotta go.

It's nothing personal really, just business.

Why Github?

Mostly because I needed to get shit done today, and fossil had a git export that worked great. Since the majority of people who try to hack on Mongrel2 also bitch and complain endlessly about not having github, I figured I'd give them a Rapture Day Present and go for it.

Happy fucking Rapture Day.

To me it sort of doesn't matter since I know how to use all of the VCS out there. Git's weird as hell and probably the most contrarian VCS possible, with some of the worst code quality I've ever seen. There's no way it needs to be 135k lines of code in 10 different programming languages. Fossil and hg prove you can do the whole thing in one language with less code and more features.

But, one thing git's got is it doesn't nuke my damn source code at random, so it wins. Oh well.

Will You Stop Using Fossil?

Yep, I think this is the end of fossil for me. I will start slowly migrating all my source projects over to github and then I'll probably think up a replacement for the other fossil features I was using on my individual sites.

I also think this is now motivating me to get Familiar working. It would have been nice to know this latest commit destroyed my fossil before I did that update, and Familiar could have done that for me.

I agree, twitter needs to cut its funding. haha

My gad Adobe... Chrome does the work for you? Well done dude, you've made a good move. :D

Found this video lurking around the GIMP space. This is the Content Aware Fill video version for GIMP. This video is pretty similar with the Photoshop CS5 video I showed last week.

What's really good about this is that it's totally free. But I'm still confused on why this gimp feature showed up just now? When we already have this feature for years. Why ohh why?

By the way if your using Debian based linux, you can directly install gimp-resynthesizer and tell your mom "Hey mom, I'm now an expert in photo editing!", lol.