moeamaya

Thank you Colin for writing this. I think it's necessary to champion how much we rely on Open Source to encourage giving back.

This has been a very recent topic at our company that was bootstrapped early this year and now is humming along nicely. We are formally implementing an Open Source Friday each month (would love to do every Fri, but company not doing quite that well). We're suggesting three avenues, but we're not limiting it to these:

1. Contributing design (we're trained designers that also develop) work to projects we actively and implicitly use.

2. Open sourcing our own novel technologies and working on documentation, issues, and community.

3. IF (there better be a good reason) we have to work on this Friday, half of the revenue for the day will be donated to supporting Open Source Software.

We'd also love to hear ideas from others on ways designers could help out the Open Source community.

This is a fun little side project my friend and I built. The goal was to design and build a color tool with resources for those who don't have access to Photoshop and Sketch. Judging from the high search volume and number of sub-par existing tools, we thought it was the perfect spot to apply our design and dev skills.

Similar to getting a raise at a full time job, the best way to walk up your rate as a freelancer is to get a new client and charge more.

In lieu of that option, I'd suggest finding a good stopping point (say after a feature is completed) and talk to your client about pursing further work at a different rate. Since they like both you and your work, I wouldn't be nervous about creating animosity—developers are in EXTREMELY HIGH DEMAND and they will be happy to properly compensate you now that you've proven your value.

I will say that it's still much more difficult to get a raise from the same client. Even if you like working with them you should at least see what else is out there for no other reason than leverage during negotiation.

I had the same initial impression based on the opening paragraph. I thought the post was going to use the Uber technique of ocr-ing a webcam (in their case mobile) image of your card and auto inputting all the info.

Either way the UX process was interesting, and I think helpful for those who haven't had the chance to think through the painful development of credit card inputs.

At UC Berkeley this semester they did something similar with a small army of subsidized printers, creating 840 8x8 "bricks" out of a proprietary concrete. More if your interested http://3dprintingindustry.com/2015/03/10/unveiling-bloom-the...

The library is concise and easy to reason about. Did you pull this out of the Bitcoin landing page?

I just started using the lib for a client last week and I love the syntax. The code is starting to get a little unwieldy, how do you structure your animations typically?

I think you missed out on the point of compensation. Even as a first employee working at a startup, you're only expected to get 1-3% equity, but you're as you stated doing many things outside of dev work. Big Corp Devs perhaps don't have as many tangential responsibilities, but they will often start with a significantly increased base salary which can be a serious opportunity cost to consider.

Nice work Jake!

I think you should keep the project summaries on the homepage. If you do make a big change I might move the Developer and Ops summaries below your projects. Give me a quick intro to who you are then let me see your work.

Also could use a little more separation and hierarchy in the project sections. Quick web tools mockup: http://i.imgur.com/Ucp6ZLG.png

Even if you ignore the improvement in overall brand consistency, as a general workflow it’s a huge win. It’s basically a design framework for a large team, no different than React is a UI library for manipulating the DOM.

But as others have suggested, there’s a subtext to a UI that is not immediately logic based, and this is where a coalesced design sensibility has a strong impact. Visual affinity is constructed through a base need, and there are billions of background calculations happening to resolve this before your conscious kicks in. Saying that each change is minuscule is a first level pass at something that while useful is ignoring the full depth to the mental model of comprehension.

I generally like your insight. The example seems to contradict your idea though—getting a readership of 20k is often much more difficult than getting paying customers from an MVP.

For the brochure, I would leave out specific metrics and data based results and instead keep the benefits high-level with tangible results.

If the brochure is merely an internal tool to help one focus on the important next steps, ignore above advice.

I second this; it's really motivating to learn about an emphatic approach to an idea that ultimately resulted in an oblique transition. A post-mortem would help those interested in solving similar problems start from a more informed base.

I've seen an alternate anecdote developing, one in which talent is growing weary of delivery, social, and data startups. It appears to result from both a financially stable base (engineers having made money from prev mentioned startups) and a desire to have a larger impact.

Additionally, something I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, but the API availability is unfathomably vast now. I was checking out Google's developer console and there are over 100 incredibly robust APIs just a GET request away. In the real world, you can order drone images, turn off your lights at home, monitor your health levels all from url endpoints. These computational implementations are encouraging talent to work on projects that are beyond the scope of a laptop and a dorm room.

I for one am optimistic in Valley Talent, and can't wait for the next few years.

I would extend this further and suggest you challenge yourself by following your interests. If you happen upon a C++ graphics library that your favorite game is built upon, your curiosity will be enough to propel you forward and learn new things based purely on intrigue.

If ultimately you go the route of wanting to learn a particular programming paradigm, I would still encourage you to try to solve a problem that resonants with you personally. The problem itself becomes the method by which you learn programming and not the other way around.

Brand development is a non-trivial matter, especially in startups. Getting your company's value prop out in two sentences is amazing, but they were able to succinctly describe it in TWO WORDS.

"easypostage" and "easypostapi" neglect the value of clean, concise naming conventions as a marketing advantage to what at the time ended up being a competitive market.

EasyPost was ahead of the curve in terms of acknowledging company representation. As an early pseudo-developer at Teespring, I felt very comfortable in their docs and deploying against their API. This was based on both their technical (seems consistent across YC co) and branding capacity.

Over a year and a half later, I'm not surprised by their success.

Ben mentions his frustrations in his blog: Despite my personal opinion that these changes were unnecessary and frankly absurd (in addition to costly: 1" bolts cost around $10 apiece), we didn't really have any choice but to make the changes. After all, for the Cambridge and MIT to let us build this thing and have people ride it, we absolutely needed our plans to be signed off by a professional engineer.

The Roller Coaster used to be an annual tradition but was put on hold the past few years because of EHS regulations and safety concerns. I know they really wanted to build it this year, so they obliged with the request.

Appreciate the reply, but I think you may have misunderstood the context of the request. I'm much more interested in a community of folks who produce vector drawings, not a place to collaborate with real-time sketches.

I along with a few others find the world of very deliberately considered drawings a better way to advance ideas. I wanted to discover the best way to share those concepts.

Seems like this could definitely be useful to a marketing team or early founders. Might make more sense to bring integration into something like Slack, Hipchat or Flowdock as soon as you have the resources to.

This reminded me MIT still uses ~<email> for public www space. Must be an artifact of this UNIX paradigm. Brian Chan as an example: http://www.mit.edu/~chosetec/.

I'm thrilled that MIT last year added maker portfolios to their undergrad applications. I chatted with a couple freshman who said they spent less time prepping for the SAT and got to use that time to work on their side projects instead. It's still early but hopefully other universities consider different metrics by which to define academic capability.

These examples showcase the importance of typesetting as much as they do typeface choice. Proper hierarchy, contrast and layout can extend the ability of the typeface individually to do a lot more than seems plausible when seen in isolation.

I second this, would love to learn what you thought worked and what didn't. Your product was beautiful and useful, was it mostly about market fit, business model or something unexpected.

I saw recently Sam was trying to find out which company had the highest exit/valuation coming out of another accelerator...this may have prompted the inquiry?

In the terms of a venture backed startup, I’m not sure your company makes sense (only based on a shallow reading of what was posted). While you have traction, a talented team, solid tech, and a potential business model, there’s not a clear understanding of the next step whether broadly or even in the developer community. I would love to have a dev environment ready in a few min but I don’t know how that tech extends beyond my own pain point.

I agree, click and drag along orthogonal paths and dropping objects in a new place would allow interesting game mechanics to ensue.

Also it would be alter the conceptual understanding to transform from 2D planimetric view to isometric.

According to techcrunch[0], Automattic (parent company of Wordpress) also acquired Longreads. It seems like either a more simplified version of Wordpress is on the way or a revamping of the core product. I'm curious if they see Medium and other long form publishers as a potential threat or there is just interest in seeing the potentials of this new style working its way into Wordpress.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/automattic-buys-scroll-kit-...

Great would love to see the update...write to me jamaya at mit dot edu. Also forgot to mention, but you can also darken the overall image (if using white text) or spot darken where the text is located. It's a technique used by Medium and others.

I like the concept, probably could be extended to other scenarios...every 30min stand up and stretch...every hour walk around the office...every 2 hours go outside.

Also in your links would like to see more scientific (although in layman's terms) references rather than other apps who do similar things.

Just a few representational ideas. You're a photography based website, but the the main photo on the page is covered up with a large transparent black box, let the photo serve as the overall branding of your site. Quick web tools mock up - http://i.imgur.com/aI3tFvs.jpg Similarly the other photos on the page are filled with content (but justifiably so) or are far too small. I really feel that the photograph needs to have a stronger presence.

As a website based on critique, I'd like to see an example of a series of photos showing incremental improvement. I know this takes time, but it's the main driver for how others see your site as a benefit to them - increasing their skill level and also participating in critique themselves.

Mirror - http://i.imgur.com/77rp2jS.jpg