technotarek

You're right about great furniture and objects. We've tried putting a local focus on some of their selection (as well as the selection from additional non-etsy sellers), by selecting/curating furniture dealers from the DC and Baltimore areas so that would-be buyers can have a look in person:

https://attic-dc.com

Especially in regards to furniture, buying online, sight unseen still isn't a great proposition. We don't expect it will ever be.

I credit this place and the other abandoned warehouses of Detroit for my interest in public policy issues (e.g., economic development, labor policy). These places were also a great source of entertainment during my high school days. The Packard Plant was a bit legendary for parties (raves) in the 90s.

"It was just under ten years ago that my friends and I began traveling from our suburban homes in Royal Oak, Michigan into Detroit looking for nightlife. We were typical middle-class teenagers seeking to change our environment and explore the 'underground' of an aging city. The destination was often an abandoned warehouse converted into a makeshift nightclub, where by 2 a.m. bass shook the rundown building from foundation to roof. Over time and after becoming acutely more observant, however, I realized that these surroundings were more than a suburban nightlife. The boarded-up homes, the all too rare museums, and the businesses polarized between mild victory and failure, all came into context—my observations matured. Through the study of economics, these observations became first-hand illustrations of poverty, real estate markets and labor dilemmas.

...

I clearly remember paying $20 to stumble into a nearly pitch dark doorway of Detroit's Packard Plant. The walls of the abandoned building, certainly the size of a football stadium, were adorned with black garbage-bag-like plastic to create boundaries for the event. There were some scarce hanging lamps and one other thing that looked a touch unreal: an industrial heater. Seriously, it looked like someone had taken the propulsion unit from a fighter jet and mounted it on the floor. Its flames poured out a good 6-8 feet and the only thing keeping you from igniting yourself was a a remote, albeit real, sense of mortality. That was it in terms of the venue. One thousand other kids paid the same and made the same entrance into the city's largest expense-free nightclub...it was a good time before glowsticks and pacifiers made their way into the scene. "

https://technotarek.com/shows/richie-hawtin

Let's start taxing candidates for mis-truths spoken in presidential debates!

Using web dev tools / inspector during a screen cast demo, either to modify a style or to show a site/app's responsive behavior. Simple, I know, but it comes off as some form of wizardry to many clients.

That grey area is largely what I'm referring to. That, and also hashtag feeds that start as creative outlets and then get saturated with both transparent and veiled advertising. For example, in DC, #aCreativeDC is a very popular hashtag that is full of advertising of some form, albeit often artistic and well done advertising. The same is true for other popular "lifestyle" hashtags (e.g, #nyfoodies etc etc).

Does anyone else feel like IG may be jumping the shark by pushing the business angle so hard? This probably sounds ridiculous given their explosive growth, growth that may seem unstoppable at this point. But, BUT, at what point do we all stop and realize that we are choosing to stare at ads all the time? Seriously, what portion of the posts on IG are either overt ads or veiled (artistic) ads? That percentage seems to grow with every post. Remember where IG started and what it exposed us to? I barely do.

Does anyone here have experience with / an opinion about the Ford C-Max? We're about to enter the new car market and are pitting the Volt against it and the Prius. (The new 2016 Prius is so ugly, though, that it's starting to fall off our radar.)

Yeah, I agree with your pendulum. I noted a WaPo article above that is hinting at that swing citing the mixing of old and new as a rising trend:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/apartment-ther...

Plus, if you look at some of the most sought after stuff -- e.g., Anthropologie furniture -- it's all throw back to old era. It seems to be as much about the ways in which people shop (online vs at brick and mortar) as it is purely about changes in taste.

Worlds colliding. This Economist article plus our antique and vintage focused startup, ATTIC (https://attic-dc.com), is featured on Cloudinary's blog today:

http://cloudinary.com/blog/10_startups_managing_images_in_th...

The E article points out the waning demand for certain genres and increasing demand for others. This can't be emphasized enough. Midcentury modern is what younger furniture shoppers seem to appreciate and it's reflected in the designs of the big box retailers like West Elm CB2. Their assessment of younger shoppers seems a bit off too, as outlets like the Washington Post and Apartment Therapy cite mixing old and new as one of the top 5 (!) design trends:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/apartment-ther...

We also think that consumers have moved away from these goods partly out of convenience (or lack thereof). Furniture is something you want touch (and smell) before you buy. You want to inspect its integrity. It's a market that doesn't lend itself to buying online, at a distance. At the same time, it's not particularly easy to shop locally either -- furniture dealers are not necessarily the most tech savvy and don't always have the resources for comprehensive marketing.

That's one of the reasons we built ATTIC -- to help aggregate and showcase local opportunities to buy antiques and vintage furniture from small businesses. In general, shopping local -- especially from small businesses -- is a difficult proposition when it's so easy to shop online. That's a problem that we think could use some solving.

Contrary to the author's opinion, BS isn't hard to maintain and the code isn't messy. I've developed more than 30 projects using BS as the framework. It has enabled me to prototype, as well as build for production, faster, cleaner and better. Might there still be something better out there? Sure, but there are definitely cons to continuously changing your tool set and diverting yourself from actual building. Imagine if a carpenter bought a new power saw every time a company introduced a slightly improved model. The economics of that should be clear.

Definitely not the same for me. Book-it...er pizza was amazingly motivating as child. So much so that when my wife noted that I was reading enough a few years back, I said get me a pizza for every book I finish. I finished more books that year than any in my adult life. Having said that, it was sustaining and I've now retreated back to reading HN most of the time!

The most important part of this article is paragraph two, for without the exclusivity present in the government procurement process, it's unlikely we'd have a lack of innovation in regard to development practice.

I've led or worked on tech contracts and grants for ED, HHS, NSF, CDC, and others. Several people have pointed out some important points that are not getting enough attention in my opinion:

by @mcone: "The procurement rules were designed for that, yes. But in real world scenarios, those rules effectively do exactly the opposite. Since there are so many hoops for potential vendors to jump through, only the most established players get to bid on most contracts. And in my experience corruption and cronyism is still alive and well in federal IT contracting."

It's true, incest between government and industry is rampant and has led to wide spread cronyism despite the system's best efforts to limit the effects. People that once worked for company X, now serve on the proposal review panels when company X competes for work. No, they don't receive direct compensation and thus there is no immediate conflict of interest, but the reality is humans are drawn to (or don't want to disappoint) the people they know (former colleagues) and thus pick their old companies. In addition, they know there is a chance they may once again return to said company (so there is long term conflict of interest potential).

Another point that hasn't been discussed is how the government's procurement process provides next to no incentive for companies to efficiently produce good products. If our industry loves the DRY concept, everything about the gov procurement process points to a !DRY (or do repeat yourself). We built and rebuilt the same database for offices of the government that shared a building with one another. But because everyone is in a silo, they don't collaborate well and don't realize that they could pool their needs to develop more universal products. (And on the industry side, as long as gov continues to work this way, they don't even have an incentive to re-use their work or propose innovative, generalizable solutions.)

And for those of you that might say, 'but can't you win a gov contract by bidding lower by working off of existing work?' The truth is price has very little to do with who gets selected for a gov contract.

Yes, their response sounds like evasion. Nothing is free. Having said that, their service is pretty good (based on the original 30 minute 'free trial').

(As some others have suggested--) I'm moving on from wireframing except when I can draw it by hand. Prototyping with tools like Twitter Bootstrap provides infinitely more value to the client and addresses most of your points (esp re exportability and responsiveness). It really doesn't take much longer (if any longer) than producing a wireframe. If it is, you're either doing it wrong or should brush up on your html markup skills. The need for your own CSS as you suggest to one response is minimal.

I spent several years holding down a regular job and doing the freelance work at night. Eventually, as I successfully completed those jobs/tasks, the word spread and I had enough coming in from the night work that I was able to shed the full time job and go on my own. Yes, it means spending a few years of working two jobs, which isn't a luxury everyone has or even wants to exercise. It's definitely paid off for me though, as I've now been 100% freelance for about 5 years.

My other suggestion is to see if you can convert a portion your existing full time job to freelance (i.e., convert from an employee to a contractor for your existing job). I did that as well, which helped fill in my client gap for a bit.