How do you vote?
posted by pete on May 22nd, 2008
Our team has an interesting demographic makeup; I can think of only one defining “Gallup poll” characteristic that could describe everyone here on a day to day basis. I’ll leave it to the reader to guess what that hot-button opinion might be.
With eight people in our office on a typical day, there are lots of decisions to be made. Being a logical bunch, most questions in life can be thought of in boolean terms:
- Is patio furniture important?
- Should we buy a physical server for our office?
- Does this potential client sound like they live too close to a desert with peyote in it?
- Does Rails scale?
- Is it time for lunch?
Without much conversation, we adopted a Trac-style voting behaviour. Any such query to the top-secret office address is immediately met with a stream of
messages in GMail. Sometimes, things will escalate into a discussion or even a meeting.
However, we’ve found that most debates can be +/- 1’d without anyone in the office breaking their concentration.
So, how do you vote?
Dan Grigsby makes the "40 under 40"
posted by pete on May 11th, 2008
Congratulations to Unspace pal and soon-to-be RubyFringe speaker Dan Grigsby, who was recently profiled in Business Journal’s top “40 under 40” list. Dan is highly deserved of your respect and praise.
Dan Grigsby has launched and sold two Internet startups, held a leadership position at Microsoft Corp. and helped turn around one of the nation’s biggest security-software companies. He did it all by age 30.
But since returning to the Twin Cities from Silicon Valley five years ago, his focus in the local tech scene has been on advising those around him, rather than his own career.
“I wanted to be a catalyst to help folks get startups off the ground,” he said. But Grigsby expects to again lead his own venture, likely in the clean-technology software space.
I met Dan at the 2006 Emerging Technologies conference in San Diego. More specifically, Dan waited for the first intermission to bee-line in my direction and introduce himself, cementing my first impression of him being the most extroverted geek I know. I’ve heard him described as a “three ideas before breakfast kind of guy” but I just tell people the truth:
Dan Grigsby is unafraid.
I would never dream of suggesting that keynoters like Paul Graham or Marc Andreessen are tired, but I sure am glad that we have minds like Dan, Leila Boujnane, and Reginald Braithwaite speaking at our conference this July.
Check out the Rails endless page plugin
posted by pete on May 3rd, 2008
A few weeks ago Victor Brylew contacted me about Endless Pageless, a whitepaper I did a year or two ago about the Ajax powered endlessly scrolling interfaces you see on sites like Google Reader.
Fast forward to today, and the Endless Page plugin is available. Awesome!
I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but it’s cool seeing concepts evolve over time. Keep up the good work, Victor!