I’ve attended Maptime in both NYC & LA. Each location seems to make the event their own. If you’re interested in maps, you should definitely check out a local Maptime event.
In NYC, we worked on different mapping challenges (subway maps, D3.js, etc.). In LA, we went over using git & Github.
I recently read The Box by Marc Levinson.
Marc brings out this excellent insight about Malcom McLean, a pioneer in containerization (using Shipping Container to modularize transport & avoid break bulk):
Malcom McLean’s real contribution to the development of containerization, in my view, had to do not with a metal box or a ship, but with a managerial insight. McLean understood that transport companies’ true business was moving freight rather than operating ships or trains.
As the excerpt says, a shipper’s business is about transporting goods and not operating ships. I’d like to draw a parallel to web development. Developers need to know how to build & maintain websites, but the true business side of web development is about providing services to visitors.
Posting this since I wanted to know roughly how much you would save by buying wifi BEFORE your flight (or inflight). And I didn’t find a good source for this while searching.
1 Hour – $5 preflight vs $8 inflight
All day – $16 preflight vs $22.95 inflight
Also, here’s some more US Airways / American Airlines inflight prices:
When it comes to work that will build a great career, Patrick McKenzie has great advice:
Profit Centers are the part of an organization that bring in the bacon: partners at law firms, sales at enterprise software companies, “masters of the universe” on Wall Street, etc etc. Cost Centers are, well, everybody else. You really want to be attached to Profit Centers because it will bring you higher wages, more respect, and greater opportunities for everything of value to you.
The gist is that you want your role at the company to correlate with revenue generation.
If your role leads to more revenue, your role will always be in demand. Sales functions have so much money allocated into them with the expectation that it is an investment. Back office tasks (HR, accounting, etc.) are essential, but they do not generate gross revenue and are always on the chopping block.
It turns out that joining tables between databases is not much harder than joining tables within the same database. With cross database joins, it is really simple:
[cc]
SELECT *
FROM database_one.table_one AS t1,
database_two.table_two AS t2
WHERE t1.id = t2.id;
[/cc]
As an avid tech news reader, I’m able to follow industry discussions about hot new start ups.
For example, startups such as Snapchat, Pinterest, etc. have garnered a lot of hype. As a technology enthusiast, what is my duty to try out new apps / sites?
Is it enough to know about them? Is it enough to have tried them? Is it enough to know how to recreate them?
When previewing a site on my iPhone (1136 x 640), I wasn’t satisfied with using my iPhone 5 or a Chrome browser Window Resizer app.
Turns out it’s super simple to use the iOS Simulator with Xcode on OS X (version 10.8.5).
Select Xcode > Open Developer Tool > iOS Simulator
You’ll be presented with an iPhone to navigate within. Select Safari and you can use a site like localhost:3000 for development.
Earlier this month, I attended a talk at Adorama in NYC that provided great context to Vincent Laforet‘s career. As a photographer who saw the writing on the wall, Vincent transitioned his career from still photography into motion picture.
Vincent’s presentation was statistics heavy and illustrated the amount of content (image and video) that gets produced every day. The future holds even more consumer made content that reduces the role of big media as tastemakers. Also, viewer attention span keeps going down over time.
When Reverie came out in 2008, I assumed that Canon reached out to him to produce it. The reality is that Vincent was at Canon and happened to come across the 5d mk2 prototype. Vincent was rejected several times, but Canon eventually let him borrow it. And history was made.
Vincent said that he takes most (95%) of his photos on his iPhone. As someone who shot for the NYTimes and is a Canon Explorer of Light, I’m surprised he doesn’t use his DSLRs more often. It makes sense since convenience is king, and we always have our phones.
Another point that was brought up during the talk was Constant Photography. Instead of taking THE photo at THE right moment, you could just take a film of ALL the moments and cherry pick the photo that you want. Why would you need a photographer when you have a videographer that does both?
What I got out of Vincent’s talk was that passion and being open to change are important. Vincent could have kept working as a photographer, but changing to a Director/DP was a risky move that paid off in the long run. As a new DP, he doesn’t know everything, but he is able to hire great people with complimentary skills and get it done.
socialite by cameronmcefee (http://octodex.github.com/socialite/)
As Github continues to take over the world, I wanted to share a couple creative ways Pull Requests have been used.
In January, Carrot Creative made a job offer via a pull request. When I found out about this at Flatiron School, I was ecstatic for Adam Jonas, and I was wondering if this was Carrot’s standard way giving job offers. Apparently, it’s not standard practice, but it’s awesome nonetheless.
Gust is having a Ruby concurrency talk with José Valim in March. Their RSVP page had a simple message: send us a pull request.
The instructions were super easy for any developer. Fork their repo, create a file with your contact info, and send them a pull request.
While these could have been handled by e-mail or one of the many channels of communication, using Github to do it is simply cool.
Did a couple CSS demos (below are images, click through to see the css):
The former is a static graphic with only css. The latter started out that way, but then involved jQuery to add usability.