Monthly Archives: March 2007

SuperHappyDevHouse: an afternoon and evening well spent

When Lindsay asked me how long I expected to stay at this weekend’s SuperHappyDevHouse gathering, I looked at the stated end time of 1 am and said ‘pssh there’s no way I’ll be there until 1 am’. I was right; I didn’t end up leaving until 1:30 am and that’s only because we were getting kicked out.

SHDH was probably the best techie meetup event I’ve been to since I moved to the Bay Area. The fact that the house is packed with smart, interesting people and you have all day to find out more about them leads to deeper conversations than you find at your average gathering. In addition to chitty chat, introduced some fellow freelancers to SlimTimer, demo’d ActiveScaffold and most importantly increased my network of designer/frontend friends by about 3x which was my primary reason for heading out there in the first place.

I was impressed by the fortitude of the people there actually getting work done, I guess I’ve just been caged up in my tiny apartment for too much for the allure of geekspeak was too strong for me to get in any hackery of my own.

I’m on the left wearing a reddit t-shirt and my mobile wrist rest (aka sweat band).

Pictures of the event on flickr

The Truman Show meets Web 2.0: Former Kiko coworkers launch Justin.tv

Congratulations to the Justin.tv crew of Justin, Emmett, Kyle and Michael for a successful late night launch and coinciding TechCrunch coverage. I had the pleasure of working the Justin and Emmett on Kiko and I’ve got nothing but positive memories of that experience and am lucky to still consider those guys good friends. Now I’ll be honest, when they told me about their next big thing I was a bit shocked, I mean, doing a 24/7 online reality tv show is as much of a 180 as you can do from the pragmatic world of Web 2.0 calendaring. But they were really passionate about the idea and, in this day and age, that counts for a lot. I didn’t end up signing on for the Justin.tv experience because of my existing commitment to SlimTimer and the fact that the success of Justin.tv is predicated on marketing, having quality content, and video streaming servers moreso than web design (unlike Kiko).

Coincidentally we all separately migrated to San Francisco and the guys now live less than 10 blocks away so I get to see a good deal of the J.tv team. Note that all four guys share a two bedroom apartment and have 1-4 extra visitors at any given time. It’s been exciting to be part of their private beta and watch the project and its members mature. I’ve watched Justin become more adept at design and CSS, marveled at Kyle’s improvements to the camera setup and video quality, seen Emmett put together their own content delivery network using EC2 when existing providers proved to be too expensive or too unreliable, and salivated as Mike worked his kitchen magic putting on a delicious gourmet meal for all the local startups every Thursday (Oh and all the biz dev stuff he’s done like securing cool sponsors and such)

It has also been an interesting way to get up with my friends without making a phone call: “Oh I can see that Justin still isn’t even dressed to go out, I can wait another 15 mins before heading over there” or “Where the heck are they heading now… ahh Union St. I’ll head them off at the pass”.

Now that they’re finally live there are a couple of subplots I’ll be following:

  • Can they survive the “First Day TechCrunch Effect” and keep their videos feeds up? I’m pretty sure they didn’t plan for the TC article to come out at 1 AM PST so it’ll be a long, Bawls-powered night for those guys.
  • Can they maintain a high level of interesting content or will the whole Truman Show like appeal drive uptake regardless of content quality?
  • Could Justin.tv be the fourth horseman of the Web 2.0 Apocalypse as some have predicted? (Was Kiko the first?)
  • What are the chances of Justin finding romance with a camera strapped to his head?
  • And the big question is… how can I use the video feed to gain the upper hand on Justin for Poker night?

Good luck guys, I’ll be watching.

ActiveScaffold RC1 Released

AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold

I’m relieved to announce that ActiveScaffold 1.0 RC1 has been released. ActiveScaffold is a Ruby on Rails plugin and the successor to the successful AjaxScaffold project that I’ve written a lot about here. This means that the end is nigh for AjaxScaffold: I’ll continue to keep the AjaxScaffold site up but no further development will take place. Once ActiveScaffold 1.0 is released I’ll put of the official EOL (end of life) statement on ajaxscaffold.com and suggest that everyone start using ActiveScaffold instead.

It also means the end of h1p acting as the project changeblog which I couldn’t be happier about :)

SlimTimer: Server Upgrade Successful

While it took a bit longer than expected, everything has been fully moved over to the new server and is online. My apologies to everyone who had to track their time by pen and paper this evening; your sacrifice will be rewarded with a more responsive SlimTimer.

SlimTimer: Another Patch of Turbulence and Upcoming Scheduled Downtime

As some of you may have noticed, SlimTimer has been a tad less responsive than usual the last couple days topping out last Friday by being downright comatose for a couple hours. After much sleuthing around the server logs I’ve determined that SlimTimer was part a victim of it’s own success (with traffic up significantly since the new year) but moreso fell victim to inefficiencies at the database level: unoptimized queries and unhelpful database settings.

I’ve already moved to correct those database settings which should fix the bulk of the problems. I’m also bringing in some people to optimize those queries and this Sunday (3/4) SlimTimer will be down for a good chunk of the afternoon (PST) while it’s moved to a bigger server.

A number of your have expressed concern about the long-term viability of SlimTimer and even offered donations. I appreciate the sentiment, but your current donations of patience have been more than enough. We’ve got big things planned for SlimTimer, which I’ll hopefully get to announce soon, and it’s not going anywhere but up. It will be a smoother ride from here on out.