Current status.
(via corgis-in-space)
In a fascinating study known as the Coding War Games, consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister compared the work of more than 600 computer programmers at 92 companies. They found that people from the same companies performed at roughly the same level — but that there was an enormous performance gap between organizations. What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly.
— http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html
On Leaving…
It’s with a mixture of excitement and sadness that I’m writing to let the world at large know that as of February 1st, I’ll be leaving this crazy business of music to start a new endeavor. After more than eight years Sub Pop, I’ve decided to move on to take a new opportunity in the world of HTML5 gaming.
This decision was incredibly hard. More than just my employer, Sub Pop has been my family, and I’ve been privileged to continuously work with some of the best folks in any industry on some truly amazing records. The artists I’ve worked with directly have become some of my best friends, and I’m incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to spend so much time working with them over the past eight years.
In the end, I need to take some risks and try something new. Building games has been a dream of mine since I started programming (at 9) and I think the time is right for HTML5 as a gaming platform. As a longtime engineer, I couldn’t be more excited; working on game development will put me right at the leading edge of what’s possible in the browser.
So, with all that said, I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be working with Massively Fun, a small start up with a really big vision for the future of gaming on the web. We’re up to some incredibly cool stuff, and you’re sure to hear more about it from me in not too long!
Gone were the fuzzy approximations of focus groups, the anecdotal fudging and smoke-blowing from the marketing department.
— James Marcus, Amazonia.
Current Status.
(If you can make it to five minutes, I have good faith you will make it to the end. And you will be rewarded.)
Well, there’s not much entertainment in a game of eating, so we decided to create enemies to inject a little excitement and tension.
— Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator
Current Status.
(via xenabitesback, chickenshit)
tl;dr
Way more than you ever wanted to know about me at http://www.hdh.me
MSTP: My Twitter Based Reddit Style Board
I did this project last fall for an independent study that I took, and have been sitting on the code since. Since locked up code that no one (including myself) is using does even fewer people any good, I opened up the project on GitHub. Maybe this can be of use to someone. I really like the concept, but haven’t had the time to take it any further.
The source is here:
It’s a Rails project. Info from the README follows…
This is a proof of concept project built to support conversation threading based on Twitter hash tags. It was built to provide a saner forum for continuing Twitter hashtag conversations, which can be hard to follow and where lots of good info ends up getting lost.
MSTP (a terrible working title which stands for “MediaSpace Thought Pool”) attempts to improve the situation by watching Twitter for particular search terms, and then automagically starting a Reddit style thread with any tweet that matches those terms. The tweeter is notified that their tweet has been turned into a thread and given a link back to the board. Having an off-Twitter thread and board is meant to enable deeper, more persistant conversations based on ideas posted to Twitter.
I imagine the primary use case for this being classroom and conference conversations. Basically any situation where a bunch of folks are tweeting ideas about a similar topic, but having a hard time furthering specific conversations.
A live demo of the project can be seen here:
http://young-mountain-21.heroku.com/
TODO:
This was thrown together as a bit of a proof-of-concept hack over a week or two. So there are lots of improvements to be had/made for the project to be used in production:
- Twitter stream API. Tweets are currently pulled in via a cron job and a rake task which searches using the twitter search API. This could be made a lot better with the stream API.
- Security. Please audit this code before using it in production. It was quickly put together to prove a point, and I won’t vouch for its security.
- Search terms are currently hard coded. It needs an interface for defining terms.
- Reply tweets when a thread is spawned. If I remember correctly, this isn’t completely implemented and/or needs a Twitter account attached to it to work properly.
- Update code for Rails 3.
I’ve Been Published!
An essay that I wrote last year has been included the inaugural issue of the Four Peaks Review. The journal collects long-form writing on digital media primarily from the University of Washington’s MCDM program (from which I’m about to graduate). The journal is available here:
https://digital.lib.washington.edu/ojs/index.php/FPR/issue/current
I think my article (on historical disruption in the distribution of music) may well be the least exciting of the bunch. But it’s there!
