At the meetup, I noticed someone had a laptop with an interesting advertisement with a “golden ticket” offer to theVaultPress beta.
The next morning, Stephane noticed that they applied that into a clever signup page. Check it out!
VaultPress sign-up
Broken Jewel—Automattic
Presentation given as Flash Talk at Automattic Meetup in Seaside on September 2010
Presentation is supposed to be Pecha Kucha style. But due to preparation constraints, it’s given as a short form.
Automattic is the company I work for. The company is distributed worldwide and once a year we gather at a remote location and meet face-to-face. This year, all the employees are taking a little time during the meetup to compose and give at least one presentation for each other, talking about any subject we are passionate about.
I started writing this talk a couple years back, and I have never found a venue to actually deliver it. Matt claims that, “You will not find a friendlier group of people to present to in the world” and that “Everybody has a story.”
This is mine.
Hope you enjoy it.
Broken Jewel—Automattic
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I’ll pare it down from 20 minutes down to six eventually. BTW: there are two major errors: Pecha Kucha is pronounced closer to “peh-katch-u-ka.” And I meant “treatable” not “preventable.”
Update
December 22, 1965
From Photo to Finished—Automattic
10 Minute Lightning Talk for the Automattic Meetup at Seaside, September 2010
Automattic is the company I work for. The company is distributed worldwide and once a year we gather at a remote location and meet face-to-face. This year, all the employees are taking a little time during the meetup to compose and give at least one presentation for each other, talking about any subject we are passionate about.
For this presentation I chose the subject of photography. Specifically, taking one photo from start to publish describing how I took the shot and the editing steps I chose.
Like many bloggers—Automattic is also known as WordPress—I’m passionate about photography and I felt that many of the other people it the room might be interested in it also—our founder and CEO’s online handle is “photomatt.”
I hope you enjoy this presentation!
This was the second presentation I gave that day. I composed it just after I finished the first.
Photo to Finished
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This presentation will be expanded into a post around Christmas. Look for it!
Tales of Virality—Automattic
Presentation given as Flash Talk at Automattic Meetup in Seaside on September 2010
Presentation is given as an Ignite Talk format (20 slides x 15 seconds/slide = 5 minutes. Autopush.)
Automattic is the company I work for. The company is distributed worldwide and once a year we gather at a remote location and meet face-to-face. This year, all the employees are taking a little time during the meetup to compose and give at least one presentation for each other, talking about any subject we are passionate about.
In the e-mail requesting submissions, Matt mentioned that Scott Berkun “did a very cool post and video on giving ignite talks, so I modelled this talk after that.
Sorry, I don’t have the audio file for this—I forgot to record one!. But this is the only talk that is fully scripted out and I included that with the file. 🙂
Hope you enjoy it.
Tales of Virality—Automattic
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Update:
Plaxo Office Space
When I worked at Plaxo’s offices on Crittenden (now part of the GooglePlex), there was a door to our server closet inside the handicap stall men’s bathroom of the third floor.
I can picture this like a scene in the movie: You are minding their own business, taking a shit on the toilet when the mysterious door opens, a sysadmin walks into the stall, says to you, “Oh, Excuse me, our wifi was down.” He then opens your stall door and leaves.
PC Load Letter
One day a VP went to print something out, and started shouting, “PC Load Letter? PC Load Letter! What the heck does that mean? PC Load Letter?! Does anyone know what that means?”
He was deadly serious—the entire office was busting up because unlike him, they had actually seen this movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ8SefiNEcs
Nikon D3100
Last month, a friend asked me purchasing advice on a Nikon D5000. I told him, “Don’t. Nikon will be introducing a new D3000 replacement before Photokina.”
Today, Nikon has officially announced the Nikon D3100 entry level dSLR camera.
If you recall the big spreadsheet in my complete guide to purchasing an entry dSLR camera (etc), the big specification upgrades are: 14 megapixel, 1080p video and continuous AF.
Two other overlooked features of the D3100 are the improved ergonomics: the shooting mode is now chosen with a dial, and a lever now activates the movie mode. Both are going to be very welcome (for reasons I explained in my guide above).
Weapons-grade wingnut
The comments on Balloon Juice can get quite witty. I love the imagery and alliteration in the following:
Wow. That’s some real weapons-grade Wingnut there.
That was used when talking about a purity purge going on over the “ground zero mosque” which is actually a community center with a prayer space. Another commenter wrote:
Calling this a mosque is like calling a casino in Las Vegas a cathedral because it has a wedding chapel.
Cisco looking for PHP engineer
Kristen sent me this job posting:
Cisco has a small team that focuses on building a hosted social-networking/media platform (Cisco Eos) for media companies and the fans. They are looking for an experienced PHP developer to help lead the technology development of their advertising platform. This is a big opportunity with enormous reach and importance. The platform you help craft will be responsible for monetizing the future of content delivery — and more — for the biggest music artists, TV shows, movies and sports sites in the world. This a fun, start-up kind of mentality team with the backing of Cisco. This project is the direction that Cisco wants to move towards.
If you like to write software that scales, addresses atypical challenges, helps the world be more entertained, and is even revenue-producing, this is a dream job.
Continue reading responsibilities and requirements after the jump.
Learning Programming Part 3: C/C++ superiority
Previously, Part 1 and Part 2.
The other day, Marie pointed me to an interesting article where Jolie O’Dell decides to go back to school to get a computer science degree. She asked me what my thoughts were on some comments concerning the necessity of learning C/C++. I’ll paraphrase in order to avoid singling anyone out.
“Scripting languages create holes in proper programming. All a language, like PHP, will do is make you a PHP programmer, while a language like C or C++ will give you a fundamental understanding that can be applied to all languages and make you a better programmer no matter what the language. This is because these languages expose you to the way the computer really works (instead of abstraction): for instance, how a string is really created, or an array, or dynamic memory allocation. If you learn PHP, you will never bother to learn the low-level reality.”
The above is a munge of many commenters’ discussions.
What do you think of the above statement?
Continue reading my reply after the jump.
Are democrats more educated?
Balloon Juice links to a Brookings study that measures educational attainment by metropolitan area and notes that 24 out of 25 areas are in states that went for Obama in 2008.
This made me immediately wonder which the outlier was. A quick scan said that the post is incorrect and that there are two outliers according to that metric. The first is Austin-Round Rock at #14 and the second is Tucson, AZ at #25. Doug was probably referring to Austin. But why talk about states, when we have the county breakdown? The county Austin resides in (Travis, TX) actually went for Obama by almost 2 to 1 (64-35%)—seems a shame to pick on Austin simply because it happens to be in a red state.
Continue reading about education and voting patterns after the jump.