Adrian Parsons

Software Engineer. Hacker. Optimist. New York via Austin.

[adrianparsons]

“Hacking” Etsy

I’ve long been fascinated by how users subvert our expectations and work around constraints. While at Etsy, I compiled superb examples of seller ingenuity on this blog: hackingetsy.tumblr.com

Some are genuinely cool, others are painful to look at. Most of them are educational—they point to the very real and immediate needs users have.

[adrianparsons]

I recently started an Etsy shop and I’ve learned some surprising things about running a small business. For instance, sales tax in New York varies by the county in which it is sold. Fine for brick-and-mortar businesses, but a real hassle for online businesses.

source: https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/publications/sales/pub718.pdf

[adrianparsons]

This is what's inside an RFID security card.

[adrianparsons]

This sort of work...used to be fun. “Part of the fascination,” he said, “is just little boys who never grew up, playing with Erector sets. Engineers just don’t lose that, and if you do lose it, you just can’t be an engineer anymore.

Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

[makingmeetup]

All future support tickets to be written in iambic pentameter

Senior Machine Learning Engineer Evan Estola recently filed a support ticket… in iambic pentameter. Our systems team promptly upgraded his workstation.

It is in the nature of my job here, that my poor dev box is frequently down, overloaded as it were by process - whom by their own nature and not of fault, are very intensive of memory. I enjoy engaging primarily - in the habit of a linux machine, and because I sometimes do rely on (e.g. data which I need to spy on) complex data visualizations, a racked machine would be less than ideal. Therefore the idyllic setup for me (and lo I know that this demand be bold, and understand if unlikely it be); a workstation under my desk as now, but with 64G of memory.

[adrianparsons]

Remember Google's SMS service? It's how a bunch of us used Google on our flip-phones in the dark ages. You could text a phrase to GOOGL (46645) and get weather reports, movie listings, an address for a business, and a lot more. Google shut down SMS search in 2013, but I just came across some flow charts I made in 2008 mapping out the service.

Check out the PDFs here and here

The first is a very clear and technical view of the service. The second is a more idiosyncratic how-to, with personal examples and sample results (rendered in the actual Nokia font, no less). I completely forgot I had done these projects for design school. Despite being in the process of getting a "fine arts" degree, I was unapologetically nerdy even then.

[adrianparsons]

I was really pleased to see this example of Lazy Philanthropy in the wild. These bins were all over terminal 2 of London’s Heathrow airport when I visited this summer. Heathrow is a major international hub whose visitors have tons of soon-to-be useless change with them. Changing currency is expensive and annoying (and often not possible with coins). These bins take advantage of that fact, and give visitors a way to feel good about themselves while conveniently giving them a place to offload cash.

[garychou]

On May 13, I gave the closing keynote at the The Graduate Show: The MFA Interaction Design 2015 Thesis Festival at the School of Visual Arts. The event is a platform for the graduates to present their master’s thesis projects. As one of their first-year instructors, it was a real honor to have...

[adrianparsons]

When the financial sector gets too big

A dominant financial sector may actually crimp economic growth and living standards for most people. It can drain talented workers from the rest of the economy and create damaging boom-and-bust cycles. A large financial sector creates lots of new vehicles through which consumers and businesses can take on debt, and the rise of debt levels creates vulnerability in which small shocks to the economy can translate into huge swings. The central job of banks, investment firms and the like is to funnel capital toward its most productive uses, and there is scant evidence that the sector did that job better when it was a bigger share of the economy, as in the 1990s and 2000s, than in the preceding decades.

“Wall Street is Back, Almost as Big as Ever”

[adrianparsons]

Too good to be true

Venmo didn’t appreciate me sending donations over their platform. Here’s the email exchange with Venmo Compliance.

[garychou]

$1,000 Project

I’ve been wrapped up a bit this week and am on the road today, so I’ve been slow to get the word out about our latest program at Orbital, aptly called the Orbital 1K.

I wrote about it here via our Tinyletter.

The backstory is that the project, which originated in the Entrepreneurial Design class that Christina Cacioppo and I co-created in 2012, continues to be a potent tool for teaching people to launch.  It creates an opportunity to learn about constraints, iteration, negotiating the unknown, building and leveraging networks, and much more, by challenging the students to work in public.

So, this Spring/Summer, we’re going to try it out at Orbital.

If you’re interested, read the newsletter announcement linked above and then let us know here.

For additional background, here are some posts I’d recommend reading:

Learning Entrepreneurial Hustle by Jon Kolko

Why Trying to Build a Billion-Dollar Startup Is One of the Biggest Mistakes You Can Make by Walter Chen

On Self Sufficiency by Gary Chou

Things I Wish I Had Known as a Musician by Annie Lin

[adrianparsons]

Proud to have gotten the NPR Foundation to join Planned Parenthood and sign up for Venmo! Now anyone can make donations to the foundation without fees here: https://venmo.com/NPR-Foundation. 

[adrianparsons]

Screenshotz

A couple of weeks ago I launched Screenshotz, a really simple service that takes a screenshot of a website once a day and saves it. I had gotten a little burnt out on Lazy Philanthropist, and needed to do something just for fun.

I had been wanting to keep track of my changes to Lazy Philanthropist over time, but have more control and a more visual focus than The Internet Archive would provide.

I’ve added some other sites to the mix, and would love to add yours! Tweet at me with your URL to get added!

[garychou]

It’s been a real joy to work with adrianparsons, tokeninamerica, jasreigns, julialevy (insidewhywegive), buildingeverybody, lukeschantz, mollysmith and mijaeldv over the past 3 months at Orbital Boot Camp, and we look forward to seeing them continue their journey. (thx jed for the photos!)

[garychou]

Join us for Orbital Boot Camp Lessons Learned Talks

In many respects, there’s always been a tension between what can be built, what people will use, and what a creator wants to make.

Whether you are talking about commercial, creative or social projects, it’s a similar challenge.  Negotiating these constraints requires that the creator go on a journey and see first-hand how things do or don’t fit together.

It’s not uncommon to look to processes and frameworks for help, but what I’ve found is that simply hearing the narratives of those who have attempted similar feats can be incredibly valuable.

Tomorrow evening (Tuesday 4/7), the students from the Winter Orbital Boot Camp cohort will be sharing their narratives–specifically their lessons learned from their 12-week journey at Orbital. 

If you or someone you love is in the process of getting their idea off the ground, I hope you’ll join us tomorrow to hear their talks.

Here’s where you can learn more about the students and their projects and also RSVP for the event.

[adrianparsons]

The First Donations.

Here's where the rubber meets the road! Today I processed the first month's worth of subscriptions through The Lazy Philanthropist (specifically the Reddit Index)

I had to make 10 payments of $1.89 in the most efficient way possible, so I used Bitcoin, Venmo, and even Dwolla.

These organizations accepted Bitcoin (links to the blockchain transaction):

Electronic Frontier Foundation 

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies  

Erowid Center  

Free Software Foundation, Inc.  

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

I found email addresses on these organizations' sites and have attempted payment through Venmo (I'll post an update when the payments clear):

Doctors Without Borders USA, Inc.   

Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc.

National Public Radio

Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc.

The Tor project accepts both Bitcoin and Dwolla. I was intrigued, so I attempted a payment with Dwolla.

Thoughts about the process:

It was awesome to finally use my charityCoin database, and even cooler to find some groups that needed to be added.

It’s awesome that I can provide proof of payment to subscribers via the public blockchain. 

Plenty of organizations accept Bitcoin but not to a specific address or bitpay/coinbase landing page. Those organizations haven’t been added to charityCoin, but it would be nice to integrate them somehow.

This was a very manual process, but could be automated in a lot of ways.

[adrianparsons]

At Orbital Boot Camp yesterday we crowd-sourced one-liners for our projects with our classmates. Some really great/funny descriptions.