Love Begins
⁂
Acquired Stardust
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
almost home
@theartofmadeline
roma★
Andulka
Game of Thrones Daily
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Misplaced Lens Cap
Three Goblin Art
Sade Olutola
Stranger Things
Jules of Nature
if i look back, i am lost
Today's Document
Keni
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@rocketwhale-v1
Congratulations to Rocket Fuel
Recently, one of our biggest clients, Rocket Fuel, went public. It looks like they're doing pretty well:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/21/us-rocket-fuel-ipo-idUSBRE98J0JR20130921
Cheers to Rocket Fuel!
Backbone Relationships
On almost every project where we use backbone (which is most of them), we inevitably come across the following problem: How do we mirror the has_one and has_many relationships (that Rails does so well) on the client with backbone?
We've evaluated several available options, but haven't found much success. Backbone.Relational gets slow with large data sets and is a huge memory leak, unless you manage it. backbone-associations just isn't powerful enough to cover most of our use cases.
Last week, I decided to roll my own solution: backbone-relationships. It has worked extremely well for most of our uses cases (see the README), which are shipping data from the client to the server. It still needs to be built out to handle the nested_attributes situations, but we're waiting for a use case to drive that. Give it a try! Let us know what you think!
Rocket Whale Art
We had some cool art drawn up for us by the amazing artist behind our t-shirts and I thought it'd be a good idea to show off some of his work. Here are the results, all framed and everything!
Wouldn't this look great on a kid's t-shirt? Some day...
Our current t-shirt design looks fantastic as a sketch!
No, he's not high, he's just sleepy. Like me, the Rocket Whale is not a morning person (whale).
How does his body fit in the rocket? Magic, I think...
@tom_odea
Atlanta Ruby Users Group Presentation Slides
We had an awesome time presenting at ATLRUG last night! There wasn't an empty seat in the house. As promised, here are the slides from our presentation:
Ruby 2.0
Push Server
Hope everyone enjoyed the presentation, t-shirt tweet-contest and free beer! If you're interested in becoming a Rocket Whaler...we're hiring.
Score a shirt at the ATL RUG Meetup
Tonight at the Atlanta Ruby User Group meetup, our very own Sam Duvall will be talking about the exciting new changes in Ruby 2.0 along with a tutorial on push servers. We'll also be giving away a few of our spectacular hot-off-the-press t-shirts. And if that wasn't enough, we'll be sponsoring some drinks afterwards at Cypress St. Pint & Plate.
Sounds good, right? Great. Come get nerdy with us.
Merry Holichristkwanzukkah!
'Tis the season! Rocket Whale is a sponsor of HypeElephant, the first ever Hypepotamus winter seasonal event dedicated to bringing cheer and laughter to all attendees. There will be plenty of egg nog and munchies for all - so get off your keyster and come have a good time with us!
For the gift exchange, bring an undesirable gift of any shape or size (suggested range of $10-15). The only requirement is that you must wrap it and create a handcrafted gift tag denoting you as the giver. Prizes are available for:
Most Amazing Gift Tag
WTF? Gift (most undesirable)
Best Hippo-Related Gift
Sounds fun, right? Register here.
Our First Oversized Check Goes To...
... Adam Harrell of Nebo Agency for his referral of Ben Robinson, Rocket Whale's new UX Designer. After working with him at Nebo, Adam knew Ben's popular catchphrases such as "don't botch this" and "I haven't eaten lunch since yesterday" would go over nicely at Rocket Whale. Adam said the $500 will be funding shots at the Nebo company Christmas party. Whether he's serious or not, it sounds like a sweet party!
Here is a Minimum Viable Photo of the exchange. For our next referral sprint, I think we'll use a real camera. Beware the demon eyes!
Want in on this action? Refer someone for our open software engineer positions and I'll hand deliver an over-sized check for $1000 to you!
How to get a UI/UX Design Job: Step 1
Rocket Whale is hiring a UI Architect/Designer to lead the product design of our headline client's new flagship web app. After going through many resumes and applications, I wanted to provide some advice to any UX professionals that are looking for challenging work at interesting companies. If you want boring work with boring people, then you need not proceed.
Your resume is a landing page of you from a professional perspective and you should design it as such. The purpose of a landing page is to give high-level details that entice users to dig deeper. Likewise, your resume's goal is to get a phone call, not to get hired.
As a UI/UX professional, you have the baked-in skills necessary to create a resume with a great user interface. Use these skills to your advantage! If you cannot design a simple, user-friendly landing page for yourself, a topic of which you have intimate domain knowledge, why would I expect that can do this for a much more complex project of which you'll start with little to no domain knowledge? Your resume is the only design project that is guaranteed to be looked at by the company that wants to hire you!
So how do you go about this? Use the standard customer discovery process. Talk to potential users (HR, hiring managers, etc.) at companies similar to those you want to work at and understand what is important to them. Create an MVP, test it with users and iterate until the design is complete. Measure your success, reach out for feedback when you don't get to the next step of the hiring process and tweak as necessary. Not only will this give you a resume that stands out, it'll give you a great story to tell when you interview. Beep bop boop, job search over.
To help get you started, this is what we're interested in learning about at the resume stage:
Do your personal and professional goals align with the position we are hiring for?
Do you have the skills necessary for the position? If not, are you capable of learning them and are you excited to do so?
Do you have results that back up what you say you can do?
And, most importantly for a UI/UX professional, can you communicate all of this in a simple, organized, elegant and interesting manner?
Interesting companies (like Rocket Whale!) look for creative people that solve problems in interesting ways. Your resume is a great opportunity to show (not tell) a prospective employer that you can do this right away. Pounce on that opportunity.
Do you agree? Have you had success with an alternate method? Any additional tips or advice? What are you looking for in a resume? Let us know in the comments!
Rocket Whale is Hiring!
We are very proud to have reached this milestone in our company and are looking for help from you to grow our company. This is your chance to make a dream come true. Have you always wanted to receive one of those oversized checks that makes it appear like you've accomplished something? What am I talking about? Of course you have. If you refer the lucky person we hire for any of the following positions, we will personally deliver an oversized check for $500 to you wherever you are in the lower 48 states.
We'll take a photo (well, someone else will as it will be difficult for us considering the giant check we'll be holding) and put you on our blog that I've been told "several" people read.
We're hiring a UI/UX Designer and at least one Software Developer. Thanks!
@tomodea
Thanks a lot, Conan O'Brien
I saw this on a blog I follow (thanks, swissmiss) and I liked it so I bought the print, framed it, and put it on the wall. The optimist in me wishes it were true 100% of the time, but the cynic in me recognizes that it isn't. That probably just makes me like it more.
-Tom
Hard at Work
We are proud to announce the launch of Preparis's new marketing site! Preparis is an all-in-one emergency preparedness portal that helps companies keep their employees safe during crisis situations. They were looking for a redesigned and easier to manage marketing web site and we were up to the task. Go check it out or read more about the project on our web development work page.
We've also been doing a ton of work for Rocket Fuel and have been learning a ridiculous amount of new design techniques and development technologies. The project is a tremendous amount of fun and we're looking forward to continuing our work over the coming months.
Startup Riot MAKE 2012
Team Rocket Whale wins the SendGrid award at Startup Riot MAKE for their HowTracker Policies and Procedures software. We had a great time hacking away for a weekend and we built a very alpha version of our upcoming policies and procedures software, which we continue to make progress on and expect to release within the next couple of months.
Our prize was a Sphero, which is essentially a phone/tablet powered cat toy that Sam's cats enjoy tremendously. The award comes from SendGrid, primarily as a result of our users being able to attest to policies by simply responding to an email.
A big thank you goes out to Elmer and the SendGrid team and also to Sanjay and Rachel who did another amazing job with Startup Riot this year.
Feature Comparison Pages are Bullshit
I think that the page on your web site that compares all of your product's great features to your competitors' products is bullshit. I'm sorry, but I do. I know it might not be your fault, but I can't help it. If you sell something on-line, you're a part of a community of liars and BS artists that will do anything for a download.
It's our belief that trust is the backbone of any relationship. We strive to earn it at all hours of every day. I wish everyone was like that. Instead, companies like Microsoft put up trash pages like this that try to tell people that IE9 is a better browser than Firefox or Chrome. Clearly, it is not.
So to all you BS artists out there, stop degrading our trust. Talk to your customers and build a better product.
Software Development Task Estimations
This is why we do agile development and is why we don't do fixed price development unless we know exactly what we're developing:
http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3?q=why+are+software+development+task
A great response also comes from the second most popular answer:
Developers are also the only group where they are asked to do something which has never been done before, and tell someone else how long it will take before they even know what actually needs to be done.
While I don't think developers are the ONLY group (almost all service providers are asked this), it certainly is a larger issue in the software development world.
Tom (@tom_odea)
Escalators
I was riding an escalator at the Atlanta airport last week, after a trip to Washington, DC, and I was frustrated because everyone in Atlanta just stands on escalators like they're on a ride at an amusement park. In DC, the right side is for standers, and the left side is for those ambitious enough to also walk. This is what I would call productive segregation.
It hit me that the idea of escalators makes a good metaphor. There are those that are content to get on the ride of life and just wait until it brings them to their destination. And then there are those that are willing to work a little bit harder to get where they want to go.
I recommend the latter.
- Tom (@tom_odea)
An Observation
Congratulating companies on getting funding is a lot like congratulating couples for getting engaged.
Startup Technology Stacks
Because of our involvement in the Atlanta startup scene, we talk with many startups in various stages of development. Among those that have either yet to build or have simply built a test product, the topic of technology stack comes up often. Specifically, what type of a framework to use.
What framework-based technology stacks are out there? Here's a partial list:
Ruby on Rails
Python on Django
Groovy on Grails
PHP on CakePHP or Zend
Scala + Lift
There are way more and as always, Wikipedia knows what they are
If you aren't a supernerd, making a decision about which to use can be overwhelming. Our view is that in most situations, the reasons for picking one technology stack over another are for business reasons, not technology reasons. Most frameworks are equal, but different, and each have their own strengths and weaknesses.
As a startup, here are what your goals for making a choice should be:
There are talented and hirable developers that know the framework (or have the desire to learn it)
The framework has been around long enough to be in a stable state
There is a decent sized (or growing) community of developers that have written open source code that you can leverage
If you can reasonably meet these goals with your technology stack, then there's really no wrong decision for a startup.
Dreaming big is wonderful and everyone would love to have 1,000,000 users by day 10. The fact is it's usually not going to happen and if it does you shouldn't have a problem finding the funding to fix any technology problems that come up.
The last thing I'll mention is .NET. Our opinion is that it should be avoided in a startup situation. Here's why:
It's more expensive than Linux based solutions
It's not cool (possibly unfair, but true), and talented developers want to work with cool stuff
.NET (and Java) are typically used in enterprise environments and it takes a different kind of person to succeed in a startup environment
If you want to read a very heated exchange on the topic of bullet #3, you can do so here.