So, at the end of 2005, Turner asked some of us to sit in a conference room. At first, I was like, "That sounds boring." After a while though, I realized that it would be a good way to get out of work on PGA.com. That part was pretty awesome because I had gotten kind of bored working to make sure leaderboards were updated all the time. Then they started asking us to come with ideas for "broadband" projects. So I went to Wikipedia and looked up broadband. Then I made some stuff up. In the end, we came with an idea for a comedy broadband Web site. It was a pretty good idea, or so I thought. Then they made me go back to work on the golf Web site. Then a month went by, and they asked us to start "fleshing out" the idea. I am pretty fleshy, so I was good at that part.
After this, it was a crazy wild ride. I have always wanted to say that something was a crazy wild ride, so this worked out perfectly for me. We did some stuff, and then we did some more stuff. Finally, they decided that this idea was good enough to actually build. This made me nervous, because it entailed me actually doing work. It was a pretty big project, and they weren't going to give us much time to get it done. I had one employee, and no code written. Over the next four months, I hired a full development team, and worked with three other development teams, and our gifted presentation team to build the site from scratch.
In all seriousness, I am very proud of what our team accomplished, and this project was a time of massive personal growth for me. There's a lot more we want to do, and we've already started working to improve and enhance what is already out there. I will definitely write more posts about the many lessons I learned. In closing, check out Little Michael Jackson.
I reworked a nice Wordpress template for my current ancient blogger infrastructure. I think you will agree that this is much nicer than the previous dated Kubrick layout. Hopefully, I will get to making a layout of my own soon, but I was so tired of looking at the old one that I wasn’t posting, and that sort of defeats the purpose of the site altogether.
I guess the only thing I will say is that we're cranking along behind the scenes getting things ready. It's hard to believe that this whole thing started with a little conversation in a conference room over a year ago. PaidContent comments, somehow linking our project with Office Pirates, although the concepts are completely different. I can see how they might see anything that comes from Time Warner as all part of the same bucket, but we actually started working on this well in advance of Office Pirates going public, and our content and site are very different from theirs. Well, gotta get back to working on the site now....
Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s followup to Office Space, is out in theaters, but apparently has been purposely underpromoted. Happily, Atlanta is one of the cities where it is currently playing, so I am going to try and see it this weekend.
This post from our quality friends at Beer and Rap has it all. I’ve never seen a tag team combination like the Corn Muffins and the Business Casual Drunk. For this, I award this post with my Blog Post of the Week. While you are there, download his mix.
Hazel looks like a must have Mac OS X utility. I have been using an Applescript that automatically keeps my downloads folder organized by day, and that is a very useful solution, but this looks like it will take that to the next level.
On this project, I seem to have a million documents and versions to keep track of, and since a lot of the end users and creators of those documents are non-technical, using our SVN repository as the master document archive would require way too much time on my part. I try really hard to keep the most recent versions of everything in DevonThink, but it's virtually impossible for me to keep up with all the updates. We would use Basecamp, but the lack of versioning makes that feature not as useful. I think we are going to just use a corporate eRoom to manage them for now, but even that is not a perfect solution. I'm curious if anyone else has a toolset that they would recommend for this task.
The text of Rob Pardo’s keynote from the Austin Game Conference got me thinking about core values and product teams. Rob is the lead designer at Blizzard, and is responsible for World of Warcraft’s experience, which is fantastic. The simple details that they got right make this game compelling, and frankly have also made it difficult for me to latch on to any other game recently. I’ve tried playing a bunch, including Saint’s Row and Dead Rising, and there always seems to be some simple detail that drives me nuts.
To get back to the matter at hand, as the head of a team of developers, and that team being as large as the largest one I have ever led, I started asking myself what our core values are. These wouldn't map directly to Rob's as "concentrated coolness" doesn't really apply to Java code. I can't decide whether these kind of core values are best left to organically develop or whether they should be something that I decide on and then attempt to instill into our efforts. It seems like they would be truer if I let them develop, then codify them. Regardless, I think this keynote text is something everyone should read, whether interested in things World of Warcraft or not.
Just a note from your blog curator to say that I haven’t abandoned you. Rest assured I am very busy, and learning a lot, and also working very very hard. I want to get back to daily updates, and hopefully that will become more reasonable and possible soon. Until then, I say, cheers.
Metallica Capitulates to iTunes. “Metallica has decided to compromise the artistic integrity of its albums in return for materialistic gain from digital sales of its singles.” Well, hahahahaha. P.S. haha.
Update: The live tracks are only available if you buy the whole album, which you undoubtedly already have. Asshattery continues.
This video is just insane. Plenty more of Birdy Nam Nam over at YouTube. They also have some video content over at their pretty cool site. Anyone know where I can buy their stuff stateside?
Well, I've been working on this new project, that I can't really talk about too much here, for about six months now. I will say, however, that I very much believe that, on any Web project, you should be able to get some kind of release out the door in six months. That kind of thinking, however, doesn't take into account the manner in which large corporations go about making decisions and executing on those decisions. It does frustrate me that we are still pretty far from having some sort of public version of this project, but I understand the world I am living in at work.
Having said that, we are now getting into the building stage, and I am looking for people who want to work on something webby. I need skilled Web Developers who have solid J2EE experience, preferably with some JSP experience. We are working on something that is really cool, and the team and environment is unique and fun. Get in touch with me if this sounds like something you would be interested in.
Our team moved over to Williams Street today. I have to say, it is a very different, and much cooler environment than the two cube farms I lived in before this. I am so happy.
From Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, Consensus Web Filters. In addition to an excellent write up on the emergence of this category of Web site, it includes a pretty comprehensive list of sites that fit into this category. One great filter, which I have sort of become addicted to, but which is not mentioned in his piece, is TailRank. TailRank has gone from being a site I was not familiar with to one of my ten most visited sites in less than a month.
For me, the purpose of these sites is not the "surf by proxy" filtering that most people seem to use them for. I like the daily scour for information that I currently pursue. These sites give me ancillary links and perspective from the community that surfing alone could never get me. Considering how smart this community seems to be in most cases, it would be foolish of me not to ingest the community's perspectives and additional datapoints that folks provide.
Ma.gnolia extends social bookmarking to groups and contacts, with basic social network functionality. I like it. Some of the design choices, like the way they chose to display groups in group listing pages, annoyed me a little. Having said that, I’m all over this, imported my delicious bookmarks, and am going to rip it up over there for a few days and see how it fits. Oh yeah, and ajax stuff and blah blah blah.
Extra Tasty is a social network enabled drink recipe site. I like the feature where you can enter the items you have in your bar, and it shows you the drinks you can make from them. Another great idea from our friends at skinnyCorp.
Blizzard released patch 1.9 for World of Warcraft yesterday. Something Awful has great, and funny patch notes commentary. My guild went into ZG, one of the mid-level endgame instances, last night, and discovered that the patch introduced some new bugs. These large trash mobs, Beserkers, fear after a certain amount of time into the encounter. Last night, this fear caused some large percentage of the party to crash, which was annoying and caused one wipe. Additionally, it seemed that a couple of the ZG bosses were buffed while others were made easier. (Tiger Boss for one.) Finally, Hakkar, the end boss, which was a pretty easy encounter for us previously, proved to be very difficult. I am not sure if this was a bug of some sort, or he was buffed. Overall, my patch experience was a negative one, which has pretty much been the norm with Blizzard. I hate that all my UI add ons stop working too, and I wish they would foster a better relationship with add on developers.
I’ve been pretty quiet here the last few months. I think this hiatus of sorts is over now, for a variety of reasons. One of them, however, is that I have accepted a new position working on a new project within Turner. I am no longer the lead technologist for PGA.com. The new position is exciting, and a bit scary in its proportions, but I am not allowed to discuss it in this forum. PGA.com was a great experience for me, three years filled with challenges, working with and for some great people, and learning a whole lot about golf and golf scoring. I think my final count was seven different golf scoring systems written from scratch. When the Masters approaches this Spring, I will feel a tinge of nostalgia.
The new X-Men trailer makes me believe that this series of films is beginning to truly approach the embodiment of the comic series in the manner I had hoped for all along.
