Privacy, blown away

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Today I visited Moore, Oklahoma and saw the destruction that the F5 caused firsthand. I had lived in Oklahoma all my life and I had never seen a tornado in person. I had never seen destruction like this. I had read the stories about having a home being ripped to shreds and lives following suit. I had read lots of them. I had seen big storms causing destruction, damage. I had seen lots of them. I had never seen the wrecked inside of peoples’ kitchens from the street. I only saw that in Moore.

It is widely accepted that tornados cause damage to more than just the physical structure of buildings. They can damage deeper, more intangible things. Yeah, everyone gets that. Something I saw that nobody had ever told me about; something I never considered, was the privacy that so many people lost. The inside of a kitchen was visible from the street, opened from the side like a dollhouse. The physical shell that they had built around them was open for all to see. Cleaning a house-turned-concrete-slab, finding personal items, piecing together a mental picture of the people that lived there, was one of the awful effects of a disaster like this. It isn’t supposed to be like this, normally you are invited into someone’s home. They allow you to see into their private life, past the exterior that is really only meant for others to see; into the interior where only the trusted few are allowed. Now, they have no choice but to allow others into their personal lives. They must allow others to see what was only meant for them to see. The ideal of privacy must be left behind in a situation like this.

It only takes the possibility of an intrusion of privacy for people to readily denounce a product. Just look at the reception of the Xbox One or Google Glass. People are worried about the very idea of devices that could possibly send personal information to any company. In Moore, Shawnee, and other cities affected by the tornados, this sort of concern for privacy is a relic of a bygone time.

These people have had their lives blown wide open. It’s not only a matter of physical loss or the loss of personal objects, it is the loss of privacy.

Exiting startups

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"We’d like to announce that our company has been acquired by a multi-billion dollar company that has the potential to make far more money than we ever could ourselves, so effective immediately, we are joining their team and shutting down our service that we have worked countless hours on. We hope you celebrate with us our transition to a new family at our new jobs."

This is how every single press release from a company about their acquisition reads for me. I used to become saddened by the loss of another innovative startup. Sometimes, it could ruin my whole day. Now, I have become desensitized to the loss of another innovative, lightweight company. The underlying issue behind these tragic losses is two-fold. One, many of startups take money from investors and continue "investing" it into their product. The problem with this is that they often stop worrying about how to monetize their product, determining that they will figure it out later after they gain more users or reach a certain level of recognition. Second, there is a saddening new mentality in technology—grow big enough and you can sell your company for millions, ridding you of the problem of figuring out how to monetize, improve your product, expand your company, and gain more users. So, like fattening a pig for slaughter, founders take more money from investors, gather more users, and then wait for the call or email from another, larger company who wants to buy them.

It took Mailbox all of a month to be acquired by Dropbox, and while I am excited by what they can accomplish together, I also wish that the team at Orchestra had been able to develop their product to make a profit and reflect the team’s individuality. What if Picasso handed off the first draft of Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to a fellow artist for a large sum of money? It would seem un-authentic, as if he sold out because of money. That is just how I feel about companies that sell out shortly after the journey has begun. The founders of a company are artists. They have the ability to shape the structure and culture of a wonderful new creation that can last for decades to come, but they are guaranteed not to succeed if they sell out to an industry mammoth.

Instapaper’s acquisition was a rare example of a reasonable exit strategy. Marco Arment built a profitable business but was unable to give the product the time and work that it needed, so he sold a majority share of it to a company who could. This is a fine example of an exit. Marco will continue to have a share in the company he built, and is staying on as an advisor for the project. Meanwhile, users will have more active developers maintaining the product and it doesn’t seem likely that Betaworks will abandon Instapaper anytime soon.

We don’t need more startup farmers that jump from company to company, building them up, only to sell—no, kill them. We need artists, sculptors, masons, big dreamers, people that will grow their company to be even bigger and more profitable than the company that they could have sold to a few years earlier. It is time for men and women interesting in building something of lasting value to step up and create companies with the intention of keeping them running for as long as their product is viable.

Oz The Great and Powerful review

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Caution, small spoilers ahead.

Oz The Great and Powerful centers around the character known as Oz. Throughout the movie, he finds his way into the heart of about five girls, even more impressive than 007′s work in Skyfall. The first 20 minutes or so of the film is set in black and white in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Then, as one would imagine, the movie springs to life, color, and widescreen video when Oz arrives in the magical land of… Oz.

While the story is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, the cinematography seems to be a prequel of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. Strike that, it’s more like a rendition of a found footage film compiled by a novice film student looking to try out Final Cut Pro X. Motion tracking issues are the norm while elementary camera shots long since abandoned by professionals abound. Also, the intern that did the background CGI wasn’t paid enough. This was the worst aspect of the movie for me.

Okay, not really. I lied. The worst part was that the best looking witch turned into the ugly green one. That was terrible. But she was evil so I guess she deserved it.

But in the end, Oz The Great and Powerful, provides a satisfactory prequel; it keeps a consistent storyline that doesn’t conflict with the classic Wizard of Oz while expanding on the backstories of the characters. But it also featured distracting visuals at times and a truly unfortunate casting error wherein Mia Kunis was accidentally cast as a villain.

7.4/10

The all-new, nearly the same Beyond The Code

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NewCodeIt was time for a change. 1070 lines of poorly organized CSS was too much. A theme that was not based on HTML 5 and put mobile second wasn’t the way I wanted things to be anymore. So I started over. I forked Underscores and rebuilt Beyond The Code’s clean Decode theme. I am happy with the outward design of the site, so I kept things very similar, but I couldn’t resist a few changes, such as being able to navigate to the next and previous post from a single post screen. The new theme’s code is better organized too, making future changes easier. But the thing I am most excited about, is the mobile first design. I wrote the mobile site in the main CSS and then used media queries to bring in styles for larger screens and devices. This creates a site that literally puts mobile devices first. Most of my traffic comes from mobile devices, so it was only appropriate to build a site that was built for these devices, not scaled down site made for computers.

Admittedly, while you aren’t likely to see sweeping visual changes in this rewrite, you can smile a little bit knowing that the site you are reading is using the latest techniques for a modern web. As always, feel free to let me know if there is anything that you think could be improved upon, unless it is IE 7 compatibility in that case, I recommend you don’t waste your time and instead put it to good use.

We are young

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Age is just a number.

I love the picture Jared Erondu paints of how age can be perceived. In truth, your age is merely the number of times you have circumnavigated the sun. Unfortunately, many people use it as a measure of maturity, which is a terribly misguided use of this statistic. A 16 year old can easily be more mature and better suited for a job than a 20 year old (and vice-versa). Granted, there are a more legal restrictions minors have to deal with. However, this is not normally a problem for most of the positions in technology careers today. Past experience and a good interview are a better indicator of a person’s ability to perform well at a job. I’m glad to see that more companies are employing younger people, but we still have room to improve.

CSS transition usage

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I love CSS transitions and animations, in case you haven’t noticed by visiting any of my websites. CSS transitions and animations make the web feel more like an app and provide a more pleasant experience, visually. They also don’t take more than a few lines of code to make. Adding a simple transition to the color of a link can take three lines of code:
-webkit-transition: color 0.3s ease-out;
-moz-transition: color 0.3s ease-out;
transition: color 0.3s ease-out;
That code can make the links on a page transition smoothly between colors. Unfortunately, very few websites bother to use CSS transitions on their websites. Why is this?

One possible reason for this is that CSS transitions are only supported in modern browsers, however this is not a reason to not use transitions because (if used correctly) they don’t negatively affect the behavior of a site when a browser does not support transitions. So perhaps this isn’t the case. One may think that perhaps web designers are not well informed on the topic of CSS transitions, and therefore don’t attempt to use them. But this is likely not the case. Designers of even the world’s biggest websites like Facebook and Google are certainly not ignorant about transitions and their compatibility with other browsers. CSS transitions are also not a difficult skill to master and there are plenty of guides on the Internet to learn to use them, so I have a difficult time believing that anyone is having a difficult time learning how to use them.

So if it isn’t compatibility and it isn’t ignorance, why is the use of CSS transitions not widespread? If a few lines of code can improve the look of a site of even in a subtle way, why not implement it in your site? To be honest, I don’t know the answer to this question. I am writing this post as an open question. Is there a good reason not to use simple transitions on a site? Why don’t the world’s largest sites use them? Is there a something that I am missing here? If you have the answer, please don’t hesitate to let me know via the reply tool at the top of this post.

I’m done with fiction

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I’ve read my last work of fiction for a long time. Now that I have finished that book, I’m going to stick to books that are informative, inspirational, and instigating. Books that tell fictional stories bring us into new worlds, they allow us to use our imagination, but following my previous post, it is better to create than consume. Although I am consuming content either way, the works which I am planning to read are of the sort that would lead me to create. I decided to make a reading list to set some objectives. I am not going to set a date by which I want to be done reading. I would rather take my time with each text and take away ideas rather than check another book off my list without gaining anything from it. I challenge you to read books that will make you a better person. Fiction is fun, but it shouldn’t be the only thing that you read.

Here is my reading list. You can use it, but really, you should make your own.
My Reading List

Create, don’t Consume

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Alex Arena

It’s so much more fulfilling to be a creator rather than a consumer.

Seriously, I’ve bought tons of crap in my life and very few of those things have had any substantial impact on me. The things I have made, (sadly far fewer in number) have had substantial impact on my life and even other people’s lives. It is one of the higher honors in life to be able to create something that impacts other people’s lives. Get out in the world. Dream. Build. Create.