Matt Mazur

From the source code of WakeInteractive.com:

This site has become one of the most pirated web designs. If you are here learning about web design and development by studying our code, then welcome. However, if you're editing a copy of this file to be used for your personal or commercial work, then kindly piss off. (Thanks for the idea Shaun)


Yeah nice idea Shaun, because that’s going to stop people.

Preceden’s going through its post-launch press phase at the moment and even though I know its fleeting, it’s still absolutely thrilling.

It started when I submitted Preceden to KillerStartups, a year to the day (coincidentally) after they covered Domain Pigeon. The only difference this time around is that I submitted Preceden to them, whereas they reviewed Domain Pigeon on their own.

Here’s the rollup:

• KillerStartups – Preceden: A Tool For Building Up Timelines
• Feed My App – Preceden: Timelines for Everything
• App Everyday – Build a Timeline for your Website with Preceden
• wwwhatsnew.com – Preceden – Crea y comparte cronogramas en Internet or the translation
• Pedagotic – Créer des lignes du temps facilement or the translation
• Блог toodoo – Preceden – наглядное планирование or the translation
• Web2Null – Preceden: Timelines erstellen or the translation
• Abduzeedo – Web App of the Week

Very cool.

The mistake I made with Domain Pigeon, and that I find myself wanting to make with Preceden, is equating this initial traffic with success. The trick is realizing that a lot of the visitors were early adopters who found Preceden through technology news websites. These visitors are, by their nature, not long term users, which is really what you need if you are going to have a successful web app.

That being said, a nontrivial fraction of the tweets about Preceden have been by teachers, which is an excellent sign that there is an audience beyond the early adopters. Usage of the site also makes me optimistic, but I’ll save that for another post.

Time will tell (pun intended).

PS: Check out Preceden’s Precden timeline if you found this post interesting.

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules (“reality”). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform “miracles” — things which violate the perceived rules.

Read more on Paul Buchheit’s recent blog post, Applied Philosophy, aka ‘Hacking’.

Paul is also speaking at Startup School–I can’t wait.

I put together this chart showing the organization of a small Bitmap file:

(click to expand)

I used Wikipedia’s Bitmap File Format article in conjunction with UltraEdit and PowerPoint to analyze this 10 x 10 pixel Bitmap image:

There are only two bytes unaccounted for: the 6B 22 at the end of the file. Anyone know what their purpose is?

Really good presentation by Stephen Anderson on design:

If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it.

– Albert Einstein

I’m taking a break this month in order to brainstorm and figure out what to work on next.

I hope to start hacking away again sometime during the next few weeks and honestly I can’t wait; the idleness is driving me crazy ;)

Twitter made the news today because of CEO Evan William’s disclosure to employees that the company is valued at $1 billion.

Humorously, I also came across this today from the Editor in Chief of Esquire, David Granger, in the Letter from the Editor section of the October 2009 issue:

“We live in a culture that has begun to prize the appearance of accomplishment over actual accomplishment–it continues to amaze me that private enterprise and venture capital spend so much time and energy (not to mention cash) on “innovations” like Twitter and other forms of social blathering rather than marshaling the energies and talents of our engineers to create new industries to replace the ones that enabled the American Century.”

I admire Twitter for building such a seemingly simple product that appeals to so many people, but I can’t help but agree with Mr Granger: is this the best we can do?

Update: Sara Lacy posted an article on TechCrunch with similar sentiments.

edw519 responded to her article with the following comment on HackerNews, which, like most of his stuff, is thoroughly thought-provoking:

Investor: What are you building?Entrepreneur: Artificially intelligent software that automatically builds sophisticated business applications based on the enterprise’s business rules.

“Determine never to be idle.  No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much can be done if we are always doing.”

- Thomas Jefferson

“Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at Craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings.”

- Wired

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

- Maslow

“By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the “normal” world. It’s populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy.”

- Paul Graham

“So many of my friends see their jobs in terms of an “annual salary” or an “hourly wage.” The security they crave turns quickly to complacency, and they wind up dissatisfied with a job they’re afraid to leave. Why? Because they are not rewarded for their efforts, a productive day is no more lucrative than an unproductive day. They get paid the same, regardless.”

- Mike Rowe

“I think it’s in everyone’s DNA to want to be a builder.”

- Dan Phillips

“The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.”

- Netflix

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders.  Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”

- John Cage

“We live in a culture that has begun to prize the appearance of accomplishment over actual accomplishment–it continues to amaze me that private enterprise and venture capital spend so much time and energy (not to mention cash) on “innovations” like Twitter and other forms of social blathering rather than marshaling the energies and talents of our engineers to create new industries to replace the ones that enabled the American Century.”

- David Granger, Esquire Editor in Chief, October 2009 issue

Last updated 16 September 2009

This evening I was lucky enough to have dinner with Raphael Mudge, founder of the recently acquired proofreading startup After the Deadline.

This was a good week for him. On Tuesday Automattic announced they had acquired After the Deadline back and incorporated it into WordPress.  The announcement was immediately followed by a flurry of press coverage and widespread admiration of his success. As someone eloquently put it on HN, “It takes cast-iron balls the size of cantaloupes to make a product that competes against companies with six orders of magnitude more funding… and succeed.“

Raffi, as he is known on HackerNews, is easily one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. His optimism is contagious and his passion for his work is second to none. Smart too: did you know that After the Deadline uses a neural networks to identify errors? Yeah, wow.

Well done sir. Congrats again.

Frustrated with the growing length of the navigation bar on the right, I made some changes.

Before:

After:

This was largely inspired by Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, which was designed by Nathan Bowers.

I postponed writing the little bio snippet for a long time mostly because I had no idea what to say. Those 35 words, believe it or not, took about two hours to get right and knowing me, they’ll probably change completely within a week. I think the extra color adds a nice touch too.