On every front except work, 2016 was a bad year for me.
Not in big ways; I didn’t have any major setbacks, bad injuries, or dramatic blowups. It just sucked in a low-key but consistent way.
It was bad in terms of the goals I set myself at the start of the year, too.
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The official announcements are out, and my former employer Metaweb no longer exists. I’m happy that the ideas, and most of the people, have found a home, but it feels strange that the company is no longer a distinct entity. In many ways it makes a lot of sense for Google to end up owning them, and I hope the former-Metaweb-now-Google employees prosper.
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This animated excerpt from a lecture by Dan Pink on the nature of motivation is absolutely worth watching:
My new job is software engineering (shocking, I know) at Snaptic, a small startup in downtown SF doing mobile application and platform development. It has a web component, which is what I’m starting out on; there are also some opportunities for semantic data work that I’m hoping to take advantage of.
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It might sound like a cheesy stunt, but I have a hard time coming up with a more fitting way to land a job at an advertising agency.
It’s too long, it’s full of self-promotion, and really it’s an ad for a video he’s selling, but it’s entertaining and contains some good advice: “Programmers: What to do if You Get Fired”.
This might be the best line:
If you’re looking for a better job, writing an amazing resume is a good place to start. I don’t mean just a better resume; I mean a resume that makes people stop asking if they should hire you and start asking if they can afford you.
—Giles Bowkett. “Programmers: What to do if You Get Fired”. Giles Bowkett’s blog, 8 Mar 2010.
Annoyingly, I find myself tempted to buy that video after reading his post…
So far, his 2008 presentation at RubyFringe seems pretty entertaining too. Maybe you should watch it after you’ve updated your résumé.
Update: at the end of that presentation, he says “build something because you believe it should exist”, which I agree with 100%.
Today was my last day at Metaweb, and I was sad to leave. Naturally I’ll miss the people most, but hopefully I’ll manage to see most of them relatively often.
I’m not exactly sure what’s next, but I’m feeling good about it at the moment, and looking forward to finding out what it is.
Since last Thursday I’ve essentially been in the the grip of a compulsion to enter data into Freebase.
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Despite having worked at Metaweb for almost a year, and despite my OCD tendencies, I had avoided getting sucked in by the allure of correcting/completing/entering data in Freebase, the web frontend to our attempt at structuring all the world’s information. I had avoided it until today, that is.
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Today was my first day at my new job, and it was good. Very strange, somehow unreal. That has nothing to do with Metaweb per se, and everything to do with my long tenure at Nimblefish. Almost five years there made it seem like the canonical work environment, so that a different environment seems to lack solidity.
It’s good to be there. It’s good to change it up, but more than that, I think that Metaweb is a really good environment for me.
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After almost five years, I am no longer working at Nimblefish. I started freelancing at Nimblefish on Tuesday 09 September 2002, so that’s four years and eight months there. I was at their current offices in downtown San Francisco from when they moved in there, and was full-time there for four years and five months. It’s difficult for me to believe that I was there that long, and difficult to believe that I’m no longer there.
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Today I told Nimblefish I was leaving. My last day is 4 May, Friday after next.
It’s rather weird to be leaving. I’ve been there for almost five years.
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I don’t write about work too often, but I’ve really been enjoying what I’ve been working on for the last few weeks. I’m writing the specification for how our system should handle turning standard HTML files into files that handle the variability delivered by our backend.
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I’m not a fan of proprietary software, and I’m trying to make sure I don’t start using any more of it. In addition, I don’t like most Microsoft products, and PowerPoint is really low on my list. On the other hand, I need something with which to make presentations for work. Enter S5, Eric Meyer’s XHTML/CSS/JavaScript presentation tool.
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What separates the two? The question has some hidden depths—especially after reading Play Money last weekend, which details the world of trading virtual assets in MMORPGs. Also, I spent my weekend happily fascinated by JavaScript challenges that a lot of people would have difficulty distinguishing from the “normal work” of a web developer.
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I had these up on a random page on my site and thought I might as well put them here.
If the PURL page has been coded correctly, these will display the field name in *front* of the field contents.
To use this, right-click on the following link and select “Bookmark this link” or “Add to Favorites”: ‘ + prefix + ‘: ‘ + cA[i].innerHTML; } } } })();”>Field Expansion Bookmarklet for IE 6.0 and IE Mac
I wrote this during a meeting in work today: