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Quote  |  Misc

The lack of

14 May 2013

In part, it’s not your fault. If you grew up and went to school in the United States, you were educated in a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes. Things are hardly better in the universities. According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees. You don’t have to be a math major to do the math: That’s three times as many jobs as we have people qualified to fill them.

Kirk McDonald from Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won't Hire You

Admittedly, I don't know who has a college degree in computer science on our team. I don't.

Photo  |  Studio

Argon Trail

6 May 2013

Argon Trail

On April 28th, 2013… we rented a bus to take nearly 50 Ruby on Rails developers who traveled to Portland for RailsConf 2013 on a hike. Here is a group shot of nearly everyone.

We hope you had as much of a blast as we did!

Here are a bunch of photos I took…

Quote  |  Misc

Did Google kill RSS?

13 Mar 2013

The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.

Aldo Cortesi from Google, destroyer of ecosystems

My RSS consumption was at an all-time high in the few years prior to Google Reader coming out. Once I migrated from a desktop RSS reader to Google Reader, I found myself opening it less often. Over the years, it's fallen off my radar. I only check a few times a month. Did Google kill RSS? On purpose? Accidental? Is RSS dead? Do we all need to rely on the sites we "follow" now via Facebook, Google+, and Twitter? Better? Worse? Inevitable?

Video  |  UX

What are your users searching for?

17 Dec 2012

Great video to highlight how important it is to monitor how your users are searching for your products. Are there alternate spellings, abbreviations, and/or pop-culture slang that they might be searching for that you’re search indexes aren’t accounting for?

In many of our e-commerce projects, we’ve worked on a handful of solutions to address this. For example, a product like “LA Vacation” could be found under a number of possible searches:

  • Los Angeles
  • L.A.
  • SoCal
  • City of Angels

The great thing with most search index tools is that you can shove a lot of additional keywords without having to expose this to your users in some archaic list on the site.

Have a project that needs help?