Our good friends over at Intercom have posted a great writeup on how to be strategic about collecting customer feedback.
Feedback - 3 rules for collecting it from customers
22 Jul 2012
22 Jul 2012
Our good friends over at Intercom have posted a great writeup on how to be strategic about collecting customer feedback.
20 Jul 2012
First order business is getting all of our content on mobile, in a format that’s readable, navigable, and searchable. Someone called me out recently for calling that “content strategy,” suggesting that making that happen isn’t really a “strategy.” You know what? It’s not. It’s tactical, it’s wonky, and it’s hard work. It’s also our most important job.
If I could prioritize the efforts of our community over the next 3-5 years, I’d spend 80% of our efforts on the problem of cleaning up our desktop content and getting it all (at least, all the good stuff) onto mobile. Let’s use our 20% experimental time to explore how to prioritize content differently based on what we think we can intuit about user intention based on device and location. And let’s give each of those problems the appropriate weight in our discussions.
13 Jul 2012

Was pleasantly amused to see this appear on YACHT’s Instagram feed a few weeks ago. Perhaps you’ve heard their music before.
They #MakeItHappen.
11 Jul 2012
It’s a hard, simple calculus: Run until you can’t run anymore. Then run some more. Find a new source of energy and will. Then run even faster.
This reminded me of a time when Gary and I were running near the waterfront in downtown Portland. He said something along the lines of that when I get towards the top of a incline that I should push myself even harder. He had some explanation that involved how our bodies burn energy, use oxygen, etc... I don't recall the specifics. <br /><br /> Anyhow, a few years later, I recall this conversation each time I find myself overcoming the hardest part of a challenge. Below the surface... and a few layers below that, there is always more energy inside of me... yearning to be burned.
11 Jul 2012
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
10 Jul 2012
Empathy – and realizing that the other person is actually a whole separate person, not an actor in your own production of Me: The Play! – is the core thing in every human communication difficulty.
but... but... as far as I can see, the world revolves around me.
9 Jul 2012
Our hosting partners, Blue Box, up to the north of us1 have recently published a series of articles about managing larger Ruby on Rails applications titled, Managing Real World Rails Apps at Massive Scale (also see parts 1, 2, and 3). These posts came out of a few interviews at RailsConf 2012. Definitely worth reading through to get a few ideas on how best to monitor and evaluate application performance.
1 We’ll forgive them for being fans of the Seattle Flounders (Sounders). ;-)
5 Jul 2012
The Portland area has emerged as a leading center of mobile-application development, a field Apple essentially created with its iPhone and iPad. A recent study credited the app development industry with about 6,000 local jobs.
Even I was a bit surprised to read these numbers. There's heavy competition in Portland!
20 Jun 2012

For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere… have a lovely summer!
19 Jun 2012
Our team has used ClickTale with several of our projects over the years. We’re excited to see that they’re expanding their feature set so that you can watch how people are using your site on a mobile device.
Have a project that needs help?