I moved my personal life over to tumblr.adamgotterer.com. Feel free to follow my life by the minute. This site will now only be related to tech posts and my ventures.
Archives for Adam Gotterer
People I Want To Meet
Published on June 22, 2008
I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine about who she would want to meet given the opportunity. She of course, like most people listed off a handful of A, B and C list celebrities. I have put some thought into it since that conversation and realized the only two “celebrities” I would want to meet are Larry David and Steven Wright. I feel like I can really relate to both of their senses of humor. Also if I didn’t know who my real father was, I would assume it was Larry David.
In actuality my list of meets consisted of a bunch of geeks and business moguls. Heres my list, in no particular order…
Larry Page & Sergey Brin – Founders of Google. Enough said.
Zed Shaw – Creator of Mongrel, a web server for Ruby applications. While I’m not a ruby developer (I have dabbled), this guy is the most opinionated stright up guy on the web. He doesn’t sugar coat anything, says it like it is. I think we would have a great time debating geeky topics.
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee – This guy pretty much created the world wide web.
Richard Branson – I just want to check out his island, drink some beers and jet ski with this guy.
Markus Frind – Creator of plentyoffish.com. This guy runs one of the largest dating sites on the internet single handed. He makes millions.
Barry Diller – CEO of InterActiveCorp. Ruthless, brilliant business man. Seems to have a knack for picking winners.
John Malone – If I’m going to meet Barry Diller, I dont want John to feel left out.
Paul Buchheit – Creator of gmail… So cool!
Kevin Rose – Creator of digg.com and revision 3, probably has the biggest “geek” fan boy following and definitely knows how to hold his liquor. Might as well throw Jay Adelson in there as well, current CEO of digg, founder of revision 3 and Equinix.
Steve Jobs – Why not, the guy is brilliant. Maybe he will hook me up with a free iphone.
Steve Wozniak – Now we are talking brilliant. More or less created the personal computer.
37 Signals Team – While I don’t agree with all of their practices, these guys are pretty smart and I would love to pick their brains.
Guido van Rossum – Creator of python. I really need to start using it a bit more.
Bill Gates – Needs no introduction.
Gary Dahl – Creator of the pet rock. If this guy can get people to buy a rock for $3.95, he can sell just about anything and I would love to know how.
Dave Hyatt & Blake Ross – Creators of Firefox.
Linus Torvalds – Creator of Linux and the poster boy for hackers everywhere.
Job Search
Published on May 30, 2008
In the past three weeks at least five people have asked me if I knew anyone looking for full time web development work. Without doing much research it seems that even with the poor economy the tech industry is still hiring. Unfortunately for the people looking I don’t know anyone searching for a job. I’m getting close to starting a recruiting agency though =) But until then… One of the people asked if I could compile a list of websites for posting technology related jobs. What I sent her is below. Don’t forget College Humor is hiring for a number of positions as well!
http://www.crunchboard.com/crunch.html – Found my current job here!
http://jobs.slashdot.org/
http://jobs.37signals.com/
http://market.mashable.com/
http://jobs.alleyinsider.com/
http://startupers.com/
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/
http://venturebeat.personforce.com/jobboard.php
http://jobs.paidcontent.org/
http://nextny.jobthread.com/
http://jobs.43folders.com/
http://www.cybercoders.com/
http://jobs.ajaxian.com/
http://www.odesk.com/jobs/
http://www.dice.com/
More generic job posting sites…
http://www.craigslist.com
http://www.monster.com
http://www.jobster.com/
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/
Weather Man
Published on May 28, 2008
It just occurred to me that being wrong 50% or more of the time at any other job would get you fired.
Weebly Puzzle
Published on May 28, 2008
This site attracts a decent amount of JavaScript folks so I thought this would be relevant and maybe even helpful. I read news.ycombinator.com everyday (or several times a day). If you are into the startup world, you should as well. It has by far the best startup news and a great community. The feedback and questions posted on there are generally informative and trolling is at a bare minimum. It’s what reddit used to be. Regardless, I came across a job posting at Weebly for a web developer position. The job description came with a little JavaScript puzzle. I had no intention of actually applying for the job, but when ever I find these puzzles I like to do them. I’m not going to post the results, because thats not cool. If you want to check your answer email me your best guess. But it entertained me for about 20 minutes. So if you’re bored or actually looking for a job check it out at http://www.weebly.com/jobs.html.
PriceAdvance Launches!
Published on May 8, 2008
We are officially out of beta today! We launched with 19 supported merchants, an advanced pricing system that does in-cart pricing (the price after you add to cart) and an Internet Explorer version on top of a new Firefox release. Check out our new demo reel below, courtesy of mostlylisa.
Science Machine
Published on April 22, 2008
This is one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. Chad is one of the designers from Vimeo. Watch and be amazed.
Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.
The 21″ x 13″ print can be purchased at my new store! store.thebigpugh.com
This piece inspired the login illustration that vimeo commissioned from me for their redesign earlier this year; it is still in use throughout the site. The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video. I’ll upload that for posterity later.
My life has changed a lot since i started this, so I thought it appropriate to include my friends, family and loved ones since they all were on my mind throughout the creative process. Enjoy!
Muxtape’s Is Growing Fast!
Published on April 3, 2008
On Tuesday March 25th, Justin Ouellette one of the developers from Vimeo launched Muxtape as a side project. The idea isn’t totally original, but its executed far better then the competition. Muxtape is a site that lets you make virtual mix tapes. You upload up to 12 songs from your computer and share the custom link with anyone who wants to listen. The design is one of the cleanest and easiest to use sites I have ever seen.
When Justin sent out an office wide link looking for feedback on Tuesday morning I googled “muxtape” and got back 33 results. I did the same thing the Wednesday and got back around 4,000 results. Thursday was around 9,000 and Friday around 22,000. I didn’t check over the weekend. I looked sometime early the next week and saw it was over 40,000. Tuesday April 1st, one week after the site launched google returned just over 100,000 results and as of today (April 4th) 121,000 result. That growth rate is pretty unbelievable and I would love to see at what point it stabilizes.
I talked to Justin today about the growth on his site, I don’t want to throw numbers out without his permission but he said the site is growing at a nice rate every day. I assure you it’s a pretty impressive number for a site two weeks old. He must be paying a fortune in bandwidth on Amazon S3. I want to say that he didn’t have a clue how big this was going to get, but then I would be lying. I think he knew damn well how the site was going to do before he even launched. He gave Vimeo two weeks notice Monday, the day before he launched. Thats a pretty ballsy move to go from a stable income to the unknown. But thats what separates the people who build great companies and the people who are too afraid and work corporate the rest of their life. I don’t know Justin that well, but I have had some interesting conversations with him and he really knows his stuff. He didn’t give me much insight to future plans. But he said theres a monetization plan in the works and a bunch of new feature. I think he is going to do great and wish him the best of luck.
BustedTees Relaunch
Published on April 1, 2008
This morning at 5am Kunal Shah, Nick Dunkman, Jmo and myself launched a new version of the BustedTees website! Visually the site hasn’t changed much. Amir Cohen, one the front end developer for CollegeHumor did an excellent job recoding the front end. We spent the better part of the last 4 months recoding everything from scratch. The original version was built on the open source Symfony PHP framework several years ago (before my time). The site served it’s purpose and helped take BustedTees to a new level, it wasn’t that it was poorly programmed, it just outgrew our requirements.
(Dev Team at 5:15am)
I’m finding that a lot of the open source PHP frameworks that I have experimented with and seen throughout the community just don’t scale well. They serve a purpose and are great for average every day sites. But when dealing with a site the size of a BustedTees or CollegeHumor it really makes sense to roll your own framework, if you can. There are of course instances when writing a framework from scratch doesn’t always make sense. In the “unsure” startup setting it sometimes makes sense to get something out there quick and worry about scaling later. Scaling is a GREAT problem to have. If you are going to use open source code, not just frameworks, it’s important to really understand the underlying code. I can bet most coders don’t have a clue how the open source code they use actually works. Some of these applications are coded by excellent developers, you might learn something new by just reading their code.
Working on BustedTees has been an incredible experience and I have learned so much. I have worked on some small ecommerce sites as a freelance developer, but nothing of this size. Theres so many things I would have never thought needed to be accounted for. In future posts I will try and elaborate a bit. Right now I’m running on a few hours of sleep I got from a nap, so I’m going to pass out…
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