CHOOSING A TEAM

Owning and running a business, the most important elements to your company are your image and the people working with you. This is even more important when you are a smaller business. If you are surrounding by the best of the best, that becomes the perception of what your company is. A small agile company composed of experts is a lot different than a large company with a few experts and a lot of worker bees. Both are valid models and neither is right or wrong. I opt for the quality over quantity approach, regardless of the income difference.

Therefore, when looking for folks to work on projects or to join the team, I look for people that are:
a) smarter than I am
b) completely devoted
c) care

It’s a decision that I don’t take lightly since I’m essentially asking someone to join a “family of friends”. That’s how I view work. It is part of your life, the people around you are part of your life, and you should surround yourself with those that bring out the best in you and themselves.

CHAD FULLER

Last June, Mr. Chad Fuller sent me a note mentioning that he was moving to Atlanta. I knew Chad well, knew how smart he was, but also knew that he didn’t have any work experience. Point blank, experience is huge for us. Due to the positioning of Dreamsocket, we typically receive jobs I would refer to as high experience work. Thus, we can’t have people work on the projects who don’t know the technologies better than they know their own name. It is our position and what we’ve built the business on it. So Chad was in a way a gamble. Obviously there is risk with any gamble. You either win or lose. However, I took a pretty calculated gamble and came out ahead…. way ahead. If I were in Vegas, I would probably be the owner of the Wynn right now .

How did I win? Instead of throwing projects at Chad he would tear his hair out with, I decided to invest in him and the company. Chad’s first project was dreamsocket.com. If you haven’t looked at the site yet I highly advise that you do. Not out of self promotion, but to see what he accomplished. Before the project, Chad had never touched HTML or built a website. After the project he could boast a site that included a store front, live docs, bug tracker, and more all under one dynamic system. Needless to say, I’m more than impressed. Being able to own and shape it himself, Chad really was able to take value in his creation and learn a lot (at least I think he did ).

INVESTMENTS

Since the site was an internal project, it was an investment. We invested in defining our image more concretely, creating a way to extend our business, and developing ole Chad. Personally, I know what its like to run in his shoes. Developers that care want to learn as much as they possibly can, to work on great things, and just enjoy what they do. It felt really good to give him a project that he could call his own, mold it, and learn from. That is really what being a business owner can do for you, it can help you help others.

As much as the business will let me, that is what I intend to do. Invest in the folks around me. If your folks have passion, let them run with it as much as you are able to afford. Your workers will grow in strength, which will in turn mean that you get an experience level you couldn’t get any other way. On that note, Chad got the IPhone bug and I’m letting him get all over it. It means diversification and it means he continues dealing with things he is really excited about. Wait and see what he’s got running .

Look for big things on Chad’s blog and our site

Though I didn’t win, the Adult Swim Interactive video commentary I did for Adult Swim got an honorable mention. It’s really nice to get a little recognition, even if it doesn’t list my company (Dreamsocket) as the developer . Thanks for the highlight Adobe!

As a programmer, it is vitally important that you constantly learn and evolve to keep you moving forward. I personally spend hours upon hours analyzing frameworks, reading, studying others code, talking with others, and generally trying to grow mentally. I refer to this as my mentally programming myself.

Well once upon a time not so long ago, the nature of my programming was much different. Instead of mentally programming myself or a machine, I was programming people both physically and mentally. In a weird twist of fate, I some how managed to be a physical trainer in Los Angeles. Now normally you are supposed to have a degree to be a trainer. Due to the fact I’d been in physiotherapy so many times from skateboarding, I was actually able to convince a friend of mine to sneak me in as an onsite trainer at a high end rec center.

So what does this have to do with programming you ask? Well just as you have a mental workout everyday, it is just as important if not more, to have a physical workout. Keeping your body healthy, keeps your mind healthy and allows you to focus and think clearer. Not only do you feel better, but you think better.

When people work out they tend not to know what to do. This can typically makes the process feel unproductive and causes one to lose interest. In hopes of setting you on the right path, I’ve included a set workout program in this post. Every phase lasts 3 weeks. After a phase you move to the next phase, until you reach the sixth phase, then you go back to first stage. Each day you do a group of exercises that work a specific set of muscles. For example, phase 1 day 1, you work out back, chest, bis, and calfs. You do 5 sets of 13-15 reps for each body part, waiting 90 seconds between each set. By starting a week off withendurance reps/sets and moving towards strength, the program gives you a comprehensive workout.

I use this program 5 days a week and have been doing so for years. It is not my end all be all (since you should try to mix in cardio, like riding a bike or swimming), but it definitely keeps me going. The program can literally be a life safer, so good luck and happy “programming”!

Phase1
(perform 5 sets, 2-3 sets per exercise)

Phase2

Phase3

Phase4

Phase5

Phase6

I don’t necessarily think I can beat having press from the New York Times, but it’s awesome to continue seeing press roll in about the PS3 Megasode Application that I helped concept and build. GameZone has the latest standout article, which you can view online. Check it out when you have a chance, and for those who haven’t done so yet, don’t forget there is actually an online video available of me presenting the prototype in Canada.

When you turn to MTV are you watching that same Sweet 16 episode over again, left wondering where all your music videos went and questioning what is Ed Lover doing now? The day of music television seems to have come and gone overnight. It existed long enough to define the culture of a generation and then in what seemed like a blink of the eye had itself redefined by a new generation. Don’t get me wrong MTV as a channel is not gone, its focus has just shifted. MTV on air is no longer Music Television it’s more like Teen Reality Television.

Enter the INTERNET which makes what was once lost now found. It’s unlimited capacity has made music videos popular once again and given them a new home. MTV is serving them up online, but so are the content creators. The fact that the creators are acting as the immediate channel or distributor marks a definite shift. The point illustrates the narrowing gap between creator and consumer, as well as who can be the creator. The creator could range from a small band with a camcorder to a large music label’s production.

With all that said, the time of waiting endlessly for that one video to come on or staying up late hoping to catch the next big thing has come to an end. Now it’s just a matter of search, point, click, and enjoy. The amount of music videos now available seems endless and it just keeps growing. We have gone from discovering cool on MTV, to MTV discovering cool on YouTube. These are exciting times.

The boys and girls at SuperDeluxe celebrated their 6 month birthday yesterday by revamping their site. My presents to them were their shiny new playlist video player and the super dooper featured videos end slate. I can’t honestly say they were presents though, since the inhouse team basically wrapped them. To that point, I’m pretty happy with the overall simplicity of the design the design team was able to come up with. We started out with a lot extra information on both the featured videos slate and the playlist player, then basically stripped it all away.

Criticisms
Though I do like the simplicity of the design, there are a few things I’m unsure of. For one, the interaction metaphor present in the playlist player is the static browse/view stance. As I pointed out with Adult Swim, these are separate tasks. I can’t decide if the nature of how the module is used justifies this coupled view or whether it should be more like Adult Swim’s. I will say that unlike Adult Swim, browsing is rather limited and there is a focus on the “playlist”. The decision could go either way, so what do you think? I also don’t know how I feel about the featured videos end slate showing up in the context of the playlist player itself. You typically won’t see this slate because continuous play is enabled. However, when it does appear in this context it is an odd experience. In my eyes, the videos in the side list are the related videos. Why would there be two lists at the same time representing the same thing? It makes sense to just have a video’s details or a replay slate instead. Anyways, those are my basic criticisms.

Potential Interaction Models
Now if we were to decouple the browse and view tasks, I can think of a couple of ways to do this. One example is the new YouTube viral player. Their player blends featured videos and the playlist into a single entity, essentially making it a playlist player. The main oddity in this situation for us is that the “playlist” is not noticeable up front. It only appears when paused, completed, or when the menu is clicked. Thus, video choice is pushed upon you from the start. The decision in this case is not to show choice, but assumes you know choice and want to offer alternatives as a side. Hence it leans more towards featured than pure playlist choice. Regardless, I do like where they went with the player, even if it does use the to cool for school OSX style navigation on the thumbs. All that said, are there any other existing players that follow this model that might be a better fit? I’m interested to hear what you all think or view examples, since I’m always searching for the best model myself.Thanks, and let me know your thoughts!

For those who aren’t aware, mx.video.NCManager is a class that is used by Flash’s FLVPlayback component. It’s a “chunky monkey” class in that it does everything under the sun including things that have nothing to do with it’s title, but at it’s core it manages connections to videos. With this management, it abstracts the love/hate relationship of connecting to an FMS server for streaming videos, which requires trying various protocols and ports.

You see, connecting to FMS is different than making a simple HTTP request. Since it is typically not a port 80 request and it is persistent, various factors can cause it to fail. The most often reason being a firewall. NCManager automagically handles this by cycling through all the port (443, 1935, 80) and protocol (rtmp, rtmpt, rtmps) combos attempting to create a successful and efficient connection.

The quirk that I speak of exists in the NCManager’s nextConnect method. The class cycles through the list of possible protocl/port connections in a defined sequence. However, it doesn’t take into account that if for some reason your default url used a protocol/port combo that is further in the sequence say rtmp over port 443 and it failed. In this case, it would try the 443 connection twice and never try 1935 (1935 preceds 443 in the sequence). This is because it doesn’t acknowledge that the first attempt was out of order and then reshuffle the potential connections before iterating through them. One might make the assumption that if you are passing it a url consisting of a port/protocol url further in the sequence that you are specifically saying the combos above it are not possible. However, that is an assumption. Even with that assumption, if you have a failure you are making a second call that wastes resources.

As I mentioned, I labeled this as a quirk since the method works, but it works incorrectly in rare instances.