Steve Trefethen's Weblog

Useful Twitter Bootstrap finds

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:59:00 -0700

I've been collecting a set of Bootstrap related items and posting them via twitter but thought I'd write a post to capture them in once place. These are not necssarily things I've tried but for one reason or another I came across them and thought they looked interesting:

Wizard dialog on github here
The design team at Wanderful uses Fireworks and here is a Bootstrap UI toolkit.
Typeahead
Remove modal slide down effect

Marissa Mayer and Yahoo's new work from home policy

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:28:00 -0700

A friend wrote the following on Facebook regarding Yahoo's new work at home policy linking to this article:

I can get on board with the idea that effective communication and close collaboration can stimulate innovation, but this line I would have stricken from the memo: "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home". Couldn't disagree more. If that's the case, you are hiring the wrong people.

Now, I would agree with the part about it being "the wrong people".

I think it's both an interesting and telling move on Ms. Mayer's part. I suspect reading between the lines she found a very dysfunctional corporate culture after joining Yahoo following a parade of CEO's over the last several years and that she wants/needs to break. Those who can't deal will leave, they should have left on their own accord long before now. Taking this view the move could easily cull the ranks of those silently dissenting employees without the need for a dreaded RIF. Some good people may leave too though if they buy Marissa's vision they'd likely find a way to make it work. Right or wrong I respect and admire her initiative to make a difficult decision.

Kudos.

Having worked for large companies (UNUM, Borland & Microsoft) I can easily see and appreciate how this sort of move can set a new tone throughout the organization. Small organizations use working from home as an incentive to attract and retain talent whereas I believe large companies can draw much more on culture to attract people to the office every day. That's exactly how I felt working at Borland (though not at MSFT). While at Borland I felt if I wasn't in the office I was truly missing something as did all of my collegues and I imagine that's the sort of culture Marissa seeks to rebuild at Yahoo. I would guess over the years at least some Yahoo employees lost the passion during the CEO parade, an unfortunate similarity to Borland.

I'm certainly not ruling out culture at small startup-centric companies particularly those where the employees all work out of the same office but I think for many passion is three fold, 1) the idea, 2) belief in the product and 3) the team all of which played a roll for me at Borland making Delphi a small startup within a large organization.

Btw, I'm no longer a Yahoo user though I look forward to seeing what Marissa can do at Yahoo and wish her luck.

Some habits are hard to break for me it's Delphi

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:31:00 -0700

I worked at Borland for 15 years and much of that time was spent working on Delphi from version 1 to RAD Studio in 2007 and to this day I still habitually type "Delphi" when I'm trying to type words like Development.

Btw, Happy Birthday Delphi! I still remember Anders exception demo with the little exploding bomb at Mocone Center in San Francisco.

Responsive design on FindnSave

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:56:00 -0700

With the launch of our FindnSave beta redesign we've put a lot of effort into building a site that supports responsive design and scales well on a variety of devices. Below are examples on iPhone, iPad and Chrome on the desktop.

Wanderful Media Launches Beta of new discovery shopping brand FindnSave

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 20:39:00 -0700

Today Wanderful Media, the company I joined in October, launched a beta site redesign of the FindnSave brand representing the first step in building a discover shopping experience. Below is a screenshot comparing the old site (left) with the new as it appears on the Democrat and Chronicle website.

CTO4Hire John Waters New Company

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 06:15:00 -0700

A friend and former collegue, John Waters has recently started a new venture I thought would be of interest to people who read my blog considering he's one of the best I've had the pleasure of working with. I met John while at Falafel Software and his new company is CTO4Hire. John's extremely knowledgable and has experience working on a wide range of technologies across a broad spectrum of businesses. I believe his skills and business acument make him uniquely qualified to offer the type of services provided by CTO4Hire (from his website):

CTO4Hire provides C-level business executives with on demand access to a highly qualified and experienced CTO, assisting you and your team on a per project basis, or on a retainer, with projects ranging from systems integration, evaluation of technology, vendors or employee assessments, software architecture and systems design, due diligence of planned ventures, and leadership of teams in startups or established enterprises.

You can contact John here. Having recently started a CTO position myself I'm particularly interested in following CTO4Hire.

TypeScript what was the problem again?

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 23:25:00 -0700

A friend pointed me to the release of TypeScript and the video where Anders Hejsberg provided an explanation and multiple examples of Microsoft’s latest efforts to improve JavaScript development. For me personally the video is a real throwback to the days attending team meetings at Borland where Anders would demo Delphi language features. In fact, there’s an interesting parallel between TypeScript and Delphi where both require proprietary interface files to call functions in external modules with the same issues of getting these files generated/updated.

I’ve been working in the OS world for the last few years now and I’m left scratching my head wondering where this effort is going? It places huge emphasis on Intellisense and error insight features yet ignores how one might approach actually debugging all this beautifully unfamiliar generated code. Throughout the video I kept asking “Why wouldn’t they simply offer their own Dart-like alternative?”

While it “feels” fun and has the ususal Anders demo props going for it seeing a compiler infer types simply isn’t as exciting as it was the first go-round and the lack of a debug session demo left me feeling rather hollow. Had MS released an updated IE natively supporting TypeScript… but no we’re not back in IE 3 days, that ship has sailed.

Perhaps it’s an Enterprise play to help those lowly Enterprise developers conquer JavaScript in a way that’s more palatable by management? Ah, I don’t think so as it’s all interestingly packed as Open Source.

Don’t get me wrong I appreciate type safety as much as the next compiler fan and in many ways I long for those good ol’ type safe days but I’m pretty skeptical that this is the right path forward.

MerchantCircle Listings Support Mobile Devices Through Responsive Design

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:30:00 -0700

In January merchantcircle.com launched a site redesign completely restructuring the HTML for the majority of pages on the site. The site redesign is based on a common base class template and architected to afford a great deal of layout flexibility via CSS. This affords the design team to dramatically modify the design of the site without requiring resources of the development team. As an example, take a look at the New Design screenshot from this post, notice the rail appears on the right-hand side whereas today’s listing uses a left-hand rail via CSS best practices.

Our latest efforts supporting mobile follow Google’s preferred guidelines:

Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.

Like most websites our traffic is increasingly moving to mobile and we feel this UX is significantly better than a desktop optimized experience.

Factual and Barcode

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 08:39:00 -0700

Note to self. I've been playing around with Factual Data and thinking about some product ideas. I grabbed a product I use and wanted to see if I could create the right bar code for it. Turns out it's pretty easy.

Query for a product on Factual

Using barcoding.com enter the UPC data (012044000281) from the above query and get a bar code:

MerchantCircle’s New Mobile Listings

steve@stevetrefethen.com — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:00:00 -0700

Previously I posted about the redesign of MerchantCircle pushed out earlier this year and this week we’ve followed up with a mobile version of business listings. The mobile implementation leverages a lot of markup generation code developed for the desktop version and offers the end user a much better experience on a small screen.

At this point, we’ve working on creating more mobile versions of pages across the site as well as some of the various sign-up, and review flows.

[Update May 2012] Mobile version of listing pages have been taken down. More to come...