In April 2007, I founded the company that in December of that year was to become Contrast. Paul Campbell and David Rice joined me in February 2008 and we worked quietly together until Des Traynor joined us in July. We launched in August and the rest is… this blog post.

Contrast has been officially alive and kicking for 452 days but today we’re celebrating our belated first birthday! We’ve written this post to record the adventure and share it with our friends. As corny as it sounds, it’s only been fun because we’ve had the support of so many amazing people at home and right around the world; every single one of your comments, tweets and e-mails is appreciated.

So we’re holding a Friends of Contrast Party ™ on Friday, 27 November 2009 in our new offices for all of of you. The details are at the end of this post.

August, 2008

Contrast was announced on the 18 August 2008 and we kicked things off with a launch party in our new but very unfurnished offices at 6 Merrion Street.

We had one client and some time on our hands! So we worked hard to prepare our first Contrast app for prime time.

September

September saw us take Exceptional to RailsConf in Berlin where we made some great friends who ended-up being some of our most loyal customers.

Des and I were both exorcising demons of projects past, with popular posts Flicking the switch, Long projects go cold and Clean breaks don’t happen.

We helped the great guys at dotMobi redesign and re-launch their dev.mobi site as Mobiforge at the end of September.

October 2008

Exceptional came out of beta on 10 October and had its first paying customer minutes later. Since its launch Exceptional has had slow, consistent growth; the best kind. We can say that safely, having experienced the other kind…

Qwitter was launched on the 17 October and within 1 hour the server fell over, under ridiculously heavy traffic. Qwitter would see us featured everywhere from The Irish Times and The Guardian to the Wall Street Journal and CNN, and would teach us a thing or two about scalable web applications.

As a way of paying back the Irish community for their support, Contrast promised to deliver one lucky entrepreneur an app in a week, and TaskFive was it. On 24 October, 7 days after picking the winner, we launched Taskfive which was featured on Lifehacker and gained over a thousand users within the week.

But despite these amazingly successful launches, the company itself was struggling. The market reaction to the credit crunch, the implications of which were just being realised this month, was to batten down the hatches. Big projects got cancelled and we were left high and dry. Our bank balance at the end of October was €443! Salary cuts were the order of the day.

November

Me and Des spoke for the first time together at Barcamp Cork in early November, and the financials lows of the previous months were washed away as we began building several exciting applications, and consulted with Fairtilizer, and Qualcomm, providing development advice and interface design respectively.

While consulting with Qualcomm, Des learned of the problems with striptease.

December

Des began a long discovery process with the incredible Breandán Knowlton for the soon to be launched Comhaltas digital archive, which saw him travelling across Ireland, speaking with curators of traditional music.

Des wrote about the importance of the Client experience, something we still grapple with day to day in Contrast, while I generated a flurry of book sales by writing It’s not how good you are.

January, 2009

January was a cold month to work without heating; but that’s the kind of thing that happens when your landlord is a prick! (No further comment.)

Contrast consulted with top Dublin web design agency XCommunications, user testing a website they had worked on during late 2008, and helped Keith Bohanna design the user experience for his soon-to-launch dbTwang app.

I dedicated myself to distracticide, while Des integrated Google Analytics with Twitter for an anonymity busting 5 hours.

February

As we finally accepted that we’re not very organised, we hired someone who is. Miss Lucie Coley joined Contrast early February as our office manager, letting us focus on things we’re good at.

Niall Harbison contacted us very early February about building a little Twitter app. We helped him shape his idea for Twitter-based recipe searching into Twecipe.

Washington activist, Michael Mossoba contacted us toward the end of 2008, looking for site that would be an alternative Fortune 500; one based on corporate responsibility, rather than profit. He wanted something striking, something remarkable. We delivered Goodness 500.

March

Ben McRedmond joined us in early March to work with us for a week during his transition year in school. Only 16 at the time, Ben is one of the most promising young talents in Ireland. In the week he was with us, Ben designed and delivered PicoMarks, and wrote about what he learned in Contrast.

FOWA came to Dublin during March, and Des and I were asked to speak at the event. Taking to the stage with names like DHH was a great experience and we got some incredible feedback from the Irish community.

Shortly after FOWA, Des travelled to Las Vegas to attend MIX 09, Microsoft’s conference for interaction designers, where he hung-out with his heroes such as Bill Buxton, Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Scott Guthrie and more.

My birthday in March was the excuse for the purchase of a very expensive yet very on-brand cake.

And our office was flooded after a pipe in the ceiling broke. Awesome.

April

In April we helped build Ftopia, a file sharing web app for Paris based
Philippe Honigman. It’s been a joy to watch Ftopia grow, and arrange partnerships with major French institutions.

Later in the month, three quarters of Contrast travelled to Belfast and spoke at a barcamp on The principles of success, Great customer support and Analytics for business.

At the end of April we began working with Barney Austen and Eoin Redmond to produce a project management tool, with a strong emphasis on financial awareness. Their pitch was that the current tools available don’t answer the questions agency owners need to know. What projects are profitable? What are the key issues we’re facing? How are my staff spread? Are they working too hard? We began building My Project Tracker to change that. More on that soon.

Toward the end of April, Des was invited to speak about Design Decisions for iPhone Applications, at the iPhone Developer Days event in Ireland…

…and I defended “lifestyle companies” at that month’s Connector event.

May

Early May, Contrast embarked on a tour of North America, including Las Vegas, San Francisco and New York.

Vegas was hosting Railsconf, giving us a chance to meet Exceptional customers in the flesh, buy them drinks…

…give them some Exceptional cupcakes (in a gorilla marketing stunt that the O’Reilly staff really didn’t appreciate), and swap t-shirts.

While in New York, we got the chance to meet and present to Seth Godin, a long time hero of ours. Seth enjoyed our presentation and wrote a little about our thesis of breaking conventions.

After the American tour, we were sorry to say goodbye to Paul who left Contrast to focus on some of his own projects. You should follow his personal blog to keep up with them.

June

June opened with the great news that David Barrett was joining Contrast full-time, after we had been contracting him on a near full-time basis for months on end.

Des went to UX London where he learned about the importance of cupcakes and attended workshops on everything from sketching through to Agile design.

At the end of June, David Rice left the Contrast gang to return to freelancing in Belfast. You can follow him on his blog.

July

Des spoke again at it@Cork about iPhone development, and returned to Dublin to the good news that Darragh Curran would be joining Contrast full time, again after a extended period of contracting. Late July saw the launch of Grab My Table, for iFoods.

August

Des and I went to Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann where a screencast of the Comhaltas Traditional Music Archive (a project over a year in the making) was shown to attendees and received an excellent response.

September

Since attending Railsconf we had been in regular contact with the guys from Scout, a rails monitoring tool which we were impressed with. In early September we kicked off a partnership with them to help promote each other’s services.

In late September, John Davey took the risk of flying me and Des, two non-flash developers, to Flash on the Beach in Brighton. We spoke about challenges and conventions in web app design and how they compare with the Flash world.

September also saw a significant milestone for any company: we got our first set of business cards, after only 13 months in operation.

We also refreshed our logo that month to mark our first year and celebrate the new Contrast team.

October

At the start of October, me, Wal and Darragh travelled to RubyFoo London, again to promote Exceptional and meet a few more of our heroes; it’s not every day you get to have a Brick Lane Indian dinner with the inventor of the a programming language.

We’ve been huge fans of Less Everything for as long as Contrast has been running, so when Steve and Allan asked if we’d be interested in travelling to Florida to speak at Lessconf, it took all of 12 seconds before they received a firm hell yeah. Lessconf was an amazing event, where we shared a stage with guys like Derek Sivers, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Hauser, Mike McDerment and more.

We also got the chance to share stories and be inspired by some of the attendees like Jon Crawford from Storenvy and Brian Kenny from WatchMeMelt.

Earlier, in August, we had dinner with Morten Bagai from Heroku, and discussed the possibilities of Heroku offering Exceptional as an add on to their hosted platform service. In October it happened, and it’ll be coming out of beta and available for use on their customers 39,000+ apps very soon!

The end of October saw us say goodbye to our Merrion Street home, to take refuge in temporary serviced offices, while our new office is being renovated.

November

Wal McConell joined us full-time this month, bringing our total count to six and completing an incredibly able and talented team. Plus myself.

Later this month we hope to launch both the Comhaltas Archive…

…and a beta of My Project Tracker!

The year ahead

It’s been an amazing journey over the last year, filled with highs and lows. The year ahead is sure to be equally exciting; we’re really only getting started.

The Friends of Contrast Party ™ will be on Friday, 27 November 2009 in our new offices: 51 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2. It starts at 7pm and when we say everyone is welcome, we want everyone. Bring friends of friends and tell them there’s free beer with their name on it. This should be a great chance to meet people in the local web scene as much as an opportunity for us to bribe you for more blog comments. See you there and thanks again!

Subtitle: How to get a million hits, followers, lists, comments, links, posts, friends, fans and re-tweets. Answer: Do something meaningful.

Just three months ago I announced that Darragh Curran had joined us full-time and today I’m thrilled to report that Walter McConnell has come aboard too. Like Darragh, Walter has a wealth of experience in software engineering. He’s fought the good fight in senior engineering positions at IONA Technologies and subsequently The TAS Group, but since July he’s been working hard alongside Darragh to keep Exceptional (our rapidly growing app monitoring product) in shape, as well as with our clients on a few exciting projects. I speak for everyone in the company when I say we’re delighted to have him on-board!

Imagine you’re a 22-year-old kid living in Belfast, a tiny city in a tiny country in a big bad world that’s never heard of you. The big web conferences ignore your town because, well, they’re too busy being big and hitting-up the big cities. So what do you do? Suck it up like the rest of us and accept the small town life of a small time kid? Or stick it to big conferences and hold an even bigger one?

If you haven’t heard of Andy McMillan, you will. He’s that kid that’s holding that conference in Belfast this week and he’s calling it Build. It’s got a better line-up than any web developer event I’ve ever heard of, anywhere in the world.

Andy has absolutely no right to run Build: he’s never held a conference in his life, he’s only out of college and he’s a “nobody”. But Andy thought big—really big—and did it anyway.

All too often we’re sabotaged by our less-than-fantastic self-belief. We’re not smart enough, not brave enough, too young, too old, not funny, funny looking, can’t write, can’t design… All of these little doubts swim about our conscious and hold us back.

There’s a corny-but-still-worth-a-read book by the same title of this post written by David J. Schwartz. Schwartz advises:

Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to solution.

The idea that thinking big and believing in yourself can help you succeed is so clichéd and obvious that I feel awkward writing a post about it. Yet I don’t know a single ambitious person that couldn’t benefit from taking that advice seriously.

Your Build might be a great agency, a successful web app or it might be speaking at major event or meeting your hero. Whatever it is, don’t be held back by your self-doubt because there’s an Andy McMillan somewhere that’ll happily do it before you.

I’m a big fan of Google App Engine. It’s like a cloud of hard working robots. You write applications, within sensible constraints. Google does all the hard work.

As food for thought on what you can achieve with so little effort on App Engine, here’s a 40 line app that will send and receive email over HTTP. Building an email gateway is a simple problem that’s hard to do well and tricky to scale. App engine makes it cheap and easy.

Can your cloud haz robots?

Image is derived from a logo shared by Google using the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License

Jay-Z is one of my all-time heroes. Certainly parts of his story conflict with that of your typical role-model: as a high-school dropout he sold crack before he began his music career. But his ambition, work ethic, quest for perfection and sheer talent—never-mind his wild success—is inspiring.

If you know anything about hip-hop, you’ll know humility is scarce amongst rappers; but even Jay-Z is humble enough to admit that his magic is not just the product of his hard-work, persistence and skill.

I can’t explain it to y’all, man… They say you put the right artist with the right track in the studio, leave the door cracked, and let God in.

This reminds me of a lovely idea from Elizabeth Gilbert who spoke this year at TED about nurturing creativity.

Elizabeth believes—as too, she says, The Greeks and The Romans did—that true creativity cannot be engineered, but rather comes from some ungovernable or even “divine” source. She says that Socrates “believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar.”

Call it God, magic, fortune or simply the sum of the variables you cannot understand or control, but know that your very best work cannot be scheduled of produced on-demand. You’ve got to be patient, you’ve got to try and try again and you’ve got to let God in.

In London last week, Des and I were late for a train. “Victoria Station, please”, I shouted, but the taxi driver was in gear and en route before I had finished the first syllable. But just as quickly, she stopped, reversed her cab, and began again in an altogether different direction. “That way will be very busy tonight”, she said.

According to Baker in Pricing on Purpose:

The majority of the most important knowledge in any field or endeavour, be it sports, entertainment, or business, is tacit knowledge… This form of knowledge is extremely difficult to articulate and relatively expensive to transfer, often travelling only through apprenticeship and trial and error.

Tacit knowledge is everything a GPS device can’t hold. It’s everything not in a Ruby on Rails reference book. It can’t be found on this blog or even in a Computer Science degree course, nevermind a set of top-20 posts.

If excellence is a thing you do every day, tacit knowledge is a thing you pick up every day. It’s the thing that big and little mistakes and big and little successes teach you. In software, it’s the experience of doing software over time.

Don’t be seduced by inexperienced developers that call themselves ninjas; knowing how to program isn’t even half the battle. (And anyway, ninjas are the guys that run around in costumes with swords and stuff.)

Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.

This discovery, written about by Derek Sivers (who Des and I will have the great pleasure of sharing a stage with at LessConf), fascinates me.

I understand the urge: that new and sexy idea-turning-reality is just too exciting not to share; I frequently blab about our projects with friends. But there’s a far more serious and damaging level to which many take it. I know people that describe in glorious detail their app / site / company, only for it never to see the light of day. They register the domain alright, but beyond that, the rest is but a dream.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

Hamlet worries about what dreams may come after his suicide, but oftentimes shared dreams are suicide themselves. So I suggest you try the opposite: shut up and get busy. There’s nothing sweeter than sharing a secret worth sharing. I’ve experienced this with quite a few of the apps I’ve worked on and it’s a pleasure. But wait until you see the next app!

In 1956 the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom released a book that changed education, and curriculum design worldwide. He presented a taxonomy of educational objectives, aiming for a more holistic education for students. Bloom’s work, specifically his cognitive hierarchy, laid the foundation for a lot of educational reform. Bloom argued there are six levels of domain expertise, and his concern was that education systems at the time were rooted firmly on knowledge, the lowest level. Anyone who has ever had to memorize information for an exam would agree.

The objectives are a hierarchy showing your ability with a specific domain. Informally you can think of them like this…

• Knowledge — The ability to recite lists, rules, formulas, specific facts.
• Comprehension — The ability to understand the reasoning behind said rules/facts, and translate and re-state where necessary
• Application — The ability to apply acquired knowledge in new situations to produce solutions
• Analysis — The ability to recognize patterns, question reasoning, distinguish facts from inferences.
• Synthesis — The ability create new knowledge, methods, formulas, based analysis of problems.
• Evaluation The ability to create multiple solutions and select the most effective in a given situation

When I was a full time researcher in Computer Science education, this taxonomy helped me gauge the effectiveness of exams. At the time most programming exams focussed on knowledge (e.g. “how do you get the length of a string”), or the marking system rewarded rote-learning (e.g. “+5% for a for-loop, +15% for an if-statement”). Looking at exam with these objectives in mind helps highlight problems. It can be also very useful when interviewing candidates claiming to have expertise in an area.

These days the taxonomy helps me in other ways.

What level to work at

User Experience designers should see parallels here between the levels they are required to work at in a given project, and the level of knowledge they get to use. For example “Make this sign-up form usable” is usually just the application of a few rules, whereas “Help my business gain more customers” requires the ability to generate multiple ideas and evaluate which is most suitable for this challenge.

When working for clients I know I’m far more effective when working at the synthesis and analysis levels than when I’m lining up text boxes, and stacking radio buttons to make an already broken form a little less painful. My mentor John Wood used to call this type of work “painting the corpse”.

Tips ‘n’ tricks

Eoghan recently posted about his issues with lists that promise to make you a better designer. I agree with him. I have no problem with check lists that serve as a memory aid, but these are a different sort to what is usually seen online.

I have issues with the usual “X ways to do Y” style lists, because at best they offer primitive knowledge that people rote learn, turning them into drones who say “Use gradient for modern effect. Always center your layout. Always use sans-serif fonts. Red is a good call to action colour”. And at worst they’re just bullshit begging for a Digg.

User experience is improved by fast loading pages. One technique is to load your javascripts at the bottom of the page. Javascript at the top of a page delays the downloading of images/css and delays the rendering of the page. Bikin Chiu points out how the delay can be longer on mobile devices, where download and execution is slower. Pushing javascript to the bottom of the page allows rendering to happen sooner, illustrated here.

Loading javascript last does have some drawbacks though. Your page might look loaded, but only work properly when all the javascript has executed. Lets look at some examples and another approach to work with this technique.

Example: twitter.com

On twitter’s redesigned homepage, clicking the login link causes a login form to pop-out - without loading another page.

A few times that I’ve clicked the login link ‘too quickly’ and instead of the nice pop-out form it loaded the old login page.

This is frustrating because by being fast I’m penalised with a page reload. How do I know when it’s ok to click? The real answer is, not at least until DOMContentLoaded is fired…

Any page that doesn’t cleanly degrade in the absence of javascript could have problems just after page rendering, momentarily behaving as if javascript is disabled.

Google’s approach with GMail is to wait until everything is loaded before showing the main interface.

Facebook engineers tested a comparison between keeping the page blank until all javascript is loaded (similar to the GMail approach), and rendering a page earlier with a brief period when links may do nothing. They saw lower ‘usage statistics’ for the blank page option - hence settled on the render early approach.

A hybrid approach

What about rendering the page as quickly as possible, and defer handling clicks until all javascript has loaded? What if we ‘wait for Spidermonkey‘. I created a quick experiment, that registers a listener for click events, and replays the last click once the document is ready (all scripts loaded). In the twitter example this would mean a small delay but eventually showing the pop-out form.

Try it out in this exaggerated example. The link doesn’t respond until a 5 second delay. (I haven’t made this work in IE yet - can you? Fork this gist).

Is this better or worse? Seen as the window of misopportunity should be small, I think this is an improvement. Clicking a link will have a delay anyway, if we wait until javascript is loaded then the action will be the intended one, not some degradation. However I don’t like that users get no feedback, from the web page, or the browser, that something will happen, or when it will happen. What do you think?

Title photo: jcoterhals.