There’s a fast-paced yoga routine that I like to do at home called Yoga and Pilates – Hips, Buns and Thighs Yoga Season: 1. My friend Josh showed it me. It’s lead by a guy named Tom Morley. Just when things get tough during the routine and I feel like I’m doing an advanced twister move, Tom Morley reminds me to “keep a poker face”. When he says it, I immediately notice that my face is squished and tense. I relax my facial muscles. All of the sudden I feel much better and I start breathing again. It’s like a weight gets lifted.

C and I have been in process of moving to our new place in Somerville. Needless to say things have been tense with shuffling gazillions of atoms across town and saying goodbye to our sweet home only seconds to Inman.

When I remember Tom Morley’s simple yet wise direction, I relax my facial muscles and things seems just a little bit brighter.

It’d be interesting to try and setup some sort of monitoring approach that would know when your face is tense and tell you automatically to keep a poker face. Maybe OpenCV could be trained to do this. Future project perhaps?

What does it do?

It’s super simple actually. You input skills that you have, say programming or auto repair. You can then ask your friends to endorse you for a particular skill via Twitter.

In addition, and what I think is extra special about the app,  you can add skills and endorse skills of other users.

The site uses Twitter for authentication and handle creation. When you authenticate with Twitter, your Twitter graph is imported and you’re shown a list of the people you follow, each with an input box that allows you to quickly add skills to any one of them. Here’s what that looks like:

Portion of initial screen that let's you add skills to each Twitter user you're following

Oh and you can also search for people and skills.

Why is it cool?

It’s an app that puts the notion that we are each other’s agent (or keeper) front and center.

I was talking with my friend Nagle the other night about how to do a better job thinking of myself as an agent to my friends and loved ones. I feel it’s both an important and rewarding responsibility that we all have.

Many times though I get caught up in my own world and, even though it’d be easy to do the task it takes to be an agent  (e.g. connect people that might be a good fit for whatever reason), it gets put in the queue and more often than not expires there.

That conversation with Nagle led to wondering if there could be a more structured way that promotes and maybe even facilitates this concept of being each other’s agent. Like something that could be programmed or a tool that could help with this responsibility.

Of course, it’s inherent to the concept of responsibility that there will always be work and commitment involved, which can’t be automated away. But maybe some of that work could be sublimated by processes that positively remind us of our responsibilities as well as the resulting rewarding feelings upon fulfillment of those responsibilities.

So I think in it’s own small way, skills.to does just that. It provides a frictionless way to immediately become an agent for the people in our lives by endorsing them through highlighting the skills that they embody.

Another neat side of the app it that is has the potential to offer a prismatic view of someone’s identity as it relates to his or her skillset. I recently watched this talk by Chris Poole, the founder of 4chan, and he talks about how identity is prizmatic; each of us wears many different hats in our lives and are viewed differently by different people. Since identity at skills.to is shaped by input from each person’s network, the resulting skillset could be a much more prizmatic view of who someone is.

For instance, I added the following skills for my friend Matt:

• frontend programming
• ui design
• bass guitar

I’ve worked with Matt so I can attest to his skills as they relate to his professional work and I also have heard him play a bunch with his band Spirit Kid so I know he’s a great bass player. I know Matt also plays hockey but I don’t know much at all about hockey and I haven’t seen him play. But maybe a fellow hockey player of his will add that to his skillset. This format of having people in one’s network contribute creates a richer understanding of someone.

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It’s exciting to think of ways that Tasty Labs could develop skills.to using it’s current basic functionality. For instance, as the data set grows, additional context could be added like location. Then searching for individuals could become a more powerful experience. For instance, I could search for people with the skill of “tennis” in and around Cambridge to find new tennis partners. Of course it’d be very useful in this way for seeking new professional relationships but I think it’s much more dynamic than something like LinkedIn because it isn’t restricted to that single dimension of what you do for money.

This a dish that my Mom came up with. You can find her recipe at http://www.brookscookbook.com. Cheese, mayo,mustard and cauliflower. So good.

So a simple layout would look like:

We want to reuse that layout for all of our views across the site which is  a little tricky on Google App Engine because the approach in the template examples I’ve seen all use an approach where single files are merged with template values, rendered and then written out as the response. So when outputting the homepage using a file in the app directory index.html as the view, the recommended approach looks like this:

The goal though is to always render our view file within our general layout. The above approach would always need the wrapper HTML as given in the first code example above in each view. So index.html would need the main wrapper HTML as well as say if we were rending the view about.html in a separate request handler.

Here’s a function that will first render the view (e.g. index.html, about.html) with any template values we pass it.

Once this rendered view is returned we can that pass this as the “view” value to our general layout.html and output it. So the request handler would like this:

It would be fun and useful to develop a simplified layout and view rendering class further out to make the syntax even cleaner in the request handler.  Also, items like a page’s unique title tag could be passed in with the layout_values as well as page specific js and css. Also, this code could easily be adapted for use outside of Google App Engine.

So basically going from this:

To something more like this:

In doing so though, I ended up breaking the following things:

• LED light on main power switch. I might have fried it from too much heat soldering wires to large tabs.
• Force Sensitive Resistor tabs destroyed (why do they make them so damn thin and fragile!?)
• 3 surface mount trimmer pots ripped off of the main servo PCB. (This one may not have been my fault. I suspect that this creature may have been involved…)

I think it’s a universal rule, sort of like Murphy’s Law, that things will inevitably brake as you make.

The question then becomes, how do we deal with this? How do we cope with the setbacks and frustrations of building? How do fail fast and keep iterating? Whether it’s building open source exoskeletons or relationships, “the road is long” and full of potholes.

Accepting the fact that the setbacks and the frustrations are part of the equation. You can’t build something without these. With this acceptance comes an increase in tolerance of the setbacks.

How else can we increase frustration tolerance?

I had a conversation with Phillip at sprout the other night about this. In the world of software development and programming, one has to have or be developing a high tolerance for breaking things while building. Software creation is a constant cycle of failing and fixing very quickly. There is a nice tight feedback loop involved with which one can see very quickly when something breaks and that the train needs to be backed up to be worked on some more. In one hour of programming it’s not inconceivable that I could experience dozens of these cycles. Programming naturally builds up a tolerance to the frustrations and setbacks of building. That’s why a project like Scratch, an easy-to-learn and use programming language, is so exciting. Regardless of its users going on to continuously program software throughout their lives after learning Scratch, it inherently develops tolerance to the failures and frustrations of programming and hopefully of other areas of building as well.

Working with others is also a surefire aid to overcoming the frustrations of building, breaking, debugging and fixing. Several friends and I recently took part in a data analysis and algorithm creation challenge sponsored by the City of Boston. It was trying at times. The fact we were working on it together is what made submitting a solution possible. If it was just me working on it, I’m not sure I would have made it that far working on it alone.

Also recently I was helping my friend put together a bike. When it came to setting up the rear derailleur, we were having trouble getting it to shift to the lowest cog. We were going to call it a night and just keep it as is but then, I believe through our collective will, we soldiered on and through trial and error finally got it to shift!

Building things ain’t easy. But we can set ourselves up to better handle the friction and push through the resistance.

Jim Kristan is part of the minority. The Army veteran, who served 20 years in the service, has dedicated his life to honoring the 9/11 victims, particularly those of United Airlines Flight 93. Passengers tried to overtake terrorists on the plane, which eventually crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pa., where Kristan will attend a ceremony on the 10th anniversary.

The Kentwood man is president of the West Michigan 9/11/01 Memorial that was founded, Kristan said, to carry on the memory of that day. He drives a pickup emblazoned with more than $10,000 in airbrushed artwork commemorating the date. Included are elaborate images of the two World Trade Center towers exploding and firefighters running into the buildings. There are depictions of the Pentagon and the Statue of Liberty crying with an American flag in the background.

He said people appreciate his efforts, even if they don’t share his enthusiasm.

“This is my entire life,” Kristan said. “It’s totally engulfed me, and I’m up 18 hours a day thinking about it. It’s my mission in life to make sure people remember and make each other’s lives better.

“I’m one of the 1 or 2 percent. The other 98 percent have gone on to what they do. That’s all right. That’s life.”

From America is mostly back to normal after 9/11 attacks, but should it be?

Relationship Drafts

My friend has been Internet dating and recently told me about his experiences. People finding him online, him finding others. Then a flurry of emails, text messages, voice mails and in some cases meetings in person. He calls it a ‘blur’. I tell him it sounds neat. He’s starting a lot of relationship drafts and learning a lot about himself and others in the process. Granted I understand how that process can also be taxing.

Over the past month or so I’ve been visiting sprout, an incredible maker/thinking/learning space in Somerville. There are a lot of people inning and outing there. Meeting so many people in a short span of time is a unique experience for me. Sometimes I’ll go home from sprout and question how I interacted with someone. Could that person have taken what I said the wrong way? Does that person like me?

Some relationships stick longer than others and the ones that don’t stick are important to think about too. They’re all drafts, all trial and error. Especially with relationships, the final, totally polished version is a myth. It doesn’t exist. There will always be rough edges to our relationships. Creating new drafts and revising others are what matter.

Unstarted Drafts

Some of those relationship drafts might end abruptly. But other drafts will never get a chance to be started.

And that’s okay in some cases. It’s necessary. Oftentimes the mind goes wild. We can’t actualize and release every draft into the world. I can’t try and make a connection with everyone I pass. I can’t try to write every blog post I think about. It’s not possible. The constraints are time and mental capacity. And those are real.

But there are also many reasons to not begin a draft that are flawed. I don’t have the skills to do that. That has already been done. I don’t want to fail. People won’t like it. People won’t like me.

I was talking with a friend at a party a couple weeks ago. He’s considering starting a blog about the space he’s interested in professionally.

“So why not start in on it,” I asked.

“I don’t know. It’s just that I haven’t blogged before and what if I’m no good. Then maybe future employers will find it and won’t hire me because of it.”

That exchange brings up an interesting point in that, for some people, there’s an expectation that exists that one should be a final version of what an employer (or a partner in a relationship) desires. And if there is that expectation and some people don’t keep drafting because of it and get feedback on it, how do we grow?

If you were to look at some old posts here at this blog you’d find some very primitive examples of code that I created. At the time though they stemmed from new insights. Although I can find flaws looking back at them, I am happy to have published those drafts because I know it was good for me. Putting them here was part of the process of recording, learning and drafting.

Those that find success in life never stop creating and revising drafts. Feedback from others is crucial to the process of revision. But feedback that inhibits the process of drafting, growing, and learning is stifling.

One question that lingers though is that, since we can’t pursue all draft ideas, how do we choose? How do we know when to stop revising? Is it just going with the gut?

Unsprung Drafts

Not all drafts need to be broadcast to other people. I guess it’s a personal thing on deciding which to share. Largely though, sharing drafts with other people is important to the process of drafting. Just like in grade school. Getting feedback on our thoughts can be very beneficial assuming that we value the perspectives of the people that are providing the feedback.

There are some drafts that are meant to be broadcast. Websites for instance (as long as they aren’t intranets) are meant to be shared with the world, or at least a subset of it. I’ve been helping C with a new website for her studio and it’s really ready to go. I think that it has been ready to make live for a couple weeks now. C has had some lingering issues with it though and, because of that, it hasn’t been launched yet. As a web developer, I have seen this same thing many times with clients. I I think it has to do with that notion above that, professionally speaking and perhaps otherwise too, there’s an expectation that everything comes polished and perfect. And if it isn’t, it really shouldn’t be exposed to the world. But I think that it’s just a matter of time before that societal belief diminishes. With the proliferation of web apps and software, there has been a growing acceptance that products and services can be released as ‘beta’. Sometimes this thing might not work as you expect. It might break. It’s a little rough and that’s okay. The truth is this has always been the case and will always be the case. Everything is in beta. Everyone is in beta.

If we keep that in mind and embrace it then I think we’d all be better off. Just in the case of the website, if we would have launched a couple weeks ago we would have had all this time to get feedback on it to make it better and get changes made more quickly. Those users that visited within the last couple weeks would have had a much better experience even if there were kinks to work out with the new site.

I do it too. I’ve been working on a new project called tinybatch.com. I have a lot of work into it. But I have these lingering questions about the value of the site and business. Is it too complicated for users to understand? What if no one wants to use it? Is it too similar to sites that already exist? And these doubts and questions have halted my continued development on it. My friend Matt was giving me a pep talk about it the other day and the truth is that my questions aren’t based in anything real. The only way to really answer those questions and to learn of new questions is to finish up the project and release it to the world. Let people try it. Get real feedback on it. Spring the draft.