Nate Klaiber

Seth Godin: Find your voice

Nate Klaiber — Mon Jun 29 09:33:00 UTC 2009

Find your voice, don't copy someone else's. via

Uncle Bob: Crap code inevitable?

Nate Klaiber — Thu Apr 23 08:09:00 UTC 2009

Low quality code is not cheaper; it is vastly more expensive, even in the short term. Bad code slows everyone down from the minute that it is written. It creates a continuous and copious drag on further progress. It requires armies of coders to overcome that drag; and those armies must grow exponentially to maintain constant velocity against that drag. (via)

TA: Swim with the current

Nate Klaiber — Wed Apr 22 08:36:00 UTC 2009

If you intend to remain viable as a business, realize that there is no escape from the current. The marketplace is the current. Turbulence is inescapable. Resistance as a defense only makes things worse. Instead, remain stable and absorb. Yield to the current and make your way, surely and swiftly, to a new shore. via

Aaron Boeving launches new website

Nate Klaiber — Thu Apr 02 09:57:00 UTC 2009

I will have more to say about his recent design in an upcoming blog post, but I wanted to at least say congrats to Aaron for getting his new design out into the wild. Some of you may have seen it as featured on Unmatched Style recently, if not, then check out Aaron Boeving for all the goodness.

As a side note, Aaron and I worked together on designing my personal book review site. I posted a new review there today on the book, Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen. If you are a Ruby developer and are interested, check out the review.

37Signals: Make it memorable

Nate Klaiber — Mon Mar 30 08:07:00 UTC 2009

It was during this time that I’d think about the sites that I appreciated from a design standpoint. Many of them are personal blogs or cool brochure sites. I began to realize that these sites displayed information well, but I could not exactly remember what they were about. They sure were pretty with fantastic CSS, but I can’t really remember what what the site said. Did it say anything? via

Seth Godin: Yeah, but he really knows his stuff

Nate Klaiber — Mon Mar 23 07:51:00 UTC 2009

He's the first one to point out a minor technical glitch and the last guy to want to get on board with a new program. He hazes first-timers and avoids the people who are actually productive. Or he's the one who can take any metaphor and make it literal, instantly, poking holes in it as he goes.

And of course, he's the one everyone has to tiptoe around, because they know his technical status can sink their initiative.

I think you should fire this person immediately. Okay, maybe give him exactly one warning.via

Seth Godin: What would a professional do?

Nate Klaiber — Thu Jan 29 08:53:00 UTC 2009

Does your customer/client/employee actually believe that they haven't been shortchanged by your amateur performance? It is costing you in ways you're not measuring because you're willfully ignoring the consequences? Think of all the sub-pro experiences you've had as a customer, instances where someone was pretending to be a chef or a bartender or a computer jock but just came up short... Were you delighted? via

Really enjoyed this particular part of his entry today. While I will be the first to admit that I am continually learning, I stumble across many people at the ground level (think basic HTML 101) who are marketing themselves as 'web designers'. I watch them work hours to complete tasks that should literally take them minutes when done the right way. I see the outcome as something that is unmaintainable and unusable. Then I watch the cycle repeat time and time again. Time is money, in these instances. The amateurs spend hours of their time (business time), doing basic tasks. This cost is then passed on to the client. The client then pays more, and gets much less.

Design is not a strength of mine (gasp, you say, as you look at this finely crafted blog!). For client projects, I will seek out a professional designer. Someone who knows the great details of designing for the web. Someone who is a true professional. Sure, I could do it - but it would take twice as long and the results wouldn't come close to that of a professional designer. It's about working smarter, not harder. When it comes to a client on the other end, then it also becomes an ethical decision, in my opinion.

The truth of the matter is this will never end. There will always be amateurs out there (I say that in the nicest way possible), not knowing how to do things but are able to sell it. They often times equate quantity with quality. More output equals better. I tend to think the opposite. Find the right people to network with. Find the people passionate about what they do. Network with these people to help create quality products. More output is not necessarily better.

I need your help with the direction of NK Book Reviews

Nate Klaiber — Sat Jan 17 13:24:01 UTC 2009

Happening at NK Book Reviews

I have been making some more changes over at www.nkbookreviews.com. Some of them are visible changes, and some are still behind the scenes for future feature releases. I am excited about the culmination of data I have related to all of the books, authors, and publishers. Here's some of the content that has been added recently:

I recently finished reviewing Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter. Here is a short snippet of the review:

There are many pieces of the puzzle that fit together to portray the big picture, and it is up to us as web developers to make sure all of those pieces are in place for the end users. Some of these things include accessibility, usability, copywriting, information architecture, design, and more. That's what this entire book is about - putting the pieces of the puzzle together to create a useful, usable, search engine friendly, and ultimately, findable website. Read More

I recently received, and am currently reading, Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen Kochan. I am completely new to the programming scene on Mac OS X and iPhone development, and this has proven to be a very good read so far. It is geared towards beginners, so the first few chapters have been programming basics in the context of Objective-C. I am very impressed at the author's ability to gradually show shorthand techniques, by first showing the base of how you can achieve different tasks (IE: If/Else and Ternary operator). This is a tough book to put down, and since I am completely new to this - I often times find myself in front of the computer running through the different exercises at the end of each chapter. I look forward to finishing this book.

Outside of regular content, I have also integrated what I think to be some very useful advertising pieces. On some pages you will now see information from Authentic Jobs and SidebarAds. A big thank you to both Cameron Moll and Jonathan Snook for coordinating this with me. My goal with these are simple. I have had several people in the past contact me about different jobs or services related to web development. Some looking for jobs in the industry, and still others looking to get different work done. I have done my best to point people in the right direction, and most of the time it would lead back to Authentic Jobs. Initially they are using the default embedded advertisements, but I am working behind the scenes now on the Authentic Jobs API to integrate the job postings with more targeted content related to book and review detail pages. I will keep you posted as more comes of that. I hope that some will find these useful as just another part to their education process.

A search index is currently being integrated. This was a feature I left out at the beginning, because it didn't quite feel ready to me. I didn't want to just settle with a LIKE search on all of the information. I wanted to create a more useful and targeted search index. This obviously takes time, but I think there will be many benefits to having it done right.

Resources

I have been in conversation with Lachy about his recently released website, Uncoverr.com. We have found that we both share some of the same goals and visions, and I look forward to collaborating with him in some different ventures in the future. He has a great vision for that website, and is actively getting more content to fill it out. He recently did an author interview with the one and only, Jonathan Snook (of the newly re-designed snook.ca), and also posted a review of JavaScript: The Missing Manual.

Communication

For those who don't know, I have also added a Twitter feed for nkbookreviews. I did this to supplement other avenues of communication. The twitter timeline will be used for several things:

Let you know when a review is posted.
Keep you updated on books I am reading.
Snippets and quotes I find helpful or interesting from the books.

This will be used two ways. As I write to this feed, I will be pulling all of my thoughts back into the website to harvest with some other pieces of data.

Next, I have been thinking about getting an email newsletter in place. Is this something you would subscribe to and find useful? I see it containing some of the same things as the twitter timeline, only on a less frequent posting schedule. Used as more of a brief overview of activity, an email dashboard of sorts.

Oops!

I have noticed recently that some URLs need to be updated for RSS subscriptions at the site. I will be updating these items this weekend to assure they get redirected to their proper spots. I apologize for those who have received errors with the feed while trying to subscribe. For now, the main feed to subscribe is http://www.nkbookreviews.com/reviews/rss.xml

I need your help

As I have gathered all of the different data for the reviews site, I am trying to find some of the different useful ways I can roll into useful features. My goal from the beginning was to keep the site as clean as possible, and make sure that each piece I added was useful and served a purpose. This meant that at launch time I actually removed several features, as I wasn't sure they were quite ready. Some of those were related to taggings, nested categorizing, and intended audiences, others were related to meta information from the books.

So, my question for you is: When trying to find the right book on a certain topic, what do you look for in a review and extra information that help you make your decisions? Be sure to let me know in the comments, or email me directly at nate@theklaibers.com.

Seth Godin: What to do when the new thing doesn't work

Nate Klaiber — Fri Jan 09 09:53:00 UTC 2009

From the start, you have to choose a path and stick with it. Either you are on the path of the TV Industrial complex, and you're prepared to promote and spam and spend and make average stuff for average people... or you are busy embracing the new media for everything it can offer. via

Rails 3 to feature new guest, Merb

Nate Klaiber — Wed Dec 24 09:20:00 UTC 2008

There's absolutely no pleasing everyone. You can't and shouldn't try to make everyone love you. The best you can do is make sure that they're hating you for the right reasons.via

I look forward to the merging of the two frameworks. It's a smart move that will ultimately give people more choice (and potentially less overhead or server footprint). In my time researching PHP Frameworks, I don't think I would see this happen with any of them - even if they all are trying to achieve the same goal. To me, it's not about competition - these are two bodies with the same passions, goals, and desires - just taking slightly different routes. Merging makes perfect sense.

Now I wonder what CakePHP will do, will they try and find someone to merge with? I mean, it only makes logical sense with their hanging on the coattails of Rails and all ;)

[NK Book Reviews] Website optimization: speed, search engine and conversion rate secrets

Nate Klaiber — Mon Dec 15 11:55:00 UTC 2008

As I continue to migrate my reviews over to http://www.nkbookreviews.com, I am going to cross-post some links to recent reviews. The most recent review was today, with Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine and Conversion Rate Secrets. This is an O'Reilly book packed full of great information.

If you haven't already, be sure to add the NK Book Reviews feed as it will have the most recent reviews and information. Thanks for reading, and let me know if you have any feedback as I spend time refining the process and website.

D-I: How to build a gantt chart with the Google Charts API

Nate Klaiber — Tue Dec 09 11:39:00 UTC 2008

The Google Charts API is an excellent way to add high quality charting to your web application. We first started working with the API as part of the Simpli5 dashboard development, and were quite impressed with its functionality and ease of use. Wrapper classes were developed and added to our Sandstone Application Framework to make the addition charts to Simpli5 and other applications as simple as possible. via

This is truly an awesome way to use the Google Charts API. Dave got to show me how he worked this out first hand from a whiteboard, and I was impressed. If you have a need to integrate gantt charts into an application you are working on, be sure to check this out first to save you some potential headaches.

Luke W: Signaling Flexible Inputs

Nate Klaiber — Tue Dec 09 08:45:00 UTC 2008

[...] For instance, there are basically five different ways a valid phone number could be specified in the United States. A simple script can check to see if one of these has been used and then submit the information in whatever format the back-end system requires. The chore of adhering to a specific format is taken off the person providing an answer and instead given to a small bit of code. via

Seth Godin: The internet is almost full

Nate Klaiber — Tue Dec 09 08:44:00 UTC 2008

Nothing can grow forever, and exponential growth is always short lived. We're running out of disk space, so if you have something left to say, better hurry. Once it's full, it's full. via

Introducing the new Nate Klaiber Book Reviews

Nate Klaiber — Thu Dec 04 18:05:01 UTC 2008

Stamp given to me as a gift from my wife on Christmas, 2007

I have decided to soft launch my new book reviews website, Nate Klaiber Book Reviews. This website has been tucked away for the past year, while I dedicated my working hours to Reflect CMS. A great big thank you to Aaron Boeving for helping me take this website from idea to reality. He was the designer of the interface. There are some things still rough around the edges, but I forced myself to get it out into the wild. Now that it's up, I will be taking feedback and making iterations.

While this past year kept me busy with work, I didn't stop reading books. I have a queue of reviews lined up and will be releasing them over the next few weeks. A lot of great books, authors and reviews will be making their way to the site. If you are an author and would like to update any bio information, feel free to contact me and I will get it updated. Thanks to those authors who have already given me some updated bios and pictures.

My Goals

My goal with this site was simple: To have an online storage of my personal library and reviews. It all started with blog posts, but they simply weren't contextual enough to let me create the proper data models for books, authors, publisher, and reviews. Also, behind the scenes is an administration panel that lets me do some fun things:

A customizable sitemap. This is automatically generated in the application via observers, but I also have the flexibility to add other static pages or alter any information as I see fit. This generates the sitemap.xml file used by all major search engines. It's less work for me, but gives me the freedom and flexibility to adjust things such as title, description, and tags on the fly. Search engine friendly URL's are automatically generated to my liking in each section. I have a robots exclusions setup to eventually block potential duplicate content pages. SEO benefits baked in.
Taxonomy baked in. There are categories and tags stored with every piece of content. These will eventually make their way into the interface, when I find out how I want to use them in a proper manner. In the meantime, they will help serve the search index that will arrive within the week.
I can keep some fun stats for my personal knowledge. I know how many pages I have read, how many I have to read, and where I am within each book. This was something I was happy to see inside of Readernaut. I can also check out books to friends, and keep track of who has what book.
Integration with other web services. Shortly around the bend, I will be integrating some of my Flickr photos to their attached reviews thanks to machine-tagging. I will also be adding calls to action to purchase from Amazon, and work closely with their API to help people purchase books when they want to. I will also be integrating with Twitter as a pseudo-RSS feed for those interested in following. Not only will I integrate with other services, but there will be a public API available for the site as it stands now. It was built with REST in mind.
The ability to filter books based on their intended audiences. These come directly from the publishers, and can be found on most of the books. This allows you to find books based on your level of experience. More will come with this.
There will be several RSS options. While many of you have said you enjoy the lengthy reviews, I will also have cliff notes versions available on all of the reviews and feeds. More to come on these options.

Stay tuned for some more updates on this progress. I will be keeping this site as a tumblelog of things going on in the industry, so if you want to subscribe to only book reviews, be sure to update your feeds with the new RSS feed at NK Book Reviews: http://www.nkbookreviews.com/reviews/rss. If you would prefer to follow me on twitter, you can follow @nkbookreviews and it will notify you of recent reviews!

Transitions

Launching this site is also part of another transition. In September I left my role as Marketing Director with Clear Function. I simply couldn't stand Aaron Boeving any longer. OK, that last part isn't true. The timing was right for me to do something I had been wanting to do for a while, which is start my own business. It also let Stephen and Aaron restructure some of their plans with Clear Function. It was a good thing for all parties involved, and I still consider them to be incredible friends and colleagues.

With that transition taking place, I received some guidance from some excellent friends and colleagues and started The Klaibers Web Engineering, LLC. I connected with a local agency, WRIS, and began taking on some different projects with them. My role with them as a Strategic Partner is great, and they have a talented team working behind the scenes there. Their new website is just around the corner. With this new venture, I have revived the old domain of www.theklaibers.com. This will be getting a new makeover after the first of the year.

A very special thank you to many different friends and family during this transition time: Stephen Rainey, Aaron Boeving, Scott Meier, Hector Cabarcas, Brad Colbow, Craig Minch, Brad Dielman, Bridget Stewart, Beth Dean, Josh Walsh, Joe Fiorini, Brendan Cullen, Matt Becker, John MacAdam, Patrick Gerber, Eric Wiley, Vince Frantz, and a handful of other people. This also includes my own family, especially my wife.

Seth Godin: The you show

Nate Klaiber — Tue Nov 25 07:23:00 UTC 2008

When you go to Las Vegas, Penn and Teller don't ask you what sort of lights you want, what tricks you want to see and how long the show should be. They put on their show. If you don't like it, that's fine. Plenty of other people do. As a result, they win. They get to do their work, their way. And they profit from their confidence.

Some bosses don't want to hire people who have a vision, a personality and a shtick. That's okay. You don't want to work for them anyway. via

Seth Godin: You will be misunderstood

Nate Klaiber — Mon Nov 24 07:18:00 UTC 2008

If you've got 140 characters to make your point, the odds are you are going to be misunderstood (a lot). There may be nothing wrong with that, but you should be prepared for it to happen. And most of the time, people won't take the time to ask. They'll just assume you're an ignorant jerk and move on. via

Myth 5: Rails is hard because of Ruby

Nate Klaiber — Mon Nov 17 09:25:00 UTC 2008

I've talked to lots of PHP and Java programmers who love the idea and concept of Rails, but are afraid of stepping in because of Ruby. The argument goes that since they already know PHP or Java, that it would be less work to just pick one of the Rails knockoffs in those languages. I really don't think so. via

Having come from PHP and then jump straight into Ruby, I found the transition a breath of fresh air. Ruby is what makes me enjoy Rails. The beauty of the language makes it fun to program.

Chad Fowler: Writing APIs to wrap APIs

Nate Klaiber — Thu Nov 13 11:02:00 UTC 2008

In response to the question Why write concrete wrapper code?, Chad Fowler states:

It may seem like a nitpick, but as a Ruby programmer I want to use APIs that look like Ruby code. “fbsession.users_getInfo()” looks like PHP code to my eyes. It’s no surprise. Facebook is written in PHP, and its HTTP/XML API was designed by the same PHP programmers that created Facebook. Wrapping the Facebook API allows me to isolate and hide the PHP idioms, such that the code I use reads like “normal” Ruby code. You could argue that this is not a technical issue, and you’d be right. But I believe in the power of both consonance and dissonance in software development. Dissonant code stands out and alerts the reader that something strange and exceptional is taking place. Sometimes that strange and exceptional thing is just bad code. Sometimes it’s an unusual technique that should be highlighted. via

Having written wrappers around APIs for Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter, and Upcoming - I couldn't agree more with his statements. I have seen Ruby Flickr API libraries that look just like the PHP. It's one large library, with methods like photo_getTags(). I would much rather write a concrete wrapper that allows my Ruby to look and function like the Ruby I love. I would rather write something like @photo.tags, and incorporate my helper methods such as @photo.tags? and @photo.tags_count. It makes this much more elegant and easier to deal with, and with enough thought into the design, still allows you to be agile with the calls taking place underneath.

Myth 1: Rails is hard to deploy

Nate Klaiber — Thu Nov 13 07:54:00 UTC 2008

So while there are still reasons to run your own custom multi-tier setup of manually configured pieces, just like there are people shying away from mod_php for their particulars, I think we've finally settled on a default answer. Something that doesn't require you to really think about the first deployment of your Rails application. Something that just works out of the box. Even if that box is a shared host!

In conclusion, Rails is no longer hard to deploy. Phusion Passenger has made it ridiculously easy. via

I recently setup Phusion Passenger on my development machine and absolutely love it. Integrated with the PHP work I do with virtual hosts, now I no longer need to run several different webservers.