It’s been just about a full month since I began the product design track with Startup Institute Boston (formally Boston Startup School) and I can confidently say it has been a good experience so far. I look forward to the final four weeks.

Going into the program, I was a little unsure what I was getting into and initially chose the development track. After some self reflection and discussion with my always insightful partner, I opted for the product design track. A large part of this program is about finding yourself, who you are, what you love, and what/where you want to be in the future. Time and again I have returned to design and building for the web because it is truly what I enjoy and what makes me happy.

We have had an impressive number of industry professionals, founders, CEOs, and more, come in to teach and talk openly with us. Hearing the various stories of how a founder built their company up, and being able to ask them any questions we want has been eye opening. The other thing that has surprised me, and given me some confidence, is finding out that I am a strong contender in the product design group with my front-end skills. Much of what the instructors have taught us, I have learned in some capacity either on my own or through my background in industrial design.

I’m not familiar with startups and the culture behind them, that part has been a learning process for me. The notion of “dating” a company, to find a good fit, has been brought up numerous times and so far seems to be holding true. I have been approached by a couple founders simply by connecting with them through a current employee or short introduction email. Was it really that easy all along? Beyond “designing my career”, building my network is one of the strongest parts of this program for me personally.

There’s so much more I can say but for now I will leave it at this: if you have an inkling to change jobs or get into a startup, then consider the Startup Institute.

On to the article. Whether or not Dennis was trying to, the article comes across with a bit of pretentiousness in telling others not to discuss web accessibility unless they are an “expert”. This brings up the whole issue of what constitutes an expert but that is for another time perhaps. Dennis specifically points to a few articles by Chris Coyier and Jeffery Zeldman in which they talk about a few ways that accessibility might be improved based on examples from screen readers.

There are many good comments on the article already and I’m sure it will generate more. One that I think shares my sentiments -

There’s a lot of cult of personality on the web and the accessibility community is no better than any other. My overall fear, and it has been for years, is that we are fostering a perception that ‘only an expert’ can do this and ‘accessibility is too complex’. By doing so we send out a message accessibility is a dark art that only those initiated into the club can practice.

If we can’t have open conversations about web accessibility or the web in general then how can we as a community improve and learn from one another. It’s hard to find good information about web accessibility, and when you do it usually takes time to read through and absorb it. One recent project that I hope will bring a change to that is The Accessibility Project by Dave Rupert. It’s an open source project that anyone can help add to and breaks the content into “digestible” chunks. As it says on the about page of the Accessibility Project, “Accessibility is hard” and we should be doing everything we can to change that.

Octopress based

In the past I’ve begun several personal sites based on Wordpress but always get annoyed keeping my local and production sites synced together. It always ended up with me becoming disenchanted and never actually writing. This all changed after I learned about static site generators, and looking around at the options, I settled on Octopress because it had pretty good documentation. Building a site with a static generator has a number of benefits:

1. Test locally
   I no longer have to worry about keeping a database in sync as there are none. It’s easy to write a post, preview it locally, and quickly deploy it to the production site. In case I ever mess things up I also keep everything versioned with git.
2. Just write
   Being able to write a post in Markdown has been one of the biggest improvements. I don’t have to login to an admin section or worry about how a WYSIWYG editor is going to mess with my markup, I just write and I know how the markdown file will compile.
3. Front ending
   Being able to just stick with what I know best, HTML and CSS with any JS I might need has been great. The Liquid markup that Jekyll and Octopress use is easy to work with and customize. Getting up and running with Ruby has probably been the biggest challenge with switching to a static site generator. After the initial setup you don’t have to mess with it much.

It’s been a long time coming

I’m satisfied with the site for now though I’m sure I will be making changes in the future. I still haven’t decided if I want to implement social media buttons or comments, I think it will depend on how much activity I see. All I know for certain is that I now have a place to practice my writing and share my ideas.