4 posts tagged “6a”

The Goodyear blimp doesn't usually hover over 6a World Headquarters. Perhaps there's some kind of major sporting event happening near by.

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One literary micro-genre that I enjoy is the startup book–tales of technology startups, whether fictional (Douglas Couplands's Microserfs) or non (Jerry Kaplan's Startup!) Recently I read Dreaming In Code, which I recommend highly. Now comes another one, called "Founders At Work" which I learned about from Joel Spolsky's blog Joel On Software.

Here's a description of the book, copy and pasted from its website.

Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

I was pleased to discover after reading the full list of interviewees that Mena Trott is one of them.

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Today was a red-letter day at Six Apart, as the latest addition to the 6a product family, Vox (né Comet) announced itself to the world, in "preview" form. Not to be outdone by its brash young sibling, twelve hours later Movable Type 3.3 launched its public beta.

I'm proud to have contributed to the development of both products-first as an alpha-tester for Vox (when it was known as Comet) and then QA Engineer for Movable Type. After my years in exile, it's great to be back at a company doing big things. It was great to be in the office today feeling the tension, excitement and dare I say joy as Comet became Vox, and the blogs that had been walled off for three months burst out into the light.

Someone very wise (it might have been Roberrt Heinlein's alter ego Lazarus Long) defined happiness as working very hard at what you love. I think 6a exemplifies that attitude. Riding home on BART right now after tweleve plus hours at the office, I'm tired, but a good kind of tired-satisfied, knowing that whatever happens, at least I gave it my all, and so did everybody else on the team.

"When you do something, you should burn completely, like a good bonfire, and leave no ashes."
—  Shunryu Suzuki

"When you get served, and you serve someone back, then IT'S ON" – Chef, "South Park"

Good article about the DOS attack on 6A on Tuesday . It's insane that these spammers can mount attacks like this, and basically bring a business to it needs. Another thing that Microsoft has to answer for, because it's their inability to secure their machines that leads to spammers being able to create zombie networks that mount these kinds of attacks.