5 posts tagged “six apart”

Do you buy products made locally?  Is there anything made in your area that you love?

All of the blogging software I use is made locally. Everything else I buy, though, seems to be made in China. Or Viet Nam. Or Burma. Some tropical far eastern location with a repressive, psuedo-Communist government.

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.

Bcm

Last weekend I blogged about a book I had just gotten, The Web Developer's Guide To Amazon E-Commerce Service: Developing Web Applications Using Amazon Web, So last night I got a comment on that entry from fumiakiy that he was mentioned in the book. Sure enough, when I looked at the dedications, he was listed there.

That's what I love about my job--I work with rockstars.

What you get from iStockPhoto if you search for 'rockstar'

Thanks to Fumiaki and Dice, we had a cornucopia of goodies today here at Six Apart World Headquarters. First, as I was walking to the MT staff meeting, I saw Stephanie drop off a box at Gene's cube. I went over, checked the from address, slit it open and saw that it was indeed the shipment of Movable Type 5th anniversary t-shirts that SAKK had made up. I brought one to the staff meeting and showed it off to much acclaim.

As if that weren't enough SAKK goodness, after the meeting we saw Dice and it was revealed that he had brought over a shipment of speciality Kit-Kat flavors, including the most epic candy of all time, green tea. The first time I heard one I was very skeptical, but it's actually quite delicious. I recommend trying one if you ever have the chance.

All in all, a red-letter day here at 6aSF, thanks to our comrades across the great ocean.

Thanks, SAKK!

Today's field trip to the Computer History Museum? I was fearing something lame and Dilbert-esque like a team-building ropes course exercise. Then when the buses pulled up front of the Mountain View country club, I thought maybe we were all going to play golf. But no, after the very nice lunch we had there, it turned out we were going to the museum, which is a place I've always meant to check out.

Simply put, the museum blew me away. Really surprised at how cool and engrossing it was. Partly because I had more of a personal connection with what I was seeing, since a lot of what I was seeing I or my family worked with or owned.

I particularly liked seeing the original 128k Macintosh, which made me intensely nostalgic. I used an original Mac from 1984 to 1993, almost ten years, and I still miss it's all-in-one simplicity and the way 12-point New York font looked when printed with an ImageWriter.

Another thing I loved were all the old 60s and 70s mainframe computers, which reminded me a Sean Connnery James Bond movie, as well as my own childhood, when my mom used to take me to the Harvard Computing Center and I would wander around, hunting for interestingly colored punch cards while she did whatever it was she did (program in Fortran I now know.)

Awesome idea for an offsitte. Much thanks to Mena for organizing it.