This post was inspired by Jared Brown’s recent gamification comic and reading the temporarily popular Gamification is Bullshit article, and my recent startup experience. Research At the startup that I just worked at (RewardSnap), we decided to create a game to encourage people to do crowdsourcing of deal ratings. Instead of just crafting a game [...]
If you have things you want to write about, I’ll make a case against keeping a large backlog. Immediacy and Inspiration It’s more useful to write about experiences at a recent conference right now instead of two months from now. The time delay not only dampens memory, it also weakens excitement. It definitely helps to [...]
At the May 2011 Indy.rb meetup, I suggested creating a survey to figure out what versions of Ruby people were using, and what testing stacks they use and would like to use. I created this survey and tweeted it out, and was impressed with the results! Over a hundred people filled out the information, from [...]
If you read through this post, you’ll see some sweet pictures and figure out a potential new way to get cookies and brownies. I got together with Alex Toumey, Kyle Shipley and Wes Winham on April 16 for an event practicing lean startup concepts. We started off by pitching ideas that we thought were interesting [...]
Summary: I have done a few startup weekends and customer discovery events in total and have found some common patterns. Pregame Make sure you have alerted friends and acquaintances about the weekend so that they know they probably won’t see much of you. This helps clear any potential distractions. It definitely helps to clear your [...]
I want to put myself in a position where I can fail. While this might not sound very appetizing, I’ll make a case that it is. I could wait two years until someone decides I’m ready for the next level, or I can decide that I’m ready—experience be damned. At a certain point, more book [...]
What could you do if you only needed to sleep four hours a day? Assuming you sleep eight hours a day right now, your average day would be 25% longer! A few summers ago, I tried sleeping 4.5 hours a day while holding a full-time job. Here’s what I experienced as the result of doing [...]
