Cincinnati Startup Scene: An Epiphany

I had an epiphany about working on a startup in Cincinnati.

There is a much different tempo, culture, talent base, and overall timbre in Cincinnati than there is on the ‘coasts’.  Things are a bit slower, less electric, and a hell of a lot smaller.  This rant could probably be applied to many cities across the midwest where the startup scene is trying to explode, but for my own selfish reasons I am going to apply it only to Cincinnati, which is the only place I’m interested in seeing actually explode.

This epiphany I had was started by reading one of those blog article/profiles of some guys who started a checkin app that debuted at SXSW a couple of years ago. You can probably guess it.  There were pictures of the founders head shots.  One of the guys had this smug, shit-eating grin that drove me crazy while I was reading the article.  I wanted to grab him by the front of his shirt and shake him.  Not really professional, but something about that cocky grin was driving me crazy.

And that’s when I realized that’s exactly what we need: swagger.  Please note: I do not under any circumstances approve the use of the word ‘swag’.  If you say ‘swag’ in normal conversation we can never be friends.  Anyhow.  We need some good old fashioned ball-busting boasting, gloating, obnoxious self-aggrandizing.  Someone in Cincinnati needs to be shouting our names from the rooftops.  We should be smiling smugly at chumps reading blog articles about us.

Oh, and we also need to build shit that people want to shout about.  Yes, we have plenty of great startups here, some really brilliant people are working on them.  And that’s awesome.  It’s a beautiful thing.  We need better than that.  We need game-changing, SXSW rattling nonsense.  Who cares if it’s a flare-up and burn out?  A couple of jackasses need to whip up something intense and insane to show off.  The guys at CrowdHall seem like a good combo.

How about Lisnr?  Use that sonic beacon technology to organize a flash mob or Harlem shake at city hall or in the casino.  Piss off someone.

Once we get some excellent, shallow, loud, explosive PR surrounding stuff and pointing it all back to Cincinnati, we’ll start getting the attention we deserve.  I’m getting sick and tired of telling this underdog story.  We have one of the top accelerators in the country, ... and all that other crap people always tout.  But do you think people really see us as a viable option to the coasts?  Come on.

We have the potential here to be ridiculous and eccentric and gravitational in the startup world, let’s just goddam do it.

Our next Startup Weekend should have the theme: “Balls to the Walls: Shake Shit Up.”

Open Letter to Rockfish

Dear Rockfish,

You have given me more in the last 18 months than I have given you.  You have been a kind and loving companion.  I will never forget that.  You picked me up when I was down, you carried me on your shoulders when I was drunk, and you overall lifted me up to the level I am today. I hope in some small way I left you in a better place than you have left me. I love you.

The day I started at Rockfish, I knew I was in over my head.  I was a little fish in a big pond surrounded by scary other fish who seemed to know what the hell they were doing.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I think I was the living, breathing incarnation of ‘fake it ’til you make it’.  But I faked it, and I buckled down, and I copied smarter people’s work, and I become a 10x better developer because of it.

I would not be the greatest developer in the world were it not for you.

Actually, there’s a 14 year old kid in South Korea who is a little bit better than me, but I’m a damn close second.  And it’s because of you.

We have shared a hell of a lot of laughs, tears, and everything in between.  We’ve been thrilled together, sad together, and utterly furious together.  We’ve seen friends, clients, and people we don’t really know very well come and go.  Alison has scolded each and every one of us at some point, and it hurt us all the same.

I really, truly, and plainly will miss you, Rockfishers.  All of you.  Every last person in the office is special to me in some way, big and small, and it really does break my heart to think I won’t be around to shout unnecessarily at some of you from the length of the office, or to accost you for eating meat (which is gross, by the way).  And who is going to sneeze without covering their mouth, abruptly and as loudly as possible? I feel like I’m actually on good terms with everyone in the entire office.  Yes, even you.  Now that I think about it, I think I’m generally on good terms with everyone in the company. Now that’s a hell of a track record!

If there are any take aways that I want to keep for myself, they’d be along the lines of ‘always strive for perfection’ or ‘good enough is never good enough’ or some such thing.  In a company this highly regarded there is always someone better than you.  And by you I mean me.  You can’t be a joker at Rockfish.  If you strive to become the best possible at what you do at a company like Rockfish, you will be in an elite group if you ever make it there, trust me. There are people who don’t even have my same job who are better than me at it.

If there is anything I wish I could leave for my coworkers, it would be (appropriately) “Never be afraid to be silly”.  Work is serious business, I know that, but you always have to take the time to laugh at yourself and laugh at everyone else. You get one shot on this big blue rock, and you should laugh about it every day. Work will be there in the morning when you wake up, I promise you that.  If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.

Last thing: Someone call me, goddammit.  Invite me up for happy hour. Now that I can’t be fired for drinking too much, let’s see what the keg is up to.  I’ll finally let my hair down and be my real self.


Yours forever.

John David Back

Standing Desk, 4 months in review

Preamble

First off, I want to say that I was the first person in Rockfish to get a standing desk. There has been some conjecture, but I’m the clear winner.  No more discussion on that.  Anyway, it’s definitely been interesting.  There seems to be a big difference between standing for 8 hours a day vs sitting for 8 hours a day.  Weird, huh?

How I did it

How I actually constructed the standing desk is almost comically easy.  I bought two LACK tables from Ikea (7.99/ea), a shelf (1 dollar), and two brackets (like 49 cents each?).  For total of really effing cheap.  I just set them up on my desk and that’s it.  I am now better than everyone.

I drilled the brackets into the legs of one of the tables, the leftmost one, and put the shelf on it.  I also duck-taped the brackets to the leg because they are hollow and I knew that one ill-placed elbow was going to send my forehead straight to the corner of the desk. That would suck.

John, how has it been?

Thanks for asking!  It’s actually been very good.  The first week or two are the most noticeable.  You don’t get as tired after lunch.  You don’t find yourself being lazy or closing your eyes early in the morning.  You focus more.  I get more excited and exclamatory as I’m coding... I wave my arms and stomp my feet and generally irritate my deskmates much more than I did when I was slumped in my chair pretending to be awake. (Just kidding, Rockfish, I was always awake)

Secondly, it makes you a hell of a lot more sociable.  You walk around more.  You talk to your neighbors more.  You’re generally more likely to walk around to see someone else’s screen.  I don’t know about every work place, but here we often IM when we could talk.  That’s often because we’re  complaining about some bug we can’t fix and our diatribe is laced with profanity, but still.  Now I can curse from a standing position vocally.  It feels better.

Overall, it’s just been a great experience.  I’d recommend it to anyone.  I also got a tall stool that I can sit on if my knees get tired, which they do sometimes.  I also walk to work about a mile so sometimes my feet are hurting.  I do need one of those anti-fatigue pads.  But I’m too lazy after standing around all day to get my ass in the car and buy one.

Anyway, let me know what you think about standing desks!

Edit: People are saying the image of the desk is too small.  So, here is the largest one I have.  You'll also notice I bought a 'TALLASS" chair from Ikea, it was 4.99 or some such nonsense.

Which tools should you use? Don't ask me.

These questions bug me.  Not from newbies, but from experienced developers.

Note: When I say tools, I mean anything: language, framework, IDE, OS, whatever.

Stop worrying so much about which tool you think is going to be the best for any given project.  It’s ridiculous.  Just pick something and use it.  If you love it, that’s awesome, keep using it.  If you don’t love it, stop using it and try something else.  These spirited debates are always kind of funny to read, but they are completely impractical and pointless.  Someone is always going to think that Rails is for posers (I think that), and that Django is for solid devs (this is actually a fact, not an opinion). 

Why the hell do you care what I think?

Even though I may do this for a living, that doesn’t make me righter than you about which tool you should use.  If you know at a basic level that the tool you’re looking at can, in fact, accomplish the task you are trying to accomplish, then it’s simply a matter of what tool feels good in your hand.  What can you see yourself hammering away with for all of eternity?

Just kidding, you're going to die in like 40 years.

But seriously, quit being a whiney crybaby and asking strangers on the internet to tell you which tools to use.  Get your slender, feminine little hands dirty.  I’m embarrassed for you.

A great way to get those soft, delicate hands dirty is to just do the tutorial on the website.  Looking for a javascript MVMM or MVVM or whatever the hell it is?  Try knockoutjs.  They have some of the best formatted tutorials on the web.  Give them a shot.  Looking for a crappy tutorial that isn’t helpful at all?  Try nodejs.

That brings me to another point: GET SOME BETTER DOCUMENTATION! Jesus it’s not a herculean effort to spend 2 hours writing up a really good tutorial for potentially thousands of people who use your shit.  You have to cater to the lowest common denominator if you want to get people through the learning curve unscathed.

Damn, buddy. You’re killing me.

TL;DR

This took a weird turn.  Anyway: Just jump right in and use things. That's the only way to figure out what you like.

Ship first, ask questions later.

"If it fits, it ships."

That’s a hell of a tagline used by the USPS to describe their flat rate boxes.  The USPS, by the way, is the best shipper in the country, hands down, but that’s a topic for another post.  Full disclosure: I do think the government can get it right some times.

Anyway, that’s not what this is about.  When I hear the phrase “If it fits, it ships,” I don’t think about red white and blue boxes, I think about MVPs.  MVP is such a loose term these days, everyone uses it to describe their product, and their product is never a true MVP.  I believe in a militant style of minimum viable product development.  It should be small in scope, and then cut out 25% of that.  Then ship it.  Whatever you can fit into that iteration is what you ship.  Make the original timeline you set out for yourself.  Timelines always get pushed.  What you think will take 8 weeks takes 12.  Or 14.  

My theory is: Ship whatever the hell you have finished in those first 8 weeks.  Then keep working.

You’ll have 100% more customers with a half-finished product that's actually on the market than you will with something that only lives in development on your laptop.  I promise.

[Redacted Yoda quote about 'doing' and 'trying']

In this modern web world, it’s those that can ship products that will win the race.  The race is to market.  People get confused and think that their idea is their baby, and they don’t want to be the mother with the ugly baby.  I promise you, by the time you’ve built a gorgeous baby, someone with an ugly baby is already getting paid for their ugly baby.  Sorry, you just missed the baby boat.  It sailed.

I treat writing the same way.  You don’t know it, but I just deleted 50 words I didn’t like.  This article is an MVP of it's own.  A crappy one, I admit.

The Takeaway

You might be asking yourself, “What the hell has this guy shipped?”  And to that, I would like to say: “Shit, I work for an agency.  Do as I say, not as I half-assedly do.”

Make the Work Awesome

Or just be good at kicking ass

Working full time and working as a part time CTO has drawbacks, which I've covered. That's played out.  A lot of blogs talk about how hard it is to work all these hours and how you give up this and that.  Those people are chumps.  There's a hell of a lot of exciting stuff that goes on, too.  For example: Dinner meetings (read: get drunk and scribble notes on napkins).  Yeah, you still go out to dinner and yes, you probably wouldn't be taking any notes, but it feels like I'm getting paid to have my CEO buy me dinner and drown me in beer.  It could be worse.

Get autographs

Second, and this one is important, you meet all kinds of seriously interesting and awesome people.  A lot of people on the scene are jokers, but there are some seriously insanely smart, driven, attractive (less important), successful people.  Cincinnati alone is crammed with the varsity squad of the midwest.  Just being able to brush shoulders with people who are not only smarter, but a hell of a lot more accomplished than me (and sometimes younger), is humbling and exhilarating.  Side note: one day people are going to say that about me.

John the Builder

Thirdly, I create some ridiculous shit.  When I'm working crazy hours and just fall into that weird zone of productivity, I impress myself.  I've spent a few thousand hours developing in Python/Django and it definitely gets easier, trust me.  I plan on open sourcing a lot of cool functionality once everything is launched and cleaned up.  I think being a lead developer on any large-scale project takes just as much creativity as designing it.  Plus more logic!  Less women though, sadly.

In closing

Working on any side project, especially a startup with a raging deadline and a crazy CEO, will lead you down avenues you never imagined to meet people you never thought you'd know and to create things you never thought you would.  It's just awesome.  I grow every day.  I think expanding your skills, building strong ideas and opinions, and forging new relationships are what it's all about.  Oh, and the hope that one day you'll get a big fat check doesn't hurt either.

Just Say... Yes?

Saying No All the Time is for Chumps

By working on new products and working with people who are building new products you hear a ton problems/ideas a day.  These are wanted, unwanted, good, bad, awful, (say yes to oxford commas) and everything in between.  A lot of thinkers and bloggers and talking heads want you to say 'No' by default and only begrudgingly say 'Yes'.  To hell with all that garbage.  I say 'Okay' should be your modus operandi.

Now, don't get me wrong.  You can't do all the ideas you hear or have all the time.  It's impossible and stupid to try.  Finishing projects (well, at least MVP-ing them) is 100x better than starting them.  Remember our mantra: "Good now is better than perfect later."  However, stop being such a goddam naysayer.  Come up with a solution and a path for ideas rather than simply saying 'no, that's idiotic.'  This is not only for people who come to you with problems and ideas, but for your own problems.

This does a couple of things:

1. You will start having a more open mind.
2. People will continue to come to you with ideas and suggestions.
3. You'll have generally a more positive outlook on things.
4. You'll get to hear some pretty awesome ideas mixed in with all that nonsense.

Ergo

A CTO has to handle a lot of ideas and suggestions, both from within the team and without.  Especially if you have a non-technical CEO.  That's just the nature of the beast.  Everyone is a critic.  I've decided today that I will never say no again.  Instead of shooting ideas down, I will either give suggestions on how to keep them going, take them into serious consideration, or, if they are truly effing terrible, try to redirect them on a better course.

What's the worst that could happen?