atevans
A nomadic, independent entrepreneur.

Couple nice rules of thumb for novice designers.

Expect a lot of design posts. I’m trying to learn - somehow all the graphic design stuff in college managed to get dumped after the final projects. Now I realize I need help, so I’ll be scouring the internet to find it. If you know of any great design resources - stuff that cuts into theory and practice rather than the “15 new jQuery tricks” and “how to make your avatars circles” linkbait - feel free to @ me on Twitter.

Cheers,

Nifty Prezi

• Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while
• here’s what I’ve been up to
• I promise to blog more
• you’ll see x posts / week from me

These things are generally not worth posting. You may or may not keep your promises. Nobody is angry with you for not posting. Your audience wants more posts about interesting things. None of these things are interesting.

Hopefully, my advice against these tired blog posts is something interesting :)

Cheers,

HTTP auth FTW - let’s keep it simple, folks

Easily convert your MySQL tables to utf-8 with a reversible migration if, say, you forgot to change the default character encoding for MySQL when you first installed it.

Not that that would ever happen to anyone.

Neat css for doing sparkline-like meters

I love developer communities. I love the spirit, the comradery and energy. But in the last couple of years or so, Hackthons have spread through the community like a plague. There are Hackathons around technologies, ideologies and everything in between. And I feel there is an urgent need to eradicate them.

Here is my main beef with Hackathon. They’re encouraging and spreading a perverse culture of unhealthy lifestyle and unsustainable workflow which has been made popular by sensational media and film.

In Kansas City, I did two 24hr hackathons and one Startup Weekend over the course of a month. I have to say, after that experience I was not ready for anything that looked like a hackathon for weeks. It was a ton of work, and after each one I needed a day or more to recover. Hackathons are very draining.

I did, however, get to try out a bunch of ideas that had been sitting in my head becoming brain crack. Getting those ideas into the wild to see what people thought of them after even a little building out was really cool. Doing that kind of short-term building was what helped me to arrive at my current vision for a startup.

So there’s plusses and minuses. Like everything, use hackathons responsibly, in moderation.

With some regularity I read articles about some amiable, accomplished and brilliant young kid that decides to end their life in the start-up scene. Invariably they’ve managed to come a very long way along some perceived curve of success and then there is a snag. Either they plateau in their growth, the start-up tanks or there is some other hiccup that causes trouble.

The author states that his article comes from the position of seeing friends commit suicide, which must be really tough. But watching someone shut down is very different from experiencing clinical depression / suicidality yourself. So take this with a grain of salt; it’s an outsider’s perspective.

From my personal experience, depression is largely unrelated to outside stimulus. That’s kind of the definition; feeling sad and anxious all the time after a family member has died is natural. When there’s no reason for it, it’s depression.

I have been depressed at crappy jobs at BigCorp where I didn’t get to do anything cool and my skills were being wasted, and I have felt the same way at kick-ass startups where I loved my job. So taking a job at a big company is certainly no defence against a lack of serotonin in the brain. You may avoid the big loss of failure only to experience the mounting frustration of unrealized dreams.

Startups involve a ton of effort, but there are advantages. You can design your lifestyle - work from home, work from a coffee shop, get a Zen-like quiet office or a Keggerator-equipped party floor; whatever you need to keep a support network and manage the stress. Take an hour or two off to go to therapy, doctor’s appointments, whatever you need. It’s your ship, find the currents flowing in the direction you want to go.

The most important thing is therapy. Get meds, see someone, meditate, keep your friends close. Take your mental health as seriously as you do your physical health. And if you feel suicidal, call someone. Do whatever you have to do to survive.

Unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you