While Javascript is not essential for this website, your interaction with the content will be limited. Please turn Javascript on for the full experience.
A Blog and Activity Feed Rolled Into One:
Evolving Conversations
Had a great conversation today... I love good conversations with people who may not speak your language, but are in the same country. The people I was conversing with had a particular set of problems, but none of them were that unique. They are the same problems that a lot of large companies face. And the conversation keep coming back to content. Content is king, but damn if great content is not a pain in the butt.
And that got me thinking... one of Project Evolution's businesses is creating web-based CMSs for companies. That's a good niche to be in, but what happens when a company has content assets far beyond what they need for the web? How do they manage content? How can they manage "chunks" of content — short form, long form, multiple languages — all in the same system? Can we craft a solution for that? Of course we can...
what we have today are publishing tools, we have content management systems that force us to think about content management + authoring and content publishing + display as the same thing.
And that's just it. Even we have to remember — the makers of Content Management Systems — that while some companies are only getting into the web CMS game now, others are far ahead of the curve and need more abstract systems that can manage chunks of content, and most importantly, help make the process of creating new content more fluid for the author.
Let's make tools that help authors author and publishers publish. It's a challenge that I would like to think more about, because the need is out there. The first wave was Content Management and Publishing, and the next wave needs to take it all even further.
It's been almost a year since "father" was added to my list of titles, and although it's not all that difficult to acquire said title, the transition into parenthood has been the biggest challenge I've ever known. The experience can only be understood by those who have staggered the path.
Design and function, peanut butter and jelly, or whiskey and sweet vermouth — things that go well together. Sometimes, even if you don’t like peanut butter.
As I talked about in my first blurg post, one of the things that made me so excited to make the leap to join the crew at Project Evolution was its marriage of design and development. Some call it Human Centric Design — others, design driven technology. Its this union of design and technology that makes it possible to conceive and create something so usable that you want to reach out and start pushing buttons as soon as you see it. PE’s technological chops make these clever and beautiful designs not just function in ways that you have come to expect, but can also function in ways that you’d never think were possible. Once you see them in action, you’ll not only wonder how you ever worked without them, but you’ll marvel that it seems like they were always there.
I am obsessed with semantic markup and object-oriented CSS. We don't always follow those guidelines to a "T", but our team always tries to get close. The perfect set of markup and CSS — and therefore the perfect project — doesn't exist, but we try to get as close to perfect as possible.
Lately, we've been making updates to our own website to try to bring it up to speed with some of the new projects and patterns that we have been pushing out the door with other clients. A colleague came across our <blockquote> style, and made some suggestions. That started a conversation about a simple question with an elusive answer, "What's the best way to markup a blockquote?" Even though I went down this rabbit hole a few months ago, this time, I had a willing participant in the conversation. Little did he know how a simple little bit of advice would start this exploration again.
When you get offered a chance to join a crew like Project Evolution, its an easy decision. Maybe more so if you have had the privilege of working with them before — albeit in a different capacity — because without a doubt this is a smart, sharp bunch of designers and programmers doing some really interesting things with design and technology.
And it’s that last word that makes them so interesting. Because its not about technology for tech sake, that’s eas(ier). Tech for tech’s sake is building stuff that should work, might work, could work, might have a need. No, this is about building, creating tools that DO work, and work elegantly and exactly the way you think they should. And then working even harder to make them better.
US Pycon 2013 was a blast and we had a lot of fun. Seeing old friends and making new ones is what these events are all about. At our booth we previewed the new Python.org, which still needs a lot of work, but we felt like it was time to show it to the community and start to get their feedback.
