15 March 2015

One of the WAVES

Gillian Jacobs directs The Queen of Code, a short film about Grace Hopper, pathfinder despite herself for women in computing. Two minor errors in the graphics (Fortran was not a computing business; the CO in COBOL stands for "Common"), but otherwise a good piece of work.

11 March 2015

Fred Mallard lives

When I was a little kid of about 6 or 8, one day I wrote a letter to my mother (I think this was at a time when we didn't see each other every day). It's in one of her keepsake boxes for me. I wrote something like this: Dear Mom, How are you? I am fine. Today I had a 60/40 day. (I was a precocious squirt, and I was just getting glimmerings of the ideas [a] of relative proportions and [b] that daily life was not an unmixed joy.) 60 bad because I lost the room's kickball in the woods, (No fence around the playground.) And 40 good because I found it again.

Today was a 60/40 day. Except that, instead of the room's kickball, it was 83K rows from a key table in the central CMS database. A backup copy of the database, a magic Perl script, and the help of Jason, Stephen, Justin, Paul, and Jared, and the rows have been retrieved from the woods.

09 March 2015

Trusting the team

My colleagues Patrick Cooper and Scott Stroud talk to Ethan Marcotte and Karen McGrane about our approach to responsive web design and how we use agile techniques to get projects done.
This project has also given us the chance to really think about our products in general, and not just thinking about the website, or the mobile site, but also thinking about our overall digital products. The product is companionship. How do we become a better companion to people?
Greetings from Evanston, Ill.