I’ve been really busy with this other site I’ve been working on, and I haven’t been keeping my WordPress install up-to-date (which is dangerous), so I just moved everything to the WordPress.com infrastructure. My blog is now at http://blog.chaddickerson.com/, thanks to the sub-domain mapping service that WordPress offers.
I also pointed my Feedburner-powered RSS feed to the new blog. If you have any trouble with RSS or anything else, let me know!
(This will be probably be the last biking post for a little while, then back to regularly-scheduled tech! Thanks for indulging me.)
Before the NYC Century ride, I couldn’t find good maps of the 55-miler, so I tracked the route on my Garmin yesterday so I could share it later. I think we got off the official route a few times for short periods, but here it is (of course, it changes frequently and could be different next year):
Enjoy. I’ll add the elevation profile and all that when I have a little more time. There was about 1400 feet of climbing.
It was a really awesome ride, as much for the sense of community among the riders as the ride itself.
On September 11, 2001, I was living in Berkeley, California. One of the things I remember most is the generous outpouring of sympathy for New York and the United States at the time, with Le Monde in Paris writing beautifully Nous sommes tous Américains: we are all Americans (translated version). Having lived in New York for two years now, what I didn’t fully appreciate then was the intense love that New Yorkers feel for the city. The towers themselves could be seen across the East River from the bedroom of my apartment where I live now in Brooklyn, which I know now because I see the Tribute in Light from that spot today. The city has become my own in the past two years of living here and I feel the impact of 9/11 in a way that I didn’t then.
Like most people, I had good friends in NYC at the time, and I caught a close friend working in midtown on IM that morning shortly after the second tower fell. I saved the transcript, and reading it now brings back the chaos and worry of that morning, the feeling of not knowing if the people you cared about were ok, and concern for the people who experienced such horror, mixed in with the human spirit of dark humor from someone who was in a frightening situation. I was lucky that my friends and loved ones were ok, but felt such a sense of sympathy and concern for those who weren’t sure about their love ones.
me: everything ok where you are?
friend: or relatively so?
friend: pendemonium
friend: i'm shaking so hard i can't even see straight
me: i was glad to see you pop up on IM.
friend: thx
friend: i'm looking for [friend of his]
friend: who works downtown
friend: classic [big company] internet moment. i can't post new content to [the web site he was working on]
me: the internet is pretty much hosed right now.
friend: i was on the subway right as it happened, evidently. 8:45
friend: i was just in the WTC on Monday
friend: labor day
me: i'm staying at home. . . not risking driving over the bay bridge today.
friend: i'm gonna be sick
me: is there any way to get back to queens?
friend: don't know, the bridges are closed
friend: nothing stop sspam. i just got 3 mails to enlarge my breast size
me: not surprised.
friend: was outside. so much chaos
friend: not safe to walk around even up here
me: why is it unsafe there? just too much panic?
friend: too much panic and confusion and emergency vehicles
Our conversation ended then, but I at least I knew he was ok at the moment, if not very shaken.
At that point, the news from CNN got to be overwhelming and I hopped on my bike to ride up into the Berkeley hills from the flatlands where I lived. When I got up there (about 1300 feet above sea level), I took some deep breaths and took in the views of the bay that had always had such a calming effect on me. That day, I remember gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge and taking a photo of it knowing that it had been evacuated out of concerns that terrorists might fly planes into it or blow it up. Would I be one of the last to see it intact? I took some other photos that day, in part to document what that day was like but also because I was legitimately wondering if something might happen to alter the landscape that I was seeing, not to mention the lives of those living in it. I thought of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. These were strange and frightening feelings, but I had seen the towers fall on TV just hours earlier and the rumor mill of what might happen on the west coast was going at full throttle.
I visited NYC about six weeks after 9/11 and the memorials around the city brought me to tears many times. I remember coming across a donation station for food and treats for the dogs who were still looking for victims, and there was still smoke in the air downtown as the remains of the building smoldered. The city was very much in mourning.
My heart goes out to those who lost friends and loved ones that day.
I’m super-excited about the panel proposal, Hacking Matters, that my friend and fellow hacker Tarikh Korula put together for SXSW. Havi Hoffman (@freshelectrons) will be joining us, too. I’ve been to SXSW three times now but have never done a panel, so I hope we get in (vote us up!)
Here’s what I wrote in the comments on the panel picker (I added some links here, which you can’t do in the SXSW comment system). (Read on for some links to some past presentations and blog posts on the subject that I collected that will give you a hint of what we’d be talking about in the panel.)
Hack Days are pure magic — events put together for engineers, by engineers, with the highest signal-to-noise ratio possible. PowerPoint draws hisses, and working demos rule the day. At Yahoo, with the generous help of Havi Hoffman and hundreds of hackers around Yahoo, I put together internal Hack Days on three continents before we did our first Open Hack Day in 2006, where I met Tarikh Korula, who won a prize [along with his partner Josh Rooke-Ley]. In May, Tarikh, Daniel Raffel, and I teamed up with Techcrunch to put the Hack Day together for their Disrupt Conference in NYC. Each event was special in its own way, but common themes and approaches made each one successful.
In this panel, we’ll tell you about our collective experiences with Hack Days and how you can put together your own successful Hack Days, whether you’re a 3-person startup or a Fortune 500 company. We hope you’ll give us a thumbs up! (Chad, @chaddickerson)
I wrote about the magic and unexpected wonders of Hack Days a lot when I was putting them together for Yahoo! — including once when the building hosting us in London was literally struck by lightning — but I’m most excited about giving some updated tips based on helping organize successful Hack Days in entirely new contexts, like the one we put together for Techcrunch Disrupt in NYC and what we’re doing with Hack Days inside a startup like Etsy (which I mentioned in my scaling startups post). Here are a collection of useful things from the past that I would likely be referring to in the panel:
In any case, I’m hoping we’ll see you in Austin next March! (Wait, did I say you could vote for us? Just making sure.)
What a great way to dust the cobwebs off my blog: my good friend and former colleague John Allspaw is joining Etsy!
John Allspaw joins the Etsy team (Etsy blog post)
From One Door to Another (John’s post)
I’m speechless and happy.
Haven’t blogged in a while, so going to shake the rust out of the engine with a little dark humor (side note: when I joined Salon back in the day, I named our first server “kafka”).
To those of you on the Q train this morning, that was me staring at my iPhone and cracking up. I have newfound respect and admiration for Bobbie Battista.
http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/onn_embed/embedded_player.swf
Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to let you know that this blog is NOT dead. I simply have too many interesting things going on to take the time to record them here (and apologies to those of you who are awaiting my email replies).
Brooklyn is awesome and Etsy is awesome. More soon.
Your pal,
Chad
As I’ve been packing for my move, one thing that I haven’t been packing is papers. About a year ago, I posted about going paperless after I ordered a Fujitsu ScanSnap, the amazing little document scanner. I haven’t discussed the outcome of my paperless quest since then, but here’s the verdict (and I’m typing in all caps for the first time on my blog because this is just how emphatically I feel about it): BUY A SCANSNAP AND GO PAPERLESS NOW. THE IPHONE HAS NOTHING ON THE SCANSNAP. IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
The utter awesomeness of having everything available digitially didn’t truly hit me until I started packing for the move. I have one single thin folder of papers that can’t be scanned for one reason or another (e.g. a certified birth certificate that has embossed). Everything else fits on a thumb drive: receipts and tax materials for the past seven years, copies of loan papers, business cards, user manuals for various products I own that aren’t available online. . . . you name it.
Once I got these “official” papers all scanned, I started scanning various mementos of sentimental value that I didn’t want to throw away: old clippings from college, concert and sports tickets, the original copy of my valedictory speech at my high school graduation, bad poetry and song lyrics over the years, etc. These are things I didn’t want to throw away completely, but don’t deserve box space. The same goes for things like paper take-out menus for favorite restaurants. With experiences like Cover Flow in OS X, I even have the same experience of flipping through a shoebox of mementos or a stack of take-out menus.
So — in case I wasn’t clear, you should get a ScanSnap. That’s all I’m saying.
(Note: SOLD!! I ended up selling the car via Craigslist, so please don’t inquire. When someone showed up with good money 36 hours before the auction ended, I didn’t have the stomach to see if I could make a few hundred extra bucks. I cancelled my eBay auction and ate the listing fee. Still, it was pretty exciting watching the process.)
Since I won’t be needing a car in New York, I’m selling my Subaru. As Subarus go, this is a top-end model — all-leather interior, giant moon roof, all weather package (heated seats/mirrors), dual climate control for AC/heat, bike rack, etc. It’s a perfect car if you have kids, like to go skiing or snowboarding at Tahoe, mountain-biking, or just need to run errands around town. It’s in really great shape and I wouldn’t consider selling it if I wasn’t moving to a place where I don’t need a car.
I decided to give eBay a try out of curiosity more than anything else. If you’re interested, email me for more info (chad at the domain of this blog) and/or go bid on eBay — here is the listing and here are some photos:
Fred Wilson posted today about Etsy looking for a VP of Product (description here) and described why he believes in Etsy:
There are some companies that are just different, special, and doing something important. Etsy sort of defines that kind of company to me. They are trying to make it possible for creative people to make a living off of the things they make. And in the process, they have built a market where you can find amazing one of kind items that make great gifts or things you can wear with a smile on your face.
When companies say they are “special” and “different,” sometimes they just mean they have a ping-pong table and they let you bring your dog to work. Etsy truly is special and different in a way that one very rarely sees (just search for “etsy addictive” or “etsy love” to see for yourself). I just spent several days in New York, mostly looking for a place to live and working out logistics for my impending move (I officially begin on 9/2), but also spending time with members of the Etsy team. Etsy is unmistakably an Internet company, but one that is connected to basic forms of human expression and social interaction that go back to the beginnings of human economies.
This is an incredibly unique opportunity and someone with whom I would be working very closely. If the people you’ve worked with would describe you as the best product manager they’ve ever seen, send your resume to work@etsy.com.
If you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “Etsy and the role sound amazing, but I love the Bay Area,” (or LA or Seattle or wherever you live) drop me a line (chad @ the domain of this blog). I was in your shoes not that many weeks ago. Moving to NY (hell, even to another house within the Bay Area!) seemed almost absurd. I had just begun some major renovations on my house in anticipation of establishing even deeper roots in the Bay Area. I had a great gig at Yahoo! and the phone was ringing off the hook with recruiting calls from interesting companies all over SF and Silicon Valley. My wife and I felt very established in the area after 10+ years, with a great group of friends and we enjoyed regularly running into people we knew walking around SF. On a purely mundane level, I had even ordered something fairly large (i.e. the kind of thing you wouldn’t move cross-country) online that would be delivered in three weeks just days before I visited Etsy. By the time that package arrived, I had already announced my decision. I was that inspired by Etsy, and am even moreso after this recent visit.
