Signal All the Way Down

Face Of God (Feat. Nadine Risha) by R/D

Fever Ray - I'm Not Done (R/D's Just Beginning REMIX) by R/D

Eskmo - 12 minute dj mix for Ninja Tune (free download) by Eskmo

Driving Across the Horizon, One Beat at Time

Sometimes you need a proper bassline to keep you moving in time. This is today's line-up for high velocity design. Re-working my life, one hard note at a time. And loving it.


Two Fingers - Fools Rhythm by One O'Clock

Akira Kiteshi - Machine by Akira Kiteshi

The Glitch Mob - Starve The Ego, Feed The Soul (R/D's Soul Full Remix) by R/D

Kether-DROID(unreleased) by Ruff Hauser

Sofi Needs A Ladder - DeadMau5 (Brion.Charles REMIX) by Brion Charles

Project | Product Management

I have come to acknowledge a few core principles that are important to guiding projects and products through conception, development and release. I just want to get them down here for now. I'll come back to add to them and expand upon them further in the near future.

You can't know how effective you're being if you don't know what your goals are.
It is critical to understand how to define requirements in the domain of the client, and to be able map those requirements to the technical execution process.

Change is the only constant. Knowing how to adapt is the key to successful projects.
It is important to understand the likely sources of change, to build variability into the scope of a project, and to control the outcome.

Multidisciplinary excellence is the road to true happiness.
Being able to communicate effectively and with native competence in the creative, technical and business realms is central to managing a modern project.

Focused design is incredibly effective.
Attention is finite, for both developers and users. Keeping an application focused on its most salient elements will deliver a more effective and compelling product.

Yes We Can

Heroku | Rails done Right

Heroku has finally launched into a more public beta. TechCrunch picked it up this morning, and they've been getting the kind of traffic and praise they deserve ever since.

Orion, Adam, James... congrats, guys.

A|C|E

I've been thinking about this for some time now, and it seems that others have been having related thoughts as well. I'll get into the factors that are driving the consideration of these things in another post, and focus on the 'what' in this post.

In my opinion, any given person has two things that are of value to exchange with most other people: Attention and Creativity.

Attention | Perception by an aware mind has value. It is how ideas spread, markets form and shift, opinions develop, and how people know the world and each other. The focused attention of a person is therefor worth much more than passive and incidental awareness. By choosing what we pay attention to, we determine which ideas can affect us most profoundly. (Whicken has some amusing fiction that's germane to this idea on his blog)

Creativity | The generation of new ideas, or the synthesis of novel constructs out of existing concepts is the other half of the equation. Creativity drives change, changes the rules and rules the markets of attention. Creative content will often draw a disproportionate share of attention in the world, and thus the market speaks.


The interplay of Attention and Creativity (and indeed, many other aspects of life) can be seen to be modulated by Effectiveness.

Effectiveness | Effectiveness is the measure of impact, relative to the desired outcome, that any given action has. Effectiveness is of far greater importance than Efficiency (as so eloquently put by Tim Ferriss), and should always guide our efforts.

How does one become more effective? By maintaining awareness of (and Attention to) the process of action and the results thereof. By constantly tuning and refining (and experimenting, ie being Creative), it is possible to constantly improve the quality of action taken. This concept is core to the paradigm of Agility that I so often tangle with in the world of software development, but it is of far broader reach and importance than just that industry, as some simple exercises can confirm (again, in posts to come).


Attention | Creativity | Effectiveness

The choice of how to use each of these is up to each individual, and the outcome of adjustments to our decisions relating to them can be realized as profound changes in our lives.

For the next day, watch yourself: what are you paying attention to? what are you creating? how effective are your actions?

How can you improve?