For me, this tattoo symbolizes the last four years of my life: the risk and adventure of moving to a new city, starting a new career (despite all the advice to the contrary), and then starting my own business.

It’s been a crazy ride so far, and won’t be slowing down any time soon. It’s exciting and scary at the same time. I guess this is the curse of aiming high? ;)

We launched ScrnShots this morning at 10:00 am PST. So, far the traffic has been encouraging, people seem to be really into it, so that’s good.

ScrnShots is a community where you can upload, tag and share your screenshots. Greg Bell and I just started full time on this project last week, and it’s very exciting for us to have a product that is actually out there and available to the public.

If you wanna signup for an account you can do it here.

We also just got blogged about on Web Worker Daily, which is also very exciting!

Spread the news!

Thank you to everyone who has blogged about it already, and to those of you who have been participating in the private beta. We really appreciate the feedback and the input.

We’re really pumped to see how the community is going to grow in the next few weeks!

We’re named Orange Peel Media!

feedback?

Working for myself is something that I’ve been thinking about for years, and now that it’s here, it really feels no different than doing homework at home. I love it! If I hit a wall, I take my dog for a walk, and if I’m suddenly not into it, I work in the evening instead.

And, next week will be even better, as Greg will be joining me for the “official” kick-off.

One thing that everyone warned me about, that still took me by surprise, is the excessive time that legal and finance can take up. Just thinking about how the daily processes of our company, how things will happen and how things will function is a lot to think about. I knew this, I just hadn’t experienced it… Until now!

What I took away from this week: Taxes alone can suffocate you

Greg Bell and I have decided to start our own company. Our primary focus for the next 3-4 months is a social community called, ScrnShots. ScrnShots is a place for people to upload, tag and share screenshots of inspirational design, usability or anything else of interest.

Everything still seems quite unrealistic at this point, but I’m sure that the long hours will bring a touch of reality with them.

Stay tuned, as I will be updating this blog regularly with interesting tidbits of acquired knowledge and grumblings.

The building was designed by Joshua Prince Ramus. Check out this Youtube Video of Prince Ramus explaining his reasoning behind the design.

]]> http://www.derekkehler.com/2008/04/16/seattle-library/feed/ http://www.derekkehler.com/2008/04/11/last-day-engine-digital/ http://www.derekkehler.com/2008/04/11/last-day-engine-digital/#comments Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:21:47 +0000 derek kehler http://www.derekkehler.com/?p=39 I have spent the last six weeks at Engine Digital. I’ve done everything from IA to development, and even some design.

Overall, it has been a good experience. Since most of my experience up until six weeks ago, consisted of working with teams of 6 people or less, I would have to say that the biggest lesson learned was communication among a bigger team.

In a group of 5 people, you can get away with verbal communication. But, when you throw an extra ten people into the mix, mistakes are easily made. Documentation becomes KEY. At Engine we use Basecamp for all our project management, todos, milestones, etc. However, even basecamp isn’t detailed enough to keep track of everything, and so for little bugs, fixes, or edits related to a project, we use Mantis.

Also just general communication among your team, is different too. With a small team, you can’t help but be involved in everyone’s projects. With a bigger team, you have to purposely ask people for feedback, make sure everything is going as planned, because time is easily wasted if you’re not aware of what everyone else is doing, and any twists that the project has taken.

Lesson Learned: Communication is good - Communication with Documentation is better

And for those of you who have had a hard time adapting to the 21st century, there’s also “The Internet for Dummies”… back to basics

“Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.”

Many google searches later, I kind of guessed that it might be because I was using windows hosting. I switched it over to linux hosting, and nothing happened, so I gave up.

I came back a full 24 hours later, and voila! magic! it just worked!

So what I figure, is that Windows hosting and PHP5 are incompatible for some reason. By simply switching to Linux, everything JUST WORKS.