“We’re a community of workers, unified by the fact that we all make a living doing things that we love” - Dave Speers

I consider myself lucky that I really, really enjoy the work that I do. Recently, my passion has been poured into the coworking project, Independents Hall, and being involved in various other community building events. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I had to force myself to return to reality and face the facts…in order to pay the bills, Alex Hillman is a developer.

Coming back from Orlando I faced a pile..one of the most daunting piles of work I’ve ever felt myself under (far worse than any string of exams I felt while still in school). To be fair, the pile was my own fault. I hadn’t done a very good job of ramping things down right before swinging into “IndyHall Mode”, where I spent most of August and September. But, I had committed to clients, who had paid for services, and I was definitely pushing the limits of the relationships I have with my clients.

On the record, THANK YOU, to all of the clients I have that were patient and proud of the stuff we did with IndyHall, and understanding while I got back in the saddle and found my way back into my development routine.

That said…2 weeks of hell, 18+ hour days, juggling stacked and overdue deadlines (again, all my own fault)..and there’s finally some light at the end of the tunnel. If I could bottle the refreshing feeling I had as I started crossing things off my to-do list, and sell it, I would. I’m pretty sure that the government would make it a controlled substance, it because the feeling was that good. Ahem. Anyway.

I realized something. These working conditions I put myself under were taking away from one important part of what I did. I develop, because I love to. I was developing these projects, because I HAD to, and the situation I got myself into was leading me towards a burnout. Understanding that my commitments and promises are what drive business and growth, and my loyal customers could have left weeks ago but instead stuck it out with me, helped. But emotionally…the realization that I wasn’t enjoying myself was a little damaging. I did not want to burn out this quickly at doing something that I enjoy so much.

Then, one week ago today, a screenshot came across my desk from one of the sharpest interface designers I know, Amy Hoy. At the top of that screenshot, I saw this:

My good friend Gary Vaynerchuk, recently soaring into the stratosphere with his 300+ episodes of a wine-tasting video podcast, was staring me in the face from the “laid back friday” couch and pointing at me as if to say, “yo man, this one’s for you”. Amy asked if I knew anyone who could build this out for a wordpress template for Gary’s new side project, and something in me said “you’ve got other stuff to do, but this one will be good for your soul”. So I agreed to spend last Saturday banging out this template.

I’m still not 100% sure what about this project set it apart, and realistically, it was only about 3 hours of work, but it was able to zero me out. I didn’t do it because I had to, I did it because I wanted to. Yesterday, I spent part of my afternoon with Gary and WLTV Producer Erik Kastner, at the Wine Library (holy crap, you have to go the place is nuts) talking about some of the things clunking around in my head. We’ll see what materializes from those conversations, I think it’s some good stuff.

I guess the whole reason I started this post was to stress the need to do things that you love. It’s energizing, and it’s healthy. I remember being in grade school and having assigned reading and pleasure reading. At the time, assigned reading may have been something from a composition book, or a textbook…but either way I read it because I had to. On the other side, I’d pick up something I wanted to read (at the time, I remember R.L. Stein “Goosebumps” series was a popular choice).

The act of reading was the same. Eyes scanning pages for letters forming words forming sentences, paragraphs, pages, and ultimately some story. But the book I picked, I had an emotional gratification from. I think this goes for the work I do, too. The act of building out this page for Gary was no different, but seeing Gary’s site live was a different reaction than I had to any of the other project’s I’ve wrapped in the last few weeks.

So where does this realization leave me? Well, I’m still processing that. I’ve got some exciting new things on the horizon, opportunities and events. I have a dream that is being realized day by day. I have some of the best friends in the world that I’m so happy are around for all of this, and many more friends that I’ve made because of the events of the last several months. I’m glad that I have them to turn to at this point in my life as I’m putting all of the pieces together and figuring out the next move. Big or little, something’s brewing.

The only thing that’s certain is that I’m going to love it.

update: seems gary and i were reading each others thoughts and he did his 120 second video today on a very similar topic, his “big picture patch“. A good reminder to put things into perspective, no matter your situation.

isn’t for the lack of interesting things going on. Quite the contrary, in fact. I have a MILLION things I want to write about. Among them:

• The opening of Independents Hall on 32 Strawberry Street
• The power of building the community before the product or service
• My own discoveries about balance and time management
• Neat new development projects
• A summary of what I’ve learned so far along the path of building IndyHall
• and much more…

In the mean time, to tide you over, you can read this piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer about IndyHall.

Roz made really great post on the urban family, and afterwards followed up with me offline about the format that etsy (an awesome crafty/boutique community) has run that really feels like a direction that IndyHall is headed.

Etsy has another “entity” called EtsyLabs, which allowed them to extend their successful community of people selling their things online into a resource to teach OTHER people how to experience that same success from doing something that they love.

Roz is spot on, part of the fuel for me wanting to start organizing Independents Hall was self-serving: I’d already built a successful business that was based around sharing of talents between friends and established talent partners. Since it worked so well for me, I not only needed a place to find more partners (thats the self-serving part), but also I wanted to show others the value of collaboration, and make it easier for them to be awesome at what they do.

Along the way, many of us have become friends, and encourage each other to succeed and be happy with what we do, even outside of the realm of “work”. The fact of the matter is, Independents Hall has allowed us to build the foundation of an “urban family” that’s much larger than just our circle of friends, acquaintances, and business partners. By taking an online community offline, and doing things face to face and not just for the purpose of business but for the purpose of improving the quality of our lives, we make huge strides to unify an otherwise segmented community that we live in.

Tags: urban family, community, philadelphia, Etsy, EtsyLabs

Originally Uploaded by ducttapeavenger

First off, you should know about a blog that was started during BlogPhiladelphia. Literally, in the 30 minutes of me running an open grid session, a blog was created from scratch (domain purchase to live) as a response to Scott McNulty’s “Group Blogging” session. You can keep an eye on it’s evolution at PhillyGeeks.net. The most recent post by Viddler’s Colin Devroe, has elicited the following response from me. It’s sort of to Colin, sort of to myself, and sort of to you, the reader. Some of it requires reading his post first, which I suggest doing. In the end, I’ll likely end up taking it elsewhere, since this is effectively a brain dump.

So I apologize for any confusing direction of a message, or the language used. This is direct from my brain to your screen.

Here goes.

Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

As a developer, even when I’m developing solo, subversion saves me both time and headaches. When working with additional developers…well Dan Cederholm puts it best:

You can work on your own, commit changes, send a message with that change, I’m totally hooked on this way of working on web apps. Yeah, it’s so much fun working on something of your own. You feel more invested and you don’t feel like you’re on the clock so you put more detail, more attention to detail, and you’re just more excited about it. It’s fun. With a lot of the client work I do, because I’m focused on the UI a lot of times I’m handing off what I did to someone else, they’re implementing it, it usually gets messed up, that’s sort of par for the course and it’s rare when it doesn’t. Working on something yourself with somebody else when you’re both in tune with what this product is, it’s so much fun and it’s far superior.

A number of tech people I work with regularly comment on how designers could really benefit from subversion. Bit-wise version control seems so much smarter, from both a size/storage perspective, as well as a team integration perspective, than this_is_the_newest_version_1.0b_final_reallyitsfinaliswear.psd.

Subversion for Design

Of course, in respect to designers, the whole prospect of working from a command line is understandably intimidating. And even with a myriad of GUIs for subversion, when it occasionally gets unruly (which it does…there’s no denying that), you need some command line mojo to get things cleaned back up.

A photoshop plugin would be sweet, something like “save as version” that takes care of all of the legwork. Consider that an official “pretty pretty please someone build that for CS3″

The real story

But that’s not what I’m writing about today. I’m writing about what I always get psyched about, a really cool LOCAL project coming from one of my new friends here in the Philly tech/creative community. I spoke to Chris Nagele of Wildbit the other day at the Cream Cheese Session and he was pimping a new rails app that his team has built, currently going by the mysterious name “Project Alpha”. In short, Project Alpha is hosted subversion. That’s not new, not even close. It also has a built in browser, and tracking, but that itself also isn’t new (though Chris’s implementation is about as sharp as I’ve seen). What’s REALLY smart is direct integration with Fogbugz, Lighthouse, and Basecamp. Essentially, all subversion activity is filtered to the right people on the team, regardless of if they are working directly with the code. This isn’t a code hosting, this is code hosting geared towards team integration and highly productive workflows. I’ve snagged some screenshots from Chris’s post on the Wildbit site, check them out.

The Dashboard

Repository Overview

Changesets

File Browser

There’s clear cues that were taken from some of our favorite team and project management tools, which I love because the way webapps are being built now, once you use one you can be comfortable in many other ones. Features, rather than interfaces, are the defining differences.

Why this works

My business workflow uses a bunch of apps. Why would I pay for multiple hosted apps rather than have one “do-it-all” suite? I think that the current trend of “do one thing really, really well” apps is smart, so long as their data is portable (like Project Alpha takes advantage of), I’m happy to have a dozen “best of breed” apps that talk to each other than one large lumbering suite that sucks at everything. I’m looking at you, Microsoft Office.

Wishes

Not-so-silent wish? I’d love to see a partnership between these tools and the model that’s run at BountySource. BS has it’s own SVN browser, which is not only part of their system bus is an open source rails plugin as well. I really like some of it’s features and Dave and Warren @ BountySource work really hard to promote open source as a viable business model. I could see both of these ventures really benefiting from each others’ work.

Also I’ll push for the integration of OpenID (so I can log into multiple accounts I’m invited into with the same URL based identity, of course), and microformats (i see opportunity for hatom and hcard immediately, I’m sure we can find a couple more things that can be marked up). But I’m sure these are considerations for down the road, because Chris is a smart guy :-)

Testers needed!

Oh, one last thing. Chris is looking to get some testers to work with Project Alpha. Also from his blog post:

We are releasing a private beta soon. When it is ready, it will be launched as a hosted subscription-based service with free and paid accounts. We are thinking about a free single project installable version as well, but have not made up our minds yet.

If you are interested in the Private Beta, please email me and provide some details on how you might use the system (size of team, number of repos, etc).

Tags: svn, subversion, hosted app, wildbit, philadelphia, independentshall, chris nagele, Project Alpha, OpenID, microformats

I’ve been spending a lot of time going to and organizing meetups as I gather information, resources, and recruits for Independents Hall. I spend a good amount of time meeting people and DOING pitches (I don’t cognizantly pitch anymore…it’s become a bi-product of conversation). What I HAVEN’T done is been able to spend a ton of time listening to other peoples’ ideas and providing ideas and input on them.

This past week I got to participate in my first “Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle”. The Purple Cow, by Seth Godin, inspired the event. Seth is known as a “change agent”, and it makes sense to me that his type of thinking would inspire this type of event. This local group is organized by Mimi Somsanith and Jen Antonio-Lim, both of whom I met a few weeks back at CreativeCamp.

So what is a Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle? We’ll…it goes like this:
Each participant gets 3 minutes to pitch an idea. At the end of the pitch they cite 3 things that they need in order to reach the goal of the pitch, as well as 3 skills that they have, as an individual, to offer back to the group. Then there is a 3 minute Q&A session. And on to the next pitch-er. Once everyone has gone, the entire group gets to spend time talking with each other, extending conversations from ideas that came to them during the pitch-sessions. The ideas, which have been written down and posted on the wall by the moderators, also provide a venue for comments from people, and even a place to stick your business card if you want to help the person achieve their idea!

This “Idea-Pitch Open Mic night” allows for a rapid-fire version of what I’ve seen go on at the Barcamps I’ve attended. Ideas fly back and forth, but without a structure…one discussion may get stomped by another, and that original idea may get lost into an abyss of good ideas. This lets everyone get their stuff out, really fast, and save the “good stuff” (some may view it as side conversation or cruft…but thats where the real value in these events is) for last.

At any rate, the event was a TON of fun. I met some cool people who were totally into Independents Hall, and got a chance to hear some other peoples’ good ideas. It’s so great to see that other people are cranking out good ideas here in Philly, and a venue like the PC Brainstorming Circle encourages people to follow through on them.

I may suggest that we try some of the rapid-fire Idea Pitch stuff at Junto next week, depending on who shows up and where the conversation goes. I encourage people to check it out and come visit the next one (I’ll post the date as soon as I know about it), and if you’re not in Philly, try out the format in your city!

Technorati Tags: conference, conversations, Independents Hall, purple cow, seth godin

Its true. You heard it here second, because it was said first (at least today) by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. John is a Philadelphia resident, and if my networking has served me as well as I think it has, he lives (or at least hangs out) fairly close to my ‘hood. He might even frequent the Starbucks that my girlfriend works at.

And yet, despite a couple of fairly innocuous attempts to contact on my part, he hasn’t returned my notes. C’mon John, it’s just a friendly outreach to find out who my neighbors are. I don’t want to be a creepy stalker-type, so its not like I’m gonna start tossing pebbles at windows and wait for you to answer the door. But you’re a public persona, like it or not. You make money from the fact that people like what you say, and how you say it. I’m just one of those people who happens to be your neighbor. **WAVES HI**

That’s the end of my “John Gruber won’t answer my emails” rant, and on to my real point:
John is right. Working from home totally destroys nights and weekends. It’s hard enough, in this industry, to “turn off” at the end of the day. It’s downright impossible when your work is sitting across the room from you, staring you in the face, waiting for you. “I have an idea right now, no, this can’t wait until monday”, you rationalize with yourself. “I know I should be spending time with my wife/girlfriend/kids, but if I just get this idea out right now…”, you tell yourself. But it’s not healthy, at least not socially, to work from home all the time.

So where do people like us (I’m talking about me and John Gruber, a freelance developer and a freelance writer, but the message applies to anyone who’s a freelance creative of some sort) go? We work from Starbucks. Or some other local cafe. We spend $50/week on lattes, over-caffeinating for the sake of a comfy chair that ISN’T in our house. But we don’t get to really interact with the other patrons…why should they care about what I’m working on? And what should I have to do with their coffee break? Nothing. Coffee shop culture is great when it comes to the work-at-home crowd, but it only serves a single functional purpose: get out of the house (ok, two functional purposes, if you count that cup of coffee).

Enter coworking. Coffee shop culture, bohemian creativity, and migrant work-patterns…meet some of the structure and collaboration of an office-like setting. It’s beautiful, really. Not only are you paying for a space at a desk (rather than paying for overpriced coffee with the hopes of having one of the comfy chairs by the window), but you’re paying for exposure, you’re paying for opportunity, you’re paying for networking. You’re paying for utilities that you don’t have in your house (most likely)…I’m talking about conference space with projectors, white boards, and conference phones. You’re paying for some other cool “community” style resources that really benefit the indie community. Maybe group discounted health insurance. Maybe discounted car-share memberships. Maybe premium or early registration for local indie-run events. These are just a touch on the ideas for what kinds of services that could be offered to an organized, but still independent, group of creatives. And, you’re also put in touch with coworkers around the country…and around the world. It’s like being part of a company that has an office anywhere you travel to, but still having the flexibility of being a freelancer.

So, John Gruber…you’re right. Weekends lose a bit of luster when you work at home. So come work at Independents Hall. Get a chance to turn off at the end of the day. Start appreciating your nights and weekends more. Benefit from the resources that we can offer once we have a solid group of members. We’d love to have someone like John Gruber behind our initiative here. We’d love to have someone like John Gruber supporting the idea of organizing Philly independent talent.

I’d love to get an email from John Gruber saying, “thanks for helping me get my weekends back”.

But this isn’t about John Gruber, believe it or not. It’s about you. Are your weekends worth getting back? Drop in to our meetup on Monday at Independence Brew Pub and see what’s up. I’m pretty sure you’ll like what you see.

Tags: John Gruber, Independents Hall, Philadelphia, Philly, Coworking, coffee shop culture, weekends

quick announcement:
If you’re interested in the future state of the independent community here in Philadelphia (and nearby communities), you should plan to attend our first meetup on Monday March 26th at 6pm at Independence Brew Pub. Details and directions on the Upcoming.org listing. Please RSVP.

Oh, we will also have some representatives from the Jersey Shore who are interested in starting “Coworking at The Shore”. Sweet!

This is all really exciting, I hope you can make it!

Tags: coworking, independence hall, meetup, philadelphia, jersey shore, independence brew pub

I’m admittedly not a big fan of recruiting agencies/head hunters. I was pleasantly surprised when I met MaryHelen Votral and the CM Access crew back in September at Creative Camp and saw a completely different kind of recruitment process.

CM Access is definitely an agency that “gets it”. The understand the value of relationships in the business world, and instead of being focused on meeting quotas they work with employers and talent to find matches that will work for the long term. Relationship building and the shared value of networking play a key part in barcamp events, so having these guys backing up the event was a perfect fit.

MaryHelen clued me in to the launch of the CMAccess blog a couple of days ago, which should be another tipoff that they “get it”. Utilizing technology in an effective manner to spread a message and provoke both thought and involvement…right on!

I’m looking forward to CreativeCamp v2 on December 2nd.

Tags: cmaccess, barcamp, blogging, recruiters

this past few weeks has been a networking whirlwind.
every place i go, every person i meet, every email i send, is another business connection.
and it’s all peaked in the last 24 hours leaving me barely able to sleep (though I’m gonna try again once I’m done with this entry).

A month or two back, right around when I became obsessed with coworking, I discovered that someone was FINALLY going to be holding a barcamp format meetup in Philly. CMAccess, a staffing/marketing firm , organized the event and while I was initially concerned about ulterior motives coming out of a company throwing a barcamp rather than an individual, or team, I cannot think of a single bad thing to say about the organizing team from CMAccss, or the event itself, except that it was too short!

Since it was their first time with the format, they blocked out a smaller, trial run event that took up 3-ish hours on a saturday (yesterday) afternoon. ultimately, 4 presentations took place in those 3 hours, but plenty of open and intelligent discussion took place. Camp organizer MaryHelen Votral spoke about some of the benefits of LinkedIn as both a business networking too, and a job search too. Self proclaimed “blogger, filmmaker, snark addict” David Dylan Thomas put together a wonderful discussion about blogging that not only served as an intro to the process and technology for some people, but focused on the writing styles the format invokes, specifically the idea of “3 dimensional writing” (in other words, using hyperlinks to write THROUGH the page, not just on it), where it’s appropriate, and where it’s not. Another brief discussion held by Eric Moss on the process of podcast production, and what the format means for the information it conveys. Also, a quick demo of some sweet automatic rotoscope tools by creator Stan Schwartz, who is also a BarCamp veteran.

side note: the diversity of this camp may have not been huge from a physical location standpoint..everyone was fairly local. however, the diversity of backgrounds people came from was incredible. I was so pleased to be sharing space with a mix that ranged from state legislator Mark Cohen, who blogs for phillyblog.com to language industry veteran Bernard Falkoff, who blew me away when he was telling stories about writing user manuals for Frogger on Commodore64, as well as annual reports for my sar/favorite/sar soup company to remain unnamed (hint, it ain’t prego.)

And there, in the middle of those sessions, and in front of nearly 3 dozen participants, I made my pitch. I explained coworking to the crowd. I explained the benefits it provides, the self-sufficient community it creates, and shared my overall passion for bringing the idea to Philadelphia. The response was…well…incredible. Watching reactions of people from all different industries, walks of life, interests, backgrounds, etc, all get interested about this idea was amazing. and not just interested, but quickly passionate as well. One participant, Lauren Galanter, even suggested an AWESOME name for the space: independents hall. how beautiful is that. Joe and I offered to help coordinate the next event in any way possible, because it was such a HUGE success and SO much fun. and the rush of public speaking is like nothing else on this planet. i love it. i wanna go on tour.

needless to say, a LOT of business card exchange took place.

Oh yeah. Business cards. So i’ve been freelancing for almost 2 years now and have never had a business card. How crazy is that? well…

the first run came off the press just in time for creativecamp! also, it should be noted that we’ve finally got the beginnings of our own website.

hey, guess what, I’m a good public speaker, but website copywriting is NOT my strong suit. that copy on the home page too FOREVER and a day to come up with, and our team profile is probably gonna take another forever and a day. lets try and not let that slack.

christ, what else…

finally hooked up the coworkingphilly wiki page on the main coworking wiki. interested? contribute! get involved. the more talent we have to kick this thing off, the better the community is going to thrive.

im sure i missed something. im sure ill be writing plenty more in days and weeks to come. i know ill be DOING plenty more, thats for sure.

my only other regret is not getting more pictures. i’m so bad at taking pictures when i go places, having a nice camera is still new to me. :-(

what an exciting weekend.