Reed’s message is touching and accurate: donating blood is such a simple act that can make such a huge difference. I know, lots of people don’t do well with needles or are afraid of blood. But think about it this way: what’s the last thing you risked something of yourself for someone else?

As an entrepreneur, I discover daily the ways which not only I, but other people assess risks. Most of the time, the risks people are taking are self-serving. Regardless of the outcome (positive or negative), they are the only person that benefits. I read about and see people make really terrible risk assessments all the time. Donating blood, however, has a KNOWN positive benefit with practically no risk at all.

I can’t think of a better place to dominate your fears while being surrounded by people who support their peers and their risks every day: IndyHall.

We’re having a blood drive here next Saturday, March 29th, from 9am-3pm. We’re only at about half of the donors we need so PLEASE consider committing to a spot and donating.

You need to reserve a spot, and since this is nearly an entire month in advance, setting aside a time should not be difficult. The Red Cross makes it easy (yay! webapps!) to register and select a slot ahead of time online. You can visit our donor registration page to find out more.

One of our friends who’s afraid of needles and knows her risk of passing out has stepped up to bat to be an excellent example for those of you still on the fence: Ruth Kalinka not only jumped up and registered, but she’s also coordinating an ice-cream after-party at the Franklin Fountain afterwards to reward everyone for their bravery. THAT’S awesome. Thank you Ruth!

A big thank you to Reed Gustow for not only helping coordinate this drive, but for helping recruit people as well. I really, really appreciate it.

When:
Saturday March 29, 2008
9am-3pm
Where: IndyHall
How: register here.

Tags: indyhall, indpendents hall, red cross, blood donation, reed gustow, ruth kalinka

They say (good) things happen in 3s

A few months back I marked the 1 year anniversary of my independence. Along the way I’ve made contacts and friends across this wide and amazing industry, and even built a home for some of them to spend their time during the work week.

I’ve alluded to, in various places, a new project that I’ve been working on since not that long after that 1 year announcement. Not that it’s been much of a secret but as of today, there’s one more tangible piece to the puzzle in my hands, and those would be my new business cards for Round3Media that you see above.

Over the last year, the types of and scale of the projects I’ve gotten involved with has changed dramatically. Lucky for me, there’s always opportunity for growth when you’re willing to take some initiative and be challenged. Through the year, I’ve had the privileged of working with a number of extremely talented folks, and in an effort to scale things properly, we’ve formed Round 3.

The Name

We kicked around naming and branding for quite a while, and as I expected, the one we fell in love with was the one we least expected.

Ken, Bart, and myself (founding partners of Round3) have all started multiple companies. For all of us, Round3 is our 3rd company. There are 3 of us (supplemented by a well rounded talent pool). There are three phases (or rounds) to most web projects: discovery, design, and development. Round3Media just made sense.

There are some strangely exciting coincidences that have happened while we’re starting up surrounding “threes”, so we’re pretty sure that’s a sign we made the right decision.

The Team

Round 3 is comprised of myself on the technology front, Ken Rossi on the design front, and Bart Mroz on business and project management. Ken’s designs and clients combined with my code have comprised a large portion of my portfolio in the last year. Frankly, Ken was the designer who convinced me that I had what it took to go out on my own in the first place. Bart’s been a huge part of day to day operations of IndyHall and continues to run a successful freelance project management operation.

To supplement our “core” team, we’ve brought Johnny Bilotta and Jason Tremblay on as contract-to-hire associates. Johnny’s designs have appeared ALL over the place recently, from the initial creative for the IndyHall website and business cards, to a number of branding initiatives we’ve done together. Jason’s been active in IndyHall since early on as well, and has been behind the technology for a number of local projects including www.wcdish.com and some of the tech behind the West Chester Restaurant Festival. We’re excited to have these two incredibly talented individuals who are interested in joining our mission.

As far as structure of the team, it’s our goal to keep things as flat and low to the ground as possible. There are three “disciplines” we’re representing (design, development, and business/project management). Beyond that, project and company goals will be discovered together. For as long as we have the ability to keep communication open and not end up with a super-tiered ultra-mega-globo-corp type mentality that I’ll get into a bit later, this seems like a step towards an ideal working situation. Why? Well there’s some problems that need fixing.

The Mission

What’s the mission, exactly? The way we see it, there’s a huge gap between the independent contractor and the agency. And don’t get me wrong, they both have their place. What I’m interested in experimenting with is the space between them.

Working as an indie is great. You have freedom, you have flexibility and agility. You have independence. You can keep your overhead low, and deliver high quality products for a great value.

On the flip side, it’s difficult to be held accountable by larger clients for larger projects. Also, if there’s a need to collaborate, there tends to be some scrambling to get things together and unify the communication for the ad-hoc team. It’s doable, and it’s a very powerful thing (i’ve done it for a long time and we do it every day at indyhall). It just takes more time and energy than most are willing to put out.

Agencies have a high level of accountability and structure. To their credit, the additional organization necessary to pull off larger projects and accounts are absolutely necessary as a supplement to the talent they employ. Certain clients and project types simply cannot be handled by a solo talent.

On the flip side, that additional organization adds cost (both time and money, as projects become more expensive and take longer to execute as information moves through the ranks). This also means that there’s a rather large amount of “whisper down the alley” between a project coming in, and the person executing the tasks.

Finally, as an indie, you rely on collaboration. There’s very small group of superheros who are actually good at hybrid skillsets. You may KNOW HOW TO wireframe, design, build XHTML/CSS/Javascript, as well as back end data driven architecture, but the odds of you being REALLY, REALLY good at all of them are much lower than the chances that you’ve lied on your resume and listed every piece of software you’ve ever heard of as a “skill”. It’s OK. I’m not chastising you. I’m encouraging you to pick a skill to be a rockstar at, and find other complimentary rock stars to work with. If you put 3 rock stars together, you’ve got the makings of a band. That’s what I want to see on a project: less drum solo, more collaborative singing/songwriting/performance pieces. And a little cowbell never hurts.

So really, what’s the mission?

Its our hope that over the next several months, Round3Media will give us an opportunity that a number of other very talented groups have begun to explore. We’re going to dig deep and find out what can be done in the space between indie and agency. Rather than scramble at each project to figure out who’s working on what, and what pieces we need to pull together, we have some stable business process that over arches over our individual indie “practices”. Its a step towards unity, but not so far away from the individuality or freedom we crave.

To follow the band metaphor from above, think of Round3 as a jam session for talented ‘artists’. The session is always at the same place at the same time, but what happens at each jam session is totally unique and special. We’re going to create a construct for business to take place in, but the creative side of web production and marketing will all be more like a pick-up “jam session”.

At the core, for me, this is all about scaling indie methodology.

Process vs Results

When the NotAnMBA guys were in town a few weeks back, they were inspired by the culture at IndyHall and similarly, speaking with Tony from CoworkingNYC. They made a post about a common theme that came out of our conversations and that the majority of us put much higher value on results than process.

Rather than caring when you get to work, where you’re working from, or that you’re “following the rules”…we’re actually more interested in people who are willing to bend or break the mold, try new things, innovate, and get to the highest qualty end result by “any means necessary”.

That openness and freedom for the people that we’ll be working with as Round3 grows is key, I think. It’s the type of process that an indie works on, because they don’t have a boss to answer to. Instead of worrying about the process that I had in mind when I delegated a task, worry about the end product that I had in mind. How you get there, how you meet or exceed my expectations (as an employer or a client)? So long as communication stays open, I’m a happy camper.

So where do we go from here?

Up, is our best guess. We’ll continue to work at IndyHall as we have been, and honestly, not much is going to change. Individually, we’re bringing some really interesting client work to the table that we’d have turned to the talent that sits around us every day for collaboration.

There’s going to be some transitioning of our existing client bases as we try to bring as many of them on board as we can. We’ve all worked hard to build client relationships over the course of our careers, and nothing would make us happier than seeing them served by the results produced by Round3 talent.

For me, personally, I’m going on the road. The next few weeks are travel heavy, as I attend Future of Web Apps in Miami this upcoming weekend and SXSW Interactive 08 in Austin, Texas at which I’m presenting (more on that soon). All along the way, I’ll be showing off not just the cool stuff that I’m directly involved in (IndyHall, Round3, etc) but will be spreading Philly love in any way that I can. I’m so excited to get to show the world, even in these two venues alone, what the talent in Philadelphia is up to. If you see me at either of these events, ask me about what’s going on in Philly. I’ll give you an earful of excitement, for sure.

The IndyHall community is one of my proudest accomplishments of my entire life. Round3, though only at its inception, is yet another moment in time that I’m insanely proud to be a part of, and I’m so excited to see grow from the seeds we’re planting.

Tags: alex hillman, bart mroz, business process, creativitiy, indyhall, jason tremblay, johnny bilotta jr, ken rossi, round3media, scaling indies

Updated 4/18/08

For those of us who work on the ‘front end development’ side of things, there’s a careful balance we hang in regarding new browser releases. The short version is that as new browsers approach their release candidate status, we need to be checking and double checking our work in them to make sure that their change logs don’t break our work.

At the same time, there’s a known issue with the fact that, more often than not, running the latest beta or release candidate alongside with the production version (and, if you’re a really good developer, one previous version back from the most current production release to take care of things). Internet Explorer is notorious for this and I recall the headaches I went through beta testing it. I essentially resolved to (and continue to resolve to) use multiple virtual machines, one for each version of IE.

Well if you’re on a Mac and into testing Firefox 3 Beta without wiping your profile for Firefox 2.x, check out Dave Martorana’s MultiFirefox.

He’s created a little launcher app that, when copied to your Apps folder along with the accompanied Firefox3.app file (appropriately renamed so it wont overwrite the stable version), will let you create and/or select an additional profile, as well as the version of Firefox that you wish to use. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it works.

You can download the dmg (2.0(003) updated 4/18/08) (again, this is mac only), or the zip of the source (2.0 updated 4/18/08) if you want to dig around the guts or, ahem, port to windows? It’s written in Python, because that’s what Dave’s a rockstar in. It’s been rewritten in Cocoa Native, because THATS what kind of rockstar Dave is. That’s not all, though, actually…aside from being an active contributing member of the IndyHall community, Dave also wrote some bitchin’ javascript a couple of weeks ago that got me out of a bind. We’re still testing that but plan to release it as a jquery plugin. Dude knows his stuff and takes a challenge on head first.

Updated DMG and source, v2.0(003) (4/18/08)

4/18/08 Changelog:
Updated to include Firefox 3 Beta 5
Full rewrite to Cocoa native (severely reduced filesize)
Auto-update for future versions
Auto-detect of all versions of Firefox available
Supposed support for OSX 10.4 (untested)

3/14/08 Changelog:
Updated to Firefox 3 Beta 4

2/25/08 Changelog:
Fixed minor profile bug
Rework of Firefox launch code
Added about screen
Decreased filesize

DMG Download (17.98mb, includes FF3 Beta 5)
Zip of source (661kb, does not include FF3, uncompiled launcher code only)

Dave maintains this project at his site, CodeContortionist

Tags: dave martorana, firefox, firefox 3, firefox 3 beta, indyhall, launcher, multi profile, multifirefox, python

I don’t consider January 1st the official start to the year because for myself, like many many others, it’s more like “national hangover day” and not really how I want to represent the beginning of the year. So effectively, for me, January 2nd is the beginning of the new year.

That said, my upside-down sleep cycles from the last several weeks of whirlwind have been making for some rather interesting dreams (no, not the naughty kind). I don’t usually remember them, but last night’s was vivid, odd, and stood out to me as trying to deliver a message to me.

I don’t remember ALL of the details, but the general sentiment was that I was back in my high school. Much like most of my high school experience, I was late and hadn’t done my homework. Where things got weird were, I found myself surrounded not by my high school teachers, but instead by various faces from today’s social media/new media/tech/geek scene that I’ve become so fond of. Instead of my stat teacher, I saw Allen Stern from centernetworks.com. Instead of the Bodeys (a mr. and mrs. pair of english teachers, for those of you who didn’t go to high school with me), Mr. Messina and Ms. Hunt. Hall monitor David Blumenstein had a watchful eye on me as I ran to my locker when I was late for class. Junto-master and IndyHall co-founder Geoff DiMasi was there as the social studies teacher. I’m sure there were more injections from my current reality to my actual past that I don’t remember as vividly, but you get the picture by now.

I’m not usually one for analyzing dreams, but I thought it was interesting that at the turn of the year, the turn of a year where I have so much more that I want to do and so much more that I want to grow, I have a dream like this one. I’m going to think of it as a cue that I need to remember to never stop learning, or think I have to stop learning. I’m going to think of it as a cue that the people around me are the best teachers there are, and part of the reason I look up to them so much is that I hope to be as good of a teacher as them.

2008 is, for me, a year of growth. That was my response on New Years Eve to a tweet that Chris sent out with a “themeword” meme. 07 was a year of experimentation and leaps of faith. I had just quit my job, started attending conferences, building my clientbase, adopting all kinds of new best practice techniques that made me more efficient. Nevermind the leap of faith that IndyHall would not only be successful, but becomes so integral into a community here in Philadelphia.

1 year later, it’s time to take all of the good habits and lessons that I acquired along the path of experimenting in the last 12 months and put them to use in a growth phase. Putting together a more formal team of talent is at the top of my list of “to-dos”, and we’ve already started formulating how that will work. Splitting my time between being the talent, and evangelizing best practices to new ears is also a priority. It’s about personal growth, its about industry growth (our industry, effectively our home), its about knowledge growth.

Instead of just attending conferences, I’m hoping to speak more. Instead of just building web sites, I hope to build web apps. Instead of just inspiring and managing myself, I hope to have a team to manage and keep inspired. I have some personal goals for IndyHall, but I’m going to save them for myself for now because I’m more interested in seeing how the community that we have here continues to hit a stride and take advantage of the resources we’ve created. That giving up of some control, for me, is part of my personal growth as well. I’m learning to practice what I preach!

I’m really excited about this year. Really, really excited.

Tags: 2008, dreams, growth, outlook

“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.

In my years on the internet, I’ve dealt with a number of mainstream ISPs…back in the dialup days, I settled on a local company who was good at supporting even things that they didn’t have to. I had a habit of janking up my local lan settings as a kid…their support staff was kind enough to walk a younger, savvy but inexperienced me through fixing whatever I had mucked up.

Since being responsible for my own utilities, I’ve dealt with almost every major telecom provider…Verizon and Comcast for internet, and I’ve had an account at almost every cell phone provider. Bottom line: the customer support at every single one of them absolutely positively sucks.

When we opened IndyHall a couple of weeks ago, I made a conscious decisions NOT to utilize Comcast or Verizon for our commercial internet install. My members’ usage was priority, and a quick, stable connection was a must…but I’ve been without service for unacceptable amounts of time in the past due to awful, awful customer support.

I started asking around, and a lot of people recommended SpeakEasy(referral code included). I called to get some clarification on their commercial line plans, and settled on the top speed commercial DSL: 6meg down, 768k up. For our office, this would be perfect, and I was told that should I need to grow into a T1 it wouldn’t require any downtime. The service rep helped me schedule our installation, and we were slated to have everything in fairly close (within about a week) of our first day in the office.

The two part installation was painless. On the first Monday in the office, someone came from the phone company to install a loop in the basement of the building. The tech showed up on time, had worked in the building before, and was very friendly and got right to work. A few days later, I called Speakeasy to confirm that his installation had been completed successfully, which I was told was correct. I also confirmed our final installation date, which at the time was for the following Tuesday.

At that point, I shot in the dark, asking the phone support “Is there any chance of moving up the final install date? It’d be really great to provide your service to our members sooner…”. Quickly, he came back, and moved up our installation to Friday instead of the following Tuesday, buying us 4 extra days of service! I was so pleased, I thanked him, and moved on.

The final installation was also great…the tech once again arrived right on time, and diligently worked through some really tough, old wiring in the building. He updated me regularly on the progress, and we tested the line together before he left.

1 week later, my phone rang, and it was Speakeasy. “Hi Alex, we’re just calling to see how your first week of service was?”.

Wow. Proactive customer support. That was new to me, in the realm of internet providers and telecom. I was honest with the guy and told him that while the speed was acceptable, it was a LITTLE slower than we had hoped, but that was mostly likely due to the old lines in our building. He agreed, and said that if we wanted that I could call back at any time and they would come back to test and, if necessary, replace the lines.

At this point I told him who we were, what we do, and how I value customer support so much. I explained to him that this was one of the most pleasant experiences I’d EVER had with customer support, let alone within the telecom industry, and that I really, really appreciated it.

So this post is an open THANK YOU to the folks at SpeakEasy for proving that customer support isn’t dead, and I highly suggest to anyone, based on my experiences, that you should consider using their services for your next business venture.

Tags: internet, commercial DSL, speakeasy, verizon, comcast, customer support

Or whatever gift-giving holiday you choose to participate in :-)

This is reposted from the IndyHall blog for those of you not following over there yet.

Here’s the scoop:

Months ago, I was introduced to a contact at Belkin by IndyHall supporter, and my good friend Chris Messina. It turns out that for many Barcamps, Belkin provides power and networking gear. They were interested in partnering with some coworking initiatives, and were looking at us. Jory (the contact) and I spoke a few times while IndyHall was in the “growth” period, and he said “keep me posted, and let me know when you’ve got an office!

Months passed, and quite obviously, we found ourselves at the aforementioned crossroads. I dropped Jory a line to see if they were still interested, and he said absolutely. We talked about the approximate size and number of desks, and together put together a list of things, mostly focusing on networking and power strips.

The next thing I knew…boxes started arriving. Lots, and lots, of boxes. The first box was a teaser…a couple of extra useful toys that Belkin tossed in, including a wireless USB print server, and some USB hubs. The next delivery was the motherload, though!

Includes:

5 x Slim Power Strips

15 x Clamp On Power Strips

6 x 14′ snagless ethernet

3 x 8″ cable ties (MUST HAVE!)

3 x 25′ ethernet patch

1 x Wireless N Router

1 x wireless networking USB hub (for printers and hard drives)

2 x 7 port USB hubs

2 x 4 port USB hubs (nest on the 7 port…sweet!)

We can’t thank Belkin enough for this contribution to our new space. In return, along with evaluating their cool gear and giving them feedback, we’re going to be helping them put together packages on a per-desk basis. Essentially, they’ll be able to sell a “coworking special” for a certain number of desks, providing all of the gear that a coworking space would need for that number of desks. Way cool, and a way for us to give back to Belkin and the coworking community!

And a special thanks to Jory, also, for coordinating this for us. We really, really appreciate knowing that you get what we’re doing here!

Tags: belkin, coworking, independents hall, power strips, networking, usb, sponsor

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.

I’m about to walk away from my computer and all connectivity for 3 full days…the longest I’ve unplugged in as long as I can remember. Today is the 3 year anniversary for Ryan and myself. It’s been a crazy road, and she is amazingly supportive of everything that I do even though, at times, my time commitments to work related things make for bad juju. I love you very much sweetie, thank you for a great 3 years.

Oh, but before I sign off and leave the state for a long weekend, one other big announcement.

Geoff and I signed a lease on a space for Independents Hall last night. I’m going to drop off our first rent check and security deposit, getting the keys and then trying to forget that on Monday, the next chapter of Philadelphia’s coworking community begins.

Congratulations to everyone who helped us get here. Ecstatic doesn’t describe what we’re feeling.

Tags: vacation, Ryan, love, anniversary, independents hall, coworking, lease

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