jhermsmeyer

Labrador OmniMedia | Rails Developer/Devops Engineer | Sonoma County, California | Remote

Labrador creates software for the hospitality industry. Our flagship product, Slate, is an iOS app (think iPad wine lists) with a Ruby on Rails backend providing iOS client management and APIs. We've been in business since 2011 and are a sister company of Jordan Vineyard and Winery in Healdsburg California.

You can download the demo on the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slate-menu/id1081898296?mt=8

We're looking for an experienced Rails and devops engineer to develop and maintain our Rails portal on AWS. You'll be taking over a codebase from a top Rails contributor and interfacing daily with our support team and CEO.

Salary 140K+

The ideal candidate will have some experience with iOS, place a high premium on schedule flexibility and enjoy alcoholic beverages. Salary will scale up for unicorns that check all the boxes (Rails/AWS/iOS).

We use Github for source control and Slack for team messaging.

Please contact me directly: josh@labradorom.com

Agreed. The sample is very likely tainted by factors that made success much more likely than average if we believe that NFL coaches are both conservative (they forgo punts only when the odds are much in their favor) and rational (they are win maximizing).

Still, there is probably a case to be made that coaches should be a bit more aggressive, but that edge could be small enough that other factors (like perceived incompetence) dominate it.

I'd say the answer provided is so simplistic that it has very little explanatory power.

Commenters have already mentioned Uber and Groupon, but I'd go further and add YC love child Airbnb as well. They famously sold cereal to stay afloat etc. What does that have to do with tech hacking? Yet they have been lauded everywhere Zulily hasn't.

I'd be interested in how one separates a disruptive business that uses technology from Disruptive Technology? It seems to me there is a hair's breadth of difference between the two.

This is news for the simple reason that it isn't news.

My favorite slide from Greenwald's article was the justification field from the Search Email Addresses Query [1].

It's a one line field. With an addition one line field for "Additional Justification".

This press release is actually expansive by comparison to their typical justifications.

[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/17859/77014/djo...

To paraphrase (or is it a direct quote?) Jacob Applebaum, "Quiet, please. Adults are talking."

This is staggering, and to chide others for being staggered is the worst kind of truculence.

More relevant, and useful: What are we going to collectively do about it now that we know, beyond a doubt, what exactly is happening?

This is a huge deal for folks stuck in Salesforce. I've already had our team of 6 regional sales managers begin using the app.

Right to anonymity? Convicted felons lose their right to own a gun. Some might never use one to commit a crime, but they still lose that right.

This is no different. It is not reasonable to call this a slippery slope. These people were convicted of predatory crimes against children, and those of us who do not commit such crimes have nothing to fear as regards our anonymity until and unless we commit similar crimes.

Not all punishments end when you're let out of prison. Nor should they.

"It will include a plethora of innovations to come that will further make it clear that big things are on the road ahead."

All Things D's writing, and hence credibility, is one butter patty away from the big dirt nap.

I've attempted to unpack that sentence and it's turtles all the way down.

> I've got to say, I don't understand why people keep mentioning drop shadows, though. Drop shadows seem fairly uncommon. Even Google only uses them for mouseover.

Put your cursor in the search field. More shadowy goodness there. Click on your avatar in the upper right, the popover has a prominent (too prominent IMO) drop shadow. It's everywhere.

As to mouseover, I agree it's for confirmation. But if we need to confirm functionality with drop shadows and gradients - what message does that send about usability?

One thought is that perhaps we should have the drop shadows and gradients there to begin with.

I think we are splitting hairs here, but I agree that what we are talking about is affordance.

The reason why I use the term skeuomorphic in this context is because there are those who believe that what you and I believe is affordance is actually superfluous and ornamental.

What else is flatland design if not a complete rejection of the value of drop shadows and gradients as affordance?

The two most prominent buttons on the home page have subtle drop shadows and gradients. Google is actually a great example of restrained skeuomorphic design.

If I had to advocate for just one aesthetic (which is silly on its face), I suppose restrained skeuomorphism would be the one.

You are in good company:

"According to various reports, when someone suggested to include a touch-typing tutorial in this intro as well, since many people did not know how to use a keyboard, steve Jobs simply said not to bother as those people would die out eventually."

* http://orangejuiceliberationfront.com/theyll-die-out-eventua...

If your audience is developers and designers, a pure flat design is great and will likely work well.

But normal people need their hand held as to what a button is. Subtle drop shadows and gradients are the best way to instantly get someone to understand that yes, this element does something. Something important is lost in flatland.

On a side note, the vault and picture frame image on the main homepage for layervault.com is the height of skeumorphism and realistic design. Beautiful, but also kinda ironic.

Agreed. There are low tech ways to achieve a similar result. But operators, servers and managers absolutely loathe anything that changes their steps of service.

The winning solution will be completely transparent to their current workflow, and will also be seamless to the customer. Until this happens I don't think we'll see widespread adoption of new pricing strategies.

For instance, a pricing increase when many/most seats are filled is probably best way to discriminate in a restaurant. Sophisticated pricing strategies like those could become commonplace with digital menus, and the staff wouldn't have to think about it - but they would see the effect in their tip total.

If this attempt at price discrimination does indeed become popular it will be via digital menus that update their pricing automatically, not via fiddly coupons. We are quite aways away from this still due to hardware costs and the sheer number of tablets that would be needed at most full service restaurants.

I have no doubt it would be a hit with consumers. Tuesday nights out would become "a thing" for the price sensitive. That's good for everyone.

Honestly one of the more impenetrable articles I've read lately. Just not very clear or well written. I'm not even entirely sure there is anything news worthy here. Just some dire need on Swisher's part to make a connection between PB and J and the famous peanut butter memo. That's not enough to justify an article.

You kinda did gloss over, well, everything that makes this letter good.

The letter is powerful because of how it said what it wanted to say. The examples and imagery are vivid; the message consistent.

What you wrote: "The real reason that most people cheat is because they don't feel loved" is right there, wonderfully articulated, in this letter.

The hard part of being married, and the hard won wisdom contained in this letter, is the realization that most of the time people fail us because we've failed them first. It's a recursive nightmare and the only escape is to forgive and continue to commit.

Easy to boil down to a tl:dr of "don't cheat" and dismiss. Knowing is not the same as doing (day after day), though.

I have talked to directors of Bay Area charities that tell me that Jobs was a generous donator personally. In fact this just happened 2 weeks ago, and the person defended him vehemently.

So there's one anecdotal data point for you.

I use Assistly for one of our CS portals and due to sporadic downtime was interested to see what Groove had to offer after reading this post. In terms of marketing, this is exactly what you want to have happen. And after all the talk of meeting the feature set of your competition, I expected to see just that - feature for feature parity or better.

Instead what I saw was an emphasis on the social media SCRM features at the expense of having a functioning Knowledge Base, which really surprised. KBes (done well) are the real win for support since they are self serve. Moreover, this is a key feature of Assistly which they can't match.

I'd say Groove hasn't yet met the bar, which is slightly ironic given the tone of the article.

My goodness. This type of thinking is going to shackle you from ever doing something new and untried.

That's the most important lesson you don't learn in college: how to do something completely novel. And it's the most important lesson one can ever learn.

So poorly written, I find it hard to take seriously.

tl;dr Make fun games, not pretty ones.

The problem is that it is never obvious when mechanics make a game great, and when art direction does. See Bioshock for the latter. See something like Everquest for the former (and which was later eclipsed by a game with better mechanics AND art direction). Great games are rare. You need both of the above, and more.

Those that are driven to make things will be inspired by what the post-pc landscape has to offer, not dissuaded.

I don't want to completely discount this short post, but the FUD here seems misplaced. Many more people are being attracted to post-pc devices vs. pcs. The fraction that go on to become engineers will make for a larger pool of hackers, not a smaller one.

Things don't have to be hard to inspire one to hack. They just need to be sufficiently interesting.

I agree. If you feel what you have to say is important enough for other people to read, put some time into shining it up, and making it readable.

Otherwise you leave yourself open to criticisms like: "If he can't execute on the small things in a blog post, then no wonder Silverlight is dead" etc.

Interference can be a problem, to be sure. But you can't create a successful business without feedback of all kinds, including technical. It's just that it has to be done thoughtfully, with respect for your talent and opinions.

You could be right, and it may well be that someone with zero technical knowledge can lead a team to success by being completely hands off. I just have to believe that success is more probable when the boss can sit down and brainstorm solutions to problems with the dev team when needed.

And perhaps more importantly, I know I appreciate it when my previous bosses understood when they were asking for something hairy, and appreciated the level of effort and skill that went into crafting a solution.

You make some solid points. My net-net or tl;dr of it all is this:

For anyone you work with to respect you, you must show that you at least have tried to do they work you hired them to do, and done it competently.

The longer version: As a CEO of a software company it means you've at least developed in a couple languages (even if its only php, ruby and some Obj. C) and actually built something. As CEO you need to also be good at (or at least had some success at) sales to be able to attract talented and well connected sales execs. If you can do both things at an above average level, you are irreplaceable.

Again, both dev and sales positions are crucial. It's very hard to find someone even marginally good at both. Great salespeople and devs should be paid and treated like the rockstars that they are. That's the easy part.

The hard part is actually being the guy who can bridge both worlds. You're not worth the paper your business card is printed on if you can't attract talent, raise capital, sling a little code, sell, and ultimately be the product manager for your company/product on any given day.

It's a hard effin' job, and if done well will earn you the rockstar hires that will make your company zoom.

My only comment: AeroFS is an objectively horrible name if you ever want wider consumer adoption. Even if you want to cater to the techie slice of the market it's still not ideal. Pretty important to get the name right.

It's a great post and I think your/Valves observations about letting designers design are spot on. Thanks for the follow up on your reasons for leaving.

Wait, if no one ever leaves Valve then why is Garrett for hire? Would be interesting to see him address that...

Ironically the meaning of "there’s room for innovation in how businesses measure success and more meaningful definitions of ambition" is not at all obvious.

Arab spring and Twitter connection aside, are they going to measure success in rainbows, or cash like the rest of the world?

Saying "the only part" of the law airbnb broke and then listing 1,2,3 violations is laughable.

Also I quite enjoy the irony that an account name of throwaway is defending the practice of using throwaway gmail accounts to spam people. Warms the cockles.