Our friends over at Blue Box (awesome Ruby on Rails hosting) sent a few of us some nice jackets. We’re hoping they’ll include us in their 2013 Fall Fashion catalog.
2013 Fall Fashion
20 Jun 2013
Wrong or Right?
18 Jun 2013
So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.
Always ask yourself, "how does this benefit our mission?"
Brainstormr Mobile for iPhone launched for your online collaboration needs
11 Jun 2013
We released an iPhone application to compliment our web application, Brainstormr.
It's merely shinier
11 Jun 2013
Perfect doesn’t mean flawless. Perfect means it does exactly what I need it to do. A vacation can be perfect even if the nuts on the plane weren’t warmed before serving.
Do we need that slot?
29 May 2013
Loved this comparison between two types of cereal packaging.
Want to have lunch with me?
29 May 2013
Once upon a time, I found myself struggling with a few business ideas and problems. How do I win more project bids? How do I find new clients? Should I get a new full-time job and drop this “Planet Argon” thing? How can I improve my coding? Am I… Should I… etc.
Taking advice from friends, I reached out to a few people that I admired in the industry. I offered to take them lunch in exchange for their time to bounce a few ideas and questions off of.
Out of the, roughly, ten people that I wrote, a few people said they were busy and said, “maybe in a few months when things are less hectic.” One person agreed to meet the following week. We met up during lunch, had some food… and I got some great feedback on my ideas and questions. When the bill was put down on the table, they said, “My treat. You’re a young entrepreneur, you shouldn’t be spending your money on people like me… yet.”
That was ten years ago.
Admittedly, over the past few years… I have had a number of people send me similar introduction emails. I, like the folks who replied to me, have found myself being too busy to schedule lunch with them… but last week… one person caught my attention with their introduction. It stood out from the usual copy/paste “help me!” email… and I ended up accepting their invitation1, but only under the condition that they let me buy them lunch.
They have better things to spend their money on right now.
Having said that, I would like to put out a formal offer to the people in the Portland area. If you are a motivated and young (say under 30?2) entrepreneur who wants to bounce some ideas and/or questions off of someone who has been running an agency for nearly 11 years… then I invite you to introduce yourself to me, pitch the topics you’d like to cover, and I’ll schedule and buy lunch for you3.
I owe you that much.
1 ProTip: Finding out something unique about the person you’re writing by a simple google search will go a long way to not getting filtered. In this case, they said they enjoyed my old band’s music… flattery works. ;-)
2 Give or take… I’m targeting the twenty-somethings because I might be able to better explain how I got by on paying myself a lot less when my personal expenses were lower. (not that you can’t keep expenses down when you get older… but you get the idea)
3 Limited to five people.
The future...
21 May 2013
This is fascinating stuff.
The lack of
14 May 2013
In part, it’s not your fault. If you grew up and went to school in the United States, you were educated in a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes. Things are hardly better in the universities. According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees. You don’t have to be a math major to do the math: That’s three times as many jobs as we have people qualified to fill them.
Admittedly, I don't know who has a college degree in computer science on our team. I don't.
Modern Web Development Workshop
7 May 2013
Yesterday, we hosted the first Modern Web Development workshop here in Portland, Oregon. Jack and Brian took attendees on a tour of Bootstrap, Sass, Git, and Jekyll.
I snuck in and took a few photos…
Argon Trail
6 May 2013
On April 28th, 2013… we rented a bus to take nearly 50 Ruby on Rails developers who traveled to Portland for RailsConf 2013 on a hike. Here is a group shot of nearly everyone.
We hope you had as much of a blast as we did!