Thursday, September 17, 2009

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nextcompTV - Episode 9 - Project Management

Bob's back this week as we discuss our philosophy and methods for project management. We're "on location" in a park near our office. It was just too beautiful to be inside on a sunny almost Fall day.



Here's a link to Basecamp, the 37signals web-based project management tool that I mentioned in the video.

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Tuesday, September 08, 2009

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nextcompTV - Episode 8

This week's video covers the progress were making on Version 3 updates and bug fixes.




As an example of the types of changes were making, here are a few screen shots.

1) Change to the way the pages are rendered to fill the browser's window.

Originally the design had a static page width that would fit most all screen sizes. We decided, based on feedback, that having the static page size really limited the use of some tables for those people with larger screen widths.




2) Changes to the Market Pricing page

We've slightly changed the way the Market Pricing page works. When you first open the Market Pricing page you'll be presented with a search area and a prompt asking you to enter a search or you have the option of showing all data in the table. This really improved performance because 90% of the time you'll want to search for specific jobs for pricing, rather than see all the jobs all the time.




3) Say goodbye to the Daisie error page.

As much as we love Daisie, it turns out that seeing her cute face each time an error occurs is quite annoying. When you get an error, you're not usually in the mood to see a cute puppy, you want a quick professional message with the options you have available to you. So we've redesigned the error page.




There are a host of other changes, some small cosmetic changes and some more fundamentally programming updates to increase overall performance.

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Thursday, September 03, 2009

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Following Your Passion - Video

Summer is on it's last legs, the leaves are changing, and football starts this weekend. Here's a shout out to my alma mater the University of Washington Huskies. May they win some games this year!

There was no nextcompTV this week due to an extremely busy schedule. I'll be back next week but in a new format. I like the idea of broadcasting live, but I don't like the video quality on uStream. And really, how many people can break away in the middle of the work day to watch a video. Not too many. So I'm switching to using Quicktime. I'll pre-recording the TV show and then post it on YouTube. The quality will be much better and I can record the show at a more convenient time of the day.

We continue working on Version 3 roll-out. At this point, the roll-out is limited to a few organizations. We're working to finish a few features and getting the bugs out of the new version. Thank you so much to the organizations that are helping with this process. Version 3 is shaping up nicely. I'll keep the blog up to date with the latest news on Version 3.

I've put together one last video for the Summer. The video documents a mountain biking trip that my brother-in-law took me on and a brewery tour where he works part-time. He and I sat down for a short visit after the tour to talk about following your passion in work and play.

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