&yet

Now you're thinking with feeds!

When I look at a single-page webapp, all I see are feeds; I don't even see the UI anymore. I just see lists of items that I care about. Some of which only I have access to and some of which other groups have access to. I can change, delete, re-position, and add to the items on these feeds and they'll propagate to the people and entities that have access to them (even if it is just me on another device or at a later date).

I've seen it this way for years, but I haven't grokked it enough to articulate what I was seeing until now.

What Thoonk Is

This last year, we've learned a lot about building scalable realtime web apps, most of which has come from shipping &bang.

&bang is the app we use to keep our team in sync. It helps us stay on the same page, bug each other less and just get stuff done as a team.

The process of actually trying to get something out the door on a bootstrapped budget helped us focus on the most important problems that needed to be solved to build a dynamic, interactive, real-time app in a scaleable way.

A bit of history

Last week we launched our newest product, &!, at KRTConf. It's a realtime, single-page app that empowers teams to bug each other less and get more done as a team.

One of our speakers, Scott Hanselman from Microsoft tried to open the app in IE9 and was immediately redirected to a page that tells users they need WebSockets to use the app. He then wrote a post criticizing this choice, his argument being that users don't care about the underlying technology, they just want it to work. He thinks we should provide reasonable fallbacks so that it works for as wide of an audience as possible.

I completely agree with his basic premise: users don't care about the technology.

Users care about their experience.

Our &yet team were privileged to get to sit down and chat with one of the young visionaries of modern software, Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist and Geoloqi founder.

Thanks to Pie and Wieden+Kennedy.

Music by Dat'r

It's our first podcast, or maybe &cast, and what a start we're off to.

James displays a knack for not preparing, being distracted, and wiping sweat off his face. He does, however, know what he's talking about when it comes to CSS specs. Eric asks James to explain the newly proposed subject selectors, link psuedo-classes and whether or not anyone could become Batman, realistically.

Let us know what you think about the CSS4 proposals and how excited you are about the "parent" selector. Because as you can tell, we're wicked excited about it over here.

A good software development framework should make the common things easy and make the uncommon things possible.

Unfortunately, Django sometimes makes the simple things easy and the hard things possible — and security is hard!

What Django does well

Realtime is becoming a central part of Internet technology.

It's sneaking it's way into our lives already with push notifications, Facebook and Google's web chats, and it's a core focus for startups like Convore, Pusher, Superfeedr, Browserling, NowJS, Urban Airship, Learnboost, our own &! (andbang), and many more.

What's most interesting to me is how accessible this is all becoming for developers. In my presentation at NodeConf I mentioned that the adoption of new technology seems directly related to how easy it is to tinker with it. So, as realtime apps get easier and easier to build, I'm convinced that we're going to see a whole slew of new applications that tap this power in new, amazing ways.

We at &yet have built five or so realtime apps in the past year, and we're super excited about this stuff. We've also discovered that there are a slew of different methods and tools for building these kinds of apps--we've used a number of them. Different developer communities have been solving the same problems with different tools and it's been amazing to see how much mindblowingly awesome code has been so freely shared. However, there's still a bit of a disconnect, because it often happens within a given dev community. We always find that we learn the most when we talk to and learn from people who are doing things differently than we are.

Monday will be Melani Brown's first day as a full-time &yet team member--we can't wait!

Melani is a talented filmmaker and photographer who will be doing awesome stuff of that sort with us.

She has worked on Kill Bill, Desperate Housewives, Nike commercials, and the online Old Spice social media ad campaign. She has photographed Bon Iver, Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside, and numerous indie bands.

As a longtime friend of the equally talented Amy Lynn Taylor, we were privileged to have Mel provide our team's photography a couple years ago. We've enjoyed several one-off collaborations with her since, including inviting her to participate in our team's month-long stay in an Italian castle this Spring.

We are excited to add Shenoa Lawrence to the &yet team. She will be serving part-time as &yet's Community Coordinator, beginning last week.

Shenoa has taken a strong leadership role in our local tech community: <!doctype society>, Room to Think (our local coworking movement), and TriConf (a local barcamp &yet helped sponsor last weekend). She's also in the process of putting together weCreate, a local directory of people, projects, and products that make up our community. Her dedication and contributions have been a major part of the continued success of all of the above.

We want to affirm that dedication and empower her to continue it.

In the midst of a particularly enjoyable college semester ten years ago, my good friend Eric Cadwell and I joked that a great job would be just going to school full-time for life.

I decided to figure out how to make a career out of it, in one way or another.

On the list of enjoyable things about the years that followed working as a pastor was the constant learning; I enjoy wrestling deeply with theology and its practicality, plus there’s no shortage of learning opportunities dealing with the human dynamics that come with ministry—painful, yes, but certainly plenty.

When I started &yet, I had the idea of building a business around the things that I had spent the bulk of my free-time learning (namely, web development and design). I figured if doing that could make me at least $30k a year, that was good enough. I mean, heck, there’s no school that’ll pay you a net gain of $30k to learn whatever you want!