I hope December so far has brought you more quality time with loved ones and a near endless supply of delicious gingerbread man cookies! I am just reaching my 100th day milestone here in the Bay Area and can’t wait to share with you the highlights of the past month.
BAY AREA STARTUP WEEKEND (NOV. 20-22, 2009)
I had heard some buzz about startup weekend through a couple sources, including a worthwhile book I read by Bob Walsh called “The Web Startup Success Guide” and Women 2.0, an organization that hosts a similar Startup Sandbox weekend. (They are hosting their next one Feb. 5-7 and I will definitely be there). What it is is a weekend workshop where bunches of people work madly to bring the most compelling pitched ideas to life in just 54 hours. Wanting to participate, I contacted one of the the international organizers and he gave me the green light to shoot video there. With my friend Niten hosting, I put together a short segment about the first night. Here is the video which also got posted on the bayarea.startupweekend.org page as well!
AGILE DEVELOPMENT
As I’ve traveled along fifteen years with the “development” of web development, I’ve found that there is now a distinction of sorts between “Waterfall Development” and “Agile Development”. Waterfall development is a top-down management type approach to creating web/technology products and is considered the common standard. However, in the Bay Area where web developers are king and startups are in abundance, agile development has caught on, primarily because it keeps developers happy and keeps the organization’s approach lean (and therefore competitive).
Recently, I’ve joined several developer groups, including the PHP-developer group, MySQL group, and the Drupal group to actively address the skills I have that I want to improve. This week, I attended a joint-group session called “Going Agile with Scrum” where I learned that “scrum” is an organizational framework for managing complex work such as new product development. The main part of the meeting was a company, genius.com, demonstrating a case-study of themselves prior to adopting a scrum framework and after. I found the evening greatly enhanced my understanding of development processes and enjoyed the company of a very good-natured developer crowd.
GETTING REAL
Just weeks before the that meeting, as if in anticipation of it, my extraordinarily talented web app developer friend Allen recommended I read a free e-book called Getting Real. This e-book, while a little extreme and limited in scope, was a fantastic introduction to what it means to ‘be and think agile’ and how to be agile when developing something, particularly a web application. If you don’t want to spend the day reading it, I’ve created a list of what I found to be the most important takeaways which you can read in less than a minute!
CES
In a couple weeks, I will be indulging the geeky part of me and fulfilling another small personal dream of mine to attend the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. CES is the biggest electronics trade show in the US that I know of and a gadget lovers dream! If you are attending too, let me know as I am still in the process of arranging travel and accomodations. If you want me to look into anything for you while I’m there, let me know. Also, if you know of any company or organization needing some footage from the event, I can do that as well! Just have them email me directly. A big thanks again to my wonderful friend who leveraged a ticket for me (you know who you are!).
GOINGS-ONS
Besides these highlights, I am still the social media intern at the startup with the heart of gold, everywun.com, my last film processing and editing project for asiapacificfilms.com wrapped, and I am working on a couple very small web development projects. I have made positive strides with my own small startup and am at the stage where I am creating HTML mock-ups of the first, simple version of it. It feels incredible just to have made it to this point!
I’ve met some amazing people this past month including:
* a seasoned audio engineer who’d like to get more into post-production
* a radio producer intern who appreciates tribal belly dance
* a strategizer in the gaming industry who also takes wedding photography
* an angel investor
* a user interface designer
* a Google Wave developer
* a life-storyteller who is extraordinarily generous in sharing his know-how
* a jazz singer who is also Marketing Director for a music industry startup
INSPIRATION
Lastly, I finally had a chance to read Randy Pausch’s, “The Last Lecture”. Professor Pausch was an honest man with many of the traditional common-sense values that propelled a post-WWII America into its position as world superpower. Goodness knows a little of that common sense in these modern American times now goes a very long way. One of the “Pauschisms” I enjoyed most was:
“Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the OTHER people.”
So go take a look at your brick walls and figure out which ones you want to take a bulldozer to. I’ll come help
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
That’s it for this past month! Thank you for being a part of my monthly emails; if you no longer want to receive these anymore, just reply with the word “unsubscribe” in the Subject line. If you have any comments or suggestions for me, by all means, get in touch!
Have a wonderful, beautiful winter holiday. May yours be filled with much joy and blessed with peace.
Sincerely, Crystal Chen
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December Tidings
Hello Friends,
I hope December so far has brought you more quality time with loved ones and a near endless supply of delicious gingerbread man cookies! I am just reaching my 100th day milestone here in the Bay Area and can’t wait to share with you the highlights of the past month.
BAY AREA STARTUP WEEKEND (NOV. 20-22, 2009)
I had heard some buzz about startup weekend through a couple sources, including a worthwhile book I read by Bob Walsh called “The Web Startup Success Guide” and Women 2.0, an organization that hosts a similar Startup Sandbox weekend. (They are hosting their next one Feb. 5-7 and I will definitely be there). What it is is a weekend workshop where bunches of people work madly to bring the most compelling pitched ideas to life in just 54 hours. Wanting to participate, I contacted one of the the international organizers and he gave me the green light to shoot video there. With my friend Niten hosting, I put together a short segment about the first night. Here is the video which also got posted on the bayarea.startupweekend.org page as well!
AGILE DEVELOPMENT
As I’ve traveled along fifteen years with the “development” of web development, I’ve found that there is now a distinction of sorts between “Waterfall Development” and “Agile Development”. Waterfall development is a top-down management type approach to creating web/technology products and is considered the common standard. However, in the Bay Area where web developers are king and startups are in abundance, agile development has caught on, primarily because it keeps developers happy and keeps the organization’s approach lean (and therefore competitive).
Recently, I’ve joined several developer groups, including the PHP-developer group, MySQL group, and the Drupal group to actively address the skills I have that I want to improve. This week, I attended a joint-group session called “Going Agile with Scrum” where I learned that “scrum” is an organizational framework for managing complex work such as new product development. The main part of the meeting was a company, genius.com, demonstrating a case-study of themselves prior to adopting a scrum framework and after. I found the evening greatly enhanced my understanding of development processes and enjoyed the company of a very good-natured developer crowd.
GETTING REAL
Just weeks before the that meeting, as if in anticipation of it, my extraordinarily talented web app developer friend Allen recommended I read a free e-book called Getting Real. This e-book, while a little extreme and limited in scope, was a fantastic introduction to what it means to ‘be and think agile’ and how to be agile when developing something, particularly a web application. If you don’t want to spend the day reading it, I’ve created a list of what I found to be the most important takeaways which you can read in less than a minute!
CES
In a couple weeks, I will be indulging the geeky part of me and fulfilling another small personal dream of mine to attend the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. CES is the biggest electronics trade show in the US that I know of and a gadget lovers dream! If you are attending too, let me know as I am still in the process of arranging travel and accomodations. If you want me to look into anything for you while I’m there, let me know. Also, if you know of any company or organization needing some footage from the event, I can do that as well! Just have them email me directly. A big thanks again to my wonderful friend who leveraged a ticket for me (you know who you are!).
GOINGS-ONS
Besides these highlights, I am still the social media intern at the startup with the heart of gold, everywun.com, my last film processing and editing project for asiapacificfilms.com wrapped, and I am working on a couple very small web development projects. I have made positive strides with my own small startup and am at the stage where I am creating HTML mock-ups of the first, simple version of it. It feels incredible just to have made it to this point!
* a radio producer intern who appreciates tribal belly dance
* a strategizer in the gaming industry who also takes wedding photography
* an angel investor
* a user interface designer
* a Google Wave developer
* a jazz singer who is also Marketing Director for a music industry startup
INSPIRATION
Lastly, I finally had a chance to read Randy Pausch’s, “The Last Lecture”. Professor Pausch was an honest man with many of the traditional common-sense values that propelled a post-WWII America into its position as world superpower. Goodness knows a little of that common sense in these modern American times now goes a very long way. One of the “Pauschisms” I enjoyed most was:
So go take a look at your brick walls and figure out which ones you want to take a bulldozer to. I’ll come help
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
That’s it for this past month! Thank you for being a part of my monthly emails; if you no longer want to receive these anymore, just reply with the word “unsubscribe” in the Subject line. If you have any comments or suggestions for me, by all means, get in touch!
Have a wonderful, beautiful winter holiday. May yours be filled with much joy and blessed with peace.
Sincerely,
Crystal Chen