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Steve's Weba little of this and a little of that November 07 YouTube music videos on iLikeSo over on iLike, we added this *hot* new feature over the weekend. I'm talking Paris Hilton HOT. Seriously. And I thought listening to measly 30-second clips of music was cool.
It started on Thursday. After scooting into work I walked upstairs to the office. I was preparing myself for the day, planning to fix a few bugs and get ready for a new feature Josh and I were about to start working on. As soon as I walked into the room I knew something was up. I got that 6th sense feeling of a new idea about to hatch. Sure enough, I saw Hadi waving his hands over in Josh and Gabe's corner of the room going on about something (our "office" is an open floorplan that is, just barely, but not quite, big enough for all of us).
"Not just music clips", Hadi was explaining, "but music videos!". I got his drift, and sat down to mock something up. It should be noted that Josh and Nat had been talking about something similar months back, but neither of them were *this* enthusiastic about it. In his typical eager fashion Hadi had mentioned it was only a "3-hour project", so the challenge was on! I cracked open a Dr. Pepper and got down to it. Hadi offered to bring back lunch if I'd keep working on it (of course I accepted), and by 12:30 I had a working version with playable videos and real code hooked up to whatever song you were listening to. This was cool. Yeah, it needed a lot more polish, but the look and feel was there, and there was no question that this thing was addictive and fun to play with.
After pushing the changes out to our test server so that everyone else could play with it, I spent the rest of the day polishing and tightening it up and adding a few more features. While I was coding, Hadi quickly wrote up a spec to make it all legit, along with what new features and fixes we should have for the next 3 versions. The next day, Friday, we all tested the heck out of it, I fixed a few more bugs, and we agreed that we should really ship this thing ASAP. Testing the feature was hard since everyone wanted to just keep watching videos! By Saturday we had it staged and ready to roll out to production, and by that evening it was fully shipped.
From an idea, to a spec, to development, to testing, and to production, all in less than 72 hours. Yes, I love my job :D
Try it out! I'm enamored with Imogen Heap right now, so go to http://ilike.com/artist/Imogen+Heap, listen to the first track (Hide and Seek) and click Play video. You can click any of the 4 videos on the right of the playing video to select an alternate version.
Until the next feature!
steve October 25 iLike.com launches!It says I haven't posted here in over 6 months. Is that right? Have I really been holed up in our company's cozy little office for *that long* without coming up for air? I think the answer is "yep". And we shipped last night. So now it's official. I can finally start *telling* people about what we've been doing instead of continuing on in this weird paradoxical world where I was forced to contain and measure my enthusiasm about the product whenever friends asked me "so what have you been *doing* all this time?"
Anyway, it's iLike.com, a social-networking meets music-recommendation site that wants to meet your iPod. Have iTunes? Try it out, let us discover your listening habits, then see what kind of music we recommend to you. Oh, and add some friends, too, while you're at it. The more people we have, the merrier the party, and more importantly, the *better* our music recommendations.
For some coverage, try Walt Mossberg, the Seattle PI, Brady's blog on O'Reilly radar, TechCrunch, and Mashable. Here we go! April 28 time to move on...Hi all,
I'm writing this from my girlfriend's house on the night before I leave for the Coachella music festival in Palm Springs, CA, where I'll be enjoying (suffering) another year of hot weather, cheap food, crowded tents, and oh yeah, good music (Depeche Mode is headlining, woohoo!). It's 1:30am and I'm falling asleep over the keyboard on her powerbook. But that's not what I'm here to write about. Which is probably a good thing that I'm tired and falling asleep or this might end up as one of my longer swimming-pool kind of posts :) My friends still give me a hard time over that :) But I digress. I've been telling people for a year and a half now that I have the coolest job at Microsoft. Being able to work on something as cool as start.com and live.com has been awesome. It's been a crazy kind of high. I've been incredibly lucky to have been able to work with talented and passionate people and to have been given the opportunity and support for something like that. We started from nothing, zilch, nada! And we had these few ideas and philosophies and tenets that were important to us, and we just ran and ran and ran with them, and it was an amazing ride. I really enjoyed every minute of it, and have put my blood, sweat and tears into this thing. But it's time to move on. I'll be leaving Microsoft after 7 years to join a startup in Seattle. The team I'm leaving behind kicks serious ass. We've had a couple of hiccups over the last few months while we've been getting bigger and going through some growing pains, but things are seriously being kicked into high gear. Big time. We are hardcore about getting back to basics and you'll see this soon. We're focused more than ever on our principles and core tenets (simple, fast, powerful) and making sure everyone up and down the management chain knows this. Sanaz is making sure of that :) The team knows I respect the hell out of them. I've never worked with such a great group of folks. I'm really going to miss them. But I'm leaving my baby in very good hands. I'm keeping this short. Good luck guys! I wish you all the best :) ciao, steve March 20 MIX06It's Monday morning, and Todd, Sanaz and I are at MIX06 in Las Vegas. I'm blogging this from the back of Bill's keynote while Todd is scooting about on the Razor :) We just heard the CTO of MySpace talk about the crazy growth they're getting on their site, and the fact that they're running everything on ASP.NET and SQL Server. They're here to investigate our client-side Atlas framework so that should be fun.
What is MIX? It's a new conference hosted by Microsoft to get people together to talk about new things happening in the web space, and it gives us a chance to show off some of our cool new technologies. Todd and Sanaz and I are here to talk about live.com and gadgets. We've got a few machines in the sandbox set up with real code so if you're here, stop by the sandbox and say hi, and get busy writing gadgets :)
Check out some of the photos being taken real-time: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/mix06/ February 09 Career FairAm down in Albuquerque, New Mexico to work a career fair booth at my old college (UNM). Should be fun to talk to potential candidates and see if any are interesting enough to fly back. I love this part of the job - it's really cool to talk to these guys and hear their perspectives on the work we're doing and the industry and general, and really just what their passions are. It's like seeing your job through someone else's eyes and makes you remember why you got excited about this field in the first place. It's very motivating.
You know you're in Albuquerque when you get a purple Chevy HHR as your rental car, and the agent at the desk says "I like to tell people this is our gangsta car". Since I flew down on America West it meant my plane would be delayed leaving Seattle (which it was) and we ended up sitting on the tarmac for about 2 hours before they decided the plane really wasn't about to go anywhere and proceeded to get everyone off the plane so that we could start the whole process all over again. Thank god for bluetooth-enabled cell phones. I happily surfed along and checked email the whole time we were stuck out there from my handy little sony vaio sub-notebook (I love that thing). Anyway, I didn't end up getting into Albuquerque until 11pm, so I got to drive my purple "gangsta" HHR around the streets of Albuquerque at midnight, of course stopping in at the famous 24-hour Frontier Restaurant across from UNM to grab one of their famous green chile breakfast burritos before heading up to my parent's new house to crash for the night. They haven't moved to New Mexico yet so I have the house all to myself. It's up in the foothills near the mountains and is nice and quiet.
We've got a bunch of copies of OneNote and some other Microsoft swag to give away at the career fair. I think it's going to be a competition to see which company has the most popular booth. Should be fun. :)
February 06 The chair has arrived!I ordered this swanky chair from Roche Bobois last summer, and they weren't kidding when they said it would take 4-6 months to arrive. I ordered it in August and it finally showed up at the showroom at the end of January. It became a running joke with my friends as to when I'd actually get it. Almost as funny as whether my scooter was back from the shop (ha ha). I think most of my friends assumed it had fallen off the boat somewhere on the way back from France.
But it's here now and it's freakin' *hot*. I even picked it up with a cheap U-Haul truck I was so excited, much to the amusement of my friends who knew how much it actually set me back (hey, every penny counts!). I wanted something that would be a centerpiece to the living room, something that would pop when you first walked in, the cherry on the pie, the icing on the cake, the brulée on the creme, etc etc. Most of my furniture is subdued in color and I have wall-to-wall dark tinted mirrors in the living room, so apart from some olive green accent pillows there isn't much color, which I like since it's earthy and zen and nice and cozy. But it just begged to have something obnoxiously bright as the showcase. So my sister and I shopped and shopped and shopped, online and off, looking for something modern, but I didn't want something recognizable or something you'd mistake as coming from IKEA (tho I like IKEA). So there we were on yet another shopping adventure when we walked past Roche Bobois on Western Ave, and we both knew that this chair was THE ONE. I already had the color in mind and we didn't need to look at the swatches for long before the perfect color was found. I feel like now I've finally finished my apartment.
I think it's time to throw another party. |
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