Ryan Snyder

Where are tomatoes from? A history of the tomato, and its...

Tue, 01 May 2012 23:29:00 -0700

Where are tomatoes from?

A history of the tomato, and its journey from Peru through Central America to Mexico, then to Spain and Europe.

Music: Le Jour d’Avant by Yann Tiersen

Video

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:34:08 -0700

Meat Club

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:29:00 -0700

Meat Club:

Tips and charcuterie recipes for starting your own Meat Club.

Bringing Distributed Teams Together

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 09:00:00 -0700

I worked at Mozilla, and recently started working at BankSimple. Both are distributed companies, and both require tremendous efforts to ensure that remote team members are on the same page and working together. It goes without saying that periods of face time are necessary to help people feel like they are truly part of a team.

I helped define the schedule to facilitate team building for both organizations in Portland, Oregon. I wanted to share our respective agendas (acknowledging some of which is redundant), as well as reflective thoughts for creating a successful team building week.

Mozilla Web Development Off-site

Mozilla is based in Mountain View, California, and its ~40 member web development team is scattered not only around the United States, but also Europe. We decided to host the team off-site in Portland, Oregon, centered around the open source conference Open Source Bridge. Since Mozilla is a community-driven organization, we wanted to create a week that allowed the web development team to bond together, as well as to engage the open source community.

Team members flew into PDX on Sunday, June 19th. Here’s a look at our schedule:

Sunday

The team flew in, hopped the Max to downtown, and got settled in. We communed at Henry’s Tavern Billiards Room over grub and brews that evening.

Monday

We contacted the fine folks at Urban Airship and rented their community room for the day. Mike Morgan, the web development manager, led a number of discussions that morning about the Mozilla mission and the state of web development at Mozilla, the highlight being his talk about growing the web development team from 2 to 40 members.

For the afternoon, we held a number of focus sessions, where team members signed up ahead of time to demo what they were working on or to lead a discussion about relevant topics.

In the evening, we held a team dinner at Deschutes Brewery, inviting members of our IT staff who happened to be in town for the event.

Tuesday

We spent the entire day at Open Source Bridge, where 3 Mozillians gave talks.

I scheduled dinners for 10-tops at 4 restaurants around town: Andina, Biwa, Clarklewis and Pok Pok. A wiki page was created to allow team members to sign up for dinner at one of the restaurants on a first-come first-serve basis. Taxis were scheduled to pick us up and deliver us to each of the restaurants. Afterwards, taxis delivered us to Apex for a team after-party.

Wednesday

We spent the entire day at Open Source Bridge, and had a free night where nothing was scheduled.

Thursday

We spent the entire day at Open Source Bridge, where 1 Mozillian gave a talk.

That evening we co-hosted a happy hour party for Open Source Bridge attendees with the lovely peeps at Emma. Mike Morgan and Crystal Beasley provided a creative way for attendees to declare their love for the open web. Team members were on their own for dinner, and afterwards a number of people celebrated Potch’s award-winning karaoke performances at 2 local venues.

Friday

We spent the entire day at Open Source Bridge hacking on projects, and presented our creations to the rest of the team at the end of the day. Friday night was a free night where nothing was scheduled.

Saturday

Saturday was a team building day. A bus picked us up and took us to the Vista House overlooking the Columbia River Gorge, then Multnomah Falls, where we hiked to the top of the falls. Afterwards we ventured to Hood River, where we lunched at and toured the Full Sail brewery. We finished the trip by touring the Bonneville Dam, then heading back to Portland. That evening we had a free night, and many team members ended their evenings at various downtown establishments.

Sunday

Team members grabbed the Max from downtown to PDX to fly back home.

BankSimple All-Hands

BankSimple is a distributed company, at least for the moment, with ~20 members scattered in offices in Portland, Brooklyn and San Francisco, as a well as a few people in St. Louis and Geneva. We decided to host the company all-hands at our office in Portland, Oregon. The focus of the week was to bond as a team, refocus and make final preparations for the development sprints leading to our upcoming launch.

Team members flew into PDX on Sunday July 31st. Here’s a look at our schedule:

Sunday

The team flew in, hopped the Max to downtown, and got settled in. We gathered in the Henry’s Tavern Billiards Room for burgers and pints.

Monday

We rented the Urban Airship community room for the entire day. Josh Reich, BankSimple’s co-founder and CEO, led the morning’s discussions, by talking about the company mission, the original vision and wanting to bring it to fruition, and the company’s move to Portland.

For the afternoon, we held a number of company focus sessions, where team members signed up ahead of time to demo what they were working on or to lead a discussion about topics that required all of us to be present.

In the evening, we held a company dinner at Ned Ludd, a farm-to-table restaurant in North Portland. I asked the chef-owner Jason French to speak to the group about the mission of his restaurant, to give the bankers a different perspective on a mission-driven business. French described his mission by stating, “I produce food that nourishes people.” He was outstanding.

We ended the evening around a pool table in the Boiler Room at McMenamin’s Kennedy School, an elementary school-turned-pub in Northeast Portland.

Tuesday

Tuesday was a team building day. A bus picked us up in the front of the Urban Airship building, and took us to the Vista House overlooking the Columbia River Gorge, then Multnomah Falls, where we hiked to the top of the falls and continued on for a few miles. Afterwards we ventured to Hood River, where we lunched on za and beers at Double Mountain Brewery. We headed back to Portland around 4pm, and had a free night.

Wednesday

This day was an all-day hack session. Team members declared what they would be working on that day, and everyone started clacking keyboards at 9am, with some wrapping up at 10pm and others at 2am.

Thursday

In the morning, the engineering and business teams divided up and commenced focus session discussions.

In the afternoon, people demoed what they were hacking on the previous day. And we shared final thoughts about the teams, the company and the mindset we needed to maintain as we prepared for the launch of BankSimple.

That evening, we celebrated a successful week by communing together at Alex Payne’s house.

Friday

Team members grabbed the Max from downtown to PDX to fly back home.

Takeaways

After taking a bit of time to think about this, here are my takeaways on having a successful team building week.

Mission

Always begin the week and end the week by talking about mission. Discuss the mission of the organization, the mission of the team, and set a clear tone for what the group should accomplish that week. Reminding people of an organization’s true purpose serves as a great way to inspire and re-ignite your team’s passion.

Cost

You can’t put a price on face time. Seriously. For distributed companies, where people often interact via email, IRC or the occasional conference call, team members need to be reminded who each other are, and to see what kind of people they are in a non-work setting.

Don’t be extravagant — a trip to Vegas is showy, distracting and deters people from embracing a company’s mission. But do treat your team well. Communing over a nourishing meal and a few bottles of wine go a long way in helping your team members know you are grateful for them and all of their hard work. Both weeks, we were able to keep every meal under $100 per person, including the nights that we really splurged.

Go Away

An all-hands or team building event for distributed companies should never take place in the city of the company’s primary office. If it’s a team building function, other employees will not respect the team’s purpose for the week and will constantly try to pull team members into meetings. After work, there is the awkward moment when all of the remote employees are at the bar enjoying each other’s company, while all of the local employees are at home with their families. Holding these functions in a city where no or few people from the company reside create a neutral territory that is more conducive to team bonding and focus for everyone, not just the remoties.

And I’d recommend against holding the event in a city like San Francisco or New York. There’s a likelihood that your employees will have too many old friends there to distract them in the evenings, rather than spending time with the team.

Alcohol Helps

While not a solution, alcohol helps after a long work session. It breaks the ice, and helps us introverted nerds drop our walls and say the things that may have been bottled up after months of working from home. Just make sure you have a designated non- or light-drinker lined up to make sure nothing gets out of hand, and to call cabs to take everyone back to their hotels safe and sound. Be sensitive to those who don’t partake, and don’t make the week a boozefest.

And plan for hangovers. The morning after a boozy company function should never include a mandatory team building session.

Free Time and Fresh Air

Ensure that there are plenty of pockets of time where people are free to do as they wish. Don’t cater lunches; let people go outside, get fresh air, walk to get some food and have some time to digest what has been covered that day. Don’t plan every evening; designate 1 or 2 free evenings to let teams and individuals decide what they want to do, and allow the jet-lagged to catch up on some much needed rest.

Keep it Short

The Mozilla team function was an 8 day event, including the Sunday to fly in and the Sunday to fly out. By the time the week was over, everyone was wiped and just ready to go back home, especially the Moms and Dads who missed their tykes. The BankSimple team function was a 6 day event including travel days, and in my opinion was the perfect amount of time.

Let the Team Help

Open up a forum to allow your team members to help craft the schedule for the week. Create an Etherpad and let people declare what they want to communicate, learn and accomplish in focus sessions. Ask them what they want to do for fun, which could mean touring a brewery or geeking out at an 80s arcade, and make it happen. One of my favorite team building sessions took place a few years back, where Mozillians took a cooking class on Indian cuisine and prepared a meal together.

Perspective

Create situations that give your team a different perspective on their work and their purpose. Go for a long hike, visit the ocean and walk along the beach, listen to a noteworthy individual speak or visit a museum that features the works of the forefathers of your industry.

Location

Choose a cost-friendly location that features a culture that your team is interested in exploring together. For both of these weeks, we chose to host the event in Portland, where both groups enjoyed digging into the food, beer and coffee scene.

If no employees reside in the chosen location, reach out to a local food blogger and purchase their consulting services to help plan your evening excursions. Tell them the nights you want to dine out, how many people, budget per head count, cuisine preferences, dietary restrictions and overall vibe you want to create for your team.

Expenses

Let your employees know ahead of time how to record and declare expenses that should be reimbursed. Some of us take those rules for granted, and the younger employees often feel reluctant to declare expenses because they don’t want to seem greedy.

Balance

Strive to create a good balance between communing, discussing, hacking and playing. All of those aspects are so important for bringing teams of remote employees together, to help them feel like they’re working with a team, even months later when they’re cranking out code at midnight in their home office.

Feedback

Fellow Mozillians and BankSimpletons, feel free to comment on what you thought was great, what you thought was not so great, and what you’d do differently. Others, what have your favorite team building experiences been? I’d love to hear y’alls thoughts.

Joining BankSimple

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:12:00 -0700

For the past 2 years, I’ve been working with Mozilla to help push its mission forward — doing whatever it takes to create a better web. It’s been wonderful to work with such a group of selfless individuals who are all focused on creating technologies that enhance the web, while fighting for users’ privacy and rights in the process.

A month ago, Alex Payne called me while I was awaiting my flight from DCA to SFO, and he asked if I was interested in coming aboard BankSimple. I told him I hadn’t considered leaving Mozilla, but to be honest, it was the only company for which I would entertain leaving. I’d had a chance to meet many of the team members — not only do they have resumes packed with accomplishments and successful ventures, but when I look in their eyes, I know they mean it when they state they are building a bank that puts its customers first.

I’ve listened to the frustrations of friends and family over the years, all helpless in their search to find a monetary institution that cares. In July I’ll be joining BankSimple, which means I now have the chance to build one.

I’ll be performing product and project management under the role of Project Lead. My sole task is to launch BankSimple.

Let’s do this.

Cha-Cha-Changes in Mozilla Web Production

Wed, 04 May 2011 18:55:00 -0700

Cha-Cha-Changes in Mozilla Web Production

Enabling Community Incubation at Mozilla

Mon, 02 May 2011 13:29:00 -0700

Enabling Community Incubation at Mozilla

What I'm Doing at Mozilla

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:03:00 -0700

I’ve held the role of Web Developer at Mozilla for a couple of years now, writing PHP and Python for various projects. But I haven’t written a single line of code in well over a month, which meant I had already transitioned into a new set of job responsibilities.

Many a Mozillian jokes that my new role is to unplug websites. While that is partially true, my real focus for the past couple months has been to interface with the various groups working on our websites to help drive each stage of website development for the Firefox 4 launch campaigns.

To make the transition official, I was gifted the job title of Web Production Manager and will have a team working with me to whip projects into shape: Mike Alexis, our web dev project manager, and 2 web production engineers, Austin King and Chris More. I can’t tell you how excited I am to work with all 3 of these guys.

Our initial task list looks something like this:

Work with the Marketing, IT, QA, L10N, Security and Legal teams to document and fine-tune web development processes, as well as testing, launch and release procedures.

Help product owners’ visions come to fruition by driving website development from instantiation, to launch, to release, to site retirement.

Whiteboard, wireframe and prototype new features to help concepts become tangible.

Ensure that all teams are involved in launch and campaign retrospectives, collectively celebrating our successes and learning from our mistakes.

Wrangle the sprawl of over 170 Mozilla websites, ensuring that each has a product owner who monitors the success and validity of each website, and unplugging sites that no longer fit the Mozilla mission. Mwahaha.

Re-engage the Mozilla community and enable them to better incubate solutions to problems facing the organization and its community, and celebrate them for doing so.

And of course, we’ll have the ever-present task of living, breathing and being the Mozilla mission, doing whatever it takes to do the right thing for the Mozilla Foundation and for the open web.

nomnomnomming on noms.in

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:09:00 -0800

Around Christmastime, I flew over to Thailand for a week of vacation in Phang Nga and a couple weeks of work, play and eating in Chiang Mai.

In Chiang Mai, I was visiting Dietrich Ayala, who described to me one of his major frustrations with living in Southeast Asia. It seems that most websites featured recommended restaurants that catered to the western palate, like burger joints, Irish pubs and Starbucks. He pitched me the idea of creating a concise curated list of foodie destinations for each of the cities he visited in his travels.

Food is my kryptonite. No matter how hard I try to turn down an offer to build a food-evangelical web service, my mind simply won’t stop racing until I just do it. I had already become known in some circles for maintaining a list of restaurant recommendations for a few cities, and it only made sense for me to publish this list somewhere besides my blog.

So when Dietrich found that the domain name noms.in was available, he gobbled it up, and we set out to work.

We enlisted the help of Crystal Beasley, who put her outstanding design touches on the site. Without her vision, the site would not look near as edible as it does. Bravo, Miss Beasley!

In the spirit of keeping things concise, I’ll leave you with the elevator pitch and let you dig in for yourself:

You are visiting a new city for 48 hours. Here is where you will eat. http://noms.in

Mozilla Website Archive

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:51:56 -0800

Mozilla Website Archive:

In order to keep a tree healthy, you have to prune its branches.

Portland Top Fives for 2010

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:02:00 -0800

Every year I put together a list of my 5 favorite Portland establishments for food, drinks and coffee. Here are my top five faves for 2010:

Restaurants

1. DOC
2. Ned Ludd
3. Pok Pok
4. Clarklewis
5. Broder

Libations

1. Beaker and Flask
2. Apex
3. Saraveza
4. Biwa
5. Victory

Coffee

1. Coava
2. Spella
3. Barista (Alberta)
4. The Red E
5. Public Domain

My Writing, 1999-2004

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 01:28:00 -0800

I’ve been in the process of cleaning out the hard disk of an old computer that I’m donating to a local non-profit organization. In doing so, I’ve run into the pieces I wrote between 1999-2004, some of which I’ve decided to publish on Scribd.

Finding your Path: Using Divine Guidance to Determine Your Life’s Direction

After selling Cram Session back in December 1998, I spent some time putzing about between various projects. One of those projects was to write a book about asking for, receiving and interpreting guidance from one’s God. I finished Finding your Path in the autumn of 2000, then re-edited the book in 2002 and called it finished. However, I never took the time to make the book publicly available, until now.

Blog
Scribd

Giovanni Pascoli Myricae Translations in English

I attended college at The Ohio State University, where I graduated with Bachelors’ degrees in English and Italian. My senior year I worked on a self-study course where the sole purpose was to translate 20 of Giovanni Pascoli’s 19th century poems. It has been 7 years since I translated these poems, but felt it was time to make them publicly available so that others could explore the works of Pascoli.

Blog
Scribd

The Mortician’s Son

My family runs a 4 generation family funeral business, and I was raised in a house attached to the funeral home. This is a short memoir containing selected vignettes that represent my experience as a mortician’s son from the ages 4 through 8.

Blog
Scribd

Farfalla

I’ve written poetry for a good portion of my life. Most of the poems I’ve kept to myself; not for any particular reason, it’s just largely been a private pastime of mine. The following are few select poems that I decided to share with the public.

Scribd

Finding your Path

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:05:38 -0800

As I’ve mentioned in other recent blog posts, I’ve been in the process of cleaning out the hard disk of an old computer that I’m donating to a local non-profit organization. In doing so, I’ve run into many of my writings from 1999-2004, which I’ve decided to publish. Including a book.

After selling Cram Session back in December 1998, I spent some time putzing about between various projects. One of those projects was to write a book about asking for, receiving and interpreting guidance from one’s God. I finished Finding your Path in the autumn of 2000, then re-edited the book in 2002 and called it finished.

At the time I was back in college at The Ohio State University, finishing up Bachelors’ degrees in English and Italian. I knew little about the publishing process, mainly the fact that it was a lengthy and daunting process and that writers needed to be prepared for a barrage of rejection letters until their works were either published or until the writer gave up hope. I just didn’t have the energy to commit to that process, and decided to leave the book to grow a layer of proverbial dust on the hard drive of my computer.

Today, there are any number of online self-publishing outfits. And considering I’ve long since given up any expectations of being paid for my work, I decided to make the available for free:

Finding your Path: Using Divine Guidance to Determine Your Life’s Direction

I really enjoyed the process of writing this book. When I started writing the book, I was 22 years old, and by that time in my life I had accumulated a number of experiences that I attributed to divine guidance. One story I like to tell is that for each of the first 3 jobs I took coming out of high school, when I went in for the final interview there was a crow standing on the front steps of each establishment, which I took as a sign that I should accept the job when it was offered.

Part of the process of obtaining the material for this book was to interview a number of people to find out how they experienced divine guidance in their lives, and to use some of their anonymized stories as examples. In short, I talked with some fabulous people who shared some pretty profound stories.

10 years later, writing this book was a wonderful personal growing experience. When I set out to write this book, I only believed in the idea of predestination; interviewing and having lengthy philosophical discussions with others led me to combining the ideas of predestination and free will in the book as well as my own life. It allowed me to finally think for myself, rather than always taking another’s word (regardless if derived from God, diety or human) as gospel. But more importantly, it allowed me to see life as a series of choices we make with God, rather than being dictated by God.

Hopefully making this book publicly available make a positive difference in others’ lives.

The Mortician's Son

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:27:00 -0800

Back in college at The Ohio State University, I took a non-fiction writing course, and decided for one of the assignments that I would write a short memoir about growing up in a funeral home. My father was a mortician in a 4 generation family business, and my family lived in the house connected to the funeral home.

Whenever I recount a story from my childhood, people inevitably ask me, “Oh my gosh… What was it like growing up in a funeral home?” My response is, “It was just normal. When you see dead people from the time you’re born, you don’t think of it as strange or creepy.”

There are many stories that I’ve collected over the years of growing up in a funeral home, apprenticing with the family business and returning home over the holidays and pitching in to help when needed. But for this piece I wanted to answer the question above, and the selected vignettes represent my experience as a mortician’s son from the ages 4 through 8:

The Mortician’s Son

Giovanni Pascoli Myricae Translations in English

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:28:00 -0800

I attended college at The Ohio State University, where I graduated with Bachelors degrees in English and Italian. My senior year I worked on a self-study course where the sole purpose was to translate 20 of Giovanni Pascoli’s poems. It has been 7 years since I translated these poems, but felt it was time to make them publicly available so that others could explore the works of Pascoli.

Giovanni Pascoli was a 19th century poet who lived in Tuscany, Italy for a good portion of his life. I chose to translate Pascoli because I felt he wrote beautiful, approachable and sometimes adolescent poems that captured the peasant life of rural Italy. It often juxtaposed the excitement and fear of the effects of the industrial revolution on his homeland. I focused my endeavors on translating selected poems from Myricae; in particular the chapters Le pene del poeta and L’ultima passeggiata, as well as the poems Novembre and Orfano.

Translating poetry is terribly challenging. A successful translator will do his or her best to translate each word, while at the same time mimicking syllable counts (e.g. rewriting endecasyllibo lines into iambic pentameter), alliteration and rhyme in order to capture the various minutiae that makes each poem sing. But as I am sure you are well aware, Italian and English are quite dissimilar; Italian floats off the tongue like a song dancing from cloud to cloud, while English can often sound like you’re banging rocks together. It is no easy feat for a translator to mimic a poem in another language, and at times he or she will make certain sacrifices in the translation in order to carry out the poem’s meaning.

In these translations, I focused primarily on attaining the proper translation of each poem, with a slightly lesser focus on matching each poem’s sound. I strove to write in blank verse, and believing that end rhymes are too constraining, I used internal rhyme when possible, but not if it adversely affected the poem’s meaning. In these translations, I do my best to honor Pascoli’s voice, and hope my efforts come across as such:

Giovanni Pascoli: Myricae Translations in English

I am especially grateful for the mentoring of Dr. Charles Klopp throughout this process.

Foodgeeks Thanksgiving Recipes

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 10:55:25 -0700

Foodgeeks Thanksgiving Recipes

Beergeeks - For the love of Beer

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:00:00 -0700

In October 1998, my homebrewing buddy Ken Hahn convinced me to buy the domain name Beergeeks.com. We launched a simple site in December 1998, and at the time it hosted homebrewing information and all of our homebrew recipes.

I gobbled up a few other related domain names, notably Foodgeeks.com and Winegeeks.com, and gradually published sites on those domains over the years. But Beergeeks was a short-lived venture; we ran the site for a few years, but never really found the time nor energy to push the site forward. The original Beergeeks.com was retired in early 2002.

In the summer of 2009, I was introduced to Lucy Burningham by mutual friends. Lucy has a captivating personality, and to top it off, she’s written numerous beer articles for many a publication. Even the New York Times. So, as our conversation flowed over macchiatos at The Red E, I mentioned the Beergeeks.com domain that I had lying stagnant, and said I’d boot up the site if I could find the time. She said without hesitation, “Let’s do it”, and by the look in her eye I knew we just had to do it.

For the love of beer, Lucy and I started working on the site in June 2010, each spent about 100 hours getting it ready, and today we’re proud to announce that the new Beergeeks is live! Woo! And I can’t forget a special shout-out to Crystal Beasley, who created the look and feel for all of the *geeks sites.

On Beergeeks you’ll be able to rate and review beers, find information about breweries and beer terminology, and you’ll be able to earn badges to represent all of your hard work. You can friend others on the site and follow their progress and reviews through activity streams and feeds.

We’re trying a bit of a different approach than normal by placing more power in the Beergeeks members’ hands. Any member who is logged-in to the website will be able to add and edit any beer or brewery on the site.

Beergeeks features a rudimentary mobile site which will allow you to quickly look up as well as rate and review beers. We’ll gradually open up our data, time permitting, and plan to make all of our data available via an API.

Give us a shout and let us know what you love, what you hate, or what you can’t live without. Hit us with your feedback and ideas at Get Satisfaction, follow us on Twitter or fan us on Facebook.

And don’t forget to friend me up on Beergeeks while you’re at it :)

Joining Mozilla

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:31:00 -0700

Shortly after the Shizzow crew began ramping down our efforts, I began contracting with Mozilla, starting in the summer of 2009. I’ve mainly been performing PHP development for a number of projects, including the Crash Reporter, Creative Collective, Jetpack Gallery (now a part of Mozilla Add-Ons) and the Bespin Plugin Gallery. Today, I’m excited to say that I’m joining the Mozilla team as a full-time employee.

The Mozilla web dev team has been gradually migrating a number of their projects from PHP to Python, many of which use the Django framework. Although I’ll still be writing PHP, I’ll also be following their lead, and have started pitching in on one of their Django projects, the Input Reporter.

I’ve really enjoyed working with Mozilla, and am continually ~~impressed~~ blown away by the caliber of people that I work with. Each Mozillian is not only passionate about technology, but more importantly is passionate about doing the right thing for the web. All of us at Mozilla feel the calling to embrace and protect the open web, and I’m so grateful to be in a position where I can help.

Uncle Craig's Words to Live By

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:41:00 -0700

My dear Uncle Craig passed away on Friday from a valiant 10 month fight against brain cancer.

Damnit, I miss that guy.

Before he left us, he took the time to scribble down the words which he lived by every day of his life. He was an ornery kind of guy, but always stayed true to his heart, and when it was time to be serious he would open his mouth and dispense sage advice in simple language. And if he ever started a sentence with, “Son…”, you knew you better stop whatever it is you’re doing, listen and hang on to every single one of his words.

Below are each of the simplified words he lived by.

Be as nice to everyone that you come in contact with as you possibly can.
Some people are just assholes.
Keep a positive attitude.
Don’t worry about things until you have to.
Happiness can only be found within yourself.
Have fun.
Find humor in yourself.
Laugh hard regularly.
A bad time lasts only an instant but a good story lasts forever.
Say I love you everyday.
Appreciate the gifts you have been given.
Give something of yourself to others.
Appreciate everything that you have.
Vote!
Do what you do and do it better than everyone else.
You will touch more lives than you may imagine.
Be honest.
Be prompt.
Learn from your mistakes.
Learn from others mistakes.
Everyone makes their own luck.
There is no substitute for hard work.
I believe that there are only three things you can’t teach someone.
Never eat in a ta-ta bar.
Marriage is like buying a new car.
Follow your heart; it is usually smarter than your head.
Be a good listener.
Use credit cards as a last resort.
Never kick a sleeping dog.
Never compromise your principles.
Give others the first opportunity to correct their mistakes.
Take every problem you have to the lowest common denominator.
People only want two things from us; they want us to solve their problems, and the want to feel like they are important to us.
Make unnecessary follow-up phone calls.
Be objective.
Learn something new every day.
Know your limitations.
Mind your own business.

Announcing the Bespin Plugin Gallery

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:12:00 -0700

The past couple months at Mozilla I’ve been plugging away (sorry for the pun) at the Bespin Plugin Gallery, and we’ve announced today that it’s officially live. Yay!

But wait, let’s back up a sec. First we need to talk about Bespin, because most of the people I talk to don’t know about this Mozilla-sponsored project.

Bespin is a code editor that you can embed in any web page. It’s lightweight, easy to use code editor that’s also easy on the eyes. It’s named Bespin after the planet in Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back, where Cloud City can be found. After all, the idea for the project is to provide developers with the ability to write, save and publish code in the proverbial web-based cloud.

The plugin gallery is a repository of plug-ins that are developed for Bespin. As a user of Bespin, you may download a Python Syntax Highlighter or a Vim Command Mapping Tool, and install these plug-ins into your Bespin editor to easily customize your coding environment. To get started building plugins for Bespin, check out the Bespin Plugin Guide.

I had a lot of fun working with Kevin Dangoor on the project, and am grateful for the design work of Sean Martell and Craig Cook, as well as the help from Stephen Donner and the rest of the QA team.