Beck Tench, Director
for Innovation and Digital
Engagement at the Museum of Life and Science
in Durham, spoke to a full house at Refresh the Triangle at the Viget South office this week. Her presentation, "The Luxury of Contemplation: Why We Owe Ourselves Time To Reflect On Our Work" brought out developers, designers, and everyone inbetween - including a few new faces. Beck is a well known name here in Durham so I was excited to finally met her and hear what she had to say.
Her talk started with an introduction to her job at the Museum of Life and Science - one that many of us can envy. As she puts it in her Slideshare bio, she "studies and experiments with how visitors and staff
use technology to
plan, enhance and share their everyday lives.
" Part of her job is to evaluate what impact various technologies have on the Museum - for example, how much traffic a mommy blogger tweet might bring to the website or what type of blog post generates the most comments. She is given ample time and freedom to explore these questions, and has found it both rewarding and insightful. The process she uses to analyze her work follows six basic steps. They were:
- Ask a question.
- Identify resources to help you dig for the answer.
- Use tools you like to help you with the task. Make sure you enjoy it.
- Play to your strengths. Use the skills you are good at to make something tangible.
- Share your work with the world. Educate and get feedback & insights from others.
- Keep going - revise, compare, etc.
Beck walked us through four examples of her data mining and showed how each step helped her to get a better grasp on what the impact and outcome of her work really was. She emphasized how having this real, tangible data has helped her organization understand and embrace the importance of web technologies. Not only was her presentation beautifully illustrated, it was also unique and thought-provoking. We had some great discussions afterward. One point that struck a chord me was her encouragement to get over our fears of sharing rough or raw ideas. Most of the negativity we imagine (I don't have anything valuable to say, I'm not creative enough, People will see right through me) is self-created and will not come to pass. We should be ok with failure and at times even welcome it. Failing means we're experimenting, something that is essential for our industry.
A question she posed to the group was a quote from Richard Hamming, an American Mathemetician who worked on the Manhatten Project and later for Bell Labs. In the article "You and Your Research" he asks: What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not?
It's a tough question to answer, and I think we're all still thinking about what the big problems in our community really are. Once we begin to identify them, we can help solve them and in doing so advance our field. Lots to think about!
I really enjoyed Beck's talk and the conversations that followed us all the way to The Pinhook. If you're in the Durham area, you should come to the next Refresh meeting in March!
You can check out Beck's slides on Slideshare, and I suggest you do - it was one of the most visually interesting presentations I've seen in a while: http://www.slideshare.net/btench/luxury-of-contemplation
Viget is pleased to announce the recent launch of the redesigned www.ppsplus.com. For this Biloxi, MS-based client specializing in home health software, we created a structure that could effectively consolidate content from three existing sites. The new site includes content for audiences interested in purchasing a software product, seeking clinical education, and researching specialized home health consulting services.
PPS Plus is all about building personal relationships with their clients, so we made sure to include the human element in as many ways as possible. In the visual design, that meant choosing colors, imagery and fonts that communicate a personal touch. In the site structure, that meant providing lots of easy ways for customers to contact a PPS Plus representative online or by phone.
The scope of this project was a perfect fit for an ExpressionEngine CMS implementation, and our new method of building in EE made the development quick and simple, keeping us on time and on budget. So far, the new site is getting rave reviews from our friends at PPS Plus and their network of clients — and they're already seeing an uptick in social media engagement with their brand.
Congratulations, PPS Plus!
As the famed SXSW Interactive conference approaches we wanted to let you know that Viget Labs will be in attendance for yet another year. If you plan to attend, be sure and say hello to Ben Scofield, Doug Avery, and Brian Talbot from the Labs of which Ben and Brian will be talking about these delicious topics:
Continue reading "SXSWi 2010, Three Amigos, and Ficly"
Every day, we hear from hopeful applicants who want to join Team
Viget (
we’re hiring!). It’s a pleasure to read the
emails and review resumes. I love my job! But, every once and a while, I
have to shake my head at some of the ways people start their emails.
I’ll do a little compare and contrast for you … Here’s a list of the
actual salutations used by the ten people we hired most recently:
- Hi Brian
- Hi Brian
- Hi Emily
- Hey Brian
- Hello
- Hi
- Dear Viget Labs
- Hi Tom
- Hello
- Hi Emily
Here’s a sampling of salutations used by people we did not hire:
Continue reading "Studying Salutations"
As you know, Haiti was recently devastated by a 7.0 earthquake, followed by over two dozen 4.5 - 5.0 quakes (latest updates here). This blog post is just to give you some quick links to where you can help - we're not interested in site visits, and we won't be publicizing this post (except that it will probably get tweeted by our bot). However, we do have somewhat of a microphone in the form of a blog, and if you found yourself perusing our site or your RSS feed, we hope this will inspire you to help out in whatever way you can. Here are a few trustworthy NGOs accepting donations (while texting is a great feature, I believe some of those funds go to the cell carrier. If you're able, giving online is a bit more effective).
UPDATE
Our former client Razoo has implemented a grant matching campaign - their match capability is currently $12,300. There are dozens of non-profits to choose from (including most of those originally linked to below), so please check it out if you are able to give financially.
If you feel like spreading the word, your efforts would be best used by linking directly to one of the above Non-Profits, not this post.
In my last post, we looked back at Developer Day in 2009. All told, we're very happy with how the four events last year turned out. We think we can improve, however, so in 2010 we're looking to do more and do it better.
To start with, we're rebranding the event series. Developer Day was a good start, but it suffered from a few problems. Perhaps most importantly, it was a little too generic – there are all sorts of Developer Days (Google and Android, Apple, Facebook, and more), which made it hard to find content related to our particular event. Soon, we'll be changing to DevNation, which gives us both a shorter hashtag and builds something about community into the event name itself. (We'll be keeping the mission statement, so DevNation will still be a "low-cost, one-day, technology-agnostic, local event .")
In addition to the renaming, we'll be relaunching all of our associated web content – our Twitter account, website, and the like. As part of this, we'll be laying the groundwork for improved functionality and notifications, so if you've been desperate for ongoing information about our events, you'll be able to find it. One of our goals has always been to help grow cross-community bonds, and some of the new features we'll be launching will hopefully aid in that.
Names and websites are all well and good, of course, but the events themselves are still the foundation of the DevNation series. We've learned a lot from the four held this year, and we'll be testing just how well we absorbed those lessons as we expand to nine events in 2010.
View DevNation 2010 in a larger map
- January 30th - Austin, TX
- February 27th - Durham, NC
- April 3rd - Atlanta, GA
- May 22nd - Chicago, IL
- July 24th - San Francisco, CA
- July 31st - Portland, OR
- August 21st - Washington, DC
- September 18th - Philadelphia, PA
- October 23rd - Orlando, FL
(Some of these dates may change as we get closer to them, but we'll be confirming well in advance of each.)
We're very excited with the plans for DevNation in the coming year, and we hope you'll be able to join us at one of our stops – be sure to follow us at @developer_day for the latest news, and feel free to let us hear your comments and questions!
Last year, on this day, I told the story of Viget's incorporation on December 27, 1999. It explains how we can thank my dad, Viget's first developer, whom we all affectionately called Pop, for being able to say that our company was established in 1999. In that post I neglected to include a photo of Pop, so here's my favorite one (taken closer to 1979):
Continue reading "Ten Years"
We've said for years that Viget loves developers, and 2009 illustrated that more than ever. Together with Relevance (a top-notch technology company near our Durham office), we launched a series of events aimed squarely at the developer community: Developer Day.
We created Developer Day in order to fill a particular need. Regional (and larger) conferences are wonderful, but they have a couple of drawbacks: they're generally focused on a specific developer community, and they draw speakers and attendees from a large area. You can connect with a ton of interesting Rubyists at the Ruby Hoedown, for instance, but after the conference you all fly home. We wanted to create the sort of event where the connections you make on the day can be strengthened in the weeks and months afterward, where the attendees and speakers all live within an hour or two of each other. We also wanted to bridge the gap between various communities, since we're generally all dealing with similar sorts of problems.
With those things in mind, we came up with the idea of Developer Day - a low-cost, one-day, technology-agnostic, local series of events. We held the first in Durham on March 21st, with Andy Hunt keynoting and six speakers from Viget and Relevance. On May 30th, we then took the show to Viget's headquarters outside of DC, with our first non-Viget/Relevance local speakers and keynotes from Jay Virdy and Russ Olsen. After the success of our first two events, we decided to expand even further, so in August and October we went to Boston and Boulder, respectively, and put on a great show in each city. Each event had more great local speakers, and more fantastic keynotes (including Stu Halloway, John Resig, Chad Fowler, and Bruce Eckel)
There have been a number of fantastic talks over the past four events, on subjects including CSS3, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, .Net, Scala, functional programming, git, and more. We think there's more to do, however – more cross-community building to do, more great speakers to hear, and more hotspots of technical talent to visit, so our plans for 2010 are bigger and better than ever. Stay tuned for my next post to get a sneak peek!
Early on in Viget's history, a certain someone decided that sending out simple holiday cards wasn't all that creative. Fair enough. As a web shop, you'd think we'd therefore focus on some kind of interactive e-card. Not so. We make digital stuff all year long, after all, so we decided to change things up and make something decidedly non-digital to send to all our family and friends. It had to be something that the whole staff could help on and somehow hint of the Viget logo. That first year, we sent VigorBalm -- handmade lip balm packaged up to look like the Viget logo. It was awesome, and a tradition was born.
Continue reading "Happy Holidays. Have Some VigePops."
Yesterday, the great web educator Jeff Brown brought his class of 25 Damascus High School students to Viget's headquarters to see what it's like to work at a "real" web services company. We had fun showing off the office, chatting about our jobs, and giving lofty, (hopefully) inspiring advice about life and careers. I enjoyed sharing the Viget story and showing them around. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it, too.
We wanted to do more than just talk, though. To that end, Brian and Jackson walked the group through a user experience design exercise. Anjali explained our marketing services and gave a behind-the-scenes view of both Google Analytics and an AdWords campaign. Rob showed off his latest iPhone site design (the yet-to-be-launched new Pointless Corp. site). Owen, Trevor, and Blair shared some other work from Viget's design lab. "They were great," Blair said. "And it gave me great perspective on my own professional development. It was inspiring to have them around for the day."
Continue reading "The Best Field Trip Ever: Visiting Viget HQ"
