=Z – The Hard Way, LIVE! from equalszee on Vimeo.

so, full disclosure: i helped on the mixing of some of this album, mostly technical issues.  i also made the cover art.  and i yelled at zach for most of the two years he was working on the album to keep working on the album.  so i am pretty close to the creative process here, but to counter my disclosure, those of you who know me know that i pretty much have no problem telling people if something they did, are doing, or will do sucks.

all that being said, this album is pretty awesome.  it’s quick, it doesn’t take a track off (except for K over L, suck it zach), and it definitely brings something to the rock-pop conversation.  it’s too bad, because zach isn’t going to put that much effort into getting it out there so it might toil in obscurity, but you can easily help change that.  go download a couple tracks, share with your friends if you like it, and force zach to do something more than just passively put out music every 2 years.

one very good way to show people that the RIAA and its bully tactics have no place in the 21st century is to take advantage of good, free, home-made music and listen to it and share it and find it and promote it.  it’s also a great way to listen to modern rock-pop albums that are soaking in ’90s nostalgia (for example).

later this week i’ll recap sundance 2012, where i am now and where things are AWESOME.

the thing is the us government already signed a much worse law in to effect earlier this year.  the ndaa made it possible for the us government to arrest and indefinitely imprison american citizens without a trial.

how, how, how, how is this ok?  how did this not get giant, massive protests on the internet?

and how is gitmo still open?

and how are we, as in america, still torturing people?

sopa and pipa are bad, but holy shit there are all these things right now that are terrifyingly bad.  where are the adults?  the legacy of 9/11 is looking more and more like the cowardly response americans had to terrorism.  grow the fuck up and be adults.

anyway, sopa and pipa are terrible laws by terrible children who don’t understand what the fuck they are doing other than accepting checks from hollywood.  contact these children and tell them to grow up.  this is at least a start.

maybe 2012 is the year i turn niv.is into a tumblr.  tumblr > wordpress, you guys.

basically, do this in spotify: search for a song you want to hear. double click it. then look at your queue. you’ll see everything from your search results. ok, that kinda sucks – you just wanted to hear one song. so, try removing everything else from the queue. oh wait, you can’t.

that’s right, everything in the search results just stays there forever. i’m not sure if there’s anything more to say about it. it’s fucking maddening. spotify’s entire raison d’etre is to let you play a song you WANT to hear, but then it throws a bunch of other shit at you without giving you any option to get rid of it?

i’m actually getting madder by the second just thinking about how fucking stupid it is. c’mon spotify, you guys are better than this.

p.s. i live in dc now and jen and i broke up and i hate everything and yay 2012.

• not a good cultural fit
• we like you, but we can’t proceed because of { other applicants , no reason given }
• hiring freeze!
• no response (which i guess is kind of a response)

the response i haven’t received, one that i think would help me out the most, would be one that indicated why i was being passed on – we liked you but we thought you lacked X. to be fair, one company, art.sy, did give that kind of feedback, though unfortunately it was of the “you don’t have enough experience” variety, which is a bit harder for me to remedy in the short-term. at least it was a response.

what i’m finding, in general, is that new york tech startups seem to be pretty snobby in what they want from a candidate. or maybe snobby isn’t the right word – specific, maybe? where i’m sitting, i know php and i know python lightly and i’ve worked with mvc frameworks and i’ve built interesting things – i have no concerns that i’d be able to pick up django or rails or whatever, and there’s no question that i’d be value-add to these companies. however, i think my lack of professional experience with rails/django/whatever the newest technology is leading to a lot of places passing on me without having the balls to at least say “well we wish you had 3 years of django experience” because that’s kind of a stupid, bullshit reason to not hire me (or at least from my biased perspective it is).

when i ask for specific feedback, i usually get silence. so i have no choice but to keep looking, but i’m getting pretty annoyed and tired of this whole process and i don’t know what to do about it. listen, rails doesn’t scale, assholes. django is fine, but really, half of you chose django at random. mvc is great, and i get that, so test me on mvc principles if you think i don’t ‘get’ django.

godfuckingdammit would someone interview me in a way that actually seems like they want to see if i know anything rather than fucking comparing my resume and what i say against some invisible checklist?

maybe there’s an opportunity here.

i’ll wait while you process that sentence.

ok, so you can find the track and the cover art below. tell me what you think.

Possibilities (8:14)

202 entries

for some background, Pick Six is a daily fantasy baseball game. there are six positions to fill – catcher, corner infield (1st or 3rd base), middle infield (2nd base or shortstop), outfield, starting pitcher, and relief pitcher. you get a budget of $120 which you can’t go over, and every player is assigned a value. fill out your lineup, stay under budget, and your players get (or lose) points based on their production on the day. there are some more nuances, but that’s the basic overview – $120, 6 positions, fill all your positions without going over budget, unlock achievements and beat your friends.

207 entries

Pick Six was a pretty quick, iterative process. the initial launch had an all-time leaderboard and the ability to pick your team. i quickly added more information around the player selection process (opposing pitcher, batter and pitcher handedness, etc). it became clear however that focusing on the all-time leaderboard was preventing new users from playing, so i changed all the leaderboards to focus on smaller time segments first (daily, then weekly, then all-time).

still 207 entries

the other big portion of feedback has been around the social interactions of the game. i started by adding the ability to follow other users, so you can build your own personal leaderboard. while this has been good, it hasn’t been great – users still can’t communicate with each other on the site, and it’s not quite satisfying enough to beat your friends. not just yet, at least.

208 entries

achievements have been another fun thing for people to look at, and feedback led directly to a few of the more clever achievements, such as the rays achievement (spend $80 or less and win the day) and the mariners achievement (spend $110+ and come in last place). while i don’t want the number of achievements to get overwhelming, i think there is still some room to add some interesting achievements to both encourage users to accomplish certain tasks and to reward users for completing otherwise monotonous tasks.

still 208 entries

i would say 80% of what i’ve added since launch has been at the suggestion of users or at least reinforced by users. followers and achievements were kicking around in my head before, but clarity on how to implement these features came directly from feedback. something as subtle as changing around what leaderboards are emphasized wouldn’t have been on my radar had it not been for user feedback. so, i’ll say what everyone else in the startup world says, which is “listen to your users”.

210 entries

but how do you find out what your users want? this is really the interesting question to me. aaron has been encouraging me to do more user surveys and a/b testing, so users can show me what they want via their browser. while i cannot argue with those methods at all, they both seem a bit… dry to me. my approach has been slightly different – i’ve made myself available, via twitter, email, fangraphs chats, and any other method i can imagine. by virtue of making myself available, users reach out to me when they have issues or new ideas on their own. i remember a long time ago reading that for every 1 person who bothers to leave a comment or emails you or whatever, there are probably 10+ more users who would agree with that person but just didn’t email you. the ratio might even be higher now. so, if 2-3 people agree on a way to move forward, odds are that your user base is going to be pretty happy with you when you implement the new feature.

still 210 entries

the other thing to remember is that users don’t always know what they want. this is why responses to open-ended questions in surveys should be taken with a grain of salt, i think. you’ll get some gems, but you’ll also get a lot of people who haven’t really given thought to your product on the same level you are thinking about your product. you can’t blame users for that, it’s pretty understandable behavior. however, sometimes you’re going to (as aaron just told me in an email) go with your gut rather than listen 100% to your users. it’s a fun balance, i guess. except it isn’t that fun sometimes.

212 entries

after 750+ words about everything and nothing, i think its time to go make Pick Six more social. after all, it is what my users (who have thought about it enough) (think they) want, kind of.

• launched a second fantasy baseball game, entitled ottoneu Pick Six
• resolved a number of issues with ottoneu Fantasy Baseball and got the game in a state where it does not need my attention on a day-to-day basis.
• realized I was going to run out of money
• secured part-time (3 days a week) employment
• had all the requisite ups and downs for being a single-person start-up in the valley

there’s almost too much to write about just from those points alone, so for now i’ll focus on the improvements i wanted to make from my last post, and hopefully will get to the rest of the talking points over the course of this week.

first improvement: take a run and shower to start my day. nope. i haven’t even gotten better at focusing on myself before focusing on ottoneu in the morning. still need to fix this.

second improvement: getting out of the apartment. the part-time work is going to be a big factor in improving this. I plan on getting to the office around 9:30am 5 days a week and work from san mateo the rest of the day about 3 days a week. i know the working out of the apartment thing cannot last, so this will be a welcome change.

third improvement: computer-free time before bed. getting better at both coding less immediately before bed and balancing computer time and computer-free time in general. as predicted, once the game started running itself, this became a lot easier to deal with.

i have a massive rant against silicon valley, an outline on Pick Six and how i got it from concept to launch in 2 weeks (and launch to 250+ daily users in 2 weeks), and some background about my new part-time gig all floating around in my head right now, but i think they will have to wait for later this week. for now, its time to add some more features to Pick Six before it gets too late.