go bold

I’ve been having a ton of fun lately playing with ifttt, a service that lets you easily glue together different web services you use / rely on every day. If you remember Yahoo Pipes (wiki), ifttt is based off the same ideas – but is much easier to approach, think about, and use. There are a couple of other ifttt flow blog posts around, but my favorite blog entries are the ones that show instead of tell – so, here we go:

The favorite use I found for it so far is my Game of Thrones task – I love The Atlantic‘s coverage but really couldn’t care less about their other Entertainment articles, and they don’t have category-specific RSS feeds. This way, I get things delivered straight to my inbox!

And, in the interest of keeping my inbox relevant, I have higher-frequency / immediate-action-required tasks tied to my GTalk, which makes sure that I can react quickly.

(I’ve noticed that more of my tasks are tied around consumption/notification rather than production. The other blog posts I’ve linked to above seem to tend toward duplicating/publishing content elsewhere, which is an interesting difference.)

The site is really nicely designed and is genuinely fun to use. Get on the invite list and start creating – I’m excited to see what other fun uses I find.

Note: Hah, if you look closely, my Rent reminder, the second task from the bottom has never fired. Clearly, the service is still in beta. I still use Resnooze for scheduled email reminders about things, but am looking forward to ifttt stabilizing enough for me to switch!

In tech and the startup world, there are tons of options – new startups spring up every day with “the next big thing” – or “the ____ killer,” or “____ for [insert platform here],” or “____ meets ____, AGGREGATED!!”

So when something really cool comes around – it seems to make sense to want to jump on board and share in their (or your expectation of their) success. But when you know little about the actual team you’d be working on, and conventional wisdom seems to put “the people” at the top of the list when considering school / workplaces / environments in general, how do things play out?

I like to think that good people want exciting projects. A good developer wants stimulating work, and once put in an environment with that stimulus taken away (either by a boring project or, for example, being bought out by a company which stifles the exciting parts), they’ll find a new place to play out their cool ideas.

So I think instead of worrying whether product.good > people.good or people.good > product.good… I’ll stick with product.good implies people.good (with the converse unfortunately not always being true, without good management / vision / etc). Here’s to the future.