36 days. 0 hours. 30 minutes. 33 seconds. That’s how long it took from crazy idea blog post to offer letters.

I was inspired by Ryan Davis’ blog post a few years ago that (secretly) announced that he, Eric Hodel, Aaron Patterson and John Barnette were available for hire. They didn’t last long. 8:05:24:52 long.

Simply put, I said:

I’ve put together a cross-functional product team of technical people. We’re available for hire as a package deal.

The team includes:

• Team Lead / Product Manager (Me)
• Brand and UI Designer (Photoshop / Illustrator)
• Front End Developer (HTML / CSS)
• iOS / Ruby Programmer
• JavaScript / Ruby Programmer

I didn’t name names. And that was a turn off for some potential enquirers. But I couldn’t yet. Two of them still had jobs. I didn’t name names then, but I can now.

Me

Software Engineering Manager

Heather Peterson

UI/UX Designer

Chad Crissman

Front End Software Engineer

Jessica Suttles

Software Engineer

Bookis Smuin

Software Engineer

I’ve worked with all four people in the past few years. They’re all top notch. I couldn’t be happier to call them my team. This will be the first time that I’m going to leading people, instead of pushing pixels, angle brackets or codes. I’m excited for the next new challenge.

We started from a ridiculous premise: let’s pick our coworkers first. And from there: let’s pick the role we’ll fill as a team. I shopped us around as a package deal with the goal building a new product from scratch as a team of us five.

A little over a month after that blog post, we were signed on to start in September at G5 to do just that.

To the next adventure…

Aaron Patterson is a super rad dude.

He loves mushroom hunting. His pointy stick of choice is vim. He speaks Japanese. He hangs out with Eric Hodel, Ryan Davis and John Barnette at Seattle.rb all the time. He eats weird food. He lives in sunny Seattle, Washington in these United States of America.

He writes awesomely awesome Ruby software, like Nokogiri, Mechanize and Johnson. He’s a core contributor to Ruby, Rails and the SQLite gem. And he’s made some software that’s, uh… more differently awesome? He even has a double mustache which might be turning into a triple mustache.

Aaron does lots of good for the Ruby community. One time at RubyConf he got everyone of the attendees a Poken. How cool is that? Recently, Chad and Kelly Jeanne Fowler gave him the gift of a box of Twinkies, just for being so great. Really, who doesn’t love Aaron Patterson? If you don’t know the guy, you should make an effort to meet him. He’s aces.

But Aaron has a problem. There’s only one of him. He has lots of ideas for useful, totally bodacious libraries that he’d like to write, but doesn’t have time to do them all. He needs an intern. Finding an intern takes time and effort though. So, I’m helping him by sussing out a great intern.

Intern Requirements

You want to do this. Trust me. It’ll be the best thing for your career, clothing style and love life. You’d get mentorship from Aaron, design and code reviews, and many, many Knowledge Bombs™. You don’t have to be in Seattle, but it’d be an extra bonus. Remote totally works, too. You need to be a Ruby programmer. You need to not be a total newb. You must having a willingness to learn, take direction and be receptive to feedback. It wouldn’t hurt if you think funny hats are funny.

If you’re interested and you’ve got what it takes to be @tenderlove’s trusty sidekick, email me (veganstraightedge@gmail.com) or toot at me (@veganstraightedge). Include your blog, Twitter and GitHub URLs.

I’ve put together a cross-functional product team of technical people. We’re available for hire as a package deal.

The team includes:

• Team Lead / Product Manager (Me)
• Brand and UI Designer (Photoshop / Illustrator)
• Front End Developer (HTML / CSS)
• iOS / Ruby Programmer
• JavaScript / Ruby Programmer

I can’t name names as some of the team still have jobs, but if you know me you probably know some or all of them. You know me and my work. They’re all top notch at what they do.

You can hire us in to build a product that you already have planned or just set us loose. (We have a whole list of product ideas that we’d like to build.) We’re looking for full-time not contract work.

Email or call me.

J-P Stacey posted up a modified version of AA’s 12 Step program about backing up your data.

8. We have made a list of all the files we have lost, and have become accepting of the fact that we never Backed Shit Up and it was our fault.
9. We have suffered for our loss of such data wherever unavoidable, except when we happened to have Written Shit Down on the off chance as well.
10. We continue to take a filesystem inventory and when we forget to Back Some Shit Up promptly admit it.

Jeffrey Zeldman and Tantek Çelik (amongst other very smart people) had a conversation across several media and sites about owning your data.

Here’s the cliff notes / reading order. It’s totally worth sifting through it all.

• Tom Henrich captured a fair bit of the Twitter conversation.

  technophilia by tom henrich”)

• Jeffrey Zeldman’s post had some great comments as follow up
• And then Tantek wrote a response on his site

Just a few of the many, many highlights.

Glenda-B! tweeted—

@zeldman @t Totally neurotic but big data is 3.0. So much unstructured data & I give my content to the void, but I can't query against it?

Jeffrey Zeldman—

Twitter needs to do a better job of storing its data. It probably needs to open source and share the data across multiple servers not connected to Twitter.com. LOCKSS: Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.

Tom Sparks—

This issue becomes more and more important as security tightens in the US and as networked social services become more and more important. I am hoping diaspora or a similar solution becomes viable in the near future.

If smaller organizations can run their own social network platforms and if those platforms can be linked between organisations, that would be a WIN. Groups or super individuals could control their own data and share it in the ways they find most useful.

Tom Henrich—

I backup my tweets not because I'm concerned that the historians of the future will be denied the benefits of access to them, but so that I can more easily refer back to them if there was something I wanted to look up. You noted Twitter's search has some pretty extreme limitations, and that's not acceptable to me.

Tantek Çelik again on his site—

Simply copying from these shared social services still leaves you vulnerable to their flakiness, poor auto-shortening of links, unscalability, downtime, maintenance, database failures, and acquisitions.

That's why I don't post to other services and copy to my site.

That's not what I'm doing.

Tantek:

I'm not copying from Twitter. I'm syndicating and copying to Twitter. As I said, Twitter is the copy.

There's a big difference. When Twitter goes down, I can keep posting, and my updates still go to the other destinations that take/share updates, e.g. Google Buzz, Identi.ca, Friendfeed, and whatever other service(s) might come along to replace them all. I'm not beholden to Twitter's stability/downtime - the copies there will appear when Twitter returns from such outages.

If your data is vulnerable to some social sharing services' whims or flakiness - you don't own your data - they do (their terms of service even says - they can do as they please with your content, with Flickr as perhaps the only exception).

Tantek’s conclusion:

Your site should be the source and hub for everything you post online. This doesn't exist yet, it's a forward looking vision, and I and others are hard at work building it. It's the future of the indie web.