Tien’s blog

Just shelled out a stack of greenbucks for the core of the site: a social networking platform + 1 year of hosting from the developer who put it together.

“Platform” is probably a little generous.  It’s Drupal plus a collection of 79 modules, many of which look hastily slapped in there, that together can potentially form the core of a social networking platform.  I didn’t buy it as a turnkey social network; I bought it primarily as a timesaving measure, and (more importantly) to get access to the expertise of the developer who created it.  He’s going to be helping us translate the requirements into a development strategy.  This is exactly the expertise I needed.

So Ron (the developer) is putting together the modules on the server, and will finish it by end of day tomorrow, at which point I will start configuring the content types.  My goal is to have some sort of demo available in two months - even if it isn’t pretty - so we can show it to potential donors.  And I know more or less what content types and fields are going to be required, so I can set those up in advance of the UI design.

It’s hard to believe that this project is only 16 days old - I just looked back and Claudia got in touch with me on the 19th of August.  We’ve made tremendous progress in a very short period of time.  This is encouraging, especially since there is so much more still left to do.

I was chatting with Kris Bruland (creator/owner of Handweaving.net) at lunchtime today and he mentioned that Handweaving.net gets 10,000 hits a day.  On a slow day.

This amazes me.  I had been thinking on a fairly small scale, like about 5,000 active users and an overall registered user base of about 30,000 users, if we were lucky.  That’s the subscription size of Handwoven.  But it looks like the weaving community is way, way, bigger than that…so there is much more potential than I had originally thought.  Whether we can capture it (especially with the international community) is another matter…but there are apparently more weavers between Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than were dreamt of in my philosophy.

Kris also said that integration with Handweaving.net shouldn’t be too hard, and offered to help our developer(s) with it if and when we got to that point - great news.  I’ll keep it in mind.

Spent last night disassembling Lady Di (my Leclerc Diana, the loom I was using before I bought the AVL) for shipment to New Mexico.  It wasn’t difficult, although the process of labeling every single part and bagging up all the screws in a bazillion different ziplock baggies did get a bit tedious.  Now I just have to figure out how to fit her back into her custom crate, which will be a bit of a challenge as I stupidly did not take photos when I unpacked her.  (Or rather, I remember taking photos but have been unable to find the files ANYWHERE.)  That will occupy another night or two, following which I have to figure out how to get the crate to the shipper; it won’t fit in my Prius unless I lay it flat, which I’d rather not.  It’s a bother, but it will be a relief to have the “second loom” out of the living room.

I have not, however, been idle on the site.  I got in touch with a Drupal developer yesterday who has a generic social networking site assembled out of 79(!) Drupal modules, and is willing to sell it to me for $500.  It comes with advice on setup and an evaluation/recommendation on the requirements once Marian (our user experience designer volunteer) completes them, which alone would be worth $500; so I think I’ll spring for it.  I’m still playing with the system, though - he has an evaluation version set up on his site so I have been playing around with configuring it and learning more about Drupal in the process.  I expect to be messing with it for another day or so before making a decision.

This prepackaged site will need extensive customization, of course, but it will save me some weeks of development, and it’s worth it to have an experienced developer on tap.

I’ve ordered two books from Amazon.  One is on developing themes for Drupal 5 - basically, customizing the user interface - and the other was recommended by Casey from Ravelry in his blog: Designing for the Social Web.  The latter sounds particularly interesting, and will supplement my understanding of social networks.  i spent four months working for a social networking company, but that’s not enough to develop real expertise.

I have also been investigating funding (which is mostly Claudia’s department, but I have one or two connections).  I think I can raise about $2500 through a connection with a friend, which will give us some wiggle room to hire lawyers and developers.  Claudia is investigating other sources of funds as well.  We anticipate doing a general appeal to the handweaving community to donate “cash or stash” - either money (which would of course be easiest/best) or donations of salable items that we can auction or sell off to raise money.  We hope this will raise some additional funds.

Finally, I am starting to investigate hosting services.  My current hosting service will not do for a larger-scale site; it’s targeted at small sites and smaller businesses.  I have no clue who the usual suspects are for hosting a medium-size social network, so am starting to ask around for recommendations.  if you have suggestions, please let me know.

Nothing terribly dramatic, but then progress sometimes isn’t.

Plan for the next few days:

• finish evaluating the social network Drupal package
• Try to understand Views, Panels, and Themes
• Start prototyping the project pages

Claudia and I spent some time talking this morning and agreed that “Weavolution” is the best name for the site.  It has elements of “revolution” and “evolution” - which is what we’re trying to do, combining weaving with Web 2.0.  Perhaps just as important, it’s an unusual, memorable name that isn’t already used for something else, making it strongly trademarkable.  WeavingVillage would likely run us into difficulties with existing shops or guilds, and be difficult to defend if we want to trademark it later.

So “Weavolution” it is!

Spent almost three hours this morning going through lists and lists of modules in Drupal, getting ideas for possible features and a better understanding of how the system works.  It’s, um, complicated.  But I’m starting to understand how the system thinks.  It’s clearly going to be a steep learning curve, though, and I have a phone call scheduled with a Drupal consultant on Tuesday morning.  I’m going to propose that he analyze our requirements (after they’ve been written) and tell me what can be done, what will have to be custom, and which modules I’ll need to install.  There are a couple of areas where I’m really not sure what I’m proposing is possible, and having an expert answer will save me a lot of time and effort.

After three hours immersed in Drupal, I spent another two hours on the phone with Claudia and other people about the website, then took the rest of the day “off”.  Or semi-off.  I wound up spending a good chunk of it taking  one of my cats to the vet for what I devoutly hope is a minor medical problem.  Her bloodwork came back normal, so I’m hoping she just ate a bug or something.  She’s been throwing up off and on for the last few days, and has had reduced appetite - so they gave her an injection of Pepcid and an IV drip for her dehydration, and sent her home.

Tomorrow Mike and I are going for another longish bike ride, about 55 miles, to Los Gatos and back.  It’s our usual route (with the usual stop at Fleur de Cocoa for a cup of the world’s best hot chocolate and some award-winning (incredibly yummy) pastries).  However, we’re taking a tough, very hilly route back, so it’ll be harder than usual.  Mike is signed up to do his first cycling century (100+ mile) ride on October 18, so it’s time to start doing longer rides.  I’ll be riding Foxy’s Fall Century along with him, but since he rides so much faster than me I’m going to do the metric (100 km, ~60 mile) century.  I figure if I do 60 miles and he does 100, we should finish around the same time.  (He’s not actually twice as fast as me, but I like to linger in rest stops and he doesn’t.)

I haven’t decided whether to ride AIDS Lifecycle again next year or not.  All the possible forces of reason suggest that it would be REALLY REALLY STUPID to try training for a 545-mile, 7-day bicycle ride while working full time and trying to get this website out the door (not to mention designing and sewing 7 different tutu-outfits to ride in) - but it’s such FUN that I’m still thinking about it.  I think I will probably register later this month and then decide later whether I really want to/have time to ride.  I don’t really need to sleep, do I?

I have now tasted my way through virtually all the chocolate bars I got from Chocolate Covered.  While some of the flavors were uninteresting and some were just plain weird,  “Nectar of the Gods” (red wine + raisins), “chamomile & hibiscus”, and “mango brazilnut” got moderate to good marks from me.  I think that for this year’s chocolates, my “oddball flavor” is going to be chrysanthemum tea with licorice root, and I will probably try “port wine + raisins” to see if that works better than port alone.  I may also try chocolate covered mango, but that may be a little too radical.  I might try making a truffle with dried mango.

I may also try passionfruit + white chocolate.  I have to make 60+ pounds of chocolate this year to send to all my AIDS Lifecycle sponsors - I had 67 sponsors this year (and raised over $6800 for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, hurray!) - so I think I will have room to try more unusual flavors.  Not everyone will get everything, but I think that will be OK.

Had dinner with a friend who’s a high-tech executive (marketing and business development mostly), and he gave me two very good pieces of advice:

(1) don’t make it more complicated than it has to be

(2) do things only when you need to have them done: not everything has to be done at once.

This is good advice, especially since I was feeling a little overwhelmed at the magnitude of the task.  So I sat down and brainstormed a list of all the tasks ahead of us - design and development, marketing, legal, business.  Then I mentally split them out into phases - prototype, design, development, testing, release.

What I’ve realized is that we are in the prototype phase, with maybe a little bit of design.  We’re not in development yet, meaning I not only don’t have to, but shouldn’t, be working on implementing the site.  One of our volunteers is a user experience designer and has offered to write up requirements for the site.  Until she does, no development can really take place - so I should quit feeling the pressure to code everything up NOW.  Right now is a time to relax, learn Drupal, prototype some of the site components that I know are going to be needed, and basically play around with the system, learning its ins and outs.  So I am doing precisely that.  I have created a Drupal test site and am working my way through the tutorials from the Drupal.org website, getting a feel for what it does and doesn’t do.

Other things that don’t need to be done right this very moment include things like incorporating, legal stuff, marketing stuff, etc.  Those can all be done once we’re closer to launch.

So right now, the three important items are:

1. Design the user flow and the feature content (Marian)
2. Learn Drupal and prototype known features (me)
3. Research funding sources (Claudia)

There!  That’s easy to manage.

In other news:

• The wood shop came back with a quote of $260 to make three not-very-complicated pieces of wood for my back beam.  I don’t think so.  I got in touch with a woodworking shop in Sunnyvale that offers private lessons (which can also be help with your own projects).  At $60/hr, I can get it done significantly cheaper than the woodworking shop would manage, plus I get the fun of playing with power tools!  (Don’t worry, I will remember to tie my hair back and keep random appendages out of the table saw.)
• I have signed up for an event with Ladies who Launch - an incubator targeted at women entrepreneurs.  The keynote speaker is the co-founder of Ning, a build-your-own social network startup!  I looked at Ning early on but decided not to use it as it doesn’t have the features needed to do project notebooks (the heart of Ravelry).  But it would be really interesting to see what she has to say about building social networks.  I am considering their incubator as well.
• I discovered a new chocolate shop, Chocolate Covered, in San Francisco!  I was going for dinner with some friends and happened to pass the shop.  I stopped in out of curiosity, not expecting much - most chocolate shops are pretty low-end - but this one was spectacular!  They had an entire wall full of different kinds of chocolate bars, all very high grade chocolate - I was amazed.  I spent some time talking to the proprietor, and bought a collection of very unusual flavors - from bacon (tastes surprisingly good! I liked it a lot) to beer to “tiger nut” (whatever that is) to poppyseed-and-cherry.  I’m going to taste them this weekend.  More truffle ideas!

Much progress on many fronts over the last two days:

• I posted to WeaveTech yesterday looking for assistance with the social networking site.  Several people volunteered to donate time, skills, and donations (mostly items to be sold to raise cash).  Other people gave detailed feedback on what they’d like to see, advice on business setup, and all sorts of things.  Of course, other people grumbled about the uselessness of the whole idea, but that’s fine: they’re not my audience.  There are enough people in the weavers’ group on Ravelry that I think the idea is viable.
• Someone pointed out that we need legal advice for the website before we set it up.  Makes sense to me; I’ve added a cheap-but-good internet/intellectual property attorney to my “to-do” list.  Fortunately we don’t need it until we’re fairly close to going “live”.  But it will definitely add substantial expense.  I can play developer, but I can’t pass for a lawyer even on TV.
• Got some ideas on where to get grants for funding, courtesy of Ruth, the listmom for WeaveTech.  Claudia (the business side of this project) is going to investigate further.  This is a Good Thing - I can fund the development side out of my own pocket (as long as it doesn’t get too expensive) but things like legal advice, incorporation paperwork, etc. have to be paid for and probably won’t come cheap.  So if we can get grants that will make our lives easier.
• Made some progress with Drupal.  I’ve downloaded Drupal 5.10 to my laptop and to the website, and have been playing around with configuring user roles and permissions.  I’m a long way from being able to sing arias, but I’m working through the tutorials and learning to play single notes.  In time, I’ll be able to belt out Wagner with the best of them.
• I have also sent out feelers to two Drupal consultants, asking if they can help architect the system.  Tell me what modules I need to implement which functionality, stand back, and watch me go.  A lot of Drupal website building is figuring out what modules are required and how to configure them; give me that information and watch me go!
• Packed off the proto-functional spec to two volunteers, one a user interaction designer and one a systems engineer.  Hoping they can help me build out the spec and make it easier to understand, build a robust development/upload process, and design a workflow that will make the site a joy to use.
• Finally, I have scheduled lunch with an entrepreneur friend of mine (the CEO of Balsam Hill, where I was contracting for a couple months this year), and am going to pick his brains about building a startup, and particularly building an Internet-based startup.  I’m also hoping his Rolodex includes other people who might advise us.

For two days, that’s not bad progress.

There are still a host of other things I need to do - finish spec’ing out the site, create a project plan, do more Drupal research, figure out how to coordinate volunteers, etc. - but they can wait until tomorrow.

I also got my sectional beam off to the woodworkers, and am waiting for a quote.  They’re going to replace the three wood sections around the metal core with thicker sections (to make the groove bigger).  It will probably take them a week or so, following which I can (finally!) get back to this doubleweave project.

I must say, I’m really enjoying this project so far.  It has many of the facets that appeal to me - coordinating lots of very different things, networking, and starting something new.  And being creative, of course.  It’s very challenging, and also lots of FUN!

Off to play with Drupal some more…

In the last two days I’ve written 13 pages of specs for the social network project (don’t look too impressed: two of those pages are the table of contents!).  There are still a lot of gaps but the basic framework is starting to take shape.

There are six basic kinds of “objects” (information-collections, or (I think) nodes in Drupal) in the site.  They are:

• profiles (of registered users)
• galleries (of projects belonging to a particular user or group)
• projects (each project belongs to a registered user, and can (optionally) be associated with a group)
• yarns (with all the data of the associated yarn)
• patterns/drafts (ditto)
• user group profiles
• (possibly) looms

These are the basic building blocks (’nodes” in Drupal, I think) and will be able to link to each other and be cross-referenced, as in Ravelry.

Yarn and patterns will be part of a “database”, that is to say you can “link to” a yarn or pattern as you would with Ravelry, thus enabling users to find all projects using a particular pattern/draft (or a particular yarn) quickly.  I am not yet certain whether this will fly (it relies on search capabilities that I”m not sure exist in Drupal).  But the advantages of having a yarn database, instead of having users enter the yarn information every time, are twofold: (1) searching is better and more reliable, since you don’t have to worry about losing projects with typos in the yarn name, and (2) it makes the process of entering yarn information much less tedious, by autopopulating your yarn information once you select a yarn.

As I’ve said, I’m not sure whether I can implement this in Drupal, but I’ll give it a try.  I want a similar database for patterns, and also possibly (not sure yet - this may be a future feature) for looms.

In addition to that, there will also be forums - one main set of forums with volunteer moderators, plus a forum for each group.  Forums are easily set up in Drupal, so this shouldn’t take long.

Functionality in addition to the core functionality listed above will include:

• (nice to have) the ability to tag other people’s work as “favorites”
• (nice to have) the ability to message other users
• (nice to have) individual user blogs

That’s it for now.  I realize that Ravelry has lots of other cool features, but this is already a (highly!) ambitious project for a Drupal novice.  I arrived at this by cutting down everything I could think of until I reached the point where I couldn’t cut further.  Then I added a few “free” (easy-to-implement) features back in, like groups, forums, and possibly user blogs.

Later this morning I will go see someone about enlarging my sectional beam so I can back to work on doubleweave.  This social network project is interesting (and extremely exciting!), but I’m starting to suffer weaving withdrawal and could really stand to get my hands on some yarn!

I am stymied in my attempts to weave doubleweave until I can get the wood pieces to enlarge my sectional beam, so I am working on other projects for the time being.  (I have called a woodworker about it, but they haven’t called me back yet; I’ll do another round of phone calls on Monday.)

I have done some more investigation into Drupal, and am frustrated by the steep learning curve and the poor documentation of most of the modules.  So I have found myself a Drupal expert who will go through my specs and translate them into Drupal architecture, give me a list of modules to use and some basic instructions, and let me work on it from there.  She isn’t too expensive, which is good, since this is a pro bono project on my part and my budget for it is strictly limited.  This is exactly the kind of help I need!

Of course, the downside is that now I have to write specs.  This is a fairly complex project, on par with the contract job I did for Balsam Hill.  The spec for that site is 20-30 pages long, and there are at least 10-15 pages of wireframes.  Not un-do-able, just takes time.  So I better get to work on it.  I need Visio and am working on buying it through a friend who is a full-time student (academic pricing).  Meanwhile it’s pen, paper, and use cases.  Not the most exciting thing to do, but (speaking as a professional project manager here) if you don’t have a concrete idea of what you want to build, you’re doomed.

Mike and I are going on a long ride today, 50-60 miles, but after that I hope to get to work.

In other news, I thought of an interesting idea for weaving.  Take a machine knitted blank (rectangle of knitted fabric), dye it, and then use it in weaving.  If you time it so that the unraveled yarn in each row is the same as the length of the weft for each row, you could conceivably get painted-weft effects that would be really neat.

As with everything under the sun, however, this idea is not original.  There’s a woman in the East Bay doing just that, and offering custom knitted blanks for sale.  This intrigues me; I’d like to pursue it further, but I should live so long as to do everything I’d like to do.  I’m back-burnering it for now, but keeping it on tap should I decide to do interesting warp-and-weft painted effects.  Painted horizontal stripes!  Now that’s a cool idea.

So many cool things to do, so little time!

Finally, I have received and accepted a job offer from Electrotank, and given notice at my old company.  What a relief!  I will start there in two weeks.

Claudia and I have been playing around with domain names for the weavers’ social network.  So far the ones we like are:

• warpnweave
• weavingvillage
• weavolution
• weavinguniverse

Which of those is your favorite?  Any other suggestions?

Peg wrote an interesting post on specialization in her blog yesterday, that got me to thinking.  (I should preface this by saying that my post has very little to do with her post, which is all about specialization and artistry, except the title.)

I’m a generalist, and always have been.  It was an major source of frustration to me for many years, as people advised me (not unreasonably) to settle down and specialize in something so I could achieve excellence (and prominence) in something rather than dabbling in lots of different things.  But I’ve always had a strong attraction for the new and exciting, such that when something else new and exciting came along, I always went diving after it to explore.  Some things I left behind permanently, some just for awhile - but I have never been able to focus on one thing for more than about six months at a time.  Always I have several different, ever-changing, irons in the fire.

This is true for me career-wise, too.  I’ve done project management for nine years, but have always striven to combine it with something else interesting - and I chose project management because it allows me to touch on many different disciplines.  Some people specialize in project management in a particular industry; I’ve always found that boring.  The end result is that where most of my friends have moved into management, I’m still an individual contributor.  This bothered me a lot until I realized that I simply wasn’t interested in management.  Safe, settled things are simply not in my nature.

On the other hand, there are advantages in generalization.  I am of the firm belief that knowledge in one discipline enriches the others - sometimes only marginally, as in chocolates and textiles, sometimes closely, like dyeing and weaving.  Sometimes there are other forms of cross-pollination, like my social network for weavers, which draws on software engineering to benefit weaving.  Career-wise, having a diverse resume makes me eligible for many different positions, especially those tricky-to-fill positions that require multidisciplinary experience.

And some things intrinsically require cross-disciplinary knowledge, for which a generalist is needed.  My ability to create a social networking site for weavers more or less on my own draws from experience and knowledge in social networking, UI design, software engineering, and weaving.  I happen to have those because I am a generalist - and thus the best person for this particular job.

But debating the practical merits of being a generalist is like debating the merit of abstract mathematics.  The truth is that I’m a generalist because that’s what makes me happy, and it needs no more reason than that.

Secondarily, the fact that I love being a generalist makes me good at it.  I pick up different disciplines very quickly, and I’m quick to adapt a thought-pattern from one discipline and apply it to another.  I love to explore, and I’m loath to settle down.  My belief is that nature, and love, trumps talent: no matter how much talent you have in a field, if you don’t enjoy it you will not achieve excellence in it.  Of course loving a field does not mean you will have talent in it - there are plenty of passionate but mediocre writers, cyclists, etc. out there - but true excellence only comes when love meets talent.  And excellence, in whatever, form, is worth pursuing.

G.H. Hardy perhaps wrote it best, in his excellent book A Mathematician’s Apology:

A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions.  The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing; and the second is why he does it, whatever its value may be.  The first question is often very difficult, and the answer very discouraging, but most people will find the second easy enough even then.  Their answers, if they are honest, will usually take one or other of two forms…

(1) I do what I do because it is the one and only thing that I can do at all well.  I am a lawyer, or a stockbroker, or a professional cricketer, because I have some real talent for that particular job…I agree that it might be better to be a poet or mathematician, but unfortunately I have no talent for such purposes.

…

We have of course to take account of the differences in value between different activities.  I would rather be a novelist or painter than a statesman of similar rank; and there are many roads to fame which most of us would reject as actively pernicious.  Yet it is seldom that such differences of value will turn the scale in a man’s choice of a career, which will almost always be dictated by the limitations of his natural abilities.  Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better).

Hardy was course speaking with the (common) assumption that everyone should specialize and the only question was in what, but the thrust of his argument, in essence, is that it is better to do things which you do exceptionally well than to do those things which you do poorly, is basically similar to mine.  Where Hardy and I differ is in his assumption that talent is the issue and that one should follow one’s talent; I firmly believe that love is the fundamental and that one should follow one’s passion; this leads to excellence more surely than mere talent.

(This is, of course, speaking as someone who has talent in many fields - including mathematics - but who seems to excel only when passionate about that particular field.  I was passionate about - and quite successful in - mathematics for many years during school, but as soon as I ceased being interested, my ability to do it flopped.  I don’t think this is coincidence.)

The net of my argument (if there is a cohesive argument to be made) is threefold:

(1) following a path that makes you happy needs no further justification;

(2) if justification is needed, fine: following a path that makes you happy, and a discipline that you love, gives you more likelihood of success than following a talent that you don’t love;

(3) it is better to be a good generalist than a bad (and unhappy) specialist.

I suppose this is fairly obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t get it.  I didn’t, for a very long time.