Market7

Establishing the San Francisco – Edmonton power corridor of software development

Market7 colleagues weary of me nagging with them with, “Can you please put something up on our company blog?” will from now on hear a different favorite phrase from me: “Why can’t you be more like David?” That’s in reference to our newest colleague, software engineer & blogger David Ackerman.

David starts with us as a contractor from Edmonton in what he himself phrases as a sort of “grand experiment” as to how well our software development can work across a 1,000 mile gap. A big part of our mutual determination to try it was spurred by David’s observation that the practice will help orient our own efforts to facilitate collaboration in video production, often across distances. Such deep thoughts, and overall documentation of the grand experiment, are being eloquently journaled by David on his blog http://www.dsackerman.com/.

• There’s always a struggle between being comfortable and being free.
• It’s an amazing time to be a software developer . . . we are the architects of the future, not simply building tools, but rather writing the binary-based rules that will effect the way we socialize, collaborate, create, and consume for years to come.
• information can travel around the world in seconds. Does a programmer really need to be local these days to be effective?
• extra discipline involved in making a telecommute situation work . . . Will it work? Who knows? What I do know is that I’ve got a company that’s doing great stuff and that’s willing to meet me half way on this new grand experiment
• application for a home business license (especially for what I’m doing – nothing that creates loud noises, strange smells, etc.) is relatively pain free
• I don’t have a lot of experience in video production (besides low budget music videos with gaudy effects), I found that I could grasp the necessary collaboration aspects fairly easily. The Market7 product is meant to bridge that gap between business types who want hard data about what’s going on and more creative types who don’t necessarily fit into easy schedules
• a lot of trust was put in me right away, and that helped a lot in terms of making me comfortable working from afar. In my mind, it re-affirmed that, “Okay, we really are doing this thing.”

We really are doing this thing. Welcome David, great writing! We’ll get you up here in video soon too.

Dear Users : It’s easy to forget that we are a community and we will need reminders and help in this process.

We don’t exist in a vacuum. We are all working together – all of us engineers, designers, clients, producers – to facilitate a new expectation of what a pleasant experience is.

For this reason I would like to encourage any of our users to know that we value whatever feedback they can give us and that we are interested and concerned about giving them the best possible experience from the best possible research and design.

Each person that spends time crafting something of particular matter to a user is extending themselves towards the important details of what is really going on between the human and the interface; together we take a step towards an interesting and unknown future. It is a future that we are building together. Learning from each other and striving towards something that ultimately remains ineffable.

I think that is rad.

Happy 3.14 day -> present