It’s you. Well, perhaps not you, but the majority of misinformed Kickstarter users whom backed the Pebble and other projects which have “failed to deliver” on the schedule they originally had.

Kickstarter is a funding platform, that means that it isn’t an online shop. All you’re doing when you back a project is helping the company or people reach their target that they need to be able to make their product happen. As an added extra, some projects will include rewards but they’re not a guaranteed product, you might get them, or you might not. Regardless of whether a news update has been released saying that production has begun on your reward or whatever, there is still a lot of room for failure which can be out of their hands. There are many reasons this may happen:

• The project gets a lot more interest than they first anticipated. Pebble is a great example of this, they expected to make around 1000 watches, they’re now making sixty-eight thousand watches. Eric and his team could never have predicted this. They quickly had to move to find a reliable production line and source more materials than they originally had planned for.
• Lack of resources, tagging on from the reason above, it’s always possible that the amount of resources a project could get their hands on for 1000 rewards may not be possible for 8000.
• Cost.
• Not enough structure in a team. Again, Pebble is a great example of this. Whilst they’re trying their best to keep everyone happy, there is a few loud mouthed people who feel they need to leave nasty comments on their forums because Eric hasn’t communicated enough about items he’d mentioned previously.
• Lack of understanding on what goes into a project on a scale they’d be working at. Made a few bracelets before? Great! But that’s not going to cut making tens of thousands of them. In thirty different colours and 10 different styles.

It seems to be a common misconception by quite a few Kickstarter users who believe that they’re buying into a product, when in reality their buying into nothing. They’re giving away their money to help fund someone or some companies dream product. Kickstarter have changed their Terms of Use to try and alleviate the stress that project founders are put under from their customers. They owe them nothing.

- The Estimated Delivery Date listed on each reward is not a promise to fulfil by that date, but is merely an estimate of when the Project Creator hopes to fulfil by.
- Project Creators agree to **make a good faith attempt** to fulfil each reward by its Estimated Delivery Date.

- Kickstarter does not offer refunds. A Project Creator is not required to grant a Backer’s request for a refund unless the Project Creator is unable or unwilling to fulfil the reward.
- Project Creators are required to fulfil all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfil.
- Project Creators may cancel or refund a Backer’s pledge at any time and for any reason, and if they do so, are not required to fulfil the reward.

Whilst Kickstarter try to ensure that successful projects fulfil their rewards, there are still matters outside of their hands that may prevent this from happening.

More people need to understand what Kickstarter is and that their rewards may not reach them by the original schedule. In a way, Kickstarter also acts as a learning platform for the creators of a project.

After restarting my MacBook this morning the first thing I did was open Google Chrome and noticed something peculiar as I switched to another tab. It was blue.

What the!?? Something weird had happened. I hopped over to the Chromium project on Google Code and searched for “blue tabs”, boom, first result, specifically however I was looking to fix it and what do you know, the 8th comment showed me how.

How to fix Blue Tabs in Chrome on OSX

1. Install any theme from the Web Store.
2. Click “Reset to default theme” in the Chrome settings, for me that’s here.
3. ????
4. PROFIT!!!

Hope that helps!

I ran into another problem today when attempting to download Pages on OSX. Although I’d purchased the Application and had previously installed it, the App Store failed to download it again, I’d be told to go to Purchases and download it from there, but it’d never work.

Finally I’ve managed to fix it, with a simple fix:

1. Open Terminal
2. Execute open $TMPDIR../C/
3. Delete the com.apple.appstore folder

And without even reopening the App Store I was able to download Pages and other applications once again! Yay!

Here is a quick snippet that I use all the time when my PHP code is generating output for a long time and I need to see it as it’s happening.

It helps me, hopefully it’ll help you.

Remember, don’t call this too often, unless you absolutely must.

I’m currently looking into creating an e-commerce site for something, a simple micro site where you add some items and checkout. Easy. Or is it? Creating a site like this anywhere will eventually lead you to taking payments. In the UK that means Paypal. A terrible mess of a payment system, the company itself is worse, I’ve been banned from their service a few years ago because someone I was doing work for turned out to be using a fake identity and using someone else’s payment details, why is that my fault? Why should I be banned? I absolutely refuse to use Paypal on ANY grounds since.

In the USA and Canada however it’s a different story. Stripe is leading the way forward in payment taking, Space Box by Drew Wilson is making it even easier to get up and running with Stripe. I for one am jealous.

Whilst there is similar services in the UK such as Paymill, nothing compares to the simplicity and support of Stripe. They’ve been actively encouraging residents from Europe that they’re working on bringing their service, even back in October of 2011:

Hi Rahul,

Thanks for the letter! Believe me, we’re working on it. Expanding
outside of the US is our biggest priority. About half the team is
originally from outside the States (I’m from Ireland myself), so we
understand the pain of trying to accept money online in Europe.

So in answer to your letter: we’re not just considering it; we’re
actively working hard on making it happen.

Thanks for the support — it means a lot to us!

Best,

-Darragh

Darragh - Stripe, Handcraft.com Stripes Reply

So what’s going on? Whilst I understand it must be hard getting this kind of thing up and running, surely it shouldn’t take 2 years+?

Stripe, you have an absolutely amazing window of opportunity here, you’d be stupid not to take it. You have the funding, you have the money and you have the chance. Make it happen.

I can’t believe I’ve only just learnt about this, but back on the 4th, Avicii’s laptop was stolen out of his hotel room, and he’s sure he knows who it was. Losing eight brand new tracks in the progress, probably hundreds of VST samples which can be a massive pain in the arse to hunt for and reinstall - as I’ve previously found out myself, Avicii has become the second DJ, after Skrillex to have their laptop stolen from basically beneath them.

Thankfully with an ear like Tims, he’s able to recreate his new sounds from the MP3 versions he had on USB drives, however the main problem he’ll face is recreating those wonderful sounds he’s used.

Fortunately, Avicii had Dropbox, oh wait… he didn’t. WHAT? How can someone who tours the world on a single laptop not have copies of source files on a USB drive, let alone the cloud? Well,

At least he has it now! But for anyone else who is in a similar position, needs backups and uses a single laptop, SIGN UP NOW!

Cheddar, the Mac, iPhone, iPad and Web application has been made for sale by its author. Only $125,000 for the entire source code, rights, ideas, everything.

Cheddar is for sale. After much thought, I have decided it is better for Cheddar to find a new home. I no longer have the time to give Cheddar the love it deserves. Cheddar, along with anything used to create it, is for sale. I am including up to 10 hours of my time to help you get it transitioned.

Cheddar, cheddarapp.com/buy/…

Whilst Cheddar is a very sleek looking application and does some things very well, I personally find Clear from Realmac much easier to use and encourages me to get things done. Whilst Clear doesn’t have a web application, it certainly does many things right, from it’s sweet sound effects to its intuitive swipe actions.

But I guess the real question is whether $125,000 is a decent asking price? Is it worth it? Let’s take a look. Sam has estimated that he’s worked on Cheddar for about 800 hours, both designing and developing the entire system.

Taking 800 hours and dividing by 24 (hours in the day) gives us 33.3 days. This means that Sam has been working on Cheddar every single waking hour for just over one month, no breaks. That’s obviously not true, so let’s assume a working day on Cheddar is 12 hours, not low, not high for a software developer.

800/12=66, so that’s 66 days spanning a 12 hour day. 2 months work. Now it’s too late for me to even attempt working out weekends, to research if Sam works on Cheddar all the time or as a hobby.

Taking 800 hours and diving by 24 (hours in the day) gives us 33.3 days. This means that Sam has been working on Cheddar every single waking hour for just over one month, no breaks. That’s obviously not true, so let’s assume a working day on Cheddar is 12 hours, not low, not high for a software developer. 800 / 12 = 66 days.

$125,000 = £77,796 which is a nice yearly wage for someone in the UK, perhaps a lawyer or something - I don’t really pay attention to that kind of thing - but to buy 33k of users and everything else, this is a bargain. Since Cheddar also includes a monthly/yearly subscription service, you’ll soon start seeing this money drizzle back into your now empty bank account, especially if you can continue to develop the software, or even take it on as part of a team.

If you buy it however, please look at Clear and how Realmac makes software, no charges for wanting more than 2 lists…

If you take a look at the bottom of any page on my blog, you’ll see a sweet little message, “Proudly powered by Octopress”, for those that do not know about Octopress, it’s a blogging platform, for hackers. It’s awesome.

Octopress makes use of a powerful and very flexible platform called Jekyll written by Tom Preston-Werner, CEO of GitHub. Jekyll is super cool and ridiculously powerful &amp is the framework which powers GitHub Pages.

I’ve not really made changes to the Jekyll side of things, instead I’ve focused on creating new plugins and tweaking the settings of everything that happens. In this post I’m quickly going to go over the changes I’ve made, the things that my blog is capable of doing and what I’m going to be adding in the future.

Plugins

Embedded Tweets

Written by Scott W. Bradley. Code on GitHub

Whilst I didn’t write this one myself, I’ve made good use of it throughout several of my blog posts. It’s exceedingly useful and very easy to implement.

YouTube

Written by Jamie Owen, Code on Gist:GitHub

I’ve only used this plugin so far on very few posts, in fact the only one I can remember using it for was my Cancer Research Video. But it served its usefulness well. Very small, very easy to use.

Spoilers

Written by James Brooks, Code on GitHub

I blogged about this plugin back in August and yet never shared the code… Something I’ll get on to. I never actually used this, but it was intended for a review about Looper.

Template additions

Whilst I’m using a custom template, purchased from WrapBootstrap. I’ve extended Octopress in a couple of ways which allows me to do some pretty gnarly things.

Multiple Authors

The first use of this was Jared White’s post on Why I built Mariposta. Up until then only one person could publish a post from an Octopress blog, whilst I’m technically the only person who can publish a post, I was still unable to allow anybody else to post. To remedy this I’ve told Octopress use several YAML properties in the post header if they exist.

If you’re unfamiliar with Octopress so far, I’ve added the following:

• author
• author_site

This sets the post template to use the given name, rather than the defaults found in the _config.yml file.

Simple, yet allows you to extend your blog by making guest posts ridiculously easy!

Descriptions

Unlike the early 2000’s, site descriptions aren’t as valuable as they once were, however they’re still really useful to have. Since Octopress wasn’t looking for a description by default, I’ve added another post variable called description which gets added into the head.html template file.

Open Graph

I share my posts on various social media sites almost every time I post. When I first started this blog I found it extremely annoying that, unless I added a picture to the content of a post, Facebook and Google+ would use the Social icons at the bottom of the page. That’s not what I wanted, and I don’t like sharing a post on those sites with no “thumbnail” it looks lazy, plus with the previously missing description, each post would be my generic “about me” block of text. So I soon implemented the Open Graph tags.

By simply adding a post variable called cover I’m able to add a picture to any post, regardless of whether or not it fits into the post content itself, and it’ll still be picked up by Google+ and Facebook.

As an added extra, my description, whether that’s the generic text or the post description is also used. The type tag is also preset to website and the title is the same as the what the actual >title< tag uses.

Going forward

So far these changes have made my blog:

• Easier to share
• Easier to discover, via social sites
• Abides to Twitters tweet-embedding standards
• Makes it feel dynamic with embeddable videos
• Expands the content that can be posted with multiple authors

Each change has proved itself useful time and time again, so what else is there I can add? Well, except for updating the technologies used to power it, Jekyll, Octopress itself, there isn’t anything glaringly obvious that I can do - which I think is really cool! However, here are some ideas I have, please feel free to use, do, take, ignore them as required.

• Archiving posts via year
• Better social integration, Twitter cards?
• Add Google+ post ownerships
• Use tags from previously imported posts from the Wordpress days

I can only imagine these changes happening as and when I really need them. The only one that I can see which would be useful right now is the Twitter cards, however right now you need to be accepted into a test program with them.

If you need any Octopress advice etc, tweet me @jbrooksuk or ping me on App.net, @jbrooksuk

This post is inspired by a HN post, Why I’m a Programmer and a discussion with a colleague shortly after I read it.

Reading Nathan’s post me me think as to why I’m a programmer, why I’m still programming after 13 years of doing so — many life sentences aren’t that long — and why I’m not doing anything else that interests me. So this post is going to be me collating my thoughts as to the above in hopefully a readable format for you.

To the past

It all started when I was much younger, I hurt my knee, bed-ridden my mum went to the library and bought back a book on JavaScript. I remember spending hours - barely being able to read the majority of the book let alone comprehend the technical terms - typing out the code examples, taking bits out and seeing what happened. Missing a comma? Broken. Spelt something wrong? Broken. On top of that, I was using good old IE4 we didn’t have the V8 engine to clean up after your mistakes back then! Whether it was the aggravation from my countless mistakes that kept me pursuing an understanding of what was happening or boredom I don’t know, craziness perhaps?

What makes a programmer?

By definition, Wikipedia states a programmer as:

A programmer, computer programmer, developer, or coder is a person who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.

Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Whilst this may be true, the term “Computer Programmer” is nowhere near as popular as it was a decade or two ago, no, infact we’ve been seeing the term “Engineer” used instead, which depending on how you look at a programmers job is far more suited, sure, we may be “programming” but we’re engineering a solution, like a structural engineer has a solution for the tallest building in the world. But then are “programmers” artists in the same fashion as an engineer? Understanding, yet alone writing good code is an artful skill.

I started writing code because I had nothing better to do. Whilst some people have regarded me as smart — so I have an IQ score, it means nothing to an employer —, I’m not academical in the slightest. Maths especially, three times I’ve attempted to do better than D in my Maths GCSE, no luck. And yet I’m able to write quite complex code and have an understanding of what’s truly happening underneath the high-level code wrappers. Doesn’t this go against the whole “Computer science degree required” in a job application? I’m no computer scientist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think like one.

The way I see it is that it’s having a mix of a logical mindset and motivation to continue learning past what you already know, that allows programmers to program. It’s having an understanding of complex patterns and grammars that, although may be typed in English, require a different way of comprehending than it does to write a complete English sentence.

Why am I still doing it?

I think it boils down to simply this; I love it. Although I can spend countless hours infuriated by a single line of code not doing what I think it should be doing, I have a fire inside of me that’ll keep burning and pushing me forward to solve my next puzzle, whether that’s writing an application, a website or automating a current solution, they’re puzzles and I like puzzles.

Yesterday I was discussing with my colleague, Stacie, that I wish I could copy & paste in real life, that I could automate the most boring parts of my day-to-day routine. Writing code is magical to me because I can make things happen by themselves whenever I want.

Today I write code as my full time occupation, some times even in my free time, however I’ve found that I’m cutting back on my side projects, spending an hour or so here and there, I don’t want my hobby to turn in to something I dislike doing.

Would I do anything else? Not unless I lost the use of the majority of my fingers, or my eyesight, otherwise even if I had locked in syndrome I’d be writing the code in my head, not quite Stephen Hawking style mind.

None of this makes sense James!?

Good.

This year I’ve interviewed some of the most creatve designers and talented developers of 2012. They’ve been an exceptional bunch of people, taking both the time and effort to answer all of the questions, take pictures of their desks and themselves and get round to sending it all to me! So for that, I want to say a massive thank you!

A year in interviews

If you haven’t already, you can read all of this years interviews now.

So except for thanking those wonderfully kind people, what is this post really about?… My Dad.

The other day he mentioned that I should be asking more person-orientated questions to make it more personal — thanks for reading Dad — he’s 100% right, I should. One of the key things you should do as an interviewer is focus on the person in hand, make them the centre of attention during the brief time you have with them, that’s something I’ve failed to do across every interview. The reason? I didn’t expect for one minute that my interviews were going to be anywhere near as popular as they’ve turned out to be!

Some statistics

Thanks to a quick cross-calculation between GoSquared, Gaug.es and Google Analytics I’m able to provide some statistics about my posts.

The most read interview was with Amber Weinberg. I believe that Amber has had the most views because she was the first to be interviewed and there was a fair few days until the next interview, leading to more exposure. Amber also linked the interview on her blog.

David Walsh’s interview follows Amber in second, probably due to the vast amount of recognition and social reach David has online. In some ways, he’s a celebrity!

The interviews grossed a total of 14,397 page views, including the Interview category page which by my previous blog standards is very impressive!

Going forward

Taking my Dads point, I’m going to be publishing interviews bespoke to the individual. In the case where the person is too busy to Skype, email, IM or whatever, I’d be more than happy to send them the template interview that I’ve used up until now. I’m also going to set myself a target, 100 interviews across 2013. Whilst that may not sound like a lot, 2013 is hoping to be an extremely busy year for me; buying a house - and all that goes with it, work, freelancing and more charitable events, plus a whole lot more. However I’m confident that I can publish more high-quality interviews!

Also, if you’d lke to be a part of the interview series, please get in touch with me by Twitter and App.net. I’m looking for designers & developers or even startup founders and anything really related to the web, development and everything in between.