Adam Baldwin and Nathan LaFreniere are yetis.

Security expert and dev/ops badass join the &yet team January 1

Because we are huge fans of human namespace collisions and amazing people, we’re adding two new members to our team: Adam Baldwin and Nathan LaFreniere, both in transition from nGenuity, the security company Adam Baldwin co-founded and built into a well-respected consultancy that has advised the likes of GitHub, AirBNB, and LastPass on security.

We have relied on Adam and Nathan’s services through nGenuity to inform, improve, and check our development process, validating and invalidating our team’s work and process, providing education and correction along the way. We are thrilled to be able to bring these resources to bear with greater influence, while providing Adam Baldwin with the authority to improve areas in need of such.

Adam Baldwin

Adam Baldwin has served as &yet’s most essential advisor since our first year, providing me with confidence in venturing more into development as an addition to my initial web design freelance business, playing “panoptic debugger” when I struggled with it, helping us establish good policy and process as we built our team, improving our system operations, and always, always, bludgeoning us about the head regarding security.

It really can’t be expressed how much respect I and our team at &yet have for Adam and his work.

He’s uncovered Basecamp vulnerabilities that encouraged 37Signals to change their policies for handling reported vulnerabilities, found huge holes in Sprint/Verizon MiFi (that made for one of the most hilarious stories I’ve been a part of), published vulnerabilities *twice* to root Rackspace, shared research to uberhackers at DEFCON, and has provided security advice for a number of first-class web apps, including ones you’re using today and conceivably right now.

Adam Baldwin will be joining our team at &yet as CSO—it’s a double title: Chief of Software Operations and Chief Security Officer.

Adam will be adding his security consultancy, alongside &yet’s other consulting services, but will also be overseeing our team’s software processes, something he has informed, shaped, and helped externally verify since, I think, before most of our team was born.

On a personal note (a longer version of which is here), I must say it’s a real joy to be able to welcome one of my best friends into helping lead a business he helped build as much as anyone our team.

Nathan LaFreniere

As excited as I am personally to add Adam Baldwin, our dev team is even more thrilled about adding Nathan, whose services we have become well accustomed to relying on in our contract with nGenuity and in a large project where we’ve served a mutual customer.

Nathan is a multitalented dev/ops badass well-versed in automated deployment tools.

He solves operations problems with a combination of experience, innovation, and willingness to learn new tools and approaches.

He’s already gained a significant depth of experience building custom production systems for Node.js, including some tools we’ve come to rely on heavily for &bang.

Nathan’s passion for well-architected, smoothly running, and meticulously monitored servers has helped our developers sleep at night, very literally.

I know getting the luxury of having a huge amount of Nathan’s time at our developers disposal sounds to them like diving into a pool of soft kittens who don’t mind you diving on them and aren’t hurt at all by it either oh and they’re declawed and maybe wear dentures but took them out.

So that’s what we have for you today.

We think you’re gonna love it.

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Welcome, Melani

Monday will be Melani Brown’s first day as a full-time &yet team member—we can’t wait!

Melani is a talented filmmaker and photographer who will be doing awesome stuff of that sort with us.

She has worked on Kill Bill, Desperate Housewives, Nike commercials, and the online Old Spice social media ad campaign. She has photographed Bon Iver, Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside, and numerous indie bands.

As a longtime friend of the equally talented Amy Lynn Taylor, we were privileged to have Mel provide our team’s photography a couple years ago. We’ve enjoyed several one-off collaborations with her since, including inviting her to participate in our team’s month-long stay in an Italian castle this Spring.

It’s been clear for some time that she’s an unofficial member of our team, more than anything because she comfortably fits our approach and values: she’s talented, creative, passionate, and has an attitude of encouraging those around her to grow and succeed.

In her many years of travels across the globe, she could best be described as an itinerant blesser. We feel blessed to officially make her a part of our team.

In addition to the great short film she made about our Italy adventure, here’s a couple more examples of Mel’s great work:

coding & designing from around the world from Melani Brown on Vimeo.

Pocket Portrait: 02 Ritchie Young from Melani Brown on Vimeo.

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Welcome, Shenoa

&yet Community Coordinator

We are excited to add Shenoa Lawrence to the &yet team. She will be serving part-time as &yet's Community Coordinator, beginning last week.

Shenoa has taken a strong leadership role in our local tech community: <!doctype society>, Room to Think (our local coworking movement), and TriConf (a local barcamp &yet helped sponsor last weekend). She’s also in the process of putting together weCreate, a local directory of people, projects, and products that make up our community. Her dedication and contributions have been a major part of the continued success of all of the above.

We want to affirm that dedication and empower her to continue it.

Shenoa is a veteran web developer and designer, and served as a leader of a community she was a part of in the San Francisco Bay Area. Members of our community have huge respect for Shenoa as an individual and as a contributor to the big success of our local dev community.

Since its first days, &yet has invested time and money in helping build our area's designer and developer community. Our team considers it one of the most important things we've been privileged to contribute to.

This is a continuation of those efforts.

We take a realistic view that community is something that emerges from intentionally cultivated soil—there are both mechanic and organic aspects to a good community, and both require hard work.

Since it began in February, <!doctype society> has gained over 70 members and drawn participants from Walla Walla, Yakima, and Spokane—but we know there are many more who should be a part of our local web development, and creative community. And our aspirations for these groups are bigger than mere social gatherings—we want to spark the founding of numerous startups in our area and help provide resources for them to succeed.

We're excited about what Shenoa has contributed so far to that end, thrilled to be able to team up with her further, and eagerly anticipate what's next.

Please thank Shenoa for her hard work and dedication and for being willing to take on this new challenge as a continuity of what she's already helped to build.

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Building a perpetual learning machine

…and announcing Tumbleweed Tech!

In the midst of a particularly enjoyable college semester ten years ago, my good friend Eric Cadwell and I joked that a great job would be just going to school full-time for life.

I decided to figure out how to make a career out of it, in one way or another.

On the list of enjoyable things about the years that followed working as a pastor was the constant learning; I enjoy wrestling deeply with theology and its practicality, plus there’s no shortage of learning opportunities dealing with the human dynamics that come with ministry—painful, yes, but certainly plenty.

When I started &yet, I had the idea of building a business around the things that I had spent the bulk of my free-time learning (namely, web development and design). I figured if doing that could make me at least $30k a year, that was good enough. I mean, heck, there’s no school that’ll pay you a net gain of $30k to learn whatever you want!

It’s worked out better than I thought — I’ve improved my design skill and learned a ton about what it takes to make great software. Plus, you can’t beat the opportunity to learn from people you’ve helped teach.

Amy hadn’t designed for web when we added her to our team and now she’s at the top of her class. Her design aesthetic has always been second-to-none, however, and I’ve learned a huge amount from her intentional simplicity. Working with me has made me a much better designer and made me realize how far I have to go.

We spent the first few months of James’s time with us helping get him up to speed with our process and writing high quality HTML and CSS — but more recently instead of teaching him, he’s doing the educating on advanced CSS3 techniques.

But we’re just getting started.

I feel like I’ve only started with what our folks are capable of teaching — and as we’ve crossed the point of being a fun ad hoc group and into being a real company for some time now, our intent is to take advantage of some that stability to formalize our commitment to education.

Thinking about all of this made us realize that if (1)you can build a business of diversely talented people who enjoy teaching and learning and (2) you intentionally make learning a formal part of your work, then essentially what you have is a miniature, ad-hoc university (in its most ideal form).

And if that’s what you have, why stop internally? Why not share it?

So, today, we’re announcing Tumbleweed Tech, our effort to provide a solid alternative to the less-than-modern approach to web development taken at local colleges and universities.

Don’t get me wrong. I love academics and degrees have their place, but sometimes, you just want to know what you need to know to dive in and get things done. Add to that access to some talented, experienced people, and we think it’s a great approach—one that many students will gain from.

Tumbleweed Tech will begin this Fall.

We have a list of potential classes outlined and we’ll be basing our initial offering based on what people want to learn. So drop your name in if you’re interested! We’d love to have you.

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/dev/castle: The Movie

Our filmmaker friend Melani Brown made a cool short film about our month-long adventure working from a castle in Italy.

In case you missed it, here’s the original blog post.

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“Capable” isn’t a strategic planning metric

You have a dream.

So, just like every single one of us, you ask, “Do I have what it takes?”

The answer is yes. Every other answer is a lie, an excuse or a distraction. The call itself is enough of an answer.

I consider myself good at a few things, passable at many, and passionate about more. What I’m capable of is completely irrelevant. I’m likely the worst to judge that anyway.

You prove yourself “capable” by simply *doing*.

So do.

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Fitt’s Law in meatspace

How we used our workspace’s “edges” to hack ourselves into consistently logging hours

At &yet, we’re always fighting to get ourselves to log hours. We recently came up with a method inspired by Fitt’s Law that’s proven quite effective.

Fitt’s Law, as it applies to interface design, essentially says the smaller and further away a target is, the harder it is to hit.

That’s why we get Apple positioning the OS X menu at the very top of our workspace and the Dock at the bottom. The edge of the screen can be said to have infinite width in the direction the mouse hits it, making it an easy target.

What we’ve realized is that Fitt’s Law can apply in physical space, too. Take time tracking, for example.

We all want to track our time, but nothing we’ve tried has worked. Lots of methods and tools help *some* people, but there are few things that help *everyone*. Nagging and reminders are worthlessly ineffective when it comes to changing behavior. Tools are hit or miss.

We’ve tried lots of things, but this one was 100% successful: over several weeks’ time, the longest any person went without logging their hours was a day and a half—and most logged them daily. That has never happened in three years of trying to solve this.

Here’s how we “Fittsed” time-tracking.

Logging time effectively is a very hard thing. Doing it consistently means a whole lot of tiny actions and a ton of reminders, each individual piece fairly meaningless. To further complicate matters, it’s something that highly productive people naturally want to “background”, not stick in their face while getting stuff done. That means by design, it’s going to be easy to forget.

What if we could associate logging time with the “edge” of our workspace in real life, not the workspace itself?

Our kitchen is central to our office in almost every way. We keep it stocked daily with whatever snacks and drinks each member of our team wants to have available. The coffee’s there and lots of great conversations get started in the kitchen, too. Everyone uses it every day, all day—typically at stopping points in their work.

I know from experience it won’t work to just stick a reminder on my monitor or where I’ll see it as I walk away from my desk. Unlike those, the kitchen is a destination. It’s a hard “edge” in the office interface.

So now we use it as a privilege, not a right. There is a piece of paper taped to the door with a line down the middle and everyone’s names on tiny Post-It Notes. On one side is the word “BANNED” and on the other, “DEBANNED”.

If I haven’t logged my hours within the past 24 hours, my name gets moved from the “DEBANNED” to the “BANNED” list (by Lisa, our office manager). All I have to do to get it moved back is go to my office and spend a moment logging hours.

The centrality of the kitchen means it’s easily enforced by peer pressure and the additional office fun of public “shaming”.

It’s helped along by another edge: the hallway and the kitchen are also the edge of my personal bubble. When we’re out in the hall, we rib each other and tease each other and push each other to succeed on whatever we’re working on together. That edge reminds me not just of the edge of my workspace, but the edge of where “I” end and “we” begin. Not a bad place to be reminded of the intrinsic value of logging hours.

It’s surprised us how well this has worked. In fact, un-banned people walking into the kitchen mid-day have gone back to log their recent hours because of the physical space reminder.

For some time, we have been thinking constantly about ways to improve the user experience of accomplishing big things as a team with minimal intrusion and maximum benefit. Most of the learning we’ve done in this area we’ve been pouring into a product we’ve been building called &! (“and bang”). You can get on the invite list here.

—

Many thanks to Nate for his critical feedback on this post, without which it might have been even more abstract and made less sense. :) But, hey, you know what they say…

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/dev/castle

Our developers and family are all going to live and work in Italy for a month. In a castle. To be specific, this castle:

The Four-Hour Workweek irked me before I decided to read it and blew my mind once I chose to.

Not only that, I blame that book for the fact that our company and our families are now days from packing up our office and moving to Europe for a month to work from a castle on Italy’s Adriatic coast.

Seriously.

The title of the book irritated me.

Why? Because I don’t want to work four hours a week.

I want to throw myself into something I love and believe in, where I can create value and make a difference and learn and grow.

That kind of business is really at the heart of the Four-Hour Workweek. Ferriss tells readers to quit being enslaved to their jobs, create a business to fund their dreams and go for it—now!

Ferriss talks about dreamlining—focusing energy on making some amazing dream a reality as quickly as possible. If that means traveling the world, going on some grand adventure, or learning to be the best in the world at something, Ferriss offers productive paths to create a business that is your “muse”, cut all unnecessary expenses, smash all roadblocks, and go for it!

You really should read the book if you haven’t.

I don’t want to oversimplify what is actually a book crammed tons of thought-provoking ideas, but a big piece of what Ferriss is talking about is making a lifestyle business for yourself.

The term “lifestyle business” gets a bad rap sometimes, but I like how Products Hero Amy Hoy puts it — “A lifestyle business is just a *profitable* business!”

Now, I already have a three-year profitable business that I built from the ground up with just me and the words “I AM DOING THIS” scrawled on a whiteboard.

And I feel fairly confident at this point that if I really wanted to, I could step away and it could support me doing whatever I wanted for a time.

But what if it wasn’t about me? Because it definitely isn’t in my book.

Most importantly, &yet is what it is because of *who* it is. And I’m just one small piece of that. &yet might actually be a lifestyle business, but it isn’t *my* lifestyle business…

And, in fact, I realized that this is actually what &yet is…

It’s a team lifestyle business.

When people ask me to describe &yet, I always think about Nathan’s take on &yet shortly after joining us. He summed it up thusly:

“&yet is a service to its employees.” [1]

So rather than me simply creating a business and a machine that makes me money as the sole owner, it is instead a business whose profits are largely used to empower its employees’ growth, freedom, and enjoyment. And, by the way, I would give ridiculously high marks to our team’s resulting creativity and effective productivity.

But back to Italy.

Yes. We are going to exclusively rent an amazing centuries-old castle on a hill that sleeps 56 and has a view of the ocean on the eastern coast of Italy.

We’re doing it because we want to, because we can, and because we believe the end results of our trip will be overwhelmingly positive.

We’re doing it because we’ve always been fascinated by Simon Willison’s /dev/fort idea. [2]

We’re doing it because we realized it’s *cheaper* to stay in a castle a little bit off the beaten path for a whole month than it is to stay in Rome for a week.

We’re doing it because this is a huge enough opportunity that all of our team members decided we’d be willing to skip one paycheck to make it happen [3]

We’re doing it this year because we want to do something like this next year too.

And I’ll be honest: all of the go-for-it encouragement and assumption-busting in The 4-Hour Workweek pushed it from whim to reality.

So—thanks, Tim! Feel free to pop by the castle. I’d love to introduce my awesome team to you.

And to everyone else: What’s your dream? What’s stopping you from making it happen immediately?

If you’re doing something like this—or even if you want to, we want to hear about it!

We’ll be sharing about our adventure and being darn honest about the experiment’s successes and failures, so be sure to Follow &yet on Twitter and our team who’s going.

———

[1] I have another blog post I want to unpack this statement a little more.

[2] Incidentally, one day we want to do a /dev/train, inspired by our external teammate, Hjon.)

[3] The balance of which the company sneakily added back in to our wages by way of a permanent raise.

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Welcome the Vander Wilt!

In which our team adds another awesome person, thanks to the Tweeterwebs

Nate Vander Wilt is the diversely talented web and desktop developer who makes the sixth employee added to &yet over the last year. We got to know Nate primarily on Twitter, believe it or not.

Nate’s a midwest transplant currently living on a semi-dusty gravel road in the bustling city of Outlook, WA.

Nate brings to the team his diverse talents in “cloud cartography” (geography and web mapping), multitouch interface, Mac, iPhone, and HTML5 web application development.

Before joining &yet, Nate ran Mac and iPhone software company Calf Trail and worked as a contractor, developing custom web mapping solutions for clients like the National Weather Service.

Here’s Nate’s thoughts, from his cleverly titled post, HTML 5.0 Transitional:

P.S. Nate isn’t the only person that &yet hired because of Twitter…

Henrik has a really nice recounting of his hiring process up on his blog. (We added Henrik Joreteg to the team in February after recruiting him out of Southern California.)

It’s especially hilarious that he nearly unfollowed Adam for being too random.

He wouldn’t have been the first.

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& here we go…

Being finally, finally, finally, done with the new site

As a web design and development company, it’s incredibly hard to build things for yourself.

This site has been in process since early August, 2009, when we as a team sat down and discussed our vision for where we wanted to go.

We put together a general outline and a plan for how we wanted to approach things. Then Amy rolled up her sleeves and took a crack at a conceptual design based on an idea from one of her Red Room posters.

The plan has changed numerous times since then, as has the content and design. We’ve discussed and debated, wrestled and wrangled, but we’re ultimately grateful to have had the time to pick things apart and really think long and deep about what we wanted to present as a team.

In the end, we’re excited that what we do is finally presented in a way that reflects the unique team that has come together at &yet. It feels that this site was another missing piece of the puzzle we’ve been assembling for the last two years.

Thank you very much to the following folks who helped us out on the project:

• Melani Brown (photography)


• The SagePort Grille in Richland (photo shoot location)


• Adam Baldwin of nGenuity (security, etc.)


• Henrik Joreteg

So here we go.

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Thank you!

In which we describe our gratefulness

We’re humbled by the support of so many who have helped us grow from one to four (plus extended team) in just a year and a half.

We have some exciting things on their way soon, including an all-new realtime web product. We’re thrilled to be able to launch the new site so we can get back to the business of business!

It’s a privilege to be able to serve the great customers we’ve been able to work with so far and it’s a joy to be a part of the great Tri-Cities area tech community.

So—thank you!

With love,

the &yet Team (Nathan / Angela / Amy / Adam)

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