Lately I've been playing in R and have my own R statistics lab day every Saturday. Well today I downloaded Seattle's data set of >438k 911 police responses for the city and plotted them in R. You can find the data I used and more here: http://data.seattle.gov/
Here is the plot I created in R from this data:
Software Craftsmanship, SOLID principles, eXtreme Programming, the list of all the "best practice" guides I've learned over the years goes on and on. They are all extremely valuable to me. They also need to make room for a new style of development being ushered in by the ideas expressed in The Lean Startup. The best way to label it is as "the way Bozo is coding for now".
I launched a small business called http://GeekRations.com and got a paying customer in a weekend. Full disclosure, that was my only customer. I'm still learning and likewise I'm not completely sure how to go about finding my next one. This was still a huge milestone for me this year. A paying customer. That was my goal.
You'll see a lot of parallels to The Lean Startup in this and that's totally cool. I'm not, however, trying to adhere to some methodology. Experience has taught me that that's the Wrong Thing. The zen I've been able to pick out of The Lean Startup and Customer Development is really just that a solid business model is testable. It's not a black art. There's no reason or excuse to go months building a product or service without talking to potential customers.
This will be a short post. I am writing this to document how I created a Node.js server that can act as an image proxy. I needed this to get around a limitation in HTML5's canvas implementation that prevents getting a loaded image's binary data if that image is from a different web domain. This function is very handy though if you're building an image editor so I had to find a work around.
What's GeekRations?
Tonight I launched my latest project, GeekRations (check it out at http://www.geekrations.com). It's a gift of the month club for geeks that pulls weird and off the wall gifts from the hidden nooks and crannies of the internet and delivers them to you monthly. I originally envisioned it for people like myself who love receiving packages in the mail just for the surprise of what's inside. It also makes for an awesome gift for that geek in your life you don't know how to buy for.
Where We're At Right Now
Currently, GeekRations is taking emails from interested prospective customers. As soon as we're ready to start shipping gifts you'll be notified where you can sign up for the service. Visit http://www.geekrations.com and sign up to be notified once we're taking orders!
Geeky Details
GeekRations is a lean start up in the purest sense of the word. The purpose of the landing page was to see if anyone even cared about this business idea. Apparently people do, so the business idea will be moving forward. Furthermore, GeekRations has an A/B test running on the splash page wording. One of them is pretty straight faced and very plain in describing our service while the other tries to be a little looser and silly. I will reveal the results of which one wins once I feel I've aggregated enough data that I can tell which is the clear winner.
