Max Beatty

Whether cor­po­ra­tions real­ize it or not, they are explic­itly and implic­itly cap­ping their char­ity. I under­stand they want to pro­tect their lia­bil­i­ties as a com­pany and do not want to look fool­ish say­ing, “Sorry, we actu­ally can’t donate $1 tril­lion, but thanks for all the RTs.” If you’re going to match dona­tions or donate a por­tion of the pro­ceeds up to a cer­tain amount, why not just donate that amount? Make it mean­ing­ful and purposeful.

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With Apple’s iCloud Photo Stream, every pic­ture you take is sent to all of your devices. That’s your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac­Book, and iCloud.com. It will save your last 1000 pho­tos for 30 days and you can’t edit or delete any of them.

If you need to delete a photo for what­ever rea­son, you have to reset your stream.

First, reset your Photo Stream on iCloud.com.

Sec­ond, turn off Photo Stream on your iOS devices by going to the Set­tings app, then iCloud, then into Photo Stream where you can turn it off.

You should now be able to delete any and all pho­tos from your device.

For mom and dad, bud­ding infor­mat­ics and com­puter sci­ence stu­dents, and any prepar­ing inter­vie­wees, this is what I jug­gled today.

I arrived at the office before 10am ener­gized in part from 1000mg of vit­a­min C and some DayQuil wear­ing an IU t-shirt and jeans hav­ing not shaved for days if not more than a week. As if scripted in a sit­com, both pots of cof­fee were empty so I made another while jok­ing with a mem­ber of the prod­uct team. A “(hope­fully) last” revi­sion of a design waited for me in my inbox. The designer hap­pened to be walk­ing by giv­ing me the chance to ask him if every­one under­stood the dif­fer­ence between char­ac­ter count and word count, a minor over­sight in the user inter­face (UI). A stand-up sta­tus meet­ing was form­ing behind me to dis­cuss the progress of the next fea­tures for our newest prod­uct. I had been pitch­ing in where I could, so I spun around to sip my cof­fee and listen.

At 11am on Mon­days and Wednes­days, major fea­ture releases must be demoed to our qual­ity assur­ance (QA) team. I had stayed late the night before so that my refac­tor­ing of a few thou­sand lines of code could be admired in one curl request. Every­one was happy for me that it worked so well locally, but insisted it needed test­ing in a broader envi­ron­ment. I adjusted the test scripts and tun­neled into log servers pray­ing it would work flaw­lessly, and as pro­gram­ming goes, it didn’t. Con­sid­er­a­tions and com­pro­mises were made to con­tinue with the release before I headed to my noon interview.

For the past cou­ple months, I’ve been inter­view­ing can­di­dates to join me in the ever broad­en­ing world of front end devel­op­ment. My in-house spe­cialty is CSS so for about 45 min­utes I ques­tioned and quizzed and made myself avail­able to answer any and all ques­tions. Towards the end, some­one thought to bring both of us lunch, which was much appreciated.

Refu­eled, it was time to start jug­gling projects three and four for the day. Another designer wanted my input on the flow of a new multi-step fea­ture that requires as much back­end magic as it does design clar­ity. We’ve been meet­ing in brief stints for the past few days to rework details and cut out non-essentials. Bugs have popped up in other parts of the code-base from my refac­tor­ing but are eas­ily fixed. I got dis­tracted and nailed down a re-opened dis­play issue with Inter­net Explorer 8. I got dis­tracted again and wrote an email sug­gest­ing a schema for stor­ing some new data when the release ops man­ager came over to clar­ify the details of a new repos­i­tory that was being cre­ated for the project whose design I first reviewed today.

After help­ing another engi­neer resolve some SVN con­flicts, we dis­cussed a new API she had designed and devel­oped that I would be using for a reworked por­tion of our prod­uct. We came up with a few solu­tions weigh­ing the effi­ciency of the code vs the most awe­some user expe­ri­ence I could imag­ine dur­ing which I was pulled over to review another revi­sion of the multi-step fea­ture. As I was walk­ing back to my desk con­fi­dent in our deci­sion on how to imple­ment the API, another engi­neer was hav­ing trou­ble set­ting up apache on his new Mac­Book Pro. I sat with him com­par­ing con­figs until we real­ized he was restart­ing OS X’s built-in apache server and not the one part of our devel­op­ment environment.

A few more bugs came up sur­round­ing my immi­nent release and were easy to fix. I started to write a script that uti­lized some PHP classes that abstract our data­base calls and asked a cha­t­room of other devel­op­ers if the classes sup­ported MySQL LIMIT. Some­one was able to help me right away, and I con­tin­ued to hack together queries until din­ner came.

That’s what I jug­gled today. I started six months ago fix­ing CSS and JavaScript issues while learn­ing the cus­tom PHP MVC, and now I’m involved with just about every step of the prod­uct life cycle. It can seem like con­trolled chaos at times, but it’s excit­ing and reward­ing once it all ships.

(If you think you’d like to jug­gle some of this, Reputation.com is hir­ing, and I’d love to have you join our team. No, no one from the com­pany asked me to write this.)

Last Fri­day, I lis­tened to a great pod­cast where Mike Mon­teiro and Kaite Gillum of Mule Design inter­viewed Chris Sacca who explic­itly said no one is fund­ing ideas. Today, Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity announced a $1.1 mil­lion fund to estab­lish the world’s largest stu­dent prize for a soft­ware or tech­nol­ogy busi­ness plan. How can my alma mater go against some­one as accom­plished as Chris Sacca (and the major­ity of angel and VC investors)?

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To date, I’ve been a mem­ber of Face­book for 24% of my life. I’ve grown up with them, lived through their redesigns, and sorta kinda under­stood their grow­ing num­ber of fea­tures. Today, they’ve added the Sub­scribe But­ton. By opt­ing in, you can remove the syn­chro­nous foun­da­tion of the plat­form which is what I’m choos­ing to do.

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