Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/buildinternet/~3/UtYn17lDDwA/

Hey developers and fellow strategists, we need to talk.

I’ve noticed that we think differently about our relationship in the builder community. You get excited over hardware, lines of code and open APIs while I seek to influence consumer behavior with technology. I feel like this divide may push us away.

Let’s fix this.

Helping Developers

I’ve realized my role in the builder community is to be your biggest fan. I may never need to code in my life but understanding you as a coder is one way we will overcome this. Here are my promises to you:

I will minimize as many distractions as possible to keep you focused  This includes screening phone call before they get to you, waiting to ask questions until you have time to actually think about them and keeping those boring project management short.
I will make you (and what you work on) look amazing. Remember all that traveling I did last spring talking with techies about our platform? I may have dropped your name a dozen times when talking about it. They were impressed.
I will promote your passion to the people who can pay for it. Translating the work you have done into jargon non-techies will understand is my job and I love teaching people new things. So if I ask an obvious question about how it works, it so I can better promote it to folks with dollar-bills to spend.

Helping Strategists

Here’s what I ask of you:

Bug me when you are working on something that will blow my mind. I love when we can geek over technology but I sometimes get busy with client work. Take the initiative and come by to talk about what you are working on. I assure you, I won’t tell you to go away.
Write the technology and hardware used on a Post-It. I know, I’ve asked you the difference between JavaScript and jQuery a hundred times. Let’s keep our sanity and when we are done talking, write down the technology and hardware used so I can Google it later. This will save us both a lot of time (and headaches).
Champion my ideas to find better outcomes to problems. The best success we have at selling our capabilities is to team up and think. Ignore the desire to say it’s impossible on the first try. Ask me questions, goals, and outcomes I’m looking for that could help solve the problem. Sometime it won’t be the first thing that comes to mind.

Helping Each Other

Making (and keeping) promises like these will help us work smarter when tackling an obstruction across the path. I’ve seen this happen at One Mighty Roar where you’d have a hard time identifying someone as a developer or a strategist because everyone invests in the people around them, constantly learning.

The opportunity to improve this relationship is there everyday. You’d be surprise how much of an impact it can have.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/buildinternet/~3/yIetNC8K_Eo/

One of the common startup myths is that single 20-somethings are the most successful entrepreneurs and that they are the demographic that starts the most companies. Zach and Sam may have started One Mighty Roar before they were even legal to go into a bar, but research from the Kauffman Foundation states that the average founder is actually 40 years old. The same report shows that nearly 70% of entrepreneurs are married and 60% had at least one child. So much for the stereotype.

Tons of startups, from Intel to Starbucks, were all started by parents. I am a dad myself and One Mighty Roar has been growing along with my daughter. Before I became a father, I got to work with a number of folks who taught me some really great lessons about balancing parenthood and a startup, and I still use these lessons to this day.

1. Think of Your Partner As Your Investor

Having a supportive home partner is a must, and you run a chance of a very painful and expensive divorce if you don’t manage the relationship and foster that support. Think of your partner as your investor, because that person has more influence than you think. So before you start a company or pick a team to join, take the time to pitch the venture and convince your most important investor. It is worth getting your partner’s support.

2. Choose Your Startup Team Wisely

The team you work with is like a second family. Pick wisely! There are many reasons I joined the OMR team, but their support of me being a parent from Day One has been nothing but an inspiration. When your team supports your choice to be a parent, it removes a large layer of office politics and acts as a great source of energy. Even your single colleagues may be parents someday. You have to set an example and inspire them not to fear it when their time comes.

3. Communicate Your Schedule and Priorities

Conflict and ambiguity bring an unnecessary level of overhead to work and family relationships. To minimize that overhead, communication and expectations-setting should be at the top of your mind daily. I am a huge fan of “Commanders Intent.” We practice it at One Mighty Roar at every level, from apprentice to founder. You have to let people know what you are going to do and what the final outcome will look like. Communicating possible risks and where you need help will prepare your home and office teams to have your back when needed. In addition to providing context to a lot of your actions, being transparent with what you are doing and how you are going to do it adds a level of personal discipline you need.

4. Focus

If it does not serve your family or business – purge it! Often, the first thing to go are networking events. Those are mostly “drink-ups” that have no real business value, anyway. Second thing to go are meetings with people who are either not helpful to your work or who are “takers.” These are folks who rarely, if ever, reciprocate for the time and connections you give them. Lastly, it is very likely you will be jettisoning a bunch of hobbies and other activities now that you are a parent. If you already have kids, you know that “me time” is like sleep at Navy Seals training – you take when you can get it, since you don’t get to plan for it. For me, sleep has become the most sought after “hobby.” Being a parent and getting to work with my team is extremely fulfilling and honestly I don’t care enough to pick other hobbies back up right now. I know I am not alone thinking that way.

5. Manage Your Energy

Energy management is not just for utilities. Business has strong demands on your mental energy, and your new family can take a physical toll. Pulling all nighters for the sake of work is non-sense. Generally speaking, the work you do when you’re up at 2:00 am isn’t top-quality, and you’re only going to have to redo the work again the following day. So don’t waste your time.

6. Set Boundaries

When people at work and at home know what to expect from you and when, you cut out a massive amount of conflicts. For example, my team knows there are certain days I leave at 5:00 pm to pick up my daughter and am not going to be reachable until she goes to sleep at 8:00 pm. On those days, my wife knows I need to be in extra early to pound out some work. Most weekday evenings I do set aside time to work on finance and legal docs, because I do the best work on those then.

That means that one of the weekend days is exclusively for housework, family fun, and other non-work activities. It also does not relieve me of my share of housework. Those are just couple of examples.

There are many many successful companies being led by parents. Motivation you derive from having to provide for your family, the impending college costs for your kids, that retirement you have to build for yourself, and the drive to make your family proud of you are incredible fuel for building a successful company. Take it one step at the time and you can and will put your family and growing business in equilibrium. It is not only doable, it is also extremely fun and fulfilling.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/buildinternet/~3/mKiKq-wsKMM/

You got hired because you have a passion for brands and were able to talk intelligently to the client about Snapchat. You always thought you’d be doing something that had an impact on consumers. Clearly, writing Facebook posts for a cheese client wasn’t what you had in mind when you envisioned your career at a marketing agency.

So you’ve realized it’s time to do something else. The good news is, your skills are not at all limited to agency life. In fact, they are very applicable to the startup world. As a former agency person, let me explain why your skills can work well and are very needed in startups.

Building the right team is the most important thing in the first few years on a startup’s life. A quality product, happy customers… all of that is a result of getting the right people on the bus. At One Mighty Roar, we invest heavily in the people we bring into the company. Every person who ends up on our website has a backstory and lessons learned from their former work lives.

For me, I came to OMR after suffering nearly four years of agency life without much to feel good about. Now, my work as a strategist gives me more opportunities to impact how people use technology. Specifically, my team is working to help the Internet of Things be easier to use and make connected devices work together. I can see the real world business value on projects like this and this is my motivation to keep pushing the notion of what’s possible.

You might not realize the skills you learned while eating lunch lonely at your desk trying to power through a deck. But the truth is, startups are looking for people just like you. We sometimes just suck at writing job posts that reflect the skills we really need, so you may need to look beyond the bullet points and seek us out.

Here are four skills that I promise will make any startup person smile during the interview:

Attention to Detail – The likelihood of clients reading your meeting notes is about the same as getting your time-sheets done on time. However, this attention to detail can help the team keep track of items that need more attention. Your ability to take notes and follow up will be a surprising change to people who are used to being pulled in different directions all day. They will look to you as a valuable project manager and as the organized person to remind them about that pitch presentation that has been sitting on their to-do list for a month.

Distill Thoughts to Actionable Goals – Inside the war rooms of startups, many ideas are talked about with little or no action on what to do next. People with an agency background have been trained to distill a client’s thoughts into goals for the agency to solve or explore. Think of the startup as your client. By coming up with action items for each talking point, you’ll be the envy of the office happy hour.

Focus the Team on Solving One Problem – Remember that time you shut your creative team in a room until they solved how they were going to make a 30 second spot into a 15 second one? Well, the same skill to keep a team motivated and focused applies in the startup world too. While it’s not on most job descriptions, startups are looking for people that can motivate teams members, be their cheerleader, and keep projects on the right track.

Creative Thinking with a Mind to Build – Does it ever frustrate you that your agency doesn’t really make anything? You don’t make products, you advertise them. Building things is exactly what startups do. But what they need more of are people with a maker’s passion — but creative thinking — to solve the daunting “What’s next?” question that many agency folks can’t seem to master. The skills needed here are simple: You have the ability to think creatively on hard problems. This type of thinking happens all the time at agencies; you just don’t have the right team to actually implement the ideas. This is your chance to finally create things that people will use.

I hope by outlining the skills startups are craving will inspire you to consider switching to startup life. Skill level aside, what I believe to be the best reason to take your agency experience to a startup is the power you have to make change happen. Some agencies pitch “pie in the sky” ideas to clients knowing moving forward won’t actually happen. Startups, on the other hand, foster a culture to take on challenges and take the risk to actually execute ideas and try new things. Change is something startups embrace. Watching the success of a startup from the outside is one thing, but being involved in the experience will impact you the way you wish your agency did. Trust me, I work at a startup.

Original Source: https://css-tricks.com/playing-shadow-dom/

About a year ago, Twitter announced it would start displaying embedded tweets with the shadow DOM rather than an <iframe>, if the browser supports shadom DOM?

Why? Well, speed is one reason.

They say:

Much lower memory utilization in the browser, and much faster render times. Tweets will appear faster and pages will scroll more smoothly, even when displaying multiple Tweets on the same page.

Why the choice? Why is it necessary to use either iframes or shadow DOM? Why not just inject the content onto the page?

It’s a totally understandable need for control. An embedded Tweet should look and behave just exactly like an embedded Tweet. They don’t want to worry about the styles of the page bleeding in and messing that up.

An <iframe> makes style scoping very easy. Point the src of the iframe at a URL that displays what you want an embedded tweet to look like, and you’re good. The only styles used will be those you include in that document.

Twitter does this iframe-injection in a progressive enhancement and syndication-friendly way. They provide a <blockquote> with the Tweet and a <script>. The script does the iframe-injection. If the script doesn’t run, no matter, a happy blockquote. If the script does run, a fully functional embedded Tweet.

That script is the key here. Scripts can do just about anything, and they host it, so they can change it up anytime. That’s what they use to detect shadow DOM support and go that route instead. And as we covered, shadow DOM is faster to render and has lower memory needs. Shadow DOM can also help with the style scoping thing, which we’ll look at in a moment.

Height flexibility

There’s another thing too, that happens to be near and dear to my heart. An <iframe> doesn’t adjust in height to fit its contents like you expect other elements to do. You set a height and that’s that. It will have scrollbars, if you allow it and the content needs it. Back in the Wufoo days, we had to jump quite a few hoops to get embedded forms (in frames) to be as tall as they needed to be. Today, at CodePen, our Embedded Pens have adjustable heights, but there isn’t any option for just “as tall as they need to be”. (I’m exactly sure if that makes sense for CodePen Embeds or not, but anyway, you can’t do it right now.)

An element with a shadow DOM is just like any other element and that it will expand to the content naturally. I’m sure that is appealing to Twitter as well. If they calculate the height wrong, they run the risk of cutting of content or at least having the embedded Tweet look busted.

Most Basic Usage

Here’s the bare minimum of how you establish a shadow DOM and put stuff in it:

See the Pen Most basic shadow DOM by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Notice how the styling within the Shadow DOM doesn’t leak out to the regular paragraph element? Both paragraphs would be red if they did.

And notice how the paragraph inside the shadow DOM isn’t sans-serif like the one outside? Well, normally that would be. Inherited styles still inherit through the shadow DOM (so in that way it’s not quite as strong a barrier as an iframe). But, we’re forcing it back to the initial state on purpose like this:

:host {
all: initial;
}
Handling that fallback

My first thought for dealing with a fallback for browsers that don’t support shadow DOM was that you could chuck the same exact content you were stuffing into the shadow DOM into an iframe with srcdoc, like…

<iframe srcdoc=”the same content”>

Or more likely this is something you’re doing in JavaScript, so you’d test for support first, then either do the shadow DOM stuff or dynamically create the iframe:

See the Pen Shadow DOM Basic by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Turns out srcdoc isn’t the best choice (alone) for a fallback as there is no IE or Edge support for it. But also that it’s not too big of a deal to just use a data URL for the regular src. Here’s a fork by Šime Vidas where he fixes that up:

let content = `
<style>
body { /* for fallback iframe */
margin: 0;
}
p {
border: 1px solid #ccc;
padding: 1rem;
color: red;
font-family: sans-serif;
}
</style>

<p>Element with Shadow DOM</p>
`;

let el = document.querySelector(‘.my-element’);

if (document.body.attachShadow) {

let shadow = el.attachShadow({ mode: ‘open’ }); // Allows JS access inside
shadow.innerHTML = content;

} else {

let newiframe = document.createElement(‘iframe’);
‘srcdoc’ in newiframe ?
newiframe.srcdoc = content :
newiframe.src = ‘data:text/html;charset=UTF-8,’ + content;

let parent = el.parentNode;
parent.replaceChild(newiframe, el);

}
TL;DR

Shadow DOM is pretty cool.
It’s comparable to an iframe in many ways, including style encapsulation. Embedded third-party content is a pretty good use case.
It’s possible to use it while falling back to an iframe pretty easily.
It’s a part of the larger world of web components, but you don’t have to go all-in on all that if you don’t want to.

Here’s another simple demo (this one using a custom element), but instead of rolling our own back support, it’s polyfilled.

Playing with Shadow DOM is a post from CSS-Tricks