The New York Times crossword puzzle the day before the 1996 presidential election.

The relevant clues:

Across

1. Forecast
2. Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper (!), with 43-Across
3. Title for 39-Across next year

Down

1. Sewing shop purchase
2. Short writings
3. Trumpet
4. Black Halloween animal
5. French 101 word
6. Provider of support, for short
7. Much-debated polital inits.

These mostly-still images with subtle animations add a great new depth to photographs.

See more at Jamie Beck’s Tumblr

After the 3/11 earthquake, #prayforjapan was a hashtag used for people around the world to send messages of encouragement to Japan. prayforjapan.jp is a site that is collecting heartwarming tweets from Japanese users, as well as messages from outside the country.

I got emotional after reading just a few of these messages. The earthquake was a terrible tragedy, but amidst all of that I feel admiration for the spirit of the Japanese people. Messages like this show that people have really come together to help one another, and it give me great hope for the country’s recovery.

I was sitting at the train station exhausted, when some of the homeless people came to me gave me some of their cardboard to keep warm. Even though we always ignore them as we walk by. It’s so warm.

During my 4 hour walk back home, there was a woman with a sketchbook that said “Please use our bathroom!” who had made it available for public use. Japan is truly the warmest country in the world. I started crying after seeing that.

I saw a group of children saying to a train station worker, “Thank you for working hard to keep the trains running yesterday.” The worker was crying. I was sobbing.

Chrono Trigger basically began as a jam session — a couple of star designers and a manga artist getting together to brainstorm and seeing what they might produce. No pressure. No cynicism.

[ . . . ]

Ultimately, the best thing about Chrono Trigger is something that can’t quite be quantified in terms of mechanics, aesthetics, or plot. It’s impossible to play without getting the sense that that its designers really had a lot of fun in conceiving it (barring a stomach ulcer or two) and were wholly dedicated to making sure they got it right. Chrono Trigger is a labor of love effected by a group of very talented game designers, and their enthusiasm for the project permeates every aspect of the experience.

Talk about nostalgia. I still consider Chrono Trigger to be the best game of all time, and this article expresses its appeal perfectly. If you haven’t played it before, fire up the emulator. If you have played it before, reading this will make you want to play again.

I might even say that I didn’t grow up in any meaningful way before I started high school.

I’ve always felt like I have very limited memories of middle school and elementary school. The problem, as I realized recently, isn’t that I have few memories. Rather, it is that my memories don’t seem to include my thoughts – what I wondered, what I thought about, and how I felt about certain things. When probing my memories I get plenty of clear images, but I can’t help but feel like an observer; I can see my past-self doing things and reacting to events, but I have no idea what that child was thinking. I mean, I can guess. I’m sure I’d be pretty good at guessing, since I know the kid well, but it’s strange that this isn’t part of the memory.

This isn’t the case for high school though. I can definitely see parts of my personality in that past self. My emotions come back vividly, and they are as much a part of my memories as the actual events. For me, high school is when everything happened. I had my first romantic relationship. I solidified precious long-term friendships. I opened up to people and brought them into my life. I discovered my passions, and followed them with all of my might. I became closer to my friends than I believed possible. I began to seriously think about the future. I kept dark secrets, and shared them with a trusted few. I cried as many tears of happiness as I did tears of pain. I was confused about the world, and sought to understand it. I struggled to understand myself.

All of these invaluable experiences are what allowed me to grow up. And I believe that it was made possible by those around me, who shared my experiences and allowed me to join theirs. By no means do I claim to be grown-up now, but my point is this – in high school, I took my first steps towards adulthood.

When we were kids, we didn’t use online forums, message boards, or FAQs. Yet somehow, every single child knew that if your videogame wasn’t working, you just needed to blow in the cartridge. And it’s not like anybody documented Red Rover or Wall Ball or Groundies/Lava Monster. Kids just talked to each other and figured it out.

Three Cups of Tea is the most inspiring book I have ever read.

It is the true story following Greg Mortenson, a mountaineer who attempts to climb K2. On his way down, he stumbles into a tiny village in Pakistan and vows to return one day to build a school for the children there. He is successful, and is urged by others to continue building schools for underprivileged children across Pakistan. His story is remarkable, and the amount of impact he has managed to bring as one man with audacious goals is astounding.

I felt a personal connection when he told of his experiences in Peshawar. Samasource works with a group of women in Peshawar who have collectively formed the Women’s Digital league, and they are now earning income through the internet. They were previously unable to do meaningful work outside of the home for cultural reasons, but now say that they are earning as much as the men, if not more. I dare not compare my work to Mortenson’s, but it felt great to learn that our goals are very similar.

This book reaffirmed my desire to do good, and I encourage you to find a copy.

I recently experienced two of the most informative and useful meetings of my life. Lloyd Taylor, the former VP of Technical Operations at LinkedIn, and Olana Khan, the former COO of Kiva, graciously donated their time to speak to us about how to organize our technology goals. We had been in the process of formalizing our thoughts for an upcoming board meeting, but their expert feedback allowed us to cement in some much-needed structure. In addition, we also were given invaluable advice about how to lead an effective technology team in general.

Preface – Agile Development

First, I should set the stage by describing our new development process. Because Samasource is a tiny organization with no shortage of exciting new ventures to pursue, we adopted an agile development framework. This idea has gotten a lot of traction, and Eric lead us through the implementation. He actually wrote up a monster post about it on his blog, but I’ll briefly summarize here.

We divide our attention into short sprints, each lasting one or two weeks. Sprints represent all of the tasks that we will be focusing on during that time, and allow us to keep our minds off of other distractions until it comes time to organize the next sprint.

Each sprint is comprised of various user stories, which encapsulate a qualitative end-goal. For example, one user story from our first sprint was “Website Visitors Understand the Mission and Trust the Org”. What this does is it allows us to focus on the real impact that our work will be making. We will not be blindly executing tasks from stale to-do lists, and will make sure that each project has tangible impact.

And each user story is made up of tasks, which are small, discrete items of work that take a short amount of time to complete. This allows us to quantify the work that will be done.

This system of agile development allows us to be flexible from week to week with what we prioritize, ensures us that we are working towards a real goal with measurable impact, and breaks the work down into bite-size pieces. With this basic system in place, we can begin talking about business organization and the steps we can take to make the engineering team as effective as possible.

Continue reading →

I recently saw Gogol Bordello perform live for the second time. The first was a year (two years?) ago in San Francisco, and it was the wildest, most exhilarating event I have ever attended. Many concerts have “that one song,” that brings the entire audience together in a fever of enthusiasm to focus entirely on the music and the performance. Gogol Bordello managed to maintain this state for the entire 2 hour show. The rush of being in a huge crowd of people screaming in unison and immersed in the moment, led by the gods of gypsy punk, was indescribable. But enough about last year.

The Oakland show was pretty good. The guys brought us a show as wild and passionate as ever before, so I think the crowd was the missing factor. There was nothing wrong with it per se – A few too many sweaty, angry men in the mosh pit for my tastes but that’s almost unavoidable – so I’m willing to bet that the San Francisco crowd that night was just too good to follow. Everybody in that theater was there to see the band, and loved – lusted, even – the music they performed. That just doesn’t happen every day, and it has earned Gogol Bordello a permanent place in my heart.

Originally posted on the fbFund blog

While a Stanford undergrad, I began my online career with gleeful audacity. The Monday after Facebook Platform launched, my friend and I released Facebook’s original Graffiti application. We were unexperienced and had no viral component, so we soon lost the battle to Mark Kantor et al.’s version. But Graffiti gave us excitement and hunger. The following fall we enrolled in Stanford’s course on Facebook applications, using the opportunity to develop Send Hotness. This time, we nailed the virality. A few advertising payouts later, we were the proud owners of two companies. Doped up on adrenaline, we loved every minute. I stepped down eventually once I remembered that I had schoolwork to do, but I felt sure that this was my path.

Fast forward to April 2009. Graduation is pending, and I have the thrilling chance to commit my waking hours to some product. As it turns out, I basically had one choice:

We’re developing a real-time, web 2.0, social algorithm-based consumer-facing interface that will revolutionize what users do when they [blank]

Many were great products, but I was saddened by those whose blanks were literal. They revolutionized where there was no value, turning a frivolous activity into a a well-designed and sexy frivolous activity. I needed more than that, and I looked for a way off of this path to inconsequence.

This is when I met Leila Chirayath Janah, the founder and CEO of Samasource. Having been in operations for 6 months at the time, Samasource’s mission was to bring dignified, computer-based work to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty. They recognized the tremendous untapped talent in impoverished countries and strove to bring prosperity by providing a sustainable livelihood. This is an idea that will change the world, and I was hooked from the start.

I now have the privilege of being Samasource’s VP of Technology, and we have truly been blessed by being invited to participate in fbFund REV this summer. It’s an unexpected meeting of my past and current passions, and it has been tremendously fruitful. The Facebook platform, as well as other social channels, have a huge potential to effect social change and support these initiatives.

Samasource’s project this summer is to bring our services to the Facebook platform by allowing partners in rural Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to offer quality assurance and testing to application developers. I believe that Facebook can bring together resourceful entrepreneurs and skilled rural workers in a way that was previously unheard of. As an application developer you are working one-on-one with a real person from across the world. This is a very moving realization, as I found when first inviting our service partners to join the site. For these individuals, having a Facebook profile is itself a powerful first step. Many have little or no web presence, and this will be their first chance to build a legitimate online reputation. Imagine the excitement of becoming plugged into such a dynamic international network for the first time, seeing no limit to where your work can take you.

So as it turns out, I am now committing my waking hours to a great product. We are remodeling the means by which an individual can rise out of poverty. We are enabling people to make socially responsible decisions that will change a life forever. Samasource is revolutionizing by giving work.