jdowning

Why is it so tough to hire a designer?

Value is moving up the stack

As happens in most industries, value creation is moving up the stack. That is, companies make money in new technology-driven arenas at first by differentiating on performance, engineering, cost, etc. As industries evolve, core infrastructure gets built and commoditized, and differentiation moves up the hierarchy of needs from basic functionality to non-basic functionality, to design, and even to fashion.

For example, there was a time when chief buying concerns included how well a watch might tell time and how durable a pair of jeans was. There is still plenty of core technology to be built for the Internet, but the fact that you can now be a fairly sizable Internet company without ever needing to own (or even look at) your server hardware means a much bigger proportion of what companies do is add value on top what’s here. And one of the most powerful ways to add value is through design.

-- Evan Williams (@ev)
https://ev.mediu

jdowning

# Bonus: you could use jq and save the value in env vars to be passed into later commands
❯ heroku api post /sources
POST api.heroku.com/sources... 201
{
  "source_blob": {
    "get_url": "presigned_s3_GET_url",
    "put_url": "presigned_s3_PUT_url"
  }
}

jdowning

#!/bin/bash

# This script cleans up your EC2 instance before baking a new AMI.
# Run the following command in a root shell:
#
# bash <(curl -s https://gist.github.com/justindowning/5921369/raw/ami-clean.sh)

function print_green {
  echo -e "\e[32m${1}\e[0m"
}

jdowning

Make it real

Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe. Discuss around concrete examples, not hand-waving abstractions. Don't say you did something, provide a URL that proves it.

Ship it

Nothing is real until it's being used by a real user. This doesn't mean you make a prototype in the morning and blog about it in the evening. It means you find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it.

Do it with style

jdowning

<Creator>
  <Name>Venu</Name>
  <UnitId>3322992137</UnitId>
  <ProductID>3226</ProductID>
  <Version>
    <VersionMajor>6</VersionMajor>
    <VersionMinor>50</VersionMinor>
    <BuildMajor>0</BuildMajor>
    <BuildMinor>0</BuildMinor>
  </Version>

jdowning

#!/bin/bash

# This script zeroes out any space not needed for packaging a new Ubuntu Vagrant base box.
# Run the following command in a root shell:
#
# bash <(curl -s https://gist.github.com/justindowning/5670884/raw/vagrant-clean.sh)

function print_green {
  echo -e "\e[32m${1}\e[0m"
}

jdowning

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

HOST=$1

while true
do
  echo -n "$(date)"

  for p in 10001 10002 10003

jdowning

Set variables to use in template:

# note: these are example values
export AWS_ACCOUNT_ID=012345678901         
export HEROKU_DATA_ACCOUNT_ID=098765432109

Use the key policy with the variables:

envsubst < key_policy.json

jdowning

{
    "Id": "KMS-policy",
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "Enable IAM User Permissions",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::<your_aws_account_id>:root"
            },

jdowning

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                         Version             Architecture        Description
+++-============================-===================-===================-=============================================================
ii  acl                          2.2.52-3            amd64               Access control list utilities
ii  acpid                        1:2.0.26-1ubuntu2   amd64               Advanced Configuration and Power Interface event daemon
ii  adduser                      3.113+nmu3ubuntu4   all                 add and remove users and groups
ii  apparmor                     2.10.95-0ubuntu2.11 amd64               user-space parser utility for AppArmor
ii  apport                       2.20.1-0ubuntu2.20  all                 automatically generate crash reports for debugging