We were on the offensive from the minute we got there, spurred on by Gary’s constant urgings of “let’s do something competitive!” and a surplus of alcohol generously supplied by Wine Library.

Over the course of the two day weekend, the following competitive activities took place:

• Volleyball
• Football
• Mountain Biking
• Relay race
• One-on-one beer shotgunning competition
• “Over the Top” style arm wrestling competition
• Spontaneous “how many consecutive sweet tarts can @akopec throw from the balcony into varying distance mouths below” competition
• 4 hour argument about whether Paul Pierce is overrated
• A game invented on-the-fly involving deception, stealth, and wild-eyed chases in the dark that saw @garyvee, @shaunchapman, and @keithholjencin crawling on their stomachs through the dewy weeds and mud at the cabin’s perimeter in the pitch darkness as if they were in enemy territory in ‘Nam.

There were a few people there not used to the intensity, and seeing their raised eyebrows at all this got me thinking about the purpose of all of it.

It’s not immediately apparent what the purpose is for members of an internet startup to bat around a ball at each other when they’ll never surpass weekend warrior status.

To find meaning in these casual competitions, you have to look at the place sports have in our culture, and why it’s important for professional athletes at the peak of their game to compete against one another.

“After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down”
-Fight Club

To the casual observer, any sport is a meaningless game around an arbitrary goal. Athletes’ salaries are more worthy of debate than their accomplishments on the field.

To the participants though, the games take on a meaning that is more powerful than the meanings found in everyday life.

Why? because sports tap into our competitive, animal nature. Every animal is wired for competition because of the scarcity of resources needed for survival.

The need to acquire food, air, water, mates, and sunlight at the expense of others is the primary driver of growth: stronger, better, faster, smarter, significantly more able to fly…whatever can give you an advantage.

Competition as inspired by scarcity also forms the foundation of one of the two most basic instincts: killing. The driving force that compels people to compete against one another in sports is a modified version of the instinct to survive by growing stronger and killing competition.

Sports are one of the most fascinating human inventions. They showcase our ability to re-route natural urges and re-assign reward systems. To transcend survival instincts and use them to organize a group of selfish individuals for a common goal.

“UNITY!!!”
-Dave Chapelle as Rick James

Look at how humans competed with other organisms way back in the day. We were smaller, weaker, and slower than most predators around us.

Yes, yes, we were smarter. But not as individuals. Try to outwit a grizzly bear and you’ll see what I mean. All we had going for us was collaboration.

Still to this day, nothing unites people so much as a common goal, and nothing inspires a common goal better than a common enemy.

Think about the world cup. Michigan fans and Ohio State fans, Auburn and Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma, were all rooting alongside each other as local sports allegiances gave way to a larger sentiment of our country as a whole against the other countries of the world.

World peace is an impossibility today, but imagine if tomorrow hostile aliens came down like in Independence Day. Any inter-human conflicts would immediately give way to collaboration in a larger struggle.

At our retreat this weekend, teams were formed and re-formed at random. Now think about it in the context practicing allegiances and collaboration.

Does this internal competition not make us that much stronger when play conflicts in the world of sport amongst ourselves give way to real conflicts between our entire company and another in the world of business?

It seems absurd to many that playing volleyball against each other gives us more of an ability to succeed at the game of business. I disagree. It’s all about the spirit of the game.

“You play to win the game. You don’t play to just play it. That’s the great thing about sports”
- Herm Edwards

We live in a world of scarcity, there is no question about it. Given that you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing you are lucky enough to not be experiencing scarcity of food, water, or shelter.

You’re faced with a different type of scarcity, a decidedly human scarcity: scarcity of attention. People have a limited amount of attention to give.

Let’s go back to the salaries of athletes for a second. The reason they get paid that much is simple: demand. The reason they compete is not, in the cases of the most successful, for money or any other tangible reward. They want to be considered to be the best by whomever is important to them, whether it’s the general public or a high school coach who slighted them.

The financial success of your brand depends on capturing peoples attention, and if you think you don’t measure individual success in terms of attention (and admiration), whether it’s from hundreds of thousands of like-minded strangers or just one of your parents, I call bullshit.

Whatever scarcity or competition you are facing, there are three approaches you can take to improve your position.

1. Embrace constructive competition (the Michael Jordan strategy)
You focus on winning through strength. You courageously admit that you are not complete; you learn from each contest. You seek stronger competition at all times, committing yourself 100% in every arena because you believe you have a chance to win.

2. Embrace destructive competition (the Tonya Harding strategy)
You focus on winning through injuring or otherwise discrediting others. Given a choice, you’ll gladly take a perceived victory over strengthening loss every time. For those who compete destructively, insecurity transforms hunger into greed and admiration into envy.

3. Refusal to compete (the Goth Kids strategy)
This happens far, far more often to all of us than any of us would care to admit. Right now, you’re implicitly denying competitions because it’s easy to convince yourself you’re doing alright when you decline to compare yourself to others.

I’m happy to report that if this weekend was any indication, it seems that everybody here wants to be Like Mike.

What’s the significance of that tweet? It was from my first day here. July 14th was a year ago. Put ‘em together, I’ve been working here for a year today. Seems like an appropriate time to take a look back.

2009

I’ll never forget the day I got this job.

The moment Gary reached across the table to shake my hand, I knew my life had changed. The rush I felt that summer evening was unparalleled, but I’ll tell you about that when you’re older.

Intuitively, I was right. A year later, working at VaynerMedia has changed my life to the extent I thought it would. But I was wrong about how.

Sure, we almost doubled in size and are making exponentially more revenue. But from an external standpoint, we haven’t come very far.

To anybody who’s not one of us, one of our clients, or a fan of Gary’s, we’re still just another nameless Internet startup in Tribeca that a bunch of kids bike to from their Brooklyn apartments.

We’re still a forgotten byline on the 12th page of an online magazine. We haven’t hit primetime, we haven’t entered the mainstream conversation.

Frankly, if you told me a year ago after that we would be where we are now, I would have been surprised and disappointed. “Surely we’d be a household name, at least in New York!”. “Surely we’d all be making six figures, on a clear path to getting Gary his billion to buy the jets”.

I was wrong. I wasn’t handed extravagant success, and neither was VaynerMedia. It’s OK though. The two things I’ve been instilled with the most over the last year have been patience and faith.

I see now that I was given something far better than automatic, trickle-down success: an opportunity to learn the blueprint for creating success out of nothing. Enrollment in my own personal business school with one of the most fascinating families in business.

2010

Teams win championships.

Gary and AJ have excellent DNA for creating a team, and they’re putting on a clinic on how to inject global perspective and purpose into a group of individuals, how to unite disparate personalities into a cohesive whole, and how to create an environment of mutual support and trust that allows everyone to work beyond their individual capability.

Everyone here is trying to drink their own ocean. Every single person here is underqualified on paper for the responsibilities and tasks they assign themselves every day. If there wasn’t an atmosphere of trust, support, and friendly competition, people would quit.

At the last place I worked, the whole was less than any one of its individual parts. Sounds extreme but it’s true. This is already an organization where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it has been that way from the beginning.

Seems simple. Should be simple. It’s not. The default approach of humans to one another is a distrustful “guilty until proven innocent” mentality. It takes honest dedication to establish a culture of trust, familiarity, respect and love in a group of unrelated individuals.

How few companies can say that they’re truly operating as a team?
How many organizations have degenerated into a cesspool of unchallenged and unutilized minds and hearts, festering and decaying in their cubicles right now?
How many startups are powered by aggrandized ego and selfish greed?? It’s tragic.

Creating a culture is done through direct and transparent communication. That’s certainly been a theme here.

The manifestation of that culture, though, is in what’s not said. Actually that makes it sound like censorship…it’s about what’s not even *thought*.

When you can trust that everyone you’re working with has their self-interest tied to yours and is here to help you rather than harm you, that frees up a lot…a LOT…of mental power.

2011

So where are we headed? Honestly, I have no idea. We’re still young as hell. Bonds are still being forged. People are still gaining competency and skill in their individual disciplines. For example, a year ago I was working with wordpress…now I’m working with redis, node.js, and edge rails.

There’s more to it than individual development though. We’re a wolfpack in training. There’s a collective, palpable, group-wide focusing. Every individual is leaning a little further forward every day.

There have been peaks and valleys, I don’t want to paint a picture that everything is unicorns and flowers here. There have certainly been points over the past year that I’ve had doubts.

But at the end of the day, I always come to the same conclusion. I’ve escaped the lonely, selfish corporate world. Each trough is higher than the previous one. Most importantly, I’m finally part of a team that I genuinely believe in and care about.

All in all I can say that globally, I’ve wrapped my head around the fact that the team I’m a part of is headed in the right direction, and it’s going to be fun to see what the future will bring.

Total read time: 8 minutes

Cyclical Iteration. It’s a philosophy that underlies everything we do here at VaynerMedia, from development cycles to client strategies to administrative processes to sushi/sake team dinners.

What is iteration?

-It’s the systemic acceptance of short term failures to ensure long term success.

-It’s the embracing of the cyclical and chaotic nature of growth and the absence of formal long term planning.

-It’s the investment in human capital and relative disregard for protection of existing assets.

This systemic embracing of the inevitability and strengthening nature of human failure that pervades our company culture is, in my estimation, the surest indicator of our eventual success.

Fail harder, fail better.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett

Iteration is not the process of stepping consistently forward. In fact, quite the opposite, it is predicated on the acceptance of stepping backwards.

Each cycle (or iteration) follows a classic trial-and-error pattern. The first few steps are usually incorrect, but they help expose the complexity of the problem and eventually lead to a more robust and often more innovative solution.

Iteration not only accepts short-term failure, it embraces it. Failure now leads to strength later on.

Seek failure and you will find real strength. Seek perfection and you’ll find weakness veiled as strength.

Disclaimer: I feel obliged to mention that this does not mean that as a company we are releasing substandard or half-cocked strategies or products to our clients. Quite the opposite — the iterative cycles take place internally and help us ensure we can deliver consistently great results.

Safe is risky.

“Safe is risky.” – Seth Godin

If your goal is to never fail (or admit failure), you’ll find that the more you acquire, the more frantically you’ll have to struggle to maintain your “winnings”.

You can’t monitor or control everything. No matter how much you try to keep everything moving consistently upward, something you’re not monitoring is going down.

You know, it takes so much damn energy and cognitive dissonance to convince yourself that you are unfailingly headed on the right path. Why not just admit that there are going to be peaks and valleys??

Sometimes you’re going to forget important things. Sometimes you’re going to do embarrassing shit. Sometimes you’re going to offend and disappoint people you care about or look up to or need approval from.

If you would just RELAX and be ok with losing a few battles, you’d find it’s much easier to win the war.

One of our greatest weaknesses as human beings is our inability to go beyond linear projection. You decide not to lose three battles in a row, because that translates to 9 and 18 in your head.

All important fundamental dynamics are so clearly cyclical, yet we can only take into account a singular slope in our projections, and that chains so many people to overly conservative or risk-averse approaches.

A risk-averse approach is safe in the short term and self-destructive in the long term. And not the fun kind of self-destructive. The slow, crippling, succumbing to death at 24 without realizing it until 42 version of self-destructive. No thanks.

Trust the actors, not the script.

In order to operate on a daily basis, human beings need to ignore a huge number of variables and attribute the continued functioning of those variables to an abstraction that some would call “faith”.

Corporate strategies and sitcoms like Two and a Half Men ascribe that faith to a rigid “plan”, and operate with an implicit wary distrust in the human actors involved.

Iterative strategies and genuine comedies like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Eastbound and Down have rudimentary guidelines for each scene but the director is happy to throw the script out the window on any given scene because her faith lies with the characters and the actors that breathe life into them.

Get attached to the people, not the product or the processes. The only asset that can flourish without attention and demonstrate true exponential ROI is a human asset.

Make more chairs.

When you get attached to your accomplishments, as a company or an individual, you’re putting your money on a commodity with diminishing returns.

Because anything you build is bound to wither eventually no matter how closely you protect or hoard it, you’re putting yourself or your company into a game of musical chairs; a game that degenerates into a dystopia ruled by scarcity and marked by fearful, animalistic competition between otherwise decent human beings.

The solution? Cut that cord, my friend. Put your faith in your future, not your past.

With each iteration you should focus on increasing your ability to do it faster and better next time rather than clinging to your creation, no matter how valuable it appears.

Anything man can build will inevitably crumble. The tires lose their traction and the hinges rust and the sheen fades. One of the saddest things to see is an organization or a person frantically patching together or attempting to bail out a decaying symbol of their past glory.

The second that glue starts unsticking, you want to confidently assess your dying creation like the million dollar man — “we can rebuild him”.

Don’t fear the reaper.

“Don’t fear the reaper (we’ll be able to fly)” – Blue Oyster Cult

What iteration really comes down to is letting the weak or old parts die the deaths they want to die.

If you don’t keep a healthy population of wolves inside, if you don’t have a certain modicum of ruthless killing in your organization or yourself, you’ll eventually find your business or your life unmanageable due to the unchecked, brimming caribou herd that will overwhelm the system.

So many things would be so much better if people could accept minor losses and deaths in the interest of “strengthening the herd”.

Imagine if you could actually “take a break” in a relationship before the relationship was over on one or both sides, how much more stable and secure would that relationship be?

Imagine if laws were repealed as often as they were passed, how much more accurate and fair would laws be?

I hate to get all Eastern philosophy and Yin/Yang on you here, but failure and death are a necessary counterbalance to (and enabler of) success and life.

If you do it right and embrace the failures in your personal actions, even the final, faltering act will be pleasurable.

Hell, I fully intend to have an open bar and a live band at my funeral.

Life’s a joke, if you let yourself exhale and you celebrate the little deaths instead of dreading them, you might be able to laugh at it again.

If you got to the position of your bosses boss, would you be happy?

If you got to choose your job, would you choose the path of highest average gain with medium risk or highest possible gain with maximum risk?

Just as anybody who dedicates their life to music has at one point imagined themself as an international rockstar, anybody who willfully dedicates their life to the Internet has at one point imagined themselves being beyond a boss; being part of something magical.

Which websites represent the rockstars we aspire to be? You already know what they are, because they all reached a level where they registered resoundingly in the national consciousness, and there’s one every 18 months or so in accordance with Moore’s law.

Chronologically they are Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay, Myspace, Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter.

So you’re saying there’s a chance.

There are a few patterns uniting this batch of sites.

1. None of them solved an existing problem. Instead, they all created entirely novel experiences.

If your focus is on fixing a problem, you’ve given yourself a ceiling that’s too low.

2. None of them were carried by a brilliant or unique idea. Instead, they were all solid ideas that hundreds or thousands of people may have had concurrently — but only one team executed and executed well enough to be a leader.

If you’re focused on concept over execution, you’ll be sitting on a barstool lamenting the fact that someone else took “your” idea.

3. None of them were started by a lone individual.

If you’re not actively surrounding yourself with people who inspire and challenge you, it’s going to take you decades to catch up.

4. None of them were a first venture.

Overnight successes were underground for decades. The great ones have always had a sort of urgent patience, like stubborn turtles.

5. None of them were started with financial profit as the primary motivation (despite some having fantastic business models).

If the money’s anything more than a bonus of your endeavor, you’ve already lost.

What was all that one in a million talk??

If you’re going to pursue the Grail, you can’t be reliant on praise or encouragement from others. You’re going to have to discount 90% of what anyone not pursuing the same Grail says to you.

Most people, including your parents, will laugh in your face if you tell them that you’re going to make the next Facebook. “A few get lucky; for every one that succeeds theres a million that fail.”

Here’s the thing about other people’s advice though: no-one believes in you. When you yourself can’t even articulate what it is you know you’re capable of, no-one is going to make that assumption on your behalf.

Do you think Steven Tyler’s mom or dad looked at him when he was 15 and said “Son put down those books, you were born to be a rock star. Here’s a guitar and a bottle of whiskey, now get in your room and make some f*cking rock and roll”. No.

If you have a special gift, you also have a special burden of needing that gift to emerge and manifest itself and a special constraint of not being able to follow any of the paths cleared for you by friends and family.

Shoot for the moon and land on the damn moon.

The benefits of owning, creating, or otherwise being associated with a Grail site are obvious to any casual observer. Rich and famous, right? Wrong. Those are the symptoms, but not the disease.

There is a higher good than money or fame: glory.

As Gary and AJ put it, “Legacy > Currency”. As Lil Wayne put it, “I don’t want the glow, I want the glo-ry”. As Drake put it “It’s funny when you coming in first, but you hope, that you last/you just hope, that it lasts”.

Chris Rock originated a wildly accurate phrase that says you always lose money chasing women but never lose women chasing money. It goes up another level. You always lose glory chasing money, but you never lose money chasing glory.

75% of the time, you’re screwed anyway.

An abstraction of any challenge that can always embolden you is that you only control at most half of the variables. All you can control is your preparation and belief. It looks like this:

To some this chart is daunting — to me it’s freeing. You’re probably screwed anyway. Might as well try.

I gotta get back to work but…thoughts?

A few weeks beforehand, they got us involved to help them craft a release that innovatively leveraged social media.

This was probably the most fun project I’ve done so far, and I wanted to share a little about what made the process so enjoyable, exciting, and unique.

1. Discovery

Travis Porter’s manager, CEO Charlie, had an existing dialogue with our own hardworking hip-hop blogger @mikeboydjr who writes Hip Hop at Lunch. Boyd introduced him to Gary and AJ and subsequently to me.

When we spoke on the phone, the opportunity was obvious. Their last independently released mixtape had propelled them to a national and overseas tour, a couple videos on MTV, and a song on the billboard rap charts. They were releasing a follow-up, 17 song mixtape and a short film (1/2 hour) on May 18th.

Their last social media campaign had been in February, a “tweet to watch” campaign for their music video for “Get Naked” and they wanted to innovate on that. From 6-8pm, they were going to take over the livemixtapes.com site, redirecting all visitors to a custom social landing page.

Travis Porter had an avid and rapidly growing fan base, which gave us a captive audience. They were unsigned, which gave us creative license. They were innovators in a space (Hip Hop music) that was seeing huge social effectiveness with rudimentary implementations, which gave us an exciting and potentially rewarding challenge.

Charlie and I hung up after about two hours and my mind was buzzing with the opportunities that this unlikely collaboration could yield.

2. Concept

CEO Charlie called me on a Friday, and the next day Boyd and I came in to the office to brainstorm. The tight timeframe of the release helped simplify and focus our vision, and we came up with the concept over a Saluggi’s pizza and a couple leftover Newcastle Brown Ales in under an hour.

The concept was:
1. Allow people to unlock through twitter (tweet link + follow travis porter) or facebook (post link + give email address)
2. Have a video section that will play either the movie or Travis Porter live ustreaming
3. Allow the audience to interact with Travis Porter directly through twitter and facebook on the page. Each interaction propagates through their network and extends the viral loop.

Simple, right? I put up a living prototype that day (you can still see it here: http://graphpaper.vaynermedia.com/travisporter) and it was game time.

3. Execution

From concept to execution was only about 20 hours between two people. I handled all the back-end work and social media integration, and our newest team member @shaunchapman (of 0 to 255 pseudo-fame) handled the front-end UI.

More impressively, we could do it in half the time if we did it again and a quarter of the time if we had control of the servers for testing production code.

Take a look at the final result:

Travis Porter: “Proud to be a Problem” social landing page

The best part is that 3/4 of the elements on the page are plug-and-play components offered by ustream, twitter, and facebook. From a user experience standpoint, 75% of the page was done in under an hour.

The development time was all spent on writing a custom OAuth implementation for Twitter, integrating Facebook’s new open graph api, collaborating with livemixtapes.com to ensure the correct user flow from authentication to unlocking the mixtape, and skinning the page according to the specifications of Travis Porter’s graphic designer, Colourful Money.

Of course that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg; if you’re interested in technical details feel free to ask how we did anything in the comments and I’ll respond with an explanation and code sample.

4. Results

- 42,000+ unique visitors in 2 hours. 239 combined days spent on the landing page by all visitors.
- #3 trending topic on all of Twitter.
- #11 most searched term on Google.
- 7,000+ tweets and follows.
- 15,000+ clicks on the official bit.ly link from the generated tweet (stats: http://bit.ly/proudtobeaproblem+)
- 4,500+ likes on the Open Graph enabled album (and de facto Fan Page) for the album Proud to be a Problem.

5. Conclusions

The launch was a success. It was fresh and exciting for everybody involved — us, Travis Porter, Live Mixtapes, and the fans.

This Travis Porter/VaynerMedia collaboration is my absolute favorite type of working relationship, and the effectiveness of a good working relationship can be seen in the results.

They are on top of their game, and we are on top of ours. They don’t need more than what we can provide because they already have the talent. They’re not going to restrict us to less than what we can provide, because they don’t have a legal department.

Travis Porter just told us their story and goals, and we listened. Then they stepped aside and gave us the freedom to select the right tools from our vast social media toolbox to accomplish those goals.

But enough about us. The most important takeaway is that it is downright scary what Travis Porter and other up-and-coming artists can do with minimal effort by leveraging social media.

The power is truly shifting from labels and other corporately tainted entities to the artists themselves, and touching that yesterday was exhilarating.

There is this article that shows the “eroding” privacy policy of Facebook in direct quotations:
http://w2.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/

There is this article showing the same progression as an infographic:
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/.

Wired noted that a Facebook employee, when questioned about how Mark Zuckerberg feels about privacy, responded with laughter, saying “He doesn’t believe in it”: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/report-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-doesnt-believe-in-privacy/

There are also congressmen that are proposing a sweeping Internet privacy bill: http://gigaom.com/2010/05/04/congress-proposes-sweeping-internet-privacy-bill/ , prompting Facebook to hire an ex-boss of the FTC as their lawyer: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/10/facebook_bush_lawyer/

…and just today, there was a security hole found (and fixed) in Yelp, one of the three sites granted “instant personalization” features (ie automatic access to a lot of your facebook data): http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/11/yelp-security-hole-puts-facebook-user-data-at-risk-underscores-problems-with-instant-personalization/

So, I’m bringing this up because I sincerely want to talk to anyone who shares concerns about these policies.

See, Facebook’s changes fill me with excitement rather than fear or uncertainty. Not just for what they make directly possible now, but for what a societal shift in the direction of open-ness would mean.

Do you pick up calls from unknown numbers? You should, every single time. The benefit of your picking up a single important call from a friend (most people don’t have jail telephones in their address book) far outweighs the cost of having to hang up on wrong numbers or junk calls.

The debate over open-ness of information comes down to this same cost-benefit analysis to me.

People seem to only consider potential (and exponentially more common) misuses of their data by a malicious individual or organization, but never the rare advantages that could be provided to them by an individual or organization bent on helping people and understanding the world better.

It’s downright tragic that the default mode of operation for most when assessing other human beings is “guilty until proven innocent”.

Consider a world where all of your interactions with everybody throughout your life are catalogued, categorized, and entered into computers. To most, this scenario would result in the society George Orwell outlined in 1984, where every individual is controlled on a personal level by an all-seeing government.

Very few people contemplating this scenario would think what I did: “Can you imagine the advances in the field of Psychology after one generation of this???”

I mean really, can you imagine how much more insight we would have into the human condition, and how much happier we could make an individual in the next generation by leveraging data we had from lives in the past that were characterized by similar data points?

Part of it admittedly comes from a naive optimism regarding human nature, but the other part is that my professional challenge every day comes down to parsing data. So I’m dubious as to the effectiveness of attempting to control a vast number of individuals on a personal level, if for no other reason than the sheer logistics of parsing all that data in realtime.

In general, fear of your information being collected and abused by a huge organization (like Facebook) on an individual basis implies a self-centered viewpoint. From the perspective of potential data collectors, whether noble or malicious, your individual personal data is basically irrelevant. Good or bad, they are after *aggregate* data.

The last point I want to make is that people always wonder “well if technology has improved our lives so much why isn’t anyone happier”. Well, shit, it’s hard to build something that’s going to make you happy if that thing has no baseline understanding of who you are, what type of people you’re friends with, and what you prefer to do with your time.

I know these are unconventional viewpoints, but as a developer who understands the technical implementation and real world implications of the Facebook platform, I’m really curious to explore your concerns and inform you from a technical perspective if you are worried about your privacy on Facebook.

If you have questions about what is or is not possible for Facebook and other websites to do with your Facebook data, I can answer them.

If you want to know where to go to make sure your privacy settings reflect your intentions, I can show you.

But must of all, if you have concerns about specific drawbacks of making more of your information publicly available, I’d love to find out why.

You can comment anonymously if you like

The shift boils down to this: the barrier to entry for integrating Facebook’s social data into any site has been dramatically lowered.

Take a look at these 8 social plugins: http://developers.facebook.com/plugins. Adding one of them to your site is as easy as dropping in google analytics or embedding a youtube video.

These plug-and-play components that Facebook released, while nice, are truly just the tip of the iceberg. The real importance behind the f8 announcements is how they affect the relationship between Facebook and web developers.

If you’re a web developer you likely have some measure of animosity towards the Facebook platform. Dealing with the Facebook API was a necessary evil. The platform was non-standard, laughably documented, difficult to test and debug, and rife with baffling and inconsistent design decisions.

Everyone dealing with it at some point thought “this should not be so hard, there must be a simpler way.” Bret Taylor, former CEO and co-founder of FriendFeed, shared that sentiment while dealing with the platform significantly more than most. Fortunately for all of us, Facebook bought FriendFeed and appointed Bret as the head of the Facebook platform.

Developers, if you haven’t already, you can get all the proof you need that this was the right decision by spending 5 minutes skimming this: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api. Dive in for an hour and you’ll see that it’s an intuitive and well-designed true REST api that returns standardized json or xml, and it’s finally clearly and logically documented.

If you’re not a developer and you’re preparing to skip the rest of this because tech-talk started and you don’t even know what the acronym API stands for (it’s Application Programming Interface), don’t. A shallower API learning curve and better integration with existing tools may seem convenient for developers and irrelevant to non-developers, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Look at Twitter — despite a miniscule and skewed user base as compared to Facebook, they joined the conversation when CNN et. al. noticed their explosive growth. This growth was primarily a function of two factors: rapid innovation and low barriers to entry for new user interaction (one-click follows etc).

The significant point here is that the vast majority of Twitter’s innovation did not come from within. They started with a well-designed and open API, and put the onus of innovation on the open market of thousands of developers who wanted a piece of their pie.

Facebook, in f8, has introduced both a well-designed and open API and lower barriers to entry for user interaction (“likes” that double as “follows”). They’ve essentially stepped out of the way and allowed their innovation to be powered by the open market of the hundreds of thousands of developers who want a piece of *their* pie.

I can’t tell you what the game-changing application will be that uses the new Facebook graph API, but I can tell you that there will be one that affects the way all of us use the internet. And when Facebook buys them for some obscene amount of money, there will be an “overnight gold rush” that in reality was set into motion this past Wednesday.

And that’s how Facebook’s f8 changes will affect you in 600 words or less.

For Microsoft, focusing on the head instead of the long tail meant that it returned queries for popular sites and failed to serve queries with smaller, lesser known resources online. The long tail of queries ended up yielding more money for Google over the last 11-plus years.

The article wasn’t particularly surprising; the divergent strategies are expected given the corporate DNAs of Microsoft and Google, the end results are widely known. It is interesting because it illustrates a dynamic of Internet business that goes way beyond search.

What is the long tail? Like the bell curve, it’s a statistical concept that has a huge number of practical applications. Do yourself a favor and read through or skim the wikipedia article on what the long tail represents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail.

Basically it says that while there is a big and noticeable drop-off between the “big fish” (e.g. hollywood-backed movies, CEO salaries) and the “small fish” (e.g. independent films, junior analyst salaries), the volume of small fish means that their aggregate weight is actually larger than the aggregate weight of the big fish.

You know who knows all about long tail distribution? Whales. The biggest creatures in the world, they’re down with long tail distribution. They all thrive by fishing for volume, not for size. The advantages to indiscriminately consuming the tiniest digestible prey are obvious just by looking at the size of whales.

The long tail plankton strategy is not limited to aquatic creatures. Google, Amazon, the iTunes store, Netflix, Twitter, and eBay are all examples of companies that got their foothold and then surpassed their competition by targeting and leveraging the long tail in one way or another.

It’s worth noting here that this is far from the first post on the internet to draw this link. Chris Anderson wrote an entire book about it called “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. You should also check out Seth Godin’s thoughts on the matter, starting here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/the-long-tail-t.html.

It’s also worth noting that before widespread availability of the Internet, the business models of these companies were impossible, because the long tail of consumers were inaccessible and impossible to aggregate. The last time market possibilities expanded like this and made previously impossible business models plausible on such a grand scale? The industrial revolution.

Out of that increased capacity for aggregation of resources and consolidation of consumer bases came a slew of companies that are now industry leading fortune 500 companies, including the number one recognized brand in the known universe, Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola made their money in plankton too, selling 50 cent sugar waters to EVERYBODY. Look at their stock price, they’re a perfect example of fishing like a whale: coasting steadily underneath the turbulent waves above, unthinkingly and indiscriminately gobbling up millions of individual dollars every day, secure in the massively distributed nature of their market dependence.

Even with all these success stories, it may still seem counter-intuitive to focus on all the little guys. That’s because we’re used to being constrained by lack of physical resources. If you’re out fishing, you’re not going to pick out the minnows one by one, because you only have so many hooks and each cast of the line takes to much time.

Here’s the thing about the internet though, it’s powered by computer programs. Resources aren’t scarce like they are in the physical world. Casting a thousand lines takes less than a second. Hooks can be fashioned out of math and electricity.

The default MO of the vast majority of companies is to fish like a shark — identify large pieces of prey one by one, stalk them, and attack with intention. Optimize your equipment for the big catches.

One good example is the way that Microsoft Office pricing is focused exclusively on making money off of the big corporate accounts. Look I’m not knocking the strategy, it’s clearly effective, Office makes boatloads. But they would never ever sell a product for $.99 like Apple and thousands of developers are doing in the App Store. If you were offered ownership of Microsoft’s Office franchise or Apple’s App Store in 50 years, which would you pick? I’d pick the App Store hands down.

The giants of tomorrow’s Internet business will be the ones that can thrive in a splintered market. With the flood of choices and increasingly fine-grained specificity of consumer preferences, the businesses that succeed will be the ones that can aggregate individual consumers and fish like a whale. If companies continue to fish like sharks, they’ll be dead in the water.

These aren’t typical blog posts…they’re marked by offensively un-retweetable length and un-scannable content. You’ll need to focus on them for 20 minutes at a time to get value, but if you follow along with the whole series you’ll have a good foundation to either start programming yourself or know what the hell the developers you’re paying are talking about.

Here are the last three lessons, where you learn to open a shell, move and inspect your surroundings, and edit text.

Command me Baby: 0. Learn to love your shell
Command me Baby: 1. Exploring an unfamiliar land
Command me Baby: 2. Learn to read and write.

Today’s topic is optimization. Not of algorithms or hardware, but specifically mental optimization — optimization of the most important computer in any programming equation: your brain.

With the rich and ever-evolving history of computer science, as well as the explosion of technologies and languages that runs parallel with the information revolution we are currently in the throes of, memorizing enough information to provide value is just not an option.

What you need to do early is get comfortable with uncertainty and confident in your ability to seek and find the information you need. The internal workings of your computer can be a paralyzingly daunting subject at first, but that very computer also provides the tools that allow you to comprehend it at a rate unavailable in other fields.

You can’t wait for someone to come along and instruct you…the digital landscape shifts at a speed that means if you rely on instructors, you will inevitably fall behind. I’m going to lay out the three most important methods for teaching yourself.

Riding the tide of the information revolution

Hey everybody, there’s this new cool thing, google. I heard about them from the Superbowl. And, turns out, the internet was made by programmers. There are more tutorials, forums, articles, and general resources online to teach web programming than any other discipline [citation needed].

On the path to effective web development, whenever you’re faced with an unfamiliar challenge or technology, you shouldn’t think ‘crap, now I need to take a two month course or buy this book so I know everything there is to know about the subject’. You should think ‘how many people have done this exact task before?’

This question always gives me confidence, kind of like how it’s easier to do a crossword puzzle a week later because subconciously you know shitloads of people have already solved it.

If the answer is hundreds of thousands, googling a remotely accurate phrase should turn up a step-by-step how-to on joe coder’s blog. 99% of your beginner questions will fall into this category. If you have a beginner’s question, just add ‘tutorial’ to the end of a subject you’re having difficulty with. The wealth of relevant beginner information that this little keyword unlocks will astonish you.

The only time you won’t get a direct answer is if you aren’t asking a direct question. Like in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when they create a supercomputer and give it millions of years to give them the answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything” and it comes back with 42.

That was a classic case of an ill-formed question. If you find yourself asking a question that’s too general and not getting you results, don’t dismay. You’re just a step behind in the process; you just need to google for what to google.

This happens a lot with products with generic names. For example, let’s say you installed a firefox extension called Screen and it’s not showing up in the right click menu. Problem is, you don’t know what that menu is called, and “Screen doesn’t appear” keeps pulling up bullshit-ass posts about broken monitors. Don’t give up, you can narrow it down with one or two more words (generally true for any search query).

Google “Firefox Screen doesn’t appear” and probably somewhere on the first page will be some forum post with some guy saying “hey I installed Screen on my firefox but it’s not appearing in the contextual menu”. Don’t even read the response, you got what you were after — that little menu is called a ‘contextual menu’.

Go right back to the search bar and put in “Screen firefox contextual menu doesn’t appear” (order is largely irrelevant for google). Now all the results will be relevant, and you’ll probably even see the answer in the preview.

Never throw your hands up in the air and blame google for you not being able to find something, instead tackle the problem of trying to provide as much context as possible.

If you’re working in a given language (lets say php), you’ll want to unconsciously add ‘php’ to the beginning of the search query, e.g. “php contact form not saving”, every specific word makes a world of difference.

If a command or program gives you an unexpected result and there is an exact error message, even something like “fatal error: file dependency some_bs.so not found”, google that error message in quotes along with the name of the program. It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand the message, and it never will. Someone on the internet did, and you can always rely on them.

Harnessing the mob.

If you’re working on the internet, whether you’re a 16 year old hacker kid or a 32 year old MBA, you need to get comfortable introducing yourself to new communities. Learn their ways, engage with them on a level they respect, earn their trust, and then ruthlessly harvest their sweet, sweet gray matter.

What do we want? BRRAAAIIINNS! When do we want them? BRRAAAIIINNS!

For server administration (what dicking around in the shell evolves into), you’ll want to sign up for an account on Server Fault. For web (and general) programming, you’ll want to be on Stack Overflow.

As an aside, these communities really warm my heart. Most forums for techies are rife with flame wars and irrelevant, uber-nerdy discussions. These sites though give a platform for my favorite social programming impulse — selfless collaboration to scratch a collective itch for problem solving and efficiency. I <3 the philosophy behind and the people powering these sites, for real.

So, if you’re serious about programming, sign up for these sites and set one of them as your homepage. You’ll see enough interesting stuff passing by on the front page feed that you’ll organically click through, and get an idea for what flies and what doesn’t within the community.

Then the next time you are having trouble with something and you can’t google it, create a question about it. Be as specific as possible, make sure to clarify “I tried googling this term but got nothing”, and be polite and respectful. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your problems get solved.

Robotic Introspection

I should mention that your shell itself has the ability to tell you about itself. There is a command called man that will give you detailed information on any command you want.
I admittedly rarely use man pages because the internet answers almost all of my questions in a more direct user-friendly manner, but with regards to completeness of information, there’s no better resource for those of you with the encyclopedic impulses I am devoid of.

For an idea of the extensiveness of information, issue a man hier:

You can use man with any of the commands we’ve learned so far, eg man ls, man cd, pwd. It’s probably worth glancing through the man page for each new command you learn…just to have an idea of what is possible, *NOT* to memorize everything.

Knowledge leads to power and the potential to know is power in itself, but knowledge for the sake of knowledge is weakness.

Hey, welcome back. This is a 42 part, once-a-week series and if you haven’t been here before, you’ll want to read the older entries to have enough patience to get through the dense paragraphs below:

0. Learn to Love Your Shell
1. Exploring an Unfamiliar Land

So I know I said last week that you would learn how to install MySQL from source, but I might have Laurence Maroney’ed on that one. I forgot that you don’t yet know how to read and write within your shell.

As Charlie Day said: “Illiteracy? What does that even mean?!?”

But seriously, reading and editing text are the single most important tasks you perform as a programmer. Programming is like operating a guillotine in that there are two distinct phases: preparation and execution. It’s also like operating a guillotine when you have businesses depending on you because this isn’t a toy you’re dealing with — every time you flip a switch, heads can roll.

Let’s talk more about the actual execution, a passion I share with certain sixteenth century kings. The execution phase of any programming task consists invariably of editing text and executing commands. The ratio is probably 95% inspecting and editing text, 5% executing commands. The reason I’m teaching you commands first is that there are far more extensive and accessible resources on learning how to write any programming language than on how to use the shell. Also, all that editing means nothing if you can’t pull triggers. You’d be like the two of clubs in a spades game or the scout in Stratego — present but toothless.

But I realized while I was writing the MySQL post (not that I’m making this series up as I go along, whaaaaaat?) that if you can’t read and edit files, you’re like a paraplegic crocodile: you’ve got the teeth but you’re legless and armless. It’s like I’d have to put everything right in front of your mouth.

I mean, I’ll be holding your hand for a couple more posts, it takes a little longer to get comfortable enough to start exploring on your own. But, I want to shake your dependencies on my lead as soon as possible and get you exploring your own curiosity as soon as possible, looking up man pages and the like, because that’s how I learned all this shit in the first place — alone. Powered only by my curiosity and casual preference to continue receiving a paycheck.

So, you need to start getting to know how to use a text editor as Drake says “sooner than later”. As such I couldn’t justify going any further without teaching you how to use my best friend in the robot world, emacs:

Emacs is the tool I use to edit text. I’m not going to go too much into the history of it except to tell you that the official name is GNU emacs, where GNU is an infinitely recursive acronym that stands for GNU Not Unix. When I found that out I got almost as much of a nerd boner as I did for this Google suggestion for recursion.

OK enough history — just know that in my profession I spend more time in emacs than on the internet (not counting email). In fact I’m in it right now, writing this blog post for you.

Emacs is the crucial glue to a complex craft, and it takes years to master so I won’t be trying to explain all the features to you today. I just need you to be able to open up new or existing files, read them, change them, and save your changes.

Other Editors

I should also mention before we dive in that there are other options, feel free to check them out but know that all editing in this series will be done using emacs. The other editors I’ve seen people use effectively are vi and full-scale Integrated Development Environments (IDE) like Aptana, Eclipse, MonoDevelop, Netbeans or whatever.

We live in the time of a raging nerd-off in the form of an ongoing vi vs emacs debate. My understanding is this: emacs and its add-ons are pirates, vi is a ninja.

Let me explain. Emacs main selling point is that it is fully customizable if you know the esoteric, ancient, but elegant programming language lisp. It’s pretty deec out of the box but you can get realllly dirty if you start modifying it to work exactly how you want it to. Customizing your emacs is like building a ship for your pirates. Those guys were pretty vicious on their own but if you give them a ship that’s set up right they are just a fearsome, agile juggernaut.

I gotta respect vi though, it’s a f*cking ninja. It’s compact, decisive, silent, super-quick, and it comes with everything it needs to kill effectively. And just like emacs that shit is *everywhere*, you’ll find it on any non-windows system you have to administrate.

So I steer clear of the debate because a) pirates and ninjas are both bad-ass; I’m pretty sure it comes down to personal preference at that point, b) I don’t know enough about vi to critique it, c) I just don’t give a shit, and neither does anyone outside of nerdworld USA. I also strongly believe that if you couldn’t be equally effective using either the debate would not still be going on unresolved.

With regards to the IDEs I’m distrustful because, while they have a shallower learning curve, it’s sometimes hard or impossible to perform really complex, customized tasks on them because they are automated and rigidly modular. As my Grandfather always said “if it says ‘automatic’, that just means you won’t be able to fix it when it breaks” before he passed away in a tragic handbrake accident. I’m kidding about the accident.

The real deal-breaker for me though is that if you rely on an IDE to do your work, you’ll be unable to function on a remote server without remote desktop and the IDE installed on there. And trust me the situation where you need to edit a program’s code through the shell will present itself sooner than later and you’ll be shit out of the luck if your skills are dependent on an IDE.

Bottom line is, you’re not going to use either for two years and be like “wait, shit, this isn’t for me”. So, ya know, might as well just use emacs

Getting emacs if you’re on windows

OK so if you are in a Mac or a Linux shell, you already have emacs, guaranteed. If you’re on windows, you’re likely going to have to install emacs although I forget, maybe it comes with cygwin or something? There’s an easy way to check whether a particular command is available to you in the shell, which. Here is a screenshot of it displaying the locations of the executable files for some of the commands we have used so far, including emacs:

if you’re on windows and your which emacs turned up nothing, you can download emacs here and unzip it and that should have everything you need to set everything up (read the readme). If you run into problems, try googling a couple things (if you get a specific error message, google that message exactly) and/or post a comment and I’ll help you troubleshoot.

Emacs super-basics

OK let’s open a file and I’ll teach you the most important command for any program — how to exit. First though, let’s get a file to use off the internet…it’s hard to get an idea of how emacs works if you’re not using a live file. For this exercise, we’re going to use the front page of Gary’s book site, crushitbook.com

First pick a directory (I’m going to use my home directory ~, but you can use whatever you want) and cd into there. Then we’re going to pull the HTML file from the interwebs, using a cool command that lets you do that called curl. I’ll show you some dirrrrrrrty curl tricks when we’re installing MySQL (check your gmail from command line, post to twitter from command line, download an entire website’s html without getting blocked) but for now we are going to just use its most common incantation — grabbing a publicly accessible file from the interwebs and saving it to your local filesystem, using curl

Now you see crushit.html has been downloaded to whatever directory you are in. I chose to name it cool.html. Now, let’s open it with emacs

once you’re in emacs, you’ll be available to move around and insert text as you normally would, but a lot of the key combinations you are used to won’t work. Most infuriatingly, you won’t know how to exit and get back to the shell. An escape route is the first thing a savvy programmer looks for in any new technology. The key combination to exit emacs is C-x C-c. As you’ll learn in the built in emacs tutorial I’m going to advise you do when you’re done reading this, that translates to “hold down control and press ‘x’, keep control held down and press ‘c’”

Once you do that you should be back in the shell. Now I could go into the basic features of emacs, but emacs itself does a really good job of that, I’m just going to add one more thing that Mac users need to do to make emacs usable: assign ALT as the meta key. To do this just go into settings on your terminal (command-,), and find and check the option that says ‘use option as meta key’

Now, open up emacs again. You can either open a file explicitly again like you did with cool.html or just type emacs to start the editor. Once you’re in there, enter C-h t which translates to “hold down control and press ‘h’, then release control and press ‘t’”. This will pull up a tutorial screen that will guide you the rest of the way. I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time already and you probably want to quit, but if you’re serious about this you really should go through the tutorial now. It makes every real task you’ll have to do that much easier.

Once you’re done (or if you didn’t care to go through it for now), you can refer to these two cheatsheets I recently made for my B.B. Caleb for some of the most useful/used commands. And yes, that is my real handwriting.

Thanks for stopping by San Diego, you stay classy and I’ll see you next week when you learn how to install MySQL from source, probably.

Welcome back. Last week we discovered how to open your shell and find out where you are with Print Working Directory, or pwd. If you missed the first week you should read that first, here: Command me, baby: Learn to love your shell. This week we will enhance your capabilities and let you move around. First open your shell — you MUST follow along on your own or you’re wasting your time by reading this. Got it open? Cool.

Now, you most likely need to fundamentally re-assess your approach to this endeavor. To effectively use your shell, you must shed your consumer mentality. Whether you know it or not, you’ve been subconsciously trained to be a consumer from birth. The explosion of prevalence and targeted effectiveness in marketing and advertising over the last half century has assured you of that.

Your capacity for exploration is limited. Your curious impulses are stunted. Your decision making process, while well established and fine-tuned by the sheer number of products pushed in your face on a daily basis, is nonetheless contingent on having the options clearly and plainly presented to you.

You will have no such luxuries in the shell. Nobody is watching what you do, nobody is there to help you along or to hold you back. All the information you could ever want is available to you, but no-one will help you find it.

The first hallmark of a good programmer is comfort with the unknown. You must build up enough faith in your problem-solving ability that you would not blink at any unfamiliar problem, no matter how esoteric or alien. When I’m done with you your first instinct when you see an apparently unattainable goal will be ‘ok, what might the first step be’, instead of your current modus operandi: ‘shit! how the hell would I get all the way up there??’

When faced with any programming task in the real world for the first year or two, 90% of the time you’ll be tasked with doing something you’ve never done before, and 100% of the time there are at least some unknown factors. Routinely, you’ll be unwillingly dropped into a completely alien terrain and forced to find your way out…equipped only with your intuition, deductive reasoning, and sweet, sweet google searches.

When you opened up your shell at the start of this, you probably looked at the unblinking (aside from the cursor) prompt and were completely paralyzed. “Where are all my options?” you think. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to write in here”, you think.

It’s not that there are no options available to you — quite the opposite. There are far, far too many to list, and that’s why they’re not listed. Every executable program, every configuration file and startup script on your computer is available to you, not to mention hundreds of utilities specifically for command-line use that you’ve never even heard of but will soon find indispensable.

Think of it as an adventure…you’re going to be plumbing the unfamiliar, submerged depths of the iceberg of 1s and 0s that you take for granted every day. You’re in an unfamiliar land, on a heroes journey to comprehend this alien environment and one day master it. If you take the right approach to learning your way around the shell, you’ll be able to rapidly assimilate the process of getting a web server restarted without errors or installing memcached to reduce load on a highly trafficked website or using git to update your client’s website. It’s all a logical progression.

I’m not going to lie: when you start, it’s all going to seem much more difficult than it should be. You’re going to get frustrated. Especially if you work with a client and they have no idea of the levels of complexity associated with this subterraneous realm they don’t know or care about. The onus of caring and understanding is on you. So let’s get you started on the knowledge train.

OK, so you’ve been dropped into this alien land like Alice in Wonderland or Link from the Original Game Boy classic Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening. From last week, you know where you are (pwd). This week we’re going to learn how to pull out a map to find out where you can go and how to teleport yourself anywhere on said map.

Surely you are comfortable with navigating files and directories within your standard Graphical User Interface (GUI for short). Clicking through folders to find files should be second nature to you. The same capacity exists within the shell, there is just a different interface for it because you don’t have a mouse and your terminal can’t draw you pretty pictures.

Firstly, you need to recreate the ability to see the contents of the folder you’re currently in. In the GUI, this is easy: just look at the screen. In the shell, you need to explicitly tell your robot pal to list the files and directories for you. The command for that is ls -lh. ls works too but prints in a less friendly way with less details…you pretty much always use ls -lh and since I care only about teaching you effectiveness, not completeness, we’re just going to start by using the command I actually use, not all the theoretical variations on it.

ls -lh and pwd are like your sanity checkers…whenever you get distracted and pulled out of the digital world, upon return to the shell you will instinctively type those two commands, one after the other, just to reload your mental map. Here’s the directories available to me:

Now that you know how to consult your map, you need to know how to move. The command to change to another directory is Change Directory or, in code aka efficient-speak, cd. You can change directories by giving this command along with an absolute path or a relative path.

An absolute path starts with /, the root directory. See each and every file and directory on your computer can be expressed in an absolute path that begins with slash. For example, when I used pwd last week, my robot buddy told me I was in /Users/neilsarkar. Note the preceding slash, it’s very important, it indicates your root directory. Your entire filesystem exists as subdirectories of the root directory, /

Remember what I said about no-one helping you know what to do or holding you back? Let’s go to the root directory now

Then do your instinctive mental map load, pwd [enter] ls -lh

This is probably the most important directory listing you can see. Every single file on your computer exists as a descendant of one of the directories you see in front of you. I remember the first time I went to a root directory, I felt like Simba standing on a ledge atop a mountain, surveying my kingdom proudly. Not getting that yet? You will if you stick with it.

The root directory is all-encompassing but powerless on its own. It’s easily the most useful point of reference you have here under the ocean, it’s your anchor and you must know it and love it. You can’t find that definitive a starting point using Finder, and that’s indicative of the increased level of power available to you in the shell. In the shell, there is no man behind the curtain. And I think that rocks.

As a side note, I’m totally cool with only knowing as little as I need to know to make something work. If you’re one of those people who needs to know or have the illusion of knowing the full story, that’s cool too, I wish I was that way sometimes it would save me a lot of embarassment. If you want to know what all of these directories mean, the cryptic ones that aren’t self explanatory (sbin, usr, var, opt, etc) are all explained here: http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/linuxdir.html

Anyway, let’s get you back to your home directory. We’ll use our new friends ls -lh and cd to get back to your home directory:

Nice. You just navigated directories using relative paths. There is one special feature of relative path navigation: you may notice that each directory contains two special elements (. and ..). These refer to the current directory and the parent directory.
You don’t use the current directory reference often, but you use the parent directory reference a *lot*.

As an example, let’s get back to the root directory using only the parent directory reference

To tie this all together, I’m going to show you how to navigate using absolute paths, and how to utilize the single most useful feature of your shell: tab completion. I use tab completion twenty to hundreds of times a day, it’s kind of my jam. OK so we are going to re-trace our steps using absolute paths this time. cd into a random directory (I’m going to choose sbin). Now type cd / without hitting enter and press tab twice.

You indicated through your frantic tabbing that you’re looking for something. Your robot pal has helpfully supplied you with a list of files and directories available from that point (the root directory) so you can refine your guess. You see the directory you want to go to (for me, it’s “Users”) so type in Users and hit tab again a couple more times, then type in the first couple letters of your username:

Hit tab again and it will autofill. Hit enter and you’re back in your home directory. Sweet, right? Can you see how uniform and extensible this method of travel is? You can use this strategy to efficiently get *anywhere* on your filesystem. You’re welcome.

Next week we’re going to start going faster and doing shit that actually changes your system. Next time you learn how to download and compile MySQL from inside the shell. That shouldn’t frighten you — the unassailable unknown is just the temporarily unconquered, remember? Thanks for paying attention. Til next week…

This post contains language intended for an audience over the age of 13.

Hi, I’m Neil. I get paid to tell computers what to do. If you’re down, I’d like to show you how.

I’m sure you’re skeptical. In my time in this profession I’ve repeatedly encountered a widespread misconception that I, like all other ‘coders’, am somehow built or wired differently so that I’m able to comprehend these alien languages. No, I’m not. Sure, I graduated an Ivy League school with a BS in Computer Science. But I graduated with a 2.1777 GPA (which was probably also my BAC at the time), and taught myself infinitely more during my three years out than they taught me during my six years in.

So while Columbia may have given me a solid foundation for learning how to do this, it was still just patience and hard work that gave me the hard skill that’s becoming more relevant and valuable every day. The hard skill that’s the reason my offer to work a dream job with Gary and AJ Vaynerchuk at any cost was one they couldn’t refuse. The hard skill that gives me the confidence of independence — I know I’ll never have to rely on any person (or worse yet, any heartless corporation) for my personal well-being or my future prospects.

If that sounds nice to you, please read on, because I want to teach you everything I know. You must know first that what it took fundamentally for me to get to this level was patience and a basic capacity for analysis, and you will need to possess both of these traits. If you’re either impatient or irrational, embarking on this journey with me will be fruitless for you. I won’t judge you though; I don’t mean either of those adjectives in a derogatory manner. Both of those characteristics have their advantages: for example the impatience-irrationality combo is a pre-requisite for working in advertising. Don’t forget that those people make a shitload of money and have their work seen by millions. So, you know, no offense if you’re not into it…I get it, no worries, catch you later.

Now, remember what I said about patience? That means I’m also not going to employ the common methodology of teaching you in a frantic manner while exploiting your desire for instant gratification, using the infomercial “lose your gut in 20 days” pitch seen most often in this consumer culture of ours. You’re learning how to coax your shell into commanding an army of robots. You’re not going to become a general painlessly, in 45 minutes, by following 15 easy steps. The posts in this series will have such a slow, steady flow that you’re not even going to want to retweet them because none of them will be compact, self-contained bundles of knowledge.

As Queen Gorgo said in the 300, “this will not be over quickly. you will not enjoy this”

I mean, computer theory has been around since at least John von Neumann, who died in 1957 (before a computer had been invented, by the way). It took me two years of study and three years of practice to learn everything I know, there’s no way I could explicate it for you in a day. That’s why this is part 0 of a 42 part series.

Every Monday for the next 9.5 months I’ll put out another digestible morsel that will slowly build your knowledge base to the point that you can competently command and control your personal computer as well as any remote machine. I’ll teach you how to set up, troubleshoot, and customize a web server and a database. I’ll give you an introduction to all the tools you’ll need and a basic fluency that will let you provide value for either your own projects or a client’s. Exciting stuff, I know.

Plus, my writing style is approachable enough that if you just follow along casually, before you know it 9.5 months will have gone by and you’ll actually know what to do when faced with that ominous command prompt. The fact that this will take almost the same duration as the human gestation period is not lost on me. What you’ll have nurtured into existence by the end of this is the foundation to be able to write codes into your computer that generate money. As Curtis Jackson a.k.a. 50 cent said, “have a baby by me baby, be a millionaire”.

One last thing I want to mention before we get started is that if you ever have a question about something you read here, or want clarification on a term or are running into errors, please write in the comments or e-mail me nsarkar {at} vaynermedia {dot com} or tweet at me @neilsarkar — I promise I will respond.

Now I know you have a short attention span so today, since you took the time to read or skim most of what’s above, you only have to learn two simple things. How to open a terminal session, and how to find out where you are once you’re there.

0. Oh, hello.

If you have a Mac it’s as simple as command-space, type ‘terminal’, and click the result that your spotlight search brings up and it will open a shell window for you.

If you’re on Linux, you know how to get to the terminal already and you probably don’t need to read the first month of these articles.

If you’re on windows, you’ll have to download cygwin, which emulates a shell environment on your local filesystem. I’m not going to hold your hand on that one though, sorry. If you can’t afford a Mac then I’m sorry you have to go through this on an unfriendly operating system. If you can though, it was your choice to go with the status quo and unfortunately for you, when you place yourself in the middle of the bell curve you have to work harder than if you’re on one of the extremes. It just seems easier in your head because so many others are doing it the same way. Moving on.

1. Where am I?!?!?

The first thing you’ll need to know on a frequent basis is what directory you are currently in. The command that your computer is programmed to understand for this is “Print Working Directory”. If you’ve ever looked over a coders shoulder though, I’m sure you’ve noticed lots of short, cryptic, consonant-heavy pseudo words. That’s because you have to type A LOT into terminals to do anything of value, so pretty much everything is abbreviated to the maximum extent it can be without losing its meaning. Thus, the command that translates into Print Working Directory is pwd.

I’m sure it doesn’t excite you that you entered a simple command and the computer responded by printing information back for you to read. But you should be excited, goddamnit. You just communicated directly with your computer. You may use it every day, but you likely have no idea of the power you just harnessed directly.

How long would it take you to subtract 42.655 from 111.1?
This guy can do a billion squared algebra problems like that in a second. 10 to the power 18 per SECOND. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 floating point calculations before you could finish reading the gaudy number at the beginning of this sentence.

Did you like Rainman?
You just made your acquaintance with the most powerful idiot-savant in the known universe.

Do you find talking to your friends using soundwaves to be an efficient means of communication?
Try the motherf*cking speed of light.

Your robot pal will do anything and everything you want it to, as long as you’re patient enough to ask it in a way it understands. One day, it will even make money for you. You just have to learn how to give it the right commands.

I don’t know how you feel about it, but my absolute favorite thing in life is when multiple individuals come together and collaborate to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Incidentally, my least favorite thing in life is corporate committee thinking, which results in a whole that is less than any one of its individual parts (that’s another post for another day). But this power comes with a price, one that I struggle with daily: the average person trusts the people that they trust more than they trust their own capabilities for logic, reasoning, and decision making.

If you’re a tech savvy person, chances are you already know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not a tech savvy person, consider this:

See what I mean? Probably not, because you saw a chart that looked complicated and you didn’t read it, assuming I would bring you up to speed in this paragraph. So the point is made anyway (although you really should read through the chart).

Most people when faced with an unfamiliar situation or problem look first to whomever they perceive as experts in a field, then to their friends and family, and only as a last resort will they consult their own logic, reasoning, and intuition. When in more familiar territory the decision making progression looks a little different, but objective critical analysis still comes last — I would argue it goes intuition -> ask people you trust for help -> use logic to make what you consider to be an educated guess.

Now, I want to make it very clear that by no means am I advocating the other extreme, which is not trusting anybody but yourself. I think that’s actually the least effective way to get what you want out of life. I’m just illustrating what I consider to be a fact: that most people in most situations do not think for themselves. Am I somehow above this? Hell no I love collaborating and relying on other people’s expertise…I wholeheartedly believe you should only engage your mental faculties when you have to (see: “Be Chill. It’ll make you smarter.”).

Not to mention that in many industries and companies, especially large ones, this reliance on our fellow man is actually a critical aspect of society that their continued functioning depends on. Do you think Ford wants all of its employees doing critical analysis and coming to their own conclusions? The company would come to a grinding halt, chaotically trying to move in all different directions like some sort of grotesque rat king.

So, you might say, it looks like the system works. Why are you even bringing it up? Well, I think it’s especially relevant to building things for the internet. Way too often I see people in our industry with insular, elitist attitudes that “just because my mom doesn’t get how to use it doesn’t mean its not revolutionary.” Actually bruh, that’s exactly what it means. If your app relies on people progressing all the way down to their logic and reasoning skills, you’re F’ed. In the A.

Your product will never infiltrate the majority — that massive community of people that rely primarily on those around them for information and decision making. Not to say that there isn’t a whole segment of the population that relies on their logic and reasoning first and people second. But hey guess what, those people that do tend to suck at spreading word of mouth because they never saw the need for having tons of friends.

If you ignore this fundamental societal truth and you pour your heart and soul into building something that feels cutting edge and revolutionary but just doesn’t stick, you’ll end up as dejected as Kenny Powers, the Reverse Apache Master, was when he retired. As the great sage put it with characteristic eloquence, you’re just like Neil Armstrong:

I wasn’t sure where I was going when I started this, but I guess I’m leading up to a cautionary message. If you’re insulated enough by the walls of silicon valley from the clueless normies (who you’re supposed to be building this shit for in the first place, by the way!) to think that you’re just an early adopter and society is going to catch up to you, I’ve got some sad news to break to you: you may suffer from premature infatuation. Look, it’s a common thing, it happens to a lot of guys, and there’s steps you can take to get past it. But you’re going to need to get past it if you want to succeed as an entrepeneur or a developer for the consumer web.

Now, I could point to countless websites that were featured on techcrunch once upon a time as cautionary tales but I’m going to leave that task to you guys in the comments section. Aside from mentioning that Twitter wasn’t Twitter until it was on Oprah, I’m going to wrap up by with two of my favorite examples of the immobility of established societal norms:

1. Edison gave us the gift of artificial light (although he was kind of a jerk). Yet the average workday still ends when it’s dark, getting dark, or a few hours away. I mean, think about it, we can work whenever we want. We should never be at work when there’s sunlight outside, but we are. I’m not saying that a few of us as individuals should start work at 11 pm and end at 7 am, I’m saying that *everybody* should do it. Like banks should open at 11pm, na’ mean?

2. In the western world, we are beneficiaries of a ubiquitous availability of soap. Yet we still use utensils to eat. Take a second to look at your hand and flex it around. Do you think we would evolve something that freaking complex that *wouldnt* help you eat? OK, maybe spoons would still be necessary…but forks and knives and chopsticks? C’mon Man!

So as I alluded to before, I had planned to riddle this post with compelling examples of sites or technologies that suffered from premature infatuation and were bound to fail due to the immobility of society. However I didn’t have the thoroughness, preparation, or internet to do so earlier today. So why don’t u guys help me out in the comments? I’ll edit the post to add any and all of your suggestions!

Please note that due to a database error (who’s in charge of that around here, anyway??) we lost all the comments on this and a handful of other posts. Sorry to all that left something here

So the Web 2.0 expo is in town here at the Javits Center in NYC. That means a year ago today is the first time I met (read: observed from a distance) the guy who is now my boss, Gary Vaynerchuk.

Cut to 11 A.M. the day of, my boy Ricky and I realized we had uh, neglected to purchase passes to the event. So naturally, Ricky engaged some guy with tech-speak who then started knee-jerk pitching him some nonsense about a portalized hub for something-or-other. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the guy, I was surreptitiously snapping iPhone photos of the access badge dangling from the guy’s neck.

40 minutes later we were back huddled around the conference room table of FanDome’s midtown offices, meticulously gluing together and furiously spray painting the raw materials we had bought from Home Depot to duplicate the badge from our high resolution photograph. It took forever to get them right, but we finally did, victoriously hailed a cab back to the Javits Center and got past security without so much as the suspicious upcurl of a lip. Great Success!

We got in, met up with @stephbags (also now a VM employee!) and headed over to the area where the keynote speeches were starting. We got in just in time, and filed in to three empty seats at the very last row of the massive lecture hall.

Now to this point, all the experience I’d had with technical seminars had been of the mind-numbing variety. Picture yourself shifting uncomfortably in a wooden chair while witnessing a live reading for the books on tape of a technical manual. Not to mention, this books-on-tape was courteously narrated by some foreign-ish guy who, how can I put this delicately, could have used a couple semesters at the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too

So you can imagine my surprise when this happened:

If you haven’t seen Gary’s keynote at web 2.0, just stop reading this post, stop all the other crap you’re doing and watch the whole thing from start to finish. There is NO better use for 14 minutes of your day today. Errr, 14 minutes in front of your computer at work that is

You done? I’ll wait. You sure? OK, now, if you were there you know that the entire performance from start to finish just blew you off your feet. It was the purest form of that feeling I just WISH, so bad, that I could bottle up and share with all of you. The feeling where you feel like you can reach out and touch the future. And let me tell you, that future is just unbelievably soft and velvety and luxuriant, like bags of sand.

I know a lot of people, especially those in the non-tech space, saw that keynote, were mildly impressed and just went about their day. I, on the other hand, was immediately and irrevocably obsessed. Combine Gary’s fundamental uplifting message with his impeccable stage presence (which is something I can appreciate the challenges of) and I was hooked.

A few days later, I was using ‘the twitter’ regularly (again, premature infatuation), and it wasn’t long before Gary sent out a tweet looking for people with sports sites, which prompted this tweet.

Nothing came of the initial e-mail contact I had with Gary and AJ then, but if it wasn’t for that early adopter action, Gary would have no idea who I was when we met in person at the NYC Digg Swigg in April. If Gary had no idea who I was then, then the conversation that we accidentally struck up with @drzhang who was serendipitously seated next to us at the NYC Blogs with Balls conference never would have led to us arranging a meeting with Gary and AJ at the then nascent Vaynermedia offices in Hell’s Kitchen, and I would never be working at my dream job today.

Now, this story is one championing the open-mindedness it takes to be an early adopter, but the reality is that early adoption can be a double edged sword, and there exists a real dichotomy here in the web world.

How it was for me a year ago at the web 2.0 expo is how it is at its best: the community is a vibrant, exhilarating, and addictive blend of early adopters, all united with the vision of bringing the future to the masses. But at its worst the web-building community is like a support group for sufferers of acute premature infatuation — a group that enables its own destructive tendencies by building elaborately designed skyscrapers that nobody asked for on top of cities that are only accessible by an underground tunnel that only people who know what an RSS feed and are using a bleeding edge version of Firefox can enter.

This premise of early adoption versus premature infatuation, and the dangers of disconnecting yourself from the grounding influence of the brick and mortar world around you is going to be the basis of my blog post next Wednesday, tentatively titled “I’m so ronery (why is everybody so fah*ing stupid)”.

Catch you guys next Wednesday!

So as Lead Developer of Vaynermedia (n.b.d.), naturally you would expect my first official blog post to revolve around cryptic subjects geared towards techies and to be unaccessible to you, well, we call you guys “normies”. But fear not, read on. It may get a little hairy at points but all in all this post is for YOU, the internet consumer. The reason this, and the majority of my posts, will be geared towards normies is threefold:

1. I’ve always felt that the primary job of a programmer is not to memorize esoteric details of programming language and standards, but rather to *communicate* effectively. Cesar Millan talks to animals, I talk to robots; you can call me The Computer Whisperer. At the end of the day your effectiveness as a programmer is defined by:
   1. how adept you are at communicating with the machine — your skill level in efficiently using the languages and technologies at your disposal to accomplish your (or your client’s) goals.
   2. how clear you are at communicating with, hear me out now, human beings. if you can’t tell your client or your boss what the capabilities of the machine are and advise them in an educated manner as to what’s in their best interest given the underlying complexity of programming for the internet, then it really doesn’t matter if you can write a twitter client for the commodore 64 (no offense, bro. I actually think this is f’ing sweet)
2. I’ve found that the most useful technical blog posts are short little code snippets where the author barely knew if it was worth posting them. As such, any time me (@neilsarkar), @calebrown, @kopecwins, Sameer, or any of the other sweet developers+designers here discover a juicy little morsel of nerdy information, we will be sure to post it short-form. I’ll reserve these long-winded ramblings strictly for matters that would interest you normies, cos I love ya!
3. If you’ve ever spent any time on Stack Overflow (<3 <3 <3), you’ll know that pretty much any subject you may have helpful tips on, somebody else has already covered more thoroughly and convincingly. And THAT WAS WEEKS AGO!. So yeah, long story short, I’m petrified of writing a post that’s trite for geeks…for those of you who haven’t experienced nerd backlash, it’s brutal.

Ok, no more prefacing. Time’s up, let’s do this. Today I want to talk about a feature of the framework Ruby on Rails, which is based on the flexible and awesome programming language Ruby. I added Ruby on Rails to my arsenal after coding primarily in PHP for three years and I LOVED Ruby on Rails from day one. Why? Because Ruby on Rails is *chill*. It tries to, as much as a programming language can, live by my personal mantra: “Don’t worry about it, it’s fine”. Let me illustrate what I mean with an example:

For you normies to understand the next paragraph though, I’m going to have to briefly explain how a Server/Application/Database interact to form a website. Imagine a restaurant. The Server (e.g. Apache, Nginx etc) is the Waiter. He takes your order (url) and sends it to the kitchen, and when the food (webpage) is ready, he brings it out to you. The Database (e.g. MySQL, Oracle etc) is the food storage freezer. Cold and unfeeling, but it contains the raw materials that the restaurant is dependent on. The Application (e.g. Ruby on Rails, PHP, C#, Java etc) is the chef. She takes the order from the waiter, goes to the freezer and gets the raw meats and vegetables that go with the recipe, prepares the exquisite dish you ordered, and sends it back to the waiter.

Got it? Good. Now, most programming languages have to go and get everything they need for the recipe on their first trip to the freezer. If you forget to include an ingredient in the recipe you define, the chef will FLIP OUT and send back a mangled mess (error page). Ruby on Rails though, uses something called Lazy Loading. It doesn’t fetch your associations until you need them unless you explicitly ask for them at the beginning. In the restaurant analogy, it’s an improvisational chef. It can put ingredients together on the fly, and doesn’t need to stick to a strict recipe script. (N.B. BEFORE all you nerds get on my case, realize that I am oversimplifying this greatly for the benefit of our human counterparts and this analogy has no implications with regard to performance or anything else, just trying to illustrate a point.)

Now, I immediately identified with this methodology because I am a practitioner of it IRL. See: “On an Ivy League Campus, Slacker Neil Sarkar Offers a New Point of View”. I know it may be unconventional, but I’m a strong believer that lazy loading or lazy evaluation is a more efficient mentality. Freeing up brain space by only retaining information that is absolutely essential allows you more computing power for problem solving. In tech terms, RAM > Conventional memory. In human terms, Effectiveness > Completeness. I mean >>>>>>, it’s not even close.

Here’s a simple real world example of lazy evaluation in action: when a girl at the bar tells you her name, don’t even try to remember it. First off you probably won’t need it five minutes from now anyway, your game’s not that good. Secondly if you do end up hanging out then hey, thats something to keep the conversation going. It’s not like she’s going to forget her own name…she’s keeping track of that information so you don’t have to until you need it.

OK so that was a crude and somewhat sensationalist example, but do you know what I am saying? As long as information is a google search away, you can stop cluttering your brain with knowledge that you don’t need RIGHT NOW, because in the event that you do need it, you can always go back and look it up.

My advice boils down to: treat life like a game of Rummy 500. If you’re not going to be using what’s in your head some time in the next couple turns (hours), get rid of it! don’t look back! it’s already in your subconcious so you can fetch it if you need it. The average person is waaaaay too averse to destruction. It’s by cluttering up the attics of our minds with useless information that we unnecessarily burden and stress ourselves and become easily overwhelmed. The world is overwhelming and stressful enough, don’t do it to yourself. Because the bottom line is you only live once, and when you feel the reaper’s embrace, you don’t want to be stuck holding those aces. Trust me, I’m a Programmer.