Javier Diaz Carretero, of Andalucia, is one of Spain’s top marathon, half-marathon and cross-country runners. He’s also role model for those willing to take risks in order to follow their passion. Makalu decided to become the exclusive sponsor of Javier in his 2010 season, during which he’ll attempt to become the Spanish national champion, for the second time, in the marathon event. As part of that sponsorship package, we recently designed and launched his personal website. Continue reading →
Business
18
Mar 10
Launch of JaviCarretero.com
15
Mar 10
On the pricing of service work.
When I started Makalu, over a decade ago, I remember longing for a user’s manual to help with questions like, “How much should I charge?” and “How should I price my work?” This article describes how we approached these questions, and includes discussion of the recent controversy over the pricing of the 37signals’s (@37signals) blog redesign project. Continue reading →
15
Mar 10
Finding the Minimal Twist.
This morning we launched the redesign of the Makalu Aerospace and Makalu Interactive websites. Makalu designer, Alex Bendiken (@minimaltwist), loves to add a twist to our designs. To celebrate the relaunch, we’re running a small competition. Continue reading →
11
Mar 10
Unintended consequences.
On February 17, Jason Fried wrote an article announcing 37signals’s intention to hire an outside firm to redesign their blog, Signals vs. Noise. Companies wishing to be considered for the project would be required to have a Pro listing on Sortfolio.com — 37signals’s yellow-pages service for finding web design companies. March 8th was the date earmarked for choosing the winning firm. Continue reading →
9
Mar 10
User Experience & Software Engineering
I remember, as if it were yesterday.
I was sitting in the ground station laboratory at the European Space Agency, needing to setup a test configuration using the “Monitoring & Control Module,” and staring at a grey screen full of mis-aligned, inconsistently-sized tabs on top of three-dimensional squares, on top of more squares on top of more tabs. The feeling was one of hopelessness and nausea. Who designed this thing? What were they thinking? Was the UI simply given to the most available “resource,” or perhaps the summer intern?
It was at that moment that I decided to start a company—MakaluMedia—in which “user experience” would drive everything we do. Continue reading →
20
Jan 10
Spanish quality
When possible, I try to spend my money in the local economy. For that reason, I decided to try buying my nutritional supplements from a Spanish provider — masmusculo.com — instead of the UK provider I habitually use. (You’d think it’d be cheaper to order in Spain, but it’s not; even including shipping from England to Spain, it’s cheaper to buy in the United Kingdom.) Today, my order arrived… Continue reading →
13
Aug 09
From my inbox: The ultimate resume. How could we not hire this guy?
The following resume, verbatim, just landed in my inbox. Seriously, how could we not hire this guy!? The only thing he’s not, is concise. Continue reading →
11
Mar 09
Timely quotes from Thomas Jefferson
Timely quotes from Thomas Jefferson:
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
“It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes: A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.”
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
“My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.”
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
3
Sep 08
Launch of the Mocca Marbella Website
Those of us working in the Marbella, Spain office of MakaluMedia are pretty darn lucky to have a super scrumptious cafe/restaurant—Mocca Marbella—just five minutes away, serving up fresh, seasonal international cuisine each day at lunch.
After getting to know charismatic Danish owner Micheal, we agreed to help him get a website built, with the idea that we’d work on it in our spare time, on a low-priority basis. Well, two years later, it’d pretty much become a monthly joke between Micheal and us. Spare time just never materialized!
So a few months ago, we sat down with Michael, and all agreed to bump up the task from “low” to “high” priority, and seriously set out to get it done. Brian quickly built public and administrative applications in Ruby on Rails, and then Alex came behind and worked his design magic.
On the public side, we tried to capture the identity, simplicity and quality that have become recognizable trademarks of Micheal and his restaurant in the local community here. Just like his famous one-page menu, the website exists in a single page, with the daily specials rendered on a virtual chalkboard, just like the real one perched on the sidewalk out front.
Micheal updates the physical chalkboard each morning with the daily specials, and to carry that concept over to the website, we built a custom administrative application where he logs in and enters the same information to appear on the site. In addition, with a click of a button, the application sends a styled HTML email to all his subscribers.
We’re very satisfied with how the site turned out, and Michael loves it. Even though we can’t take on any new projects for a few months, it has also been gratifying to have gotten several business enquiries from Mocca clientele, due to the site!
28
Aug 08
Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future
My company, MakaluMedia, is supporting the joint efforts of the National Writing Project and Google, to provide a platform for the nation’s young people to express their opinions on issues that concern them to the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates.
From the NWP site, a summary of the project follows:
Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is an online writing and publishing project that invites young people to write about the issues and concerns they would want the next president to address and, with the support of their teachers, to publish their writing for a national audience.
During the presidential campaign, U.S. high school teachers and mentors guide students through the process of writing a persuasive letter or essay to the presidential candidates. Students’ work should encourage the candidates to give attention to issues and concerns that students feel are central to their future. Topics are chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests, and teachers will be able to support student writing and publishing in a way that most directly fits their local curricula and educational goals.
Through the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website (which launches in mid-September) and Google Docs , a free online writing tool, participating teachers can work with students to publish their work online for their peers, teachers, and parents, and for the public. And who knows, the future president may read their letters too.
Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is open to U.S. teachers and mentors working with students ages 13–18. If you know a school teacher who may be interested in participating, please direct them to the following site.
NWP Letters to the Next President Information Page
The deadline for teacher registration is September 8, 2008.
10
Oct 07
End the flow of unwanted catalogs with Catalog Choice!
Growing up in the US, I remember how annoying it was to receive commercial sales calls on the telephone late in the evening, when the family was sitting around trying to enjoy some quality time together. This problem was later solved (mostly) through the introduction of the “Do Not Call,” registry — a legislated service which marketers must consult before they can call you. If your name is on the “Do Not Call” list, it’s illegal for them to call you.
A similar problem exists today with paper catalogs. American consumers are simply inundated with unsolicited, undesired paper catalogs from a multitude of merchants. While receiving these catalogs can be just as annoying as receiving the marketing phone calls, there’s a deeper, more concerning problem. The production of the 19 billion paper catalogs sent each year in the US takes a huge toll on the environment.
19 BILLION. We throw around terms daily like million, billion, trillion, without really having a feel for the magnitude of those numbers. Consider this, it takes 11 days for a million seconds to pass. It takes 32 years for a billion seconds to pass! So, 19 billion catalogs — that’s a lot of wasted paper!
Earlier this year, my company MakaluMedia was offered an opportunity to participate in a project backed by some of the US’ largest environmental and non-profit organizations to help address this project. Today represents the culmination of several months of hard work on this project, and I’m proud to announce the launch of Catalog Choice:
Catalog Choice is a free service, that allows people to find and opt-out of the undesired catalogs they receive. The concept is very simple; you sign up, search for a catalog you receive, and opt-out. We take care the rest, and in about six weeks’ time, you should no longer receive the catalog.
I’ve written more about the project over at our company blog.
3
Jun 07
Want to get acquired by Google?
…then by all means, have our company design your corporate logo!
18
Dec 06
Word Count Journal, and other cool stuff going on at MakaluMedia
This past year has been really great at MakaluMedia. The company has grown in its core space business, and has moved into a couple of exciting new partnerships in the areas of web infrastructure and applications.
In addition to some new, and really cool, Drupal-based platform work in Europe that I can’t talk much about (yet), we’ve had the awesomely good fortune to have hooked up with a very successful software entrepreneur in the United States, with whom, over the course of 2007, we’re going to be building and launching a series of consumer applications that we hope will positively impact people’s lives.
The first app will launch on January 1, and is called Word Count Journal:
http://www.wordcountjournal.com
Word Count Journal is a new blog format where you write one word your first day, two words the second, three words the third, etc. By the end of a non-leap year you’ll have written a total of 66,795 words, more words that most novels.
Read more about it on the Summit weblog!
3
Jun 06
The Building of Fincalena
Not too long ago we launched a site — Fincalena.com — representing a milestone in what for me was a really interesting project. For anyone interested, I published an article about it over at Summit, our company weblog.
21
Apr 06
Launch of IRMA24.com
Just a little note about the launch of IRMA24.com, the small website we just launched for Jesus Cabello, the electrician that has just made the jump to self-employment, and who did a great job for us in the electrical installations of our new office in Marbella, Spain.
24
Jan 06
Dear Prime Minister of the UK
Our company has a little feedback form on its website, and any submitted data is forwarded to me. Today, I received what must be the most interesting feedbacks ever:
Dear Prime Minister of The UK,
A lot of The SMS got Stuck in The Air without Reach (The Whole World!). The ESA took Them out of The Air, knowing that such Amount of Money reaches a High of Hundreds of Billions of Euro(500)!!
Could you Make a Demand on your Part?!
My Regarded Gratitude,
Yasing El Ballouti
We do a lot of work for the European Space Agency (ESA), and it looks like Mr El Ballouti feels they plucked some SMS messages out of the air, wants a refund, and that, well, Tony Blair must be employed by MakaluMedia.
Update: It seems Mr Ballouti also sent some comments to President Bush not long ago, in the comments of a weblog.
17
Jan 06
Outer Level describes logo development process with MakaluMedia
One of our recent customers, Outer Level, has written up a weblog entry describing the process of working with MakaluMedia designer Mike Rohde in the development of a new corporate logo.
2
Jan 06
Salaries of small business owners
John Engler talks about the salaries of small business owners and his uncle estimates that most small business owners pay themselves a salary equivalent to 10% of gross revenues. I just made a rough calculation, and my own salary is about 7% of MakaluMedia’s gross revenues, so that’s probably a decent rule of thumb.
Between reading John’s blog, and Scott Johnson’s blog, I feel motivated to write some articles about starting and running a business.
4
Dec 05
Wordpress Pages or Posts?
I’ve nearly decided to use WordPress to implement our company’s intranet. I’m thinking that I’ll use the key/value meta facility to assign content to groups, and then add some http authentication to provide selective visibility to that content by group. What I can’t quite decide it whether to use “Pages” for content, or categorized “Posts”.
If you have any ideas, opinion, experience with this, I’d love to hear about it.
PS: I considered MediaWiki, but found it a bit cumbersome to work with.
12
Nov 05
The Software Engineer
As I go through the process of reviewing CVs for a software engineer position we have open, and keep seeing acronym list after acronym list, I’m reminded of the discrepency that seems to exists between my concept of a software “engineer,” and that of so many people out there marketing themselves as such.
In school, I recall a strong emphasis that engineering is more about understanding and process, than tools or techniques. It’s as much about the practical world, as it’s about the theoretical. It’s about knowing how to analyze and decompose a problem, before trying to solve it. It’s about seeing the big picture, finding sensible solutions to problems that exist in the context of constraints, and understanding that the last 10% of a solution can cost as much as the first 90%.
These aspects are common to all fields of engineering — electrical, chemical, software, etc. — but they seem to be often lost these days in the field of software engineering. That’s why, for me, there’s a clear distinction between a programmer, and a software engineer. And the latter is becoming increasingly difficult to find.
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