by Michiel on March 25, 2010 · 0 comments
in Uncategorized
Everyday Feed started as a pet project about a week ago. I already scratched my own itch with building a service that actually let’s me read my feeds instead of skipping them. Also, this project is my way of researching and testing all the hints and tips I learned from Rework, Getting Real and Crush It.
I would really like you to test it, if the idea and functionality appeal to you. If not, you can of course also just give me feedback on design or copywriting topics if you’d like. I have some future ideas. For example I’d love to build a tablet-aware web app or an iPad app for reading the daily edition of your feed paper on mobile devices so that’s probably what I’m going to work on first. But if someone has a better idea, please let me know.
Head on over to everydayfeed.net, sign up and see if it’s useful for you. Thanks!
A little longer than two weeks ago, I talked about why the newspaper is going to rock, but that it’s not going to rock in it’s current form and that it’s not going to be owned by the big news companies.
In that post, my conclusion was that iPad/tablet-like devices are going to be the near future of consuming news. In my forecast of up to 5 years, I see a lot of people reading their news(papers) on a tablet while commuting, traveling, on the airplane, at the office, etc. I hope this will happen even sooner with the release of the iPad in a few weeks and of course, the other tablet devices.
But, I also want to contribute to a new way of consuming news – especially online blogs, news portals, magazines and other kind of feed-like services. Because building an iPad app is just one small step to far for me right now, today I’m announcing something else:
It is called Everyday Feed. It is a web service that allows you to read all the feeds you have like a newspaper. No, I don’t mean in a visual way but in an experience-kind of way: waking up, preparing breakfast, grabbing your newspaper along the ways and drinking some coffee. Everyday Feed will let you do that for your feeds.
Head over to the current website for more details at http://everydayfeed.net.
If you want a sneak preview, contact me directly via email, on Twitter or leave something in the comments.
This morning I got out of bed, made myself a bowl of cornflakes with milk and headed over to the kitchen table where my dad always puts down the newspaper I’m subscribed to: NRC Next. It’s a Dutch tabloid-format newspaper with daily news and in-depth articles around recent happenings in the world.
I recently resubscribed to it and I love it: I have redacted important news that fit’s to my size of wanting to read a newspaper. I just HATE folding around a large newspaper all the time. I want to have a portable newspaper that I can take with me, easily put in my bag and that falls on my doormat every day. Every night when I read the last less important articles in NRC Next, I’m already waiting for the new issue so I can enjoy another new newspaper-reading day.
[click to continue…]
by Michiel on February 6, 2010 · 0 comments
in Uncategorized
I just wanted to share with you this presentation I created yesterday to communicate to other people and ourselves on how we use Scrum in Firmhouse. This is a first set of tools I’m creating for ourselves to get going with Scrum to create our products. But it can be a good piece of information for you too. The slides are great to keep as a reference on what kind of meetings you are going to have and what you need to discuss in them.
Expect more detailed Scrum and Agile Development stuff in the near future. We’re getting to an awesome workflow here. In the mean time, read 37signals excellent post about how they are going to approach development of new features in their products.
Here are the slides via SlideShare embed:
by Michiel on January 14, 2010 · 3 comments
in Uncategorized
So I thought I’d give you an update on Qloudwatch. Qloudwatch is going to be the easy-to-use web service that allows you to get insights on your Amazon Web Services cloud usage, group your instances into project and set budgets and warnings for AWS instance costs.
We’ve been working really hard the past few weeks to get ready for a first public release. Bob is busy thinking about an honest and functional business model and researching our terms of service and I’m crunching feature development, tweaking, adding even better security.
What we’re currently looking at releasing in our first launch is the following:
- Create projects and give other people access so you can collaborate on a cloud project. Multiple users with different AWS accounts can be added to a project so you can share costs and get a good overview what your application or cloud team is using, spanning possibly multiple AWS account.
- Adding instances to project by accessing the AWS API with your AWS credentials. Yes, we do ask you to enter them into your account for now. Because of this, we’ve implemented SSL security and encryption into our database. Even in our demo period you can test right now at http://qloudwatch.com
- Give you total and monthly cost estimates based on the running hours of the instances in a project.
- A personal dashboard where you can get insights in the instances your personal AWS account is running.
We’re going to rapidly develop more statistics and are going to build in ways to collect better usage data from your instances if you choose to. If you want to influence our priorities, please give us some feedback of what statistics and overviews you would like to see first.
Here are some more sneak preview screenshots:
I am Michiel Sikkes and I'm Lead Developer and partner at 