P16: Practical Progress

My dog snoozing in my sweetie's lap

Aww! Snug!
Originally uploaded by mattkangas

This is my dog Buckley, snoozing in the crook of my fiance's arm during the long drive back from North Carolina on Dec 28. Hank (below) may be doggone cute, but Bux is my boy!

My sister's dog Hank, in the park

Hank sitting pretty - aww!
Originally uploaded by mattkangas

We took the dogs to the park this weekend, and for one fleeting moment, Hank actually posed for a picture. So cute! You'd never think he was a troublemaker from this photo.

BusinessWeek article on Daylife.com

Have I mentioned that I have a new gig? We were just written up in BusinessWeek.

BusinessWeek: Redirecting the Web's News Stream

If that went over year head (it did for me), here's a simpler explanation of what we do:

Daylife: a guide to today's news

(ps: According to our homepage, George Carlin just passed away...)

Back from Ohio; More App Engine stuff soon

I just arrived back in NYC from an extended Memorial Day weekend at my brother's place in Ohio. It was a good trip, but being offline since Friday was tough on my inbox... ;-)

Some good personal news: I'm starting a new job shortly. I don't want to jinx it before the contract is signed, but it's a good team in NYC working on a nifty product, quite aligned with my previous work at BusyTonight. I'll happily spill more details to you shortly.

While I was gone, Google made three awesome announcements about App Engine:

• New APIs: Image manipulation and Memcache. Hooray! These are hugely helpful.
• Expected pricing tiers, effective later this year -- helps you plan if App Engine is economical for your app
• Open Signups - no more waiting in line to register!

I'm also hoping to roll out a really quick-and-dirty "MediaWiki clone on App Engine" soon. Source and one wiki instance will be publicly available.

Why is this blog called "P16blog"?

Since I've already started down the path of "what is this blog about", I suppose I should comment on the name as well.

"P16" is my abbreviation for "Practical Progress", not unlike I18N which is a common programmer's abbreviation for "internationalization"... the letter "I", followed by 18 characters, then the letter "N". No, I'm not counting the space, and "P16" sounds better than "P15S" or nearby alternatives.

This begs the question, why "Practical Progress"?

It stems from a conversation I had a year ago, with James, a good friend and former HotJobs colleague. We were at the Dublin House on West 79th, sampling some of the finest Guinness pints in the city. I think I was talking about maybe writing a book, which led to a discussion about what's good and what's awful with technical books. The obvious example: any O'Reilly book versus any academic textbook. I voted strongly in favor of the O'Reilly approach, because textbooks are so known for inducing "my eyes glaze over" reactions in readers.

I think it's a difference in presentation, "theory-first" versus "application-first". James said he enjoys theory-first presentations. Me, I can't stand 'em. As I see it -- I'm going to have to make space in my mental toolbox for this new idea. Why should I bother if the author can't give me one compelling example of how to apply this idea?

James replied, "You're such an engineer". This made me smile. The difference between science and engineering has always been... one focuses on theory, one focuses on getting things done. I'm proudly pragmatic. Reminds me of Phil Greenspun's EE-vs-CS explained parable. :-)

So there you go. This blog is about new technologies, but not for technology's sake. It's about putting better tools in our hands, so we can do more.

And... I will always try to remember to give a motivating example before I dive down a techno-weenie rabbit hole! :-)

Hello again. What's this blog about?

It's been a while since I've written anything for this blog. Sometimes I wonder, "what's the point of writing?" But I had a point, once. Let's review, for your sake and mine.

Hi, I'm Matt Kangas. I live in NYC and I call myself a "technical internet entrepreneur". That's short for: veteran of many internet startups, usually in a tech-lead/programmer role. The most well-known of those was Yahoo! HotJobs, which I left in 2005. The least well-known was probably my search startup, BusyTonight.com. (It's offline now. Sorry.)

For the longest time, I subscribed to Marc Andreessen's reason for not writing a blog: "I don't have the time or ego need". But then he started writing a blog after all -- and it's quite good!

So let's write. But to what end, and to whom am I writing?

I don't sit next to anyone in a cubicle. These days, I mostly work from home. But aside from the soul-sucking homogeneity of cube farms... one thing I miss about not being in an office is the conversations! We had a great team at HJ NYC, and it was so easy to bounce an idea off the guy in the cube next to you. To ask Alex about a research paper he just found. To kill a few minutes playing the Atari 2600 at Tom's desk. Or to plot our next step in world domination.

(Right!)

I loved chatting with those folks on a daily basis. But now we're scattered at places like Google (in Alex's case), AOL (in Tom's case), RightMedia (Max, Dave, Leland), and a bunch of smaller places. Like my living room. :)

So that's what my blog is about - chatting with colleagues. Strong ideas and good times. I will write as if I'm writing to my old friends, and I hope they tune in. But you, dear reader, are a colleague of mine too if you wish.

Welcome to the virtual cube farm. :) Now let's fire up my old Vectrex and show that Atari 2600 what a real game system is like!

New job, Going to BarCamp3 NYC this weekend

Dear readers - I haven't posted much recently because I've been busy starting a new job. The company is MyStrands.com, the NYC office is still under construction, and my boss is this fellow.

The project I'm on is in early stealth-mode. All I can tell you so far is that it's not the MyStrands music recommender product, it's something new and very promising. And there's a good chance that I will be using Erlang for some part of it. :)

This weekend I will be at BarCampNYC3. Please stop by and say "hi"!

I'll be giving a presentation, like all BarCampers, probably a show-and-tell of how I set up the Apache Solr search engine for Flix55.com.

Event: BarCampNYC3
Begins: March 15, 2008 at 11:00 am ET
Ends: March 16, 2008 at 6:00 pm ET

Location:
Polytechnic University
6 Metrotech Ctr
Brooklyn, NY 11201

The Birthday Boy

The Birthday Boy
Originally uploaded by Little Red Fish

A festive view of your faithful correspondent, on his recently transpired birthday