Taking Another Chance. I'm Putting Together a Team - 03/12/2007 - 12:01 AM:
On February 11th, 2007 I got onto a plane and flew to Mountain View, California, planning on sitting in Google's lobby until they took the time to talk to me. They had no idea I was coming, no idea who I was, and the most likely outcome of the trip was that they would turn me away at the door. Getting on that plane was the first chance I took, and now I'm taking another one. Welcome to Chapter 2.
The quest in Chapter 1 was fairly simple: I had 15 days to get a big company like Google to pay attention to a good idea from a little guy like me. Now, new paths have opened up, and Chapter 2 has a slightly more epic quest: I have six months to turn Novel Projects, Inc. - a company with no money, no employees, and little more than a good idea - into something I can take back to Silicon Valley come summer.
There were many questions I didn't get to address in the video, but there's at least one that I have to talk about now or risk painful retribution at th...
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A Call From Brian From My Date With Drew - 03/12/2007 - 11:57 AM:
I've been bottling up some cool news for a few days now. I didn't want it to get lost when we moved the original blog.
Remember how last week I mentioned that I got a call from the president of Imagination Worldwide, the company that distributes the movie that influenced this entire adventure, My Date With Drew?
Well, about three hours later, Brian Herzlinger - the star of My Date With Drew - called me himself to wish me luck! We chatted for about 10 minutes, and at the end, he told me he was proud me, and that Kerry, Brett, and Jon (some of the others involved in making the film) were cheering me on. Nice! :) His call came at the perfect time, right at the transition ...
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Lots of Resumes and Our First Two Milestones (aka. a Mysterious Package) - 03/15/2007 - 9:10 AM:
I spent most of yesterday printing out and reviewing "e-mail resumes" from programmers that have stepped forward to offer help on the project. Since I'm a visual kind of guy, I went ahead and spread them out on the floor for a picture; there's about 30 serious resumes so far, which isn't too bad for a company that's only officially been accepting them for 3 days, and whose introduction mentions that we have no money. I mean, keep in mind that this time last month, Novel Projects, Inc. was nothing but me sleeping on my friend's couch in California hoping Google might notice I exist.
I've been really impressed by the quality of the programmers that have contacted me so far, both as people and their skills. They're good in every sense of the word. Apparently, starting out as we are, you get both the talented and the creative, exactly the people I want to be wor...
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A Video Introduction to Brandon Zehm. - 03/19/2007 - 9:43 AM:
The video introducing Brandon Zehm, Novel Project's first programmer since 2003, is currently being processed by Google Video and should be here shortly. In the mean time, I figure it's time to introduce him in a written sense. Meet Brandon Zehm, an independent programmer that e-mailed me early on when I made a public request to talk to programmers living nearby. You might recognize him from a picture I posted on the original blog. Not only is a he an extremely nice guy, he knows his programming languages and has a portfolio to prove it, specifically PHP, Perl, Python, Ajax, some C, and MySQL. While not all of these will be useful to the project, some of them most certainly will be.
The video will ...
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Taking Our Time With Resumes. The Greatest Doormat Ever. - 03/22/2007 - 8:27 PM:
More resumes started coming in the instant I announced that Brandon had officially joined the team, and we were up at his house until 1:30 last night going over applicants. After some extensive discussions we now have a better idea of what languages we're intending to use, which makes narrowing down who we want to talk to a little easier; it's a combination of Java, PHP, and Perl. I must admit that Perl is Brandon's influence - I originally started learning programming on Perl before things like PHP existed, and I have bad memories of the experience. At the same time, it has some rapid prototyping advantages for what we're doing. Separately of that, we might be ready to introduce our next team member around Thursday of next week, but we'll see. We're not rushing anything.
I'm going to try t...
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A Little Sunday Update: Pictures of Volume 1 of the Book of E-mails. - 03/25/2007 - 11:18 PM:
I know that I promised I'd keep myself from posting too frequently, but I had some pictures for you. The first volume of the book of e-mails arrived in the mail this weekend and it's pretty cool. In case you're not sure what I'm talking about, I promised during Chapter 1 that when I returned from California, I'd take all the good luck e-mails I had received from people that had come to the site and wished me well, print them out, and have them bound into a big book of good will for my personal shelf. Then, no matter what, the thickness of that book would be the true measure of my success.
...
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I'll Introduce the Next Programmer on Monday. A Comment on Team Structure. - 03/29/2007 - 9:23 PM:
I had intended to introduce our next team member today, but the video simply didn't get done in time. I was close - I almost posted it, but didn't at the last second. Instead, I'll introduce our next team member on Monday, after a weekend of tweaking lets me get it right.
In the mean time, I wanted to mention something about how we're structuring our team - a potentially dull but important subject. When starting a team from nothing, without resources to offer salaries, how you structure your team is very important. Considering our unusual start, I figure it's only fair that you know how I've chosen to try to organize Novel Projects. So, instead of a video today, you get a nifty little graphic that basically outlines how our team is and will be structured. You can click on the image ...
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