Learning to ride a unicycle by Mikey G Ottawa via Flickr
One of the best things about working here is the freedom to learn and try new things. Yesterday, I hacked around and installed Laconica, an open source twitter clone. We use irc to keep in touch while in the office or in various remote locations but that has a few limitations. One is the fact you need to have an irc client set up, another is that the history of conversations is not easily viewable by all members and especially so if you are offline when a certain chat or conversation happened. So after hearing about it on the Stack Overflow podcast, I tried it out. There was no long approval process, just a short discussion about how it might help us.
The point though, is that at messaliberty one of the aims of the team is to have fun and to learn. Of course we have other targets, like to be profitable by a certain date, or to get a certain number of users to try out hulor but if our working life turns into uninteresting, draining routine we have failed.
success = (fun+learning) && (profit ||other targets);
Speaking personally, I’ve had jobs where I dread going into work, but it simply isn’t the case here.