Christian Arca

Over the past several weeks I discovered The Infatuation, a restaurant reviews publication for the people. Discovering content on The Infatuation network has been a ton of fun, mainly because their content is in the right places.

The Web At the core of The Infatuation are great restaurant reviews on their website. Perfect for when you want to find a new restaurant to try.

Snapchat They use 👻 InfatuationTV as a micro television show. Short clips of delicious looking food. 

Instagram They post (obviously) pictures of great looking food, no surprise there. But what I like best about how they use Instagram is within their guides. For example in their NYC Summer Hit List rather than using large glossy perfect photos, they use people’s Instagram photos as their content. 

This lets The Infatuation establish themselves as the best curator of instagram photos of food at restaurants, and buy into their brand. It also entices other Instagram users to tag The Infatuation on Instagram and contribute to their content in hopes of being featured. Again, this strengthens their content strategy, content curation, and ultimately brand. 

TextRex Finally, you can text Rex, The Infatuation’s dinosaur recommendation service to get an instant recommendation in NYC for whatever might be the occasion. 

The Infatuation has prominence in my digital life, and it’s always enjoyable. Probably because it recognizes how it should make itself available to me and when by being in all the right places at the right time. 

In 2008 I was working on a high profile project at Agora Games. We were all really excited about it and I put out at the time what I thought was some of my best work.

At Agora Games we were contracted by other game studios and publishers, so we didn't own the vision, scope, or work.

A couple months out from our launch date and only a couple of days out from a major milestone I received and email that said not all of the work we put in could be used. I’d guess that 70% of my work was cut.

I love food. If you met me in person or saw me on the Internet (blog, Twitter, Instagram) odds are I’ve mentioned food.

I don’t just love eating it and cooking it, I also love knowing how food is grown. Over the past year I’ve started to follow agriculture technology more closely, and have been curious about aquaponics.

Aquaponics proves to be a very efficient method of farming, specifically in that aquaponics allegedly used 2% of water that a conventionally irrigated farm would use. Regardless of the accuracy of that information that’s interesting.

Companies like Edenworks are experimenting with aquaponics and are looking for technology to be at the forefront of their agricultural endeavors.

Given the state of current and future climate conditions - such as the California drought - it makes sense that industries that previously didn’t use software turn to it for greater efficiencies, optimization, and breakthroughs.

Yesterday I spent two hours on FaceTime talking with my friend Rapahel who recently moved to San Francisco. While we were over 3000 miles apart and on a three hour time difference, talking with him on FaceTime felt as if we were hanging out in the same physical space.

The video quality was good enough to recognize even the most minimal expressions. We could tell when the other wanted to interrupt to make a point or were getting tired of the topic at hand, allowing us to adjust the conversation as needed.

Honestly, if it weren't for the fact that we were on each other's iPhone screens, and that he was in a living room and I was on a patio, we could have fooled ourselves into thinking we were just hanging out as usual.

It wasn't until today that I realized how used to and comfortable I am with living in virtual worlds. In fact it's not that far of a departure for me to think that my FaceTime conversation with Raphael should have happened in VR, because in some way it already happened in virtual reality, it just wasn't immersive.

Back in 2009 I took a two week business trip to Japan while I was working at Agora Games. I went with my coworker Masa-san to meet up with video-game studios we were hoping to work with in the future. 

We met with an impressive lineup of companies including Hudson Soft, Konami, Sony, and Nintendo to name a few. The trip spanned Sapporo, Tokyo, and Kyoto. For me this trip was special in a lot of ways. 

As a young game designer visiting these video-game institutions which made video-games what they are today, it was incredible. Before I left for Japan, I wasn’t sure what to expect when visiting any of these companies. 

Many traditional video-game studios in the U.S. that I visited were much like what scrappy startups are today. Free snacks, nerf gun wars, office shenanigans, a casual environment, hard work, and long hours. If you had all of that then you cared about video-games, and you were passionate about them, and you bought in to the game industry culture. 

When I visited studios in Japan, there was none of that. Offices were clean, tidy, and crisp. Most employees wore business casual attire, with only a few being daring enough to wear full on casual attire. There were no nerf gun fights, or loud taunting. There was quite, focus, and green tea sipping. 

At first I was surprised and thought maybe this was unique to the studio I was visiting, but then I saw it again and again. It didn’t matter that we were talking about video-games the traditional Japanese business customs applied and followed. And everyone I met talked about video-games with a lot of passion, love, and energy. They didn’t need office toys, or shorts and sandals to prove that. 

A few days ago I wrote about the choices I made for my photo journal. I talked through the content I wanted to display and my reasoning behind that. What I realized now is that I didn’t talk about why content is the most important thing. 

So I want to write about that (briefly) today.  

My wife Gillian, started a blog yesterday where she will document baked goods she makes. Right now, the blog - gillianbakes - consists of a photo, a title, and a reference if there is one. That’s it. 

I shred the blog on Twitter tonight and Cat Noone asked if the blog will expand to recipes, and that’s a great question. 

When my wife and I talked about her posting recipes on her blog there were a few things we wanted to do. 

Avoid reposting recipes Recipes from cookbooks are all over the internet. You can find recipes from Momofuku, The Art of Simple Cooking, or Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book with a quick web search. 

There’s nothing wrong with that. Gillian herself bakes from a lot of great recipe books, but posting the recipe directly from the book feels like a waste of space and energy. There’s nothing original about that type of content.

If someone wants the recipe they can purchase the recipe book that’s credited or they can do a Google search. 

Following the same format everyone else uses Most food sites or blogs post recipes in the same format as each other. A list of ingredients, and a list of steps, and some pictures of what the final product looks like. 

It’s possible that in the end we’d follow the same path but there’s an opportunity to explore a new method for posting recipes. Until we have a good idea for how to create great recipes on the blog, we won’t share any. That content isn’t ready and wouldn’t be good enough just yet.

The content should be original There are pictures of pies, cookies, cakes, and other baked goods all over the internet. You could make the argument that the pictures of Gillian’s baked goods aren’t original, and that’s a fair point. But the point of the blog is to showcase her baking. So for the context of the blog, the photos posted are original. 

This also brings me back to recipes. The recipes we want to post are original recipes or modifications to existing recipes that make it better than the original recipe, therefore making it an original recipe.  

These aren’t groundbreaking principles for creating content, but they are principles that put an emphasis on the right type of high quality content Gillian and I are looking for. Without these principles for content, the content produced wouldn’t be unique and it could easily blend into the noise. 

A few weeks ago I started to wonder if we could improve our team’s standups. It’s not to say that our standups are bad, but there’s probably room for improvement - there always is. 

Seth Walker - a coworker of mine - suggested I reach out to Lara Hogan, another coworker of mine. She had recently rebooted her team’s standups and it seemed to work well for her team. 

I reached out to Lara and the next day we sat down for thirty minutes to talk about her team’s standups. I got some great notes from her based on her past learnings and she also invited me to a few of her team’s standups the following week to observe. I got to see her standup in action and it was a great learning experience and I came away with some ideas for how to improve our team’s standup. 

I could have read blog posts online about how to improve standups. Written by people far away who don’t work at the same company I do, and that would have been helpful. But when I have the option to talk to intelligent, friendly, and collaborative coworkers, why wouldn’t I seek that out first?

This weekend when I wasn’t trying to move as little as possible to beat the heat, I created a new Tumblr to host my photo journal. You can take a look at christiantakesphotos. 

There’s not much to it. It’s very simple. I spent most of my time thinking about how to display the content, because that’s what the focus of the blog is. 

I settled aggregating photos by their date, adding a brief caption, and then also including technical details of each photo. Part of what I find interesting about products are why certain choices were made, so I’m going to share how I made the choices I did regarding my photo journal. 

Grouping content by date The reason why I’m launching a photo journal is because I want to take more photos. I want to take more photos because it’s always been something I’ve been interested in. Seeing other friend’s photos - that look good - have always made me feel jealous. 

I’ve been striving to bring my camera with me everywhere. This means that I usually take anywhere from 4 to 50 plus photos, depending on how interesting the day is. 

Not every photo turns out great. While my photo journal is a way to post my work and learn from myself - and others who want to contribute - I also want to display great content. If I only take a handful of photos and I don’t think any are good enough, nothing gets posted. If I take several photos and there are a few good ones, then I can post them in chronological order and they can tell a great story. 

Either way, this decision for me was about making the content the core of the blog, and I think this decision reinforces that. 

A brief caption While content is king, sometimes the content needs context or a frame. A short sentence can provide a lense for how to interpret or perceive the photos so that I can suggest how they’re best enjoyed. How you interpret or enjoy the photos after you read the caption is up to you. 

Technical details Since I’m learning from the photos I’m taking I wanted to share the technical details that I’m paying attention to when I’m taking these photos. I think this achieves two things. 

1) If someone who is a good photographer and wants to help me, they could use these technical details to make suggestions in the comments. For example, they could say, “Next time try using a lower f stop when you’re shooting in this environment.” 

2) If I take a great photo and someone wants to know how they could achieve a similar result, the technical details I’m sharing are a good starting point. 

It’s Friday. It’s a gorgeous day out in NYC, so I think it’s appropriate to talk about something fun. 

My friend Josh Tsui, is the co-founder of Robomodo a video-game studio in Chicago. They make many of the really fun Tony Hawk games. He’s been in Chicago and video-games for a long while, has some great stories, and also knows a lot of people with some great stories. He also loves making movies.

Today, Josh launched a Kickstarter campaign to help him make a documentary about Chicago arcade studios in the 90′s. It’s called Insert Coin: Inside Midway 90′s Revolution. You can watch the trailer here or at the bottom of the post. 

A lot of people are fascinated by the revenue that game studios like Riot and Supercell bring in, but this isn’t new. When NBA Jam came out for arcades it made $1 billion in its first 12 months, and that was in 1993! 

If you grew up on arcades, video-games, or like interesting documentaries head over to Kickstarter and back Josh’s project today. 

I don’t know why I haven’t thought about doing this - a throwback thursday post - earlier. It’s a great opportunity to write about how I remember the past and what I learned from it. 

Today, I want to go way back to when I was 13 and I had my first job at Midnight Solutions. I was the only employe. It seems silly to say that it was my company, because all I was doing was making custom computers and websites for people I knew, and I never made that much money, but it was a job. 

How Midnight Solutions started When I was 13 I started to play video-games very seriously. In fact, it was the first time I played video-games at home. Before then, in place of video-games I had the pleasure of spending time with math workbooks and playing the piano. 

The first video-game I got serious with was Counter-Strike. Like long-term five years serious relationship serious. You know how athletes use specific shoes or equipment to get better, well for gamers it was all about the hardware in your computer. 

At the time, there were very few companies that offered customization for their PCs, and Dell was one of them. A very good custom built PC from Dell could range between $3,000 and up. 

As I kept going deeper into the gaming community I also started to meet people who knew a lot more about computers than I did, and I learned from them. I learned what RAM, CPU, and GPU were and how everything came together to build a personal computer. Most importantly I learned that you could buy these parts off the shelf, and put together a computer yourself. And here’s the best part about it, if you did that you could build yourself a custom personal computer that would cost you $4,000 at Dell for roughly $2500. 

I presented this to my family as a total bargain, and assured them that I knew what I was doing and for the holidays that year I built my own computer. After a holiday break crammed of playing Counter-Strike I thought that other kids (people I knew through Counter-Strike) might be interested in buying custom built personal computers from me rather than Dell. 

Using my network as my target market I had a very niche network. That’s another way of saying I was a nerd that played a lot if video-games. I’d hang out on IRC with other Counter-Strike players, we’d meet up at LANs in NYC, it was a small core group of people. Kind of like the hackers from Hackers the movie, except we weren’t doing anything illegal, we didn’t rollerblade, and we never looked cool. 

The needs of my nerdy network were simple. Great computers that played the latest video-games, and everyone had that need. Even better, their friends had that need also. I didn’t have to find my target audience, because I was a part of my own target audience. 

My first sale and product I had built my own computer beforehand, but I had never built a computer for someone else for money. When I made my first sale, I was excited, confident, but also nervous. 

Things didn’t go as smoothly as they should have gone. Somehow between installing the CPU and delivering the PC to my customer the CPU got fried. Personally delivering the PC, turning it on, and hearing three system beeps (indicating that something had failed) was a nerve wracking experience. I apologized, tried a few things, and finally had to let my customer (and his mom) know that I would have to go back home, diagnose the issue and that I’d let them know as soon as I figured it out. 

Somehow his mom didn’t ask for their money back right away - which I was thankful for. I got back home and did everything I could to diagnose the issue. I eventually figured out it was the CPU, got a new CPU from the manufacturer, installed it and the computer worked out great. 

After I installed it I gave the customer back some of their money since the PC was a week and a half late in being delivered. He - the teenage kid - was really bummed and his mom I’m sure was a bit worried but she handled it well. I wanted them to know that I appreciated this and that they were important to me as customers. 

I ended up making short of $100 in profit for that job, but I had an extremely satisfied customer who was boasting about my personal computers to other people. 

Yesterday I launched my Money >> Hours calculator. If you missed my blog post about that you can read it here. If you just want to use the calculator you can do that here.

I’ve been surprised by what’s happened since yesterday so naturally I thought I should blog about it. 

Spreading the word After writing my blog post about Money >> Hours I sent it to my friends at Orbital and asked them to share it if they thought it was worth sharing. Many of them re-tweeted my original tweet. Here are the analytics from my original tweet: 

Impressions: 1,949 Total engagements: 79 Link clicks: 35 Retweets: 12

My original tweet was at 10am, by 11:35 am there were 33 calculations. At 4:53pm there were 79 calculations, and right now (a little over 24 hours later) 110 calculations have been made. 

This doesn’t mean that I had 110 unique users, it just means that the form made 110 calculations. Still, that’s a lot more than I had expected. 

The power of my personal network exceeded my expectations. I can only imagine what could be done if I put more thought, focus, and effort into reaching out to everyone I know at the same time. 

Validating my own thoughts I made the calculator because I found it useful to get a different perspective on buying things with money. Within a few hours at least three people reached out to me and shared the same sentiments. 

I wouldn’t go as far as saying that there’s a need for this calculator but I will say that some people definitely found it helpful to have the perspective of money that the Money >> Hours calculator brings you. It was great to learn that so quickly.

Getting feedback In just a few hours I already had feedback from people who used it. My friend Nikki provided me feedback without even knowing it. She described Money >> Hours a lot better than I did, “How much of your life is that thing worth?” That was great product copy and positioning feedback. 

Anne and Ana both thought that an allowance version of the calculator would be great so that kids can start thinking about the relationship between time and money. 

Seeing how other people talked about Money >> Hours and how they would want to use it was interesting and let me get a fresh new perspective on it.

Making the calculator was easy I made the calculator in two hours this past Sunday. Most of this time was spent researching syntax, documentation, and how to use GitHub hosting. It didn’t take very long. 

I used Javascript, Firebase, and Github and have something that works and that other people can use. That’s what I cared about. 

It looks like a website straight out of the 90s. I’m not great at CSS and it would take me a while to get to the skill level I’d want to. Rather than delaying sharing the calculator I doubled down on simplicity and didn’t style it at all. In many I ways I think it makes it feel that much more like a calculator. 

You need time, space, and clarity to work What I didn’t mention on my blog post yesterday was that I’ve tried to get this calculator several times beforehand, always after a day of work. I’d work one or two hours at a time, run into a problem, get tired and uninterested and I’d call it a day. This went on for a couple of weeks.

On Sunday I started from scratch, early in the afternoon. I wasn’t tired, I didn’t have anything I needed to do, I had time and focus and I finished in two hours. That felt great. 

Last night I tried to make some quick updates after coming home from work and the results weren’t great. 

I knew that it’s best to do work with a clear and rested head, but when I did what I had spent over four hours doing in two, it really hit home how important that is. 

I made something last night. It’s a calculator that converts money into hours. I call it Money >> Hours. 

The idea came to me over a year ago when I was buying a road bike for my triathlon. I was saving up for it, when I asked myself how many hours do I need to work to buy this? Or on the more existential side, how much of my life am I dedicating to acquiring this thing.

Since then I’ve manually calculated money to hours for some of the things I’ve considered purchasing. The things have ranged vastly from a cup a coffee to a vacation. It’s made me think about the purchase differently. Sometimes it makes me appreciate the purchase a lot more, other times it makes me think that this thing I want to buy isn’t worth this much of my life. 

So to make it easier, I made the Money >> Hours calculator. I sat down yesterday and using Github Pages, Firebase, and javascript the calculator was done in an hour or so. I admit, most of my time was spent searching for documentation, syntax, and examples. 

Money >> Hours is simple. It’s not a new app, service, or company. It’s a calculator I made because I found it to be useful. I also made it to create something on my own from start to finish and feel good about it. 

It’s guaranteed in product development that you will estimate work incorrectly and miss target dates. There’s no way around it. There are plenty of factors that are never constant with every project that make it difficult to accurately predict when work will be or should be completed. 

That being said, in time you can get more accurate. In my experience I’ve found the following three tips helped improve our thinking behind time estimates and as a result also helped us increase the accuracy of our estimates. 

There’s nothing to be scared about If you and the rest of the team are doing what you should be doing then there’s nothing to be scared about. It’s okay to be wrong about time estimates, or say that work is going to take longer than expected. No one is going to get fired. These are great learning opportunities. 

It’s about the expectations, not the date Estimates help plan launch dates, and more often than not launch dates are completely arbitrary. And even when the dates aren’t arbitrary they’re still probably flexible. That means that what you’re managing isn’t a launch date, it’s people’s expectations of that date. 

The closer you get to a launch date, the more real the expectations become and the harder it becomes to accept changes in the expectations. Communicating often, early, and honestly can help manage these expectations by changing them far enough in advance that it isn’t perceived to be a problem. 

It’s wrong to be late, not early When development work goes past its estimate of work, it’s wrong, but when it’s done well in advance of its original estimate it’s early. Technically when work is late or early the estimate is wrong. Estimates are only right when they're on-time. But everyone perceives work that’s completed before the estimate to be early, not wrong. 

This doesn’t mean that you should estimate a year of work and then deliver it in four months. But it does mean that you have the opportunity to introduce a safety buffer to your time estimates so that you can better manage expectations. The worst case scenario is that you finish early, and that’s not a bad place to be in. 

Every day I connect with my social circle solely online. Mainly through Twitter but also through a Slack chat. Some of the people I interact with I’ve met in person, others live in the same city but have never been in the same physical space at each other. 

Our interactions are only a few seconds long over the course of the day. We’re not even sharing the same time as each other, our conversations are asynchronous. 

Yet these are people who I enjoy connecting with. They read drafts of my writing, help me broadcast my thoughts, listen and give me advice, and generally give me a break from my day. They’re like an online support group” 

This isn’t strange or new to me. When I was younger I spent most of my days in IRC chat rooms connecting with my own social circle scattered across the globe. 

I love side projects. I think they are great ways to explore, experiment, and learn in an area that you might not be completely comfortable in. But I can’t remember the last time I started and finished a side project, and it’s something that bothers me. 

Several months ago, my mother-in-law Kathy took up sewing, and that became her side project. She’s been working on it and just last month she opened up her own Etsy shop Waiting For Harry where she sells scarfs made out of upcycled t-shirts. In just a month, she already has five sales.

I can’t help but think what this side project of hers would look like 20, 30, or even 50 years ago. It’s not like she wouldn’t have been able to make upcycled scarves from t-shirts 50 years ago, but gaining instant access to millions of people - that would have been impossible. 

I usually post a weekend read about tech or product. So I get really excited when I get to change it up and talk about a book I just finished reading and want to recommend.

I finished Dave Eggers (new?) book Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

For the record, the title is a pain to ass while writing from my iPhone.

I couldn't believe how quickly I finished the book. I had such a fun time reading it. I didn't know what to expect, because the only other book I read from Eggers was The Circle. This was different and read more like a play.

There are six characters and one setting and the novel is all dialogue. The writing might not be brilliant but it's fun and I went from liking and disliking every character throughout the book. The book focuses on a lot of current issues and the characters all have very different perspectives. Needless to say, it keeps things interesting.

Yesterday I spent my morning volunteering at Harbor Lab in Long Island City as part of celebrating Etsy’s 10-year anniversary. Harbor Lab is an organization that’s working to make the Newton Creek - a superfund site - a better place. 

When I got there in the morning, I thought that we might be doing some planting, building, or cleaning, and that was true. But I didn’t expect that what would have the biggest impact would be moving bricks. 

When Erik Baard started Harbor Lab the land he got had bricks, a lot of bricks. These bricks are alongside the creek bed and there must be over 5,000 bricks. They can’t use a forklift to get the bricks out because the land is too soft, and the cost of using a crane on top of a barge would be costly and perhaps impossible. So they move bricks by hand. 

There were over fifty of us helping out. Fifty smart people who are good at their jobs, and the most impactful thing we could do to help was to move bricks from one place to another. 

I ended up at the start of the line, grabbing bricks from piles and then passing them down our human assembly line. Some of the bricks were rotted and breaking. Some other bricks were in fragile piles stacked so high that the only way to get them down was to climb up the piles around them and carefully choose a brick that wouldn’t topple the pile over. 

We worked for three hours and moved over 500 bricks. Erik told us that we had been their largest workforce ever. 

While I was working in the hot sun and I could feel my muscles tire I couldn’t help but think that people pay for this type of experience through events like Warrior Dash or Spartan Races. And here was Erik, who was ecstatic to have 50 people sign up to help him for a single day. 

There weren’t any elaborate obstacles to overcome, and there weren’t any medals or beer at the finish line, but the experience was free and fulfilling.