Well, it was a fun ride; I’ve moved on from Lolapps, and as of this posting, a week from starting a new gig at the big G (really, that’s Google, not “grad school” as someone had guessed…). The experience has been enormously educational:
- working for a startup since its infancy;
- growing the company in scope and size;
- building apps on top of a rapidly iterating and emerging platform in the Facebook App ecosystem;
I’d easily recommend any aspiring entrepreneurs, engineers, or web-savvy netizens to try their hands on similar opportunities. That said, after having fought the battles and learned the lessons for the better part of two years, I realized it was time for me to bow out of the system and return to more traditional software products.
Here’s why.
The holidays are always a great time for pictures. Me, armed with the iPhone’s 3MP teeny camera and a 12MP Sony TSC point-and-shoot, was ready to commemorate the occasion and maybe even get a few decent prints out. Hell, maybe I’ll actually learn to shoot bokeh or HDR or whatever.
Photography’s one of those hobbies guys flock to – along with cars and video games – after a certain stage in life; in this case, it’s usually right around having a kid and wanting to cherish the early years. It’s also one that’s been widely practiced since the advent of digital cameras and onboard image processing, rendering most shots into passable email material. Like most people, I approached the subject of picture-takin’ from a purely utilitarian perspective: I wanted to etch memories into physical being. My artistic side (admittedly, limited) hated how 90% of my shots weren’t even clear enough for a normal print, and those that were in focus looked aggressively ordinary. I knew there were lessons in composition, exposure, white balance, and depth of focus I had to learn, but every time I read an article and tried to replicate the results, I was met with disappointing quality.
