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The city Seattle is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located in the state of Washington between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, about 96 miles (155 km) south of the Canada United States border in King County, of which it is the county seat. The Seattle area has been inhabited for at least 4,000 years, but European settlement began only in the mid-19th century. The first permanent white settlers, Arthur A. Denny and those subsequently known as the Denny party arrived November 13, 1851.

Early settlements in the area were called "New York-Alki" and "Duwamps". In 1853, Doc Maynard suggested that the main settlement be renamed "Seattle," an anglicized rendition of the name of Noah Sealth, the collective chief of the two indigenous tribes. As of 2006, the city had an estimated population of 582,174 and an estimated metropolitan area population of approximately 3.3 million. If you want to read more about Seattle, check out the original content from Wikipedia.

Photo credits goes to JMCPhoto for the insets. The Edmonds ferry header is by Phil Rodriguez, thats me. I like the simplicity and the clean look which allows me to experiment/mix scripts that makes sense to me. A news link API for quick reference on current events.

Seattletown Radio is from Slacker, which I think is the best in delivering music entertainment. I will be adding more features later.

What is Seattletown

Seattletown.com updates clients to interactive projects in progress. Viewing Seattletown also serves as a key url for my online portfolio.

You may find websites not completely linked this time. These items are in the process and waiting for additional changes and or content.

I hope you like this site and find it useful. Please feel free to check out my other websites. You might find something you will like. I can be contacted by phone at (425) 213-8412 or e-mail PRDesign or through other comment areas on related website for more information. Thank you for visiting seattletown.com!

Programmers in a Zoo: An Inspiring Insight

From an essay, "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" by Paul Graham.

March 2008

A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate "team-building" exercises.

They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties. But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing.

And yet the company they worked for is considered a good one, and from what I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough. In fact, they seemed to be from one of the more prestigious groups within the company. So why did it seem there was something odd about them?

I have a uniquely warped perspective, because nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders. We've now funded 80 startups with a total of about 200 founders, nearly all of them programmers. I spend a lot of time with them, and not much with other programmers. So my mental image of a young programmer is a startup founder.

The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I was used to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed.

So what, you may say. So I happen to know a subset of programmers who are especially ambitious. f course less ambitious people will seem different. But the difference between the programmers I saw in the cafe and the ones I was used to wasn't just a difference of degree. Something seemed wrong.

I think it's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees. I think startup founders, though statistically outliers, are actually living in a way that's more natural for humans.

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.

Trees

What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups.

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. continue reading Paul Graham






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Programmers in a Zoo: An Inspiring Insight

Trees