Do Not Fold

These Days is looking for new web-talents. We thought it would be fun to make a mini-site where you can show your true web-ninja skills. You got to hack your way into our minisite and prove you’re a true ninja! Good luck!

A few weeks ago I had the chance to go to the Google Amsterdam office to meet Thomas Steiner, a Google Sales Engineer. It’s because These Days has an NDA with Google that we could go there and talk with Thomas about technical issues with several Google products, like analytics, API’s, etc.

Last Friday Tomas posted this on his blog, a couple fun facts about Google search that I didn’t knew about:

Sometimes it’s the small things that let you feel the difference. In cooking it’s just this little bit of thyme that makes a piece of meat a real steak, in technology it’s easter eggs. Search Google for recursion, and Google will ask you if you rather meant “recursion”. Search Google for ASCII art, then this is what you get for the Google logo:

  ___                _
 / __|___  ___  __ _| |___
| (_ / _ \/ _ \/ _` |   -_)
 \___\___/\___/\__, |_\___|
               |___/

It’s back in town! Erm… London that is. The annual Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference by Carsonified. Book your tickets now, because last year was really good. I booked my tickets from the moment there where any available. Yes, I’ve got me one of those early-bird tickets… yay!

The conference is held on 1 and 2 oktober and the speakers include Aza Raskin (Mozilla), Dustin Diaz (Twtter), Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), Kevin Rose (digg), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), etc. If you are going too and you want to meet-up, let me know!

Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library) on Building Personal Brand. Great, inspiring speech from the Web 2.0 expo in New York. (via)

I don’t blog often about my work at These Days, but the new Pioneer site deserves to be noticed. Last week, Pioneer launched their new European website: www.pioneer.eu. I really love the design and the structure of the site, the javascript effects just add to the cool form-factor of the brand and the website. I did some css but mainly did the javascripts. I used Prototype and Scriptaculous because I can count on it and the behaviours in different browsers but mainly because I’m not as familiar with jQuery as I am with Prototype. Anyway, you’ve got to check it out: www.pioneer.eu!

One of my favourite Mac apps has just been updated. Coda is a web development application for the Mac and is super cool. Now with subversion it ‘ll be even better. It’s a free upgrade — full release notes here. At the moment loads of people still use TextMate but now they might switch. TextMate is really good too, it’s less sexy but it has more features and is a bit cheaper. So now that Coda has source control built in, it’s almost at a position where it has everything I want included. Just add code completion like Eclipse does and it’s perfect!