Steve’s Blog

Blues documentary: You See Me Laughin’

From England originally, I’ve lived in the Deep South for the last 10 years.

The South has forced me to change my mind about a lot of things, blues music being one of them.

I couldn’t have cared less for the blues before arriving here. It took a while, but the music has turned my mind around 180 degrees.

Here’s a brilliant documentary called “You See Me Laughin’”, filmed in 2002, just before I arrived here. It’s about the blues players on Fat Possum Records in Mississippi. All four parts are on YouTube: Continue reading “Blues documentary: You See Me Laughin’”

Never be seen working on the weekend

I’ve always thought of myself as teacher.

But, as OSTraining has grown in the last several years, I’ve found myself moving into the role of a manager rather than a teacher. 

Still, the two roles have a lot in common.

One of the biggest similarities is that you really need to be careful about the behavior you model. For example, I often used to work weekends. Some Saturdays and Sundays, I’d send emails, make site changes and be noticeably busy.

Continue reading “Never be seen working on the weekend”

A card from Chiara

This year, I had the pleasure of doing some work with Chiara from UntilSunday.it.

Chiara helped redesign our logo and brand at OSTraining.

At the end of the year, we got a card from Chiara. If you’ve ever met Chiara, you know that she has a unique and artistic flair. She put all of that talent into one of the most unique cards we’ve ever receieved.

I apologize if my photos don’t do the quality of the card justice, but I thought it was worth sharing: Continue reading “A card from Chiara”

Todd Marrone: There’s Not One Correct Answer

One of my wife’s high school friends, Todd Marrone, passed during Christmas.

Todd worked as an art teacher in Philadelphia schools for 15 years.

I never met him, but after hearing the news, my wife was telling me about him. She was showing me some of his YouTube videos, including a TED talk from 2011. It’s a beautiful talk, and from the sounds of it, a fitting introduction to Todd and his ideas about being a great teacher:

We sold Admincredible to Watchful

admincredible adamI’ve known Vic Drover for a long time now.

We started talking when he launched one of the first ever commercial GPL businesses back in 2007.

The next year, we did a Joomla class together in Las Vegas and then were two of the speakers at the first ever CMSExpo in Chicago.

We’ve keep talking almost every week since.

The summer, we reached a fork in the road with Admincredible. Members of our team were getting really busy in other areas of their life and at the same time the Admincredible platform needed a substantial extra investment to go where we wanted to take it.

We decided to look into selling. We had interested from hosting companies and development companies, but the best fit was Vic and his Watchful platform. Not only was the offer from Vic, but Watchful offers almost exactly the same service as Admincredible, so it was the smoothest transition for our customers.

Thanks to TJ and Eddie for taking the Admincredible ride with me. Thanks to our customers for taking it with us and thanks Vic for taking on it from here.

6 reasons why I’m not much interested in forks

I’ve been heavily involved with Joomla and, to a lesser extent, Drupal for a good number of years now.

During that time, I’ve seen forks come and go but they’ve never really sparked my interested. Here are 6 reasons why:

#1. Money. I’ve kids, a wife and a mortgage so I need to pay the bills. There’s rarely enough money in small projects to pay the bills and forks are always small projects.

#2. Open source. I’m far more attached to open source than I am to any brand name such as Joomla, Drupal or WordPress. I work with open source because I want to see live in a society dominated by open rather than proprietary systems. A large and popular project provides a much better platform to make that happen.

#3. Chance of success. 99.9% of forks fail. In fact, 99.9% of open source project fail. People wildly overestimate how rare it is for an open source project to succeed. I saw a very naive comment on Reddit the other day: “the creation of an ecosystem is trivially easy”. Projects like Joomla and Drupal are 1 in 100,000. They caught lightning in a bottle. Your project probably won’t.

#4. People. I’m attached to the people in each open source project rather than just the codebase. I’m a trainer, not a developer, so that’s the way my mind works.

#5. Different place, same drama. I’ve heard people say that they want to start afresh to avoid the drama in the old project. Sorry, but people are people. The grass probably won’t be greener on the other side.

#6. Be different. Rather than forks, which offer more of the same for the first few months or years, it’s a lot more interesting to see something completely new. A great example is Ghost as an alternative to WordPress.

None of this is to say that forks are bad things or that you shouldn’t launch one. These are just the reasons why I probably won’t be interested.