Marcel, what are you doing the whole day?
At first there is the obvious stuff, if we decide to introduce embeddable recommendations, somebody has to build them. We’re talking about everything all the time. What’s the best way to embed something on websites? What are sites like Twitter, Vimeo and Youtube doing? What’s good, what’s something we rather don’t want to imitate? How can we improve the stuff others have already indroduced?
If we think everything is clear, I’ll start designing some layouts. This could take three hours or even two weeks, depending on the complexity of the topic and my ability to come up with the right idea. If everyone is okay with my work, Martin begins to build the stuff in HTML/CSS/JS that needs some time, followed up by fixing bugs and tests for different browsers (Hi, IE7!). Finally Philipp’s and Florian’s work starts, they build stuff I don’t understand. And then, after a week of work, there are embeddable recommendations.

That’s nice, all done, that was easy, right? Yep, but what if you notice that you didn’t think about responsive layouts and your way of embedding recommendations — iFrames — is not the best and breaks if a layout is flexible? That’s the time you decide to build the whole thing new, no iFrames, instead the user gets the whole code to paste into his website. Three people, eight days of work and everything that has been accomplished are lousy embeddable recommendations. Wow.
We’re trying to do stuff right, and to do things right you need time. You need to fail to try again and it’s getting better every time you try. That’s the beauty.
Now take embeddable recommendations as an expample and think about stuff like plugins for every browser, an iPad app, a newsletter, a video to explain QUOTE.fm, Read, a redesign of user profiles and so much other projects which are in our pipeline. We have so much stuff to do that everyone of us has several to-do lists on which he’s working at the same time. It’s awesome.
Regarding our upcoming iPad app, we’re basically building QUOTE.fm for a second time. Everything has to feel and look different. And we’re adding even more new stuff. Our version of “Read Later” is coming with it and it’s going to be awesome. There are so many nice little details you can work on and they are worth the time.
Today we’ve tweaked the “New Recommendation” window. Yes, you can spend an hour fixing the animation of a window that falls down. Yes, it’s necessary to compare 0.2 with 0.3 seconds more than one time. The result looks amazing and it’s going to be fun to use.
Then there are brainstormings, e-mails, meetings and kitty livestreams that need to be watched. So, trust us. We’re not going to run out of work. Fortunately.
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Some of you may have noticed: This post is written in English. And I plan to write all the upcoming posts in English too. I’m not a native speaker and I’m sure this piece has mistakes all over it. Feel free to write a comment to inform me about flaws. Please explain why something is wrong, I’m trying to get better here.






