Rand Wacker

Got up really early this morning. Not because I’m excited about Christmas (well, I am), but because I haven’t gotten much exercise in the past couple of days and I went to bed at like 8 or 9 last night. These combined forces usually lead to 3am insomnia, so here I am enjoying the warm glow of my Mom’s Christmas tree as well as my PowerBook keyboard…

I was knocking around the blog-o-sphere, and then trying to tackle a couple of personal todo items that have festered for a while. One was to finally get all my non-financial passwords into some form of organization: airline sites, /., that kind of thing. My default was to just use a text file or something, but figured I’d look around for other things that might be a bit geekier. Turns out there is no shortage of password/PIM vaults for OSX. After playing with a few good ones (Vault, info.xhead) I decided that I really liked Wallet from Waterfall Software.

After kicking down my fifteen bucks over PayPal I thought I’d poke around their site a bit. I’ve been very interested in the microcosm of low-cost software developers out there, and the OSX community seems to have spawned a vast array of very high-quality developers working in smallish groups to build useful and reasonably priced tools ($15 is definitely my sweet spot for a useful utility). Turns out that the company is essentially three teenagers collaborating virtually and located mostly in the Pacific Northwest. Very nice work guys.

So I explored a little more and found some of the same guys working at another small Seattle venture, Delicious Monster. Poking around a little bit more I discover that several of these folks work (or worked) for The Omni Group, which is responsible for two of my favorite tools of all time, OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle. Keep linking around and you see an expansive yet surely small/tight network of really good people building really good software. The total network isn’t huge though, I think I just stumbled across the blogs of 10 or 15 very talented individuals that all know and work together.

Early morning postulations from someone who needs to get their body clock back in check:

• Consumer software like this is fun, as opposed to the enterprise software market I’m in which is business.
• Apple has done a very good job of maintaining mind share among the leading edge developers. I have a number of friends in the OSX group at Apple, maybe I should go work for with them (oh, wait, that’s enterprise software).
• Wicked smart kids are building wicked smart companies based on a good idea, strong design, and the heart to follow it through, I admire that.
• My blog design is stale.
• I still want to move back to Seattle.

Happy holidays everyone!

OK Rand, time to learn to breath again. I just wrapped one of the most hectic times of my life. Since the Sunday after Thanksgiving I have been on a non-stop insanity schedule including cross-country work trips, group projects for school, the Beta launch of my largest work project for this year, and finals. I’ve literally been operating in a mode where if I’m awake I’m working on something, sleeping sort of whenever my body just shuts down and can’t do anymore, and trying to punctuate my few free moments with at least a little exercise, quality food, and time with Alexis. Lets just say that its been a challenge, and one I’m very happy with the final results of.

Today I’m catching up on some of the things that got pushed back, clearing out my email inboxes, catching up on friend blogs, and enjoying riding BART to work again (I had too many 6am meetings that I was driving in way too often). This weekend I’m catching up on SLEEP, and relaxing with Alexis far away from any phones or computers. And then, three weeks of “vacation” (what, all I have to do is go to work, that’s easy!)

More soon, if there’s anything worth writing about.

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