Mash the Keyboard, Part 1
A story on experience
On Feb. 28th, I started Mash the Keyboard.
I’ve been employed for almost two years at Ervin & Smith, a damn good Digital Marketing & PR agency in Omaha, NE., as a Jr. Developer. For the past half year or so, I’ve been on the TD Ameritrade team building product.
Ervin & Smith taught me so. much.
I highly suggest working here.
Kill your developer ego, speak accessibly, understand your market, test test test test test test test test. Deliver a perfect product. Ervin & Smith taught me that I can be a better developer.
I know you, the reader, could take that last sentence negatively.
Take it mindfully—that’s how I intend it.
Initially, I was hired at E&S to build Blogglebeans®, a company
that I firmly believe is standing in a unique position to answer
one, invaluable question:
If communities raise children, and we’re living in a time where the global community is rapidly growing, how will the global community raise our children?
Vision can be pretty tough to communicate accessibly. You need to
craft glasses perfectly. And in the case of the person you’re giving the
glasses to? They need to trust that these glasses provide them the best
vision to move forward.
Blogglebeans taught me to craft the glasses.
Communicate the vision.
This deeply defines the culture of the business you’re building.
If it wasn’t for Sara Hanlon and David Shreffler, I couldn’t have figured
this out.
The “Why” of an idea is defined by the goals it intends to accomplish.
Leaders give you the “Why”.
Before my two year escapade at E&S, and while I was attending college at
Iowa Western in Council Bluffs, I was focused on the Occupy Wallstreet movement; localized to Occupy Omaha. I helped with the technical aspects, building the site, chat, etc—I was focused on giving everyone
the platform to communicate their anger, direct it and make real
impactful change.
The dedication I had stemmed from the second general assembly, the first one I personally attended. Walking in, the feeling of the room was cramped, angry, confusing. People were talking about NOT using platforms on the internet, and purely working in the streets.
I jumped in so that couldn’t happen.
Occupy Omaha did two things to me.
1: It taught me the value of being mindful, focused and quiet.
To listen to every perspective, synthesize and react/execute in the best, most informed way possible.
2: It set me up for the deepest depression I would ever have.
I built products for businesses who had philosophies that
I didn’t agree with.
I have never, and will never again, feel so guilty.
Before Occupy Omaha, I co-founded an open source music label with Martin Boehme of Powlyglot called Oiled up Birds. There was nothing
deep we were trying to accomplish. We wanted to “fix Council Bluffs”, which I’ll ramble about in detail in part two.
Oiled up Birds was intended to be architecturally “flat”, where we wanted
to give everyone absolute creative control, provided they lent a hand to the other artists in the most organic ways possible.
It was a really, really cool idea.
Oiled up Birds taught me how to manage.
People of different backgrounds can work together to create really
cool things, even more so if there’s an accessible platform.
The “How” of an idea is defined by the strategies it uses to accomplish the
goal, the “Why”.
Managers give you the “How”.
I’ve had an opportunity, one I’m sure not many can share.
The person who taught me code, the basis for everything I do, played the role of a Teacher, a Manager and a Leader. If there’s any bit of value anyone can take from this, it’s this simple model I fell into.
Teachers give you the “What”.
The “What” of an idea is defined as the toolbox that the strategies, the “How”, utilize to fulfill the goal, the “Why”.
Every human alive can judge themselves inside this model.
Am I a good Leader? Do I actively inspire the people around me?
Am I a good Manager? Do I efficiently organize the people around me?
Am I a good Teacher? Do I accurately inform the people around me?
Hopefully I’ve provided you some value. I wanted to tell my personal
narrative in a way that didn’t make me feel, well, full of myself.
If you loved this, read part 2, which will be posted soon. In it, I talk about the goals of Mash the Keyboard, and the need humans have to develop models that help us understand our world.
Mash the Keyboard is on Twitter and Facebook. We primarily talk about
Social Discovery Optimization (SDO). We’ll mix up all the stuff we share
to give value to Developers/Designers, Marketers, and Business Leaders.
Our flagship product is Hubdia, a search engine platform focused on finding the stuff you create, that you’ve posted across all social platforms, and organizing it.
