The lavish Los Angeles Hotel Bel-Air recently reopened with redesigned rooms and made sure to toss out its old, clunky receivers along with the outdated interior design. The 70-year-old hotel replaced the telephones with Apple’s booming iPad, so guests no longer need to use a laminated binder menu and corded handset to order their caviar and wine. Room service now occurs via the iOS tablet included in their room, and the hotel hopes to have 50 percent of orders placed through the new addition.
I was fortunate enough to travel to Budapest, Hungary with the entirety of Automattic. It was amazing to meet everyone face-to-face, finally putting speech and mannerisms together with written words and code.
One of the many highlights of the trip was getting to work with some people I don’t normally interact with — having some of my designs/code launched on WordPress.com was another amazing experience. Keep an eye out for the new post-post page; the screen you see after you publish a post on WordPress.com.
I’ve always thought of it this way: a good writer reads a lot of books. They see how other writers solve problems. They pay attention to what’s happening now as much as they pay attention to the classics. Good writers are readers first, but eagle-eyed, careful readers.
I think good developers are the same: they look at other apps. They “read” those apps, the problems they have and how they solve them. They notice trends, they notice new solutions, they notice when things work and when they don’t.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
More testing. You can ignore me.
After a long 12 hours of traveling, I arrived in Budapest around 11:30am local time. Which is about 5:30am on the east coast.
Its been a long day. But I’m excited for the week to come!
