August 31, 2008

Facebook and flippin’ houses

Flip in Utah masthead
So you might have noticed that my blog postings were somewhat sparse this year (for the 2 of you who follow it on a regular basis). Beyond not having much time to present my interesting findings, I’ve been busy flipping a house I purchased in January of this year. I blogged about it through most of the process, and now it’s just time to put up all the “after” pictures to enjoy what I came up with.

I’ve got to say I learned a lot in the process about many things that apply directly to being a freelance designer. While working with contractors, sub-contractors and people who I thought were “skilled” tradesmen in their respective fields I learned valuable lessons about being on the “client” side of things. Perhaps I’ll share those in a future post. I also enjoyed being creative in a format beyond my day-to-day job of doing UI design. Picking tile, wood floors, designing window woodwork, picking carpet, tearing down walls, etc. all provided a tactile experience that the design of software lacks. From that standpoint, I’d have to say the experience was an enjoyable one.

I also wanted to mentioned that I joined Facebook recently. I had been interested in some of their use of the latest-and-greatest technologies and wanted to keep track on what changes they make overtime. (Their growth rate has been phenomenal!) I’ve already found many people I know there, and have enjoyed exchanging messages through their internal email, or their “wall” functionality.