Front-end dev skills at Yahoo! Juku school
Today Yahoo! announced via the YUI blog that they’re seeking students for their Yahoo! Juku program. Yahoo! Juku is an interesting training opportunity in front-end development skills—“HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP”, plus more—as well as working experience within a guided program inside Yahoo. Yahoo is pretty direct about their goals for the Juku program, which are to grow talent they particularly need, train their own staff to teach (cool!) and also draw attention to the void around web skills in academic CS programs. Here’s Yahoo’s call-to-action:
If you’re a budding Front-End genius with a strong background in programming fundamentals and a passion to learn, [Yahoo! would] like to hear from you.
…
The vision of the Juku program is to provide top-quality training in frontend technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP) with the ultimate goal of producing great frontend engineers. Participants are put through 3-4 months of intensive training taught by some of the best frontend engineers at Yahoo!, focusing not just on concepts, but also on best practices in terms of maintainability, accessibility, and performance.
I like that Yahoo is addressing the lack of CS dept. attention toward web development skills, while so many social websites bring web programming into day-to-day lingo. And in the ashes of the Yahoo-Microsoft merger coverage (disclosure: I work for partly MSFT), it is nice to see focus continue on efforts like education, even with so many open questions about where Yahoo heads next.
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Business Startup: To-Do Checklist
As promised, I’ll be keeping you up to date on all the tasks and processes that goes into creating my new business - {radiiate}. I’m sure you’ll agree with me, that there’s a whole bunch of things that needs to be put into place when creating a new business; and even though it is a very exciting experience, it also requires a lot of time (and patience if admin tasks aren’t your thing).
So here’s a progress report:
Creating an identity
The first thing I did was to decide on a name and create a logo for the new business venture. In my opinion, it is very important to get this out of the way first, as you need to be able to visualize your dream business and without a name / logo, that’ll never happen.
Business Cards
Many people will argue that business cards is not needed for online professionals, as their website / blog / online portfolio becomes their “business card”. Even though I might tend to agree with that argument, a lot of corporates still prefer exchanging business cards - so it is better to be prepared (and have your business card ready) when go to a project pitch with the big-wig corporates…
Anyway, this means that I had a 1000 cards printed for {radiiate} (will still post photos of them, when I find the inspiration to photograph them 
) and they’ve already been pretty valuable on a few occassions.
Registering a company
This is super, super important - you have got to distinguish between your own, personal finances and that of the company. So I’ve registered a Closed Corporation (CC) in South Africa - basically a Limited Liability Company - to allow me to have a separate legal entity to work with. Since I bought a shelf company (I needed to have a company that was already registered on 1 March this year for tax purposes), I’ve filed for the changes to the name and members’ details - which should take about 2 / 3 weeks to be approved.
Hiring!?
Since I don’t have offices yet (I’m still living the freelance life and working from home), I haven’t been able (or interested really) to employ anyone full-time. I have however established relationships with a bunch other freelancers, to whom I can outsource work on-demand. In addition, I have found a local designer / coder to basically work for me on a freelance basis, whereby I send him work on a daily basis and he bills me per hour (as I’m booking out 90% of his time at the moment, he is almost an employee, except for the fact that his remuneration is not part of any of my overheads).
Remaining To-Do’s
I’ve still got quite a bit to do, before I can say that I’m running a new business… Here’s the most important things that still needs some attention:
- Bank Accounts. I’ve already got a meeting at the bank later this week and I need to get my business accounts sorted out ASAP, as all of my current income is going straight into my personal account. On the other side, I’m not overly keen on getting more bank accounts, as all it means is that I have to pay more monthly bank charges…
- Office Space. I don’t even want to talk about this, as it has been a real mission finding office space in my area! I’m not keen on driving more than 10 minutes to work every day and I can’t afford a massive place - which means that it has been difficult finding something appropriate. But I’d really like to move out to an office by the end of July to allow me to collaborate more efficiently and have a dedicated meeting space to meet with clients.
So what do you make of all of this? Got any experience in this regard?
(Image by ~dontvu219)
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Video Blog Review 1 - FavBrowser.com
Welcome to the first Daily Blog Tips video post. It has been a long time since the idea of playing with videos came into my mind, and now I am finally up with the first one. I am aware that the quality needs to get improved, but if you guys like the format it might become a weekly feature on the blog. Apart from blog reviews I will try to to tutorials and how-to videos as well.
On this first blog review I will cover the design and layout aspects of FavBrowser.com, a blog coming from one of our readers (I asked his permission to review it).
In future reviews we will cover different aspects, like search engine optimization, content quality, promotion strategy and so on. If you took the time to watch the video, please let me know if you would like to see more of them, and if you have any suggestions for topics or formats.
If for some reason you can’t see the video player, here is the link for the YouTube page: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WI074pRX13w.
Partner: MakeUseOf.com Amazing Websites and Tools you Never Knew About
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Video Blog Review 1 - FavBrowser.com
Welcome to the first Daily Blog Tips video post. It has been a long time since the idea of playing with videos came into my mind, and now I am finally up with the first one. I am aware that the quality needs to get improved, but if you guys like the format it might become a weekly feature on the blog. Apart from blog reviews I will try to to tutorials and how-to videos as well.
On this first blog review I will cover the design and layout aspects of FavBrowser.com, a blog coming from one of our readers (I asked his permission to review it).
In future reviews we will cover different aspects, like search engine optimization, content quality, promotion strategy and so on. If you took the time to watch the video, please let me know if you would like to see more of them, and if you have any suggestions for topics or formats.
If for some reason you can’t see the video player, here is the link for the YouTube page: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WI074pRX13w.
Partner: MakeUseOf.com Amazing Websites and Tools you Never Knew About
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Do Not Fear Failing or Doing New Things
I just came across an interesting interview with Google’s founder Larry page. The interview is about how to change the world. Sounds challenging huh? This guy actually did it, so he has credit to talk about it.
When asked about how to get more people actually thinking about and working on things that might end up changing the world, he answered:
There are a number of barriers in place. Let me give an example. In our first founders’ letter in 2004, we talked about the risk profile with respect to doing new innovations. We said we would do some things that would have only a 10% chance of making $1 billion over the long term. But we don’t put many people on those things; 90% work on everything else. So that’s not a big risk. And if you look at where many of our new features come from, it’s from these riskier investments.
Even when we started Google, we thought, “Oh, we might fail,” and we almost didn’t do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, “You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don’t succeed.” Probably that one decision caused Google to be created. It’s not clear we would have done it otherwise. We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It’s not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.
This advice is good for pretty much anything you decide to carry on in your life. Blogging and online ventures are no exception. If you want to succeed on the web, you will need to let your fear of failure go away, and to try new and innovative things.
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