Big thanks to Danny Mustafic for recording the presentation (which should be available here in a few days) and to Chris Spruck and Kevin Roberts for putting the event together.

Form validation demo

Pagination demo

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“The term “coworking” was coined by Bernie DeKoven in 1999, and in 2005 used by Brad Neuberg to describe a physical space.

Neuberg organized a coworking site called the “Hat Factory” in San Francisco, which is a live-work loft that is home to three technology workers, and is open to others during the day.”

I discovered coworking some time last year shortly after I quit my full time job and started freelancing from home. I had truly miscalculated how much I needed to be in contact with other people in order to fuel my own creativity and productivity. Shortly after going solo I tried out Ignition Alley and I loved the vibe of working alongside other professionals from different backgrounds and fields, all united for our desire to get out of the house and into a better environment. I started making the 20+ mile commute each way about once a week and noticed that even after spending that much time on the road I was enjoying my work more, and was getting more done. Later on, I signed up as a full time member at StrongBox West where I was spending anywhere between 5 to 7 days a week (what an awesome bunch they are!)

I liked coworking so much that in July 1st I officially opened Cobb Exchange. It’s been a great experience thus far and it keeps getting better all the time. I knew of many other location independent workers and freelancers that lived in the same area I do, yet there wasn’t a place for us to go. You can still see many of us struggling at Startbucks, or the coffee shops around the Marietta Square; but slowly people are starting to hear about coworking and eagerly jumping on the idea.

In the Google Coworking group someone pointed out that today would already be five years that we have an official name for what we do and proposed we call it Coworking Day. Many of us thought it would be a great day to get the word out, write blog posts, Tweet with the #CoworkingDay hashtag and reach out to all those out there who have yet do discover coworking. I also thought it would be a great day to get  the Cobb Coworking Meetup.com group started to reach out in yet another way.

For those of us that are involved with this phenomenon at any level, every day is Coworking Day and that is great. For the rest of you that have yet to discover what coworking is all about, I can assure you that trying it out for yourself is worth more than thousand words I could write. Get out, get coworking, get inspired and get stuff done.

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I have mostly written about PHP, API’s, and freelancing. Well, there’s a new passion in my life, coworking. Have you heard of coworking? More importantly, have you tried it out? It rocks. If you don’t know what I’m talking about take 30 seconds to read this Wikipedia entry. For the last six months I’ve been a member of two great coworking spaces, Ignition Alley and StrongBox West. I’ve spent so much time in the latter that even though I haven’t been there in over a week I’m still the mayor.

I’ve enjoyed coworking so much that I decided to open up my own place. As of today Cobb Exchange is open to the public. It took a lot of effort to get everything set up, but I feel great about setting the foundation for what I believe will be a hub of business and social activity for the area. Of course you can expect to see a lot more about coworking in this blog. I hope that widening the scope of subjects will help avoid long periods of silence. I’m documenting the experience of setting the place up and will post it soon. If you’d like to see some of it there’s a Facebook page with pictures.

If you are in the Atlanta area, you have an open invitation to come see us, and if you are elsewhere let me know where, I might stop by some time.

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In this episode we covered these topics:

• Quit Facebook Day
• Development tools for MySQL
• WordPress 3.0 and Drupal 7
• IE 9 Test drive is out and ready for testing
• Apple vs. Adobe vs. HTML5
• Freelancers – generalist, or specialist?
• Donations
• Upcoming events.

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There was a lot of learning involved while building it so expect to see tutorial articles in the near future dealing with OAuth, Twitter API, reverse proxying, caching and more.

It’s a simple concept, but I haven’t seen it done before so I took on it with my buddy Danny and we built it in between doing actual work. Give it a try, let us know what you think and help spread the word too!

Want to know more? It couldn’t be any other way, follow Séquito (@sequitoapp) on Twitter.

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When you work on your own projects you are free to experiment, learn, and create. It’s okay to read some tutorials and get an idea of how something works, but it’s a completely different ball game when you actually apply that knowledge, not just to the simplified example task dictated by the learning material, but to your own ideas. You’ll run into unexpected challenges that will force you to push your limits and improve your skills.

Don’t just take my word for it, this is nothing new. Take a look at Google’s 20 percent time; it has yielded some of the companies most popular products: Gmail, Google Talk, Orkut, and a whole lot more. Of course, it’s easier when your employer is footing the bill for you to broaden your horizons, but you aren’t one to avoid a challenge, right?

Some things you can do could be one of those millions of ideas you had for a (Twitter/Facebook/iPhone/something) app, the revamping of your site you’ve been putting off for 3 years (HTML5 + CSS3 maybe), building premium themes and templates for sale, start a meet-up group. Are you a developer? Try experimenting with design, and vice versa. The possibilities are endless, the point is that you should stop thinking about it and start doing it. Take it seriously and it will likely grow beyond the little project you just started for fun.

I’m currently working on three side projects, and I make sure I keep track of them like I do with my “real” projects. It’s incredibly rewarding and hopefully some day they will become my “real” projects.

What are you working on? What do you want to learn? What’s stopping you from doing it?

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The presentation was divided in two parts, HTML5 and CSS3, and served as a good introduction to the what, when and why of these two technologies.

HTML5 was presented by Moses Ngone, a good friend and a fellow developer. He started by talking about the state of the web, the history of HTML, and everything else from DOCTYPE declarations to H.264 licensing.

The CSS3 part was presented by Aaron Walter of MailChimp fame. Aaron introduced CSS3, its main advantages and its pitfalls. The talk went from the most popular features like rounded corners and text shadow, to some very impressive demonstrations of opacity, rgb(a), selectors and transitions.

Here are all the slides in PDF format and here ‘s a list of all the resources mentioned during the talk on Moses’ site.

Thanks to Danny Mustafic of Hungry Bird Creative for bringing his awesome video equipment and capturing the whole event. It should be up in the AWDG site soon, but you can get a preview here. And more thanks to J and Farhan for putting together yet another great event.

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Should you learn back end programming? front end? specialize? generalize? Depending on who you ask the answer again varies drastically. From my own observations I believe that most designers or developers get started by doing one thing, and quickly realize that they need to acquire new skills in order to deliver a finished product (i.e. a beautiful, usable, accessible, semantic web site that ranks well and is loved by millions.)

The harsh truth is that we do that because we are selfish. Let’s take for example Joe Design. Joe is really good at writing dynamic applications, is able to write decent AJAX calls, and can take a PSD mock up ad turn it into clean HTML/CSS. Joe’s client needs a web site so she hires him to manage the project from beginning to end. Now Joe decides that since he knows enough jQuery to make AJAX work he should be able to create a good interface using this library, yet he knows very little about user experience and interfaces. He also decides that since he’s been in the industry long enough his designs are good enough, although in truth he’s getting a lot of “inspiration” from other sources. He also reads a lot, so that should qualify him to write decent copy, after all, how hard could it be?

By the time the project is finished, there’s a great backend that fails to deliver a compelling experience, and the client is quite disappointed with the result. Joe could’ve called on fellow freelancers to help him out with the design, interface and copy, but he figured that would leave him less money and that after all he could “hack” his way through his weaker skills and learn a bit more about them while doing it. In truth, Joe could’ve hired fellow freelancers, deliver a top notch product, have a happy client, and still learn while doing it.

It’s time that we stop being selfish. Build a trusted network of professionals and by doing so you will deliver better products and services, keep clients happy and get even more work that you would otherwise. I’m not advocating not learning new skills, but we need to be cognizant of our own limitations.

Do you work with other freelancers? Are you a jack of all trades? Are you being selfish? I’d love to get your two cents.

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Lasmus Rerdorf was quoted saying “What do you expect? With the upcoming release of Facebook’s R&B PHP there’s no way we can compete; PHP cannot continue to exist in its current form.”

Unsurprisingly, the community received the news with anger. In an unprecedented show of solidarity and unity, Ruby and Python developers joined forces with PHP enthusiats and flooded the streets of major cities worldwide under the slogan “We are all PHP.” Still, not everyone is in agreement. One very well known community leader that asked to remain anonymous said “It’s time to turn this over to a handful of engineers that can do the right thing, the community has ran its course.”

It seems that the only way of avoiding the fees is renaming any publicly accessible .php files as .rff (royalty free file), yet it hasn’t been fully tested against Løøf Lirpa’s fee-collection script. Alternatively developers can opt to downgrade to PHP 3 or earlier as it will remain open source for the foreseeable future.

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Just in case, I’m the dude on the left side of the screen.

Nick and Josh Show Episode 2 from Run Level Media on Vimeo.

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