kev.in

You might be wondering what I’ve been up to since leaving my job several months ago. I made a movie to explain, in a series of pictures, what my day-to-day life of the last four months has entailed.

After countless hours of designing, coding, modeling, learning, networking, drawing, hacking, zipping, unzipping, scanning, testing, documenting, administrating, photoshopping, rewriting, tuning, fixing and launching, I have finally resurfaced with something I am really proud of.

I’m really excited to announce the opening of dibs.net, a local community online bulletin board for buying and selling stuff. (To check it out now, see what I’m selling on my personal site: http://kevin.dibs.net or read the “About” page: http://dibs.net/about).

Why did I build dibs.net? As the saying goes, “to scratch my own itch.” There are other ways to advertise and sell online, but none came close to what people need. For example, eBay items need to be shipped; they charge high fees; plus everything takes a week to sell. Craigslist, on the other hand, works well for getting the word out, but the barrage of email is a nightmare if you have more than a couple things for sale; I could never keep track of who wanted what, when they offered, how much, or when they were coming over.

Enter dibs.net! I built in features for:

• answering questions from interested buyers, and adding your answer right to your listing, so you don’t have to keep answering the same darn questions over and over
• managing many offers at a time, including accepting and rejecting
• really great-looking listings, with no limit on photos
• personal account URLs, so your stuff is listed exclusively at yourname.dibs.net

The result? There is no better way to buy and sell things in your community.

Of course, there is plenty more to it than that. You’ll have to check it out to see everything it does. Now if you’ll pardon me, I need a nap!

It’s alive and kicking!

Read more about dibs.net.

For the last few months I’ve worked tirelessly on my pet-project-cum-fulltime-startup. The cadence of my work has accelerated in recent weeks as I have put myself under more and more pressure to “go live.” I have pulled all-nighters or crashed into bed at 5am more frequently than I’d like to admit. Through the neglect of non-essential errands, my car has developed a thick film of grime on its exterior and my hair has become shaggy and unkempt. My eyes are permanently bloodshot. My dog no longer reacts to the word “park.”

The only guarantee about working tirelessly is that you will end up tired. And maybe a little cranky. Check, and check.

But despite these tribulations, this experience has been rewarding and worthwhile. I love what I’ve built, and I hope the world does, too.

This weekend I am focusing all of my remaining energy on launching. In the end, the feature set is going to be well beyond what I had envisioned for the initial launch — a shortage of external deadlines and product managers leads inexoriably to an abundance of features.

Also, as I like to read about the plumbing and machinery behind web pages, I hope to have a chance to explain all the details of how I went about building the service. Since I’m a one-man team, I’ve been dependent on time- and money-saving strategies, including technologies like Ruby on Rails, Amazon EC2, Apache Solr and Ubuntu Linux. That, and more, in a future posts.

For now, sleep.

One of these days I’m going to start a blog. It will be perfect.

It’ll be informative, thoughtful, witty, current; maybe a little snarky. It will have a hipster name and I’ll post fun and artsy pictures to it. I’ll contribute my own carefully considered commentary to the heated discussion du jour. It will be a place for me to wax philosophic about intellectual, political and technical matters that affect us all. It will be entertaining but also deep. I will have a hundred thousand readers.

I will present useful, thorough tutorials for those eager to learn and post poignant stories about my life and my business. I’ll share best practices, productivity tips and programming recipes. My posts will generate pages of real discussion and make people think. Did I say a hundred thousand readers? Make that a million.

One of these days I’ll start a blog with a glassy logo and a slick pro-designer color scheme. It will have cool web 2.0 features. I’ll spend time each day writing articles and reviews of new technology, new companies and the Silicon Valley.

Honest, one of these days I’m going to start a perfect blog. Or I could start something now: perhaps just a simple picture at the top; a sidebar that shows songs I’ve recently played in iTunes; and a page with a list of blogs that I read. And then I can just start posting. Whether anyone reads it or not. Yeah. I think I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll start Right Now.