Table XI Talks
Announcing TXILife.com
As part of our ongoing efforts to enthrall and enlighten our friends/clients/hangers-on, as well as to provide an opportunity for our employees to engage directly with the outside world, we’ve launched a new blog entitled TXI Life.
As opposed to our corporate blog (which is basically our newsletter archive), this site focuses on what it’s like to work at Table XI. Additionally, we will post technical tips and tricks that will appeal to some, but not all of the readership of our newsletter.
For now, it’s mostly photos of the delicious meals cooked for us by our office manager Ellen, who has taken over for our series of (relatively short-tenured) chefs but we hope to be adding more meaty content (pardon the pun) down the road.
Please note that TXI Life is written by our employees and is not edited, so caveat emptor.
This message comes to you carbon-offset
Over the course of the past few months, we’ve been working with a consultant to develop Table XI’s environmental policy. We were looking for guidance in avoiding, reducing, and offsetting our company’s environmental impact.
We’re fortunate that many of our employees are already environmentally-conscious consumers. While January earned the dubious honor of being the tenth coldest on record, some still diligently biked to work and most took public transit. As an organization, simple changes at the office — providing reusable coffee mugs, switching to compact florescent lights, cooking instead of ordering out — represent small steps towards mitigating our impact and cause relatively minor inconvenience at a reasonable cost.
We’re a business and we seek to grow. But in order to achieve growth that is sustainable, prices must represent the entire cost of doing business, which includes external environmental effects. While we haven’t reached a regulatory paradigm in the United States that internalizes these costs by law, we’ve jumped the gun and done our best to put our money where our mouth is.
After doing our best to reduce our environmental impact, we’ve offset our 2008 carbon emissions and challenge you to do the same.
Another Addition to Our Team
Daniel Strabley: our newest hire
Every day we seem to read about some big company slashing jobs by the thousands. For many, times are extraordinarily tough, but at Table XI, things seem to be holding steady. We believe the future is bright — especially for small business — and have continued to invest and grow.
To that end, we’ve actually added another capable staffer to our team since our last communique. We are excited to announce the addition of Daniel Strabley to our team of 12. While it’s only been a few months, it’s hard to remember what life was like before he joined us!
Daniel comes to us from closerlook, a design studio focused on the pharmaceutical industry, and represents the first full-time graphics designer that Table XI has ever employed. For the first 6+ years of our existence, we worked closely with a number of freelancers, but never felt we had sufficient work to warrant a full-time designer. Boy were we wrong…
Since mid-November, Daniel has dramatically improved the way we work by improving our design process, and by bringing his sizable HTML implementation skills to our clients’ projects. His presence means our engineers can spend their time focused on functionality without having to sweat the vagaries of the dreaded Internet Explorer 6 bugs (Microsoft browsers are notoriously non-compliant with Internet standards. For more info, check out this post from a previous newsletter).
Daniel has also been hugely helpful to our sales and marketing efforts. He has helped us augment our materials with pictures that replace a thousand words, created proposal and presentation templates, and begun the process of organizing all of the graphic material we use. Best yet, we’re quite sure we’ll find even more uses for his numerous talents as we further understand his capabilities.
Relaunching Gradesaver
One of the interesting things that happens when you work with the same customers for a long time is being part of a website’s entire lifecycle.
In early 2005, we helped Gradesaver, a client specializing in online education services, rebuild their former site*. Their market is a competitive one and the new site made an immediate impact on revenue. At the same time, we helped them streamline the site’s development and content management, as well as the payment of the writers and editors that provide the company’s editing services.
By early 2008, Gradesaver’s competitors had made major strides forward revamping their own sites. The old version of Gradesaver.com* was starting to seem a bit dated, and growth had stagnated. We suggested a systematic facelift of the front end of the site to restructure their content, URLs, and navigation in a way that would improve the experience for users and improve the site’s search engine rankings.
We launched the new version of Gradesaver.com* at the end of last year. The new site is highly search-optimized, and represents page-by-page analysis of the way users find and interact with the huge body of content the company has developed.
The site is still new, but its preliminary results have been encouraging. Many of the terms we chose for optimization have met with improved search engine ratings, and more of the people who visit the site are making purchases, despite the state of the economy.
While there is still room for refinement, we are excited with the progress, and looking forward to an exciting 2009. We thank our clients Nick and Olivia as well as Table XI team members John, Matt, Rich, and Jordan for all of their tireless efforts rebuilding the site!
* the archived versions of the site are displayed courtesy of Archive.org’s Wayback Machine which can supply endless hours of kitschy Internet amusement
The Atom Smashers
Regular readers of the Table XI newsletter have come to expect a technological tip or trick from us in each of these emails. However, instead of suggesting a product to you this month, we are going to suggest a movie — The Atom Smashers. Produced by our close friend and sometimes collaborator Andrew Suprenant, Executive Director of 137 Films, the award-winning science documentary tracks the search for the Higgs Boson at Fermilab, a government-funded research facility west of Chicago.
For the uninitiated, the Higgs boson is a sub-atomic particle whose existence has been widely postulated by theoretical physicists, but whose existence has never been demonstrated through experimentation. Often referred to as the “God Particle,” it is believed to be the mechanism by which matter has mass. The film covers the search, the science, the politics, and the lives of the scientists doing the research.
The Atom Smashers aired on PBS as part of their Independent Lens series, was premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and has been shown at other festivals around the world. You can purchase a copy of the film directly from the 137 Films web site, or you can contact Andrew if you’d like to learn more. The film is also available for screening at schools and universities, and we highly encourage you to introduce it to the innovative educators in your life.
Table XI featured in Business Week Article
If at first you don’t succeed….
Josh and Jordan are featured in the cover story of this month’s edition of Business Week: Small Biz. The article, entitled Failing Up, highlights five entrepreneurs who endured the failure of a previous start-up to go on to create a successful business.
What we're reading
Table XI staffer joins ex-staffer to create fantasy sports blog
It’s fall, and that means football. Instead of boring you with a diatribe on the technological tools our people use to try to dominate their fantasy football league, we thought we’d give a quick shout-out to a new blog. Youlikadajuice.com is a hilarious mix of fantasy insights and comedy. Written by Ben Golden and illustrated by Jordan Ho, YLDJ is a fresh look on sports, fantasy, and comedy in the style of ESPN Page 2, but without the editorial board.
University of Chicago nerds poll better
With the upcoming election, we’re being constantly bombarded with news, polls, and “insights” about the presidential horse race. There’s so much data out there about the election —mixed in with sensationalized anecdotal evidence — that it’s hard to know where to look for reliable information. FiveThirtyEight.com is a poll of polls run by a couple of hardcore U of C statistics geeks. They have built a comprehensive computer model that takes into account many outside factors (such as including the historical accuracy of each pollster), boiling them down into a very clear picture of the race.
The narrative of the blog puts campaign events and strategy into context with the underlying data, offering a truly unique perspective on many of the goings-on. Recent prognostications have included analysis of the debates, the McCain campaign’s decision to “go negative,” and insights on whether or not Georgia might actually be in play (they think it is). While the writers are Obama supporters, the blog maintains a bipartisan approach and tone, and we think it’s the best place to find timely and relevant information about the campaign.
We're adding to the team... again
On Sept. 23, Ellen Brast became our part-time office manager and research assistant. Raising two kids, volunteering extensively, cooking gourmet meals, and helping with her husband’s home-based business wasn’t enough to keep her busy.
Her presence has already made a huge impact, and we are having trouble remembering what life was like before she showed up. Everything around Table XI is just… more… organized.
Prior to becoming a full-time mom, Ellen was an information specialist at Gardner, Carton & Douglas, where she assisted lawyers and law librarians with computer-based research. Ellen has a B.S. in Political Science from Miami University in Ohio.
Another One Bites the Dust
Another one bites the dust
Well it’s official. Another Table XI staffer has chosen to be annoyed rather than be alone. On Sept. 27, Jordan Ho married Marlene Go at the Crystal Gardens at Navy Pier. We’re super happy for Jordan, and excited to welcome Marlene to the extended Table XI team. The festivities included a 14-person bridal party, three photographers, a trolley ride to multiple photo sites, a surprise Chinese lion dance, two slide-shows, six speeches, and a radiant bride decked out in traditional garb serenading the lucky groom.
We wish the happy couple all the best, and we’re counting on Alex to whip out his B-Boy skills at our next staff party.
Testing programming job applicants
How belligerence killed the job-seeking cat: a true-to-life fable
At Table XI, our people are the lifeblood of our business. Without the ability to find, identify, hire, and retain fantastic people, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do. So far, it seems we’ve been pretty successful. Most people we hire fit well, and they tend to stay with us for a long time.
This month, we thought we’d share a bit about the testing process we use to add programmers to our team.
Why we test coders:
- Computer science programs tend to focus on theory, so lots of recent graduates can’t actually program.
- Sending code samples does not prove a candidate actually did the work.
- The people we hire at Table XI thrive on challenges, and love the chance to demonstrate their skills and their willingness to work hard.
We don’t care whether you’re young or old, experienced or green, we want to see how an applicant responds to a standardized problem. Amazingly enough, we’ve had a few candidates who think they are above our exercise. One suggested he’d do our programming work once we made him a job offer.
Recently, an excellent candidate applied to an open position at our company. He had solid work experience, a well-developed portfolio, and proven attention to detail. Of the forty or so applications we had received at that point, he was one of the three to whom we sent our testing exercise.
To our surprise, the applicant launched into a profanity-laced diatribe on how unusual it was to ask candidates to do such an exercise. He cussed out a potential employer. Who would have known that testing a candidate would result in such deep revelations of their psyche?
So — in addition to demonstrating skill level, testing helps us figure out:
- How badly do candidates want the job? Are they willing to put in extra effort?
- Can they solve problems and do the work we’re hiring them for?
- Are they willing to take a risk to get something they want?
Refusing to do the exercise is a great way to fast track your resume to the trash can. Thankfully, we had several other extraordinarily talented applicants for the same position. We have received a number of well thought-out solutions to our problem, and we think we’ll be able to fill the position quickly.
That said, if you know anybody who fits the job description, please send them our way.
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