213,459 people (and counting) have asked to make their lives harder this year.
They’ve all signed up for Code Year, a free service that delivers interactive programming lessons by email each week. The beauty of the entire Code Year concept is it’s simplicity. There’s a single page website that delivers a clear message about the project. All you need to do to join is enter your email address and click the ‘Start Learning’ button. Dead simple.
According to the AVC blog written by Fred Wilson, Code Year’s success is largely attributable to it’s distribution via the social web. Twitter, followed by Facebook, are the primary drivers of sign ups.
Simplicity is beautiful. One of the reasons people migrated to Facebook from MySpace is because they got tired of looking at all the crazy flashing shit on people’s MySpace profiles. The network became infested with widgets and random crap.
If Web 2.0 focused on the evolution of people using Internet technology to communicate with one another — as opposed to using it as a universal reference tool — then 3.0 is about reclaiming the web’s usability.
A Good Meal is About Great Ingredients
In addition to my role as a Digital Marketing Evangelist and all around tech obsessed individual, I’m a hopeless food nerd. Cooking is my favorite hobby because it focuses my mind completely. There are certain steps you need to follow in order to make sure your dishes ‘come up together’.
Most of all, cooking is about using a few high quality ingredients.
When I first got into cooking I tried reading some books written by some of the recognized culinary geniuses. They were so horrible. Most of the people I read up on were using way too many words to describe a meal and its ingredients. It seemed like the books were written to impress other food writers instead of making the ordinary reader excited about food.
The came the book ‘Kitchen Confidential’ by Anthony Bourdain.
He wrote about the ‘seedy underbelly’ of the culinary world and exposed the reader to what it’s really like for most chefs in the largest restaurant city in America — New York. Along the way he described common cooking terms and procedures in a way that made them fun to learn. The simplicity of his message — cooking is a skilled trade performed mostly by people seeking a life outside of the ordinary 9 to 5 mold — was easily and delightfully absorbed by aspiring foodies like me.
I aspire towards sharing that simplicity and joy in my own writing, and to make it as accessible as possible. That’s one reason I scraped the design off my website recently to focus on things like Facebook comments and sidebar sharing options.
So if you’re a business, check out websites like Code Year to learn about usability and getting the larger community to understand how and why to share your message.
And if you love food, pick up a copy of Kitchen Confidential. It’s a killer book.