iPhone 5
September 26, 2011 in
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My friend Brandon Clements wrote a book called Every Bush is Burning. This is the teaser for it.
Every Bush is Burning Trailer
September 25, 2011 in
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One reason organizations get stuck is that they stick with their “A” players so long that they lose their bench.
- Seth Godin in Poke the Box (p. 49).
Living the Dream
The past several months have been amazing. It has been some of the most stressful and difficult time ever, but oh goodness, it’s been good. For as much as I whine about traveling, it’s growing on me. 
Jesus has grown me a ton in the past year, and it’s crazy good. Lots of miles. But good.
My runnings around
- Returned from Sweden last December
- Moved to Columbia for school in January
- Travelled to Memphis twice, once for business, and once for a birthday.
- Moved out of a house and into Tom’s house in Atlanta.
- Left for Haiti and met my adopted sister.
- Back to Atlanta, moved into my summer house.
- My sister’s graduation from High School!
- Home for my birthday. Turned 21.
- Surprise trip to México with Midtown. Unbelievable how that worked out.
- Move back to Columbia
- North Carolina for mountain climbing
- Atlanta for Paintball
- Charleston for sister’s birthday
- Connecticut for school
- Tennessee with friends
Just looked it up, and that’s 15,000 miles. Lots of movement.
But I can tell you this much, it’s been fun.
How I Started Working for 8BIT
Since October of 2010, I’ve worked with a crazy cool group of guys called 8BIT. We’re a tech start up, and we make websites. That isn’t actually true, but if you pretend, it’s close enough. My path to 8BIT looked something like this:
- Prepare resume
- Attend Career Fair, meet long-haired blond man who asks how much I like scotcheroos.
- I am interviewed several times, and finally a work sample is requested.
- By creating a 1-to-1 rip off of Michael Hyatt’s website, my internship is secure.
Ok so it wasn’t like that at all. In fact, it was the grace of God, and this is how.
Jönköping Sweden. October 2011
While in Sweden, I found that I had dramatically underestimated the amount of money I would need to live in the country. Even living frugally, it just wasn’t happening. Normally I work during the semester, so I suppose I had psychologically accounted for money that wouldn’t be there.
Well my parents had just begun adopting a girl from Haiti, and were in the process of raising $20,000+. So they weren’t exactly interested in doling out the Benjamins at the time. I was out of money, and stuck in Sweden. No one was giving me a job.
Rewind to 2009. John Saddington – then referred to as @Human3rror – starts a blog called ChurchCrunch. It was pretty successful off the bat, and he was writing about all things church technology. Reading about technology applied in the church may actually be my favorite thing. Perhaps behind Baked Ziti. It’s close.
But I started commenting on the blog. A lot. In fact almost daily.
I commented like 1000 times, because it was interesting to me. So after getting a thousand emails that say: “new comment received from Stephen Bateman,” I guess I was on the radar. One afternoon in Sweden, I emailed John about an internship for the summer at his fledgling startup. Despite my money situation, I wasn’t even thinking about it. Just looking for a summer internship somewhere interesting.
Well John replies back: “Would you be interested in doing something now?”
To which I jubilantly responded “Zomg yes. kthxbai.”
We had an interview at 3am in Swedish time, where I told him I wanted to be a developer. Yes, by golly, a developer. I had already begun learning PHP, and was well on my way to developing my first “application.” Well, it’s hard to really say what the heck he was thinking, because he hired me as an intern developer.
It’s sort of the same thing as Arnold Schwarzenegger applying to be a ballerina. Or Governor. That’s neither here nor there. But nonetheless, I was in the door, and started on my first development project.
A few weeks into it, I realized I wasn’t a developer at all. So I naturally went for my other passion, design. Turns out, just because I’m Swedish, doesn’t mean I have the skillz. Then I transitioned to Business Development. Sort of. And it’s not perfect, but we’re getting closer.
Part 2 will be about meeting the team. Yea. Oh boy.
In this picture we're missing Michael, Andrew, and Eric. 
Facebook is genius
There is an enormous uproar of disapproval coming from Facebook users about the recent design tweaks that Facebook made. But there is a case to be made for how wise and thought-out those changes are. Some things I’ve heard from people:
“Note to FB about your new design…it sucketh! Y’all must be bored to keep changing stuff…”
“my day has already sucked enough…why did facebook have to change and make it even worse?”
“facebook, please stop trying to tell me what you think i want to look at. i promise if im interested in it, ill look at it!”
Woah woah woah! Cool the jets kids. Change can hurt, but Facebook knows you. And they know that in two weeks, you’ll love them for it. Here’s why:
New Features
Top Right Newsfeed Thing
Your attention span on the internet is microns of a second. Long form reading is boring and you don’t do it. But if there is a constantly updated drip of information, it’s like crack for your brain. Facebook is like a drug, your brain gets used to a certain flow of incoming information, and they have to increase the rate to keep up with demand for that drug.
Persistent chat bar on the right
The most interesting thing to you on planet earth is your own face. Coming in close second is the faces of other people, especially your close friends. Facebook has figured out how to put the faces and names of your closest friends always on the screen. This is the ultimate illusion of community and togetherness. If I read my sister’s name, it’s almost like I had a conversation with her. But it works, and you’ll keep coming back.
Update Frequency
Ultimately I expect Facebook will toss this feature after a few months or a year. Soon they’ll be able to automatically figure out what should be a top story, and there will be no need for granular control. This feature requires too much effort, but if you don’t use it, there isn’t much lost anyway.
The Point of all this mess
Google and Facebook are driven by different versions of the same revenue model: advertising.
For Google, they want to increase the number of searches that people do with speed, relevancy, and ease of use. But Facebook is different. They want to create an illusion of community so you’ll spin around in circles on their network. So there are faces. Lots of them. Because that’s what you like. So you’ll stick around longer, and look at the ads more frequently.
If you are *really* disgusted by the changes, you have one vote. You can leave the network altogether. But remember that Facebook doesn’t care about what you think you want. They already figured out what you really want. And now it’s executing business objectives.
Support Adoption
Over the past 3 months, my parents have been in process of adopting a child from Haiti. They traveled down to Haiti with my sister in November, and found a girl that they think Jesus wants us to adopt. Her name is Ruth, and she will be 8 this December.
Between now and January, we’ll be rolling out a pretty sweet flash site, as well as working on some fundraising stuff, since adoption is freaking expensive. Check out our Facebook page for updates
The Switch: Tumblr
I got fed up with the energy it takes to post to WordPress. I felt like I had to pump out 200 words every time I post, and then there was this business of logging in, and making sure that images were the right size etc, tagging and categorizing, tweeting, and managing comments.
All-the-while I’m not making money. Which is ok, I just want to make the best use of my time if I’m going to blog “for fun.”
This was kicked off by a post by @tentblogger called how to choose the right blogging platform.
It became clear that WordPress isn’t the right blogging software for me, right now. Not that I don’t love WordPress, in fact I’ve used it for nearly every project (-2) for the past 2 years, it just isn’t quite right for the moment. I see a lot of momentum in the tumblr community, and I’m looking forward to the experience!
For the moment, stephenbateman.com will be devoted to freelance work, with projects being posted here. Otherwise, you can find me at http://blog.stephenbateman.com, which links to tumblr. Look forward to seeing you there!
Social Justice and the Gospel
Tomorrow my 
Entrepreneurship team is doing a presentation of our product idea. I have been given the privilege of announcing that we will be donating 50% of our profits from selling coffee mugs to Charity:Water. What’s cool is we have a good shot at giving 200 people water for the year.
As I prepared to present, I realized that even though we’re presenting a marvelous picture of sacrifice best explained by a response to the Gospel, the Gospel itself will be noticeably absent. We’re giving to Charity:Water, an organization I wholeheartedly support. But I have to wonder if our efforts could be chalked up to just being socially conscious, good citizens of the world who are willing to help out when needed.
But it’s so beautiful
You know I think many times churches do things where the gospel is assumed. Figuring that people will get the gospel from their actions. Probably not intentionally, I don’t think there are many pastors out there trying to stifle the gospel at all. But it’s such a cool experience, to be working with some pretty awesome teammates, while understanding that clean water without living water is just…clean. I don’t think many Christians get to do social justice projects entirely alongside people with little interest in the person or work of Jesus. The perspective is so helpful.
