Screenshot of ykyat.com

I’ll blog more about this next week, but just wanted to quickly let you know about our new web application, ykyat.com.

It’s a very simple service built on Twitter. It collates classic ‘you know you’re addicted to…’ jokes on a central website, and allows them to be rated so that the funniest are promoted for all to see.

It was built partly for fun, and partly as a grand experiment in rapid application design and development: we designed, built and deployed the entire app from the ground up in 8 hours 42 minutes. We learnt a lot from the process and I’ll be posting a minute by minute diary with some screenshots next week.

70000 attempts in...

For a bit of fun, I decided to re-implement Roger Alsing’s approximation of the Mona Lisa in Ruby (my language of choice).

Rather than the brute force approach taken by the original implementation, I’ve gone for a full genetic algorithm solution, with crossover, mutation and population propagation. It’s been lots of fun :)

If you’re interested, grab the code here. It’s all open source: if you fancy modifying it, feel free to do so!

Update: Added work in progress image.

Update: Replaced work in progress image. This one only uses 50 triangles!

I love this quote.

To me it sums up the idealism that caused me to go into this business in the first place: If you don’t like your story, or the world around you, then change it!

I saw a lot of average web application developers out there, and I decided the whole ‘web business’ thing could be done much better. So I set out to create a great company full of great people producing great work, making the experience of web application development that much better for others.

It’s perhaps not the best time in the world to start an average business, but, let’s face it, who would want to start an average business? There’s never a great time to start a bad business, but there’s never a bad time to start a great business.

If you’ve got a great idea for a business, or a charity, or for making a positive difference, but you’re sitting on the fence with it, what’s holding you back? Rather than us vaguely wondering if history might be kind to us (or even notice us at all!), let’s instead take up the challenge and write some history of our own.

I find it slightly bizarre that even economic cycles have their own branding departments now…