Somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% of blist users are outside the U.S. As such, one of the most frequent requests we’ve had since launching is to support many more character sets. We aren’t ready to declare it as a release yet, but we think we’ve completed the work to support all character sets throughout blist - from then back-end database through the front end user interface.
Now we’re asking for your help. If you’re one of our friends in Brazil, Italy, Japan or China can you try it out? Regardless of where you are, if you aren’t using a vanilla western character set, we’d like to know if you see any problems. We believe we now support storing and displaying user generated text in any character set - Kanji, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and all others. If yours isn’t working, let us know.
Supporting international character sets is a step in the right direction, but we know it’s not the same as full international support. That would include having localized versions of our menus, icons, labels, messages and help files. We’re aways off from that still, but hopefully this first step towards supporting our international users will be a big help.
Ciao!
Many blist users are located outside the United States, many of those users work in languages other than English, and many of those languages include not only accent marks and non-English letters, but can alsouse completely different scripts, like Japanese Kanji or Mandarin Chinese. Now blist supports a broad range of languages for user-entered data.
I had a passionate discussion yesterday with one of the guys on the team. It was about getting folks to work a little harder in order to try to collectively get a little more done each week. It turned into an interesting discussion about our company’s culture.
What kind of culture do we want? Do we just let it happen? Or do we deliberately try to develop the culture we want?
I think responsiveness, speed, innovation, agility and nimbleness are good and vital attributes for a startup. Hard work and productivity are crucial as well. But I don’t want to create a culture that values working long, unproductive hours over smartly and efficiently getting things done. We’re in this for the long haul. Burning out and getting nothing done isn’t a viable strategy.
One of the most productive employees who ever worked for me worked almost exactly the same schedule every single day over a 10-year period. He was in the office by 7:30 and on his way home by 6:30 every day. He was more productive than those working 8 to 5. He was also more productive than the folks working 70 hour work weeks. At one point I estimated he was responsible for 50% of the productivity of a 7-person development team. The difference was how he worked, not how long he worked.
We have lots of room for improvement at blist. We can be more responsive. More nimble. More innovative. More agile. More productive. Sure maybe working another hour each day would help some. But the culture I really want to develop is one where we optimize for efficiency, not where we compensate for inefficiency.
