Corvus Consulting

In February I’ll be wrapping up full-time involvement with Ma.gnolia, my longest and, by far, the most fulfilling gig to date as an indie contractor. I’ll still be a member of the Ma.gnolia community, and I have a couple side projects going with Ma.gnolia’s founder and my close friend, Larry Halff. I’m very proud of what we’ve built in Ma.gnolia, all the way from its inception through design, launch and the growth of a smart and friendly web community.

Almost every assumption I’ve held about application design and how people connect through the web has been challenged or changed by this project, and I like to think I’ve grown quite a lot from the experience. I also learned to wear and quickly change hats: on any given day I’d be manning the front-line of member support, talking with the Ma.gnolia community, designing new features and evolving existing designs, writing newsletters, co-managing development tasks, and of course keeping that classic sense of humor in play. Insert dreamy, retrospective montage here, perhaps set to a Jack Johnson tune.

Since we started Ma.gnolia, so much has changed, and there’s still a long way to go. The walls between websites that were once taken for granted have crumbled significantly with the rise of APIs, OpenID, Microformats, OAuth and the widening adoption of web standards. Software designers and even some business are seeing and serve the fact that people don’t act as atomic units, but as members of social groups where the relationship trumps all. Things change, and yet somehow feel familiar.

My role as Ma.gnolia’s product manager has introduced me to many interesting and honestly good people, and provided the chance to work with some very talented folks. The new perspectives and methods I took away from those contacts that have proven themselves over and over. Chris Messina and Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency, specifically, have profoundly changed how I think about many aspects of my work, from feature design to business policies to the right and wrong ways to engage with online communities. In a way, it’s been like a graduate course in web app design and product management.

What’s next? As I mentioned, I’ll still be hanging around the Ma.gnolia community. I’ve also begun some work with the Citizen Agency crew, and will be looking to engage more with the Vancouver development scene. Though I enjoy working in distributed teams, I think the soul does best when there’s more face-to-face interaction in the mix, so I’m really looking forward to that. But most of all, I’m excited about being able to bring what I learned in working with Ma.gnolia to new projects, taking that flower power far and wide.