I quit Evernote: why a company shouldn't choose good looks over their core functionality

I used to love Evernote. "Remember everything" is their headline. People talk about "outsourcing your memory" with Evernote. And I did. I made Evernote the hub for most of my work that didn't require documents. I stored everything, from meeting notes and blog post drafts to notes about our cats' health and even kept a shared notebook for our favorite recipes.

One of the things I loved most about Evernote was its ability to keep all my notes synced across multiple devices. Sounds great, doesn't it? Yeah, except things don't "just work" anymore.

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Note: This is just an archive post. The blog has moved to a new home at blog.ialja.com, where you will also find a copy of the entire blog.

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When magic happens at Rails Girls Ljubljana

What happens when you fill 2 classrooms and 1 big conference room at Telekom Slovenije with over 70 girls of all ages, who want to build their own web app, and 30 coaches, experienced web developers? No, it's not a rhetorical question, it's a real challenge!

Over a hundred people at the first Rails Girls Ljubljana workshop! Photo by: Katarina Jazbec

Sure, the girls are among the most enthusiastic out of the 586 that signed up for Rails Girls Ljubljana, a free two-day workshop. But most of them have no experience with programming whatsoever. And the coaches sure are all excited to help and hope to see more girls among their ranks, yet most of them have little or no experience with teaching, especially with teaching complete beginners. Even after more than a month of intensive planning, countless emails and meetings, I, as the main organizer, can't help but feel nervous on Friday, December 14, the first day of the first ever Rails Girls Ljubljana. Is anyone even going to show up?

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Note: This is just an archive post. The blog has moved to a new home at blog.ialja.com, where you will also find a copy of the entire blog.

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Explaining the web and web programming with Octocat, sushi and fish

One of challenges of organizing Rails Girls Ljubljana was coming up with short lectures that would prepare the girls, absolute beginners, to understand the basic terminology of the web and what they would be working on.

Sure, there are some existing presentations online about what programming is and where Rails fits in the whole story, but I thought beginners could benefit from something a bit more simple, funny and thus memorable. Which is why I borrowed GitHub's mascot Octocat and sent him off on a journey to find sushi without fish on the web. Wait, what?

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Note: This is just an archive post. The blog has moved to a new home at blog.ialja.com, where you will also find a copy of the entire blog.

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