There was approximately 2 years during University where a couple of mates and I would attend the gym regularly and focus on the most obvious muscle groups such as chest and biceps, but we definitely weren’t working out correctly. We would literally do bicep curls and bench press just about every time we visited the gym, focusing very little on any other muscle groups in our bodies. The result? Just about nothing - our arms and chest would swell up for a day or two after we’d hit them, but we weren’t eating the right foods and training correctly to make any proper gains.

Between 2006 and 2007 I had been working very hard on a web project to the point where I left very little time for my health and day-to-day well being among other things. I was feeling physically stagnant, boxed up and toxic. My focus in life had been way too much in one area of my life, without time for anything else, including my friends. The passion that I had for building web sites and starting a business had consumed me to the point that everything else didn’t matter.

For months I would cling to the mentality of “Its ok that I’m unfit now, I’ll just work even harder to get this project up and running, then once all the work is done, I’ll get fit straight after that.”. It was like hitting my head against a brick wall, the harder I worked on the computer, the less fit I became and the more toxic I felt. The work was never all done, there was always something else that “just needed fixing quickly”.

Pretty soon, I broke. I developed a temporary hatred for my work. I associated work with feeling terrible, not spending enough time with my loved ones and living a heavily unbalanced life. It was like a switch had flicked. I had not lost the passion that drove me so hard into the ground, I still had it. But I had picked it up and pointed it in a different direction entirely, I had learnt a critical lesson in time management, luckily quite early in my life.

I dug up some of the old memories of “working out” during University and couldn’t wait to get back into it, only this time, being about 7 years older, with a more developed physical base to build upon and more of a “do it properly or not at all” attitude. I knew I needed something to bring that well being and buzzing, energetic feeling back. Something that I could use to take me forward, lasting the distance through any number of personal and business challenges that I may be presented with throughout the coming years - there would always be more challenges.

I got a mate, also a qualified personal trainer, to write me up my first program and got started immediately.

That was approximately 12 months ago, and I can honestly say I have hardly missed a day of training since. The same passion that drove me into the ground is now driving me to keep improving my strength and well being. My lifestyle has changed for the better and I am truly addicted to the new routine, but not in a fanatical way. And you know something, my passion for my work has re-surfaced, but in a much more balanced sense.

I see my weight training as simply part of my normal working day - that is, the working day is not yet complete until I have exercised. I don’t get home until work AND exercise have both been completed. I also only train 4 days a week, which I have found to be more than ample for achieving the results and allowing myself plenty of time to rest and grow.

During the past 12 months I have witnessed my own state of mind lift to a much higher, happier and more confident level, as well as my body feeling a lot stronger, nimble and better able to deal with the random challenges that life throws up. In short, I feel like I am going to live a lot longer than I felt 1-2 years ago - and that is a good thing!

Although I learnt this lesson the hard way, its now absolutely a part of who I am. I can’t imagine life without exercise any more and I will never go back to my old ways. I feel I actually have a lot more drive and balance in my life. Its ok to fail, as long as you fail fast and hopefully young so that you can come back harder and stronger before you’re too old. I would seriously encourage any of you passionate and super-dedicated entrepreneur/developers out there who have been neglecting exercise to slap yourself in the face and really put things into perspective - it will improve your productivity and the quality of your work.

How long can you truly sustain the current cycle of continuously feeling weak and drained for?

Hopefully you will find this new design a lot easier on the eye, less cluttered and cleaner to read.

The entire design is implemented as a re-usable Wordpress theme, so if anyone would like a copy, please contact us.

If you haven’t read Getting Real yet, I would strongly encourage you to do so. I read that book and was fascinated that some highly successful people were swearing by the way I’ve tried to work all along! It really was a big reenforcement for the beliefs I’ve had around software development from the beginning.

Its not like anyone ever really thought that Java was in the race.

Maybe you would like to:

1. Thank them for being a courteous driver.
2. Make an offer to purchase their vehicle.
3. Send them a social message or ask them out on a date.
4. Pass on a message related to road safety or their driving habits.

This is all now possible (and super easy) with communiplate. Go ahead and install it on Facebook.

Communiplate, let’s you communicate with other Australian drivers, simply by knowing their number plate.

The system simply asks for your number plate and registration state, as well as mobile number, before connecting you with the Australian communiplate network.

Once you’re part of the communiplate network, you can send a message to any Australian driver, simply by addressing the message to their number plate. Its dead easy.

There are two reasons we decided to use Facebook as the platform for the first version, rather than say our own stand-alone site:

• Ease of development: Building Facebook apps is simpler than building an entire stand-alone web site from scratch. That saves time and infrastructure hassle. You don’t have to build a login form, forgot password, register form etc. You get pre-authenticated users just ready to hit the GO button on your app!
• Virality: Facebook is already loaded with users just itching to try new things. Its the quickest way to get a large number of interested users out of anything currently on the internet and, of course, it is saturating the news lately. However, from there you can still build your own web site front end and integrate the two. Because you still own the data behind your Facebook app when you build one. In fact, it lives remotely on your own server, not on Facebook like it appears to to users.

We were dead right, because the take up already has been awesome. We have never seen this many users so quickly take up a new web application in the first couple of days. All of the Facebook infrastructure specifically designed to allow decent applications to spread virally, truly works. We think its the perfect platform to build so many modern web apps, even before you build your main web site.

This is only very early days for communiplate, we have another thousand ideas that you will see integrated into the application over time.

The number of applications available is exponentially growing. The ones that bubble to the top are starting to be worth money, as just like traditional web applications, if they have a large number of users on board, that is worth money - regardless of whether it exists inside the bounds of Facebook or not. Because Facebook allow developers to include their own sponsored advertising listings in their applications, its completely up to the developer as to how they want to try to generate income from their apps.

This Christmas application showed up in the Facebook Developers Discussion board, listed on Ebay for US$6600, with members remarking “great another 10 day old app trying to get 6 figures”. The author responds with “Have another look - it’s 4 figures, then a decimal point, then another 2 figures. That’s a 4 figure sum. Hopefully it’ll go for more than that though? I reckon there’ll be over a million users by 1st Dec”. There is a lot of this caper going on at the moment.

Basically, once these developers understand the simplicity of building Facebook apps, they are quickly pushing out new ones and listing them on Ebay as little as just a week after launch. This is only made possible by Facebook being the perfect platform to virally spread applications, allowing them to attract large numbers of users super quickly, creating an immediate dollar value.

Dreamtheatre is a massive database containing detailed specifications on virtually all available high-end Hi-Fi/AV equipment. Awesome for enthusiasts who wish to compare and contrast different models before making an expensive decision. No, its not an online store or some kind of partnership with major retail outlets. Its purely a clean, free information service with the intentions of being useful to people.

The Facebook girl had some interesting things to say though. The most exciting thing I got out of Facebook’s news was that they are trying to partner with third party sites to bring in external snippets into the News Feed. For example, if you purchased a book from amazon.com, perhaps your Facebook news feed would say “Aaron purchased Chopper from amazon.com - click here to buy a copy for yourself”. I loved that idea and think it will go a long way. Their main driver was basically that if your friend buys or does something, then you are probably reasonably likely to be interested in doing the same. So it should attract a much higher conversion rate compared to say traditional contextual advertising such as Adsense.

I saw David Karp, founder of tumblr speak. He was a pretty energetic and passionate guy. He recently raised $750k of Series A funding. Definitely the whole investment scene is on a whole different level over there. Tumblr is basically like a simpler, steamlined and hosted alternative to something like Wordpress. Its just basically a more user friendly way to blog things. Its super quick to sign up to, super quick to use and start posting too. But that’s about as much as I can get from it. It doesn’t revolutionise anything, but it does improve something already in existence, or make it somewhat easier and more efficient. Obviously Spark Capital and Union Square ventures considered that to be worth throwing $750k at. This aspect of New York is probably the most amazing. That so many seemingly simple/generic ideas can attract quite a lot of money. Networking is critical and the first thing these young developers do is try to get mentioned on the prominent US/Silicon Valley blog sites. Once they’re in that little loop, if the product is reasonably good, it just snowballs on from there. There are so many enthusiasts over there who will just sign up to something to give it a shot and play with it.

Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel presented and I would say that his presentation was by far the most impressive of the group. He is in a niche field effectively competing with similar technologies from Microsoft.

Then this thing was presented, Sleep.FM. Full credit to the guy for getting up there and presenting to the large audience. He certainly believed in his product. Basically, Sleep.FM lets people send messages to you via the internet to wake you up. So the guy was like “Do you sleep? Do your friends sleep? Right. Then Sleep.FM will help them because everyone needs to wake up, right?”. It reminded me exactly of the quote in the movie Office Space “You see, its a conclusion mat, and you would like jump to it”. They do have some interesting plans though to manufacture some “smart” physical alarm clocks that you could put on your bedside table, and it would be monitoring the internet to receive notifications from the Sleep.FM service. This is where I think this whole idea has more potential. But the whole time, I just couldn’t work out why you wouldn’t just say leave MSN Messenger open when you sleep. Its basically the same thing. But being New York, it might just attract $750k in VC funding, you just wouldn’t be surprised over there!

Probably the best thing that I got out of this event was a real ground-level appreciation for the level of enthusiasm and interest that the whole web 2.0 scene has over there. It would be really exciting to have so many passionate developers and entrepreneurs in the one room in Canberra. However, it also made me realise that the guys over there are no different whatsoever to us guys here in Australia doing exactly the same stuff. It made me appreciate the talent we already have here in Australia and realise that you don’t need to be based in New York under the spotlight to get your idea up. Sure it might help, but its also more competitive over there and the playing field is more heavily saturated.

It gave me some renewed energy to basically make things happen in Australia and put the throttle down even harder. Because the group of smart guys that I work with have all the skills and passion of anyone we saw at the New York Tech Meetup. I ended up coming away from the meet just seeing all the NY Meetup guys as equals and great people passionately dedicated to their field just like we are. So that’s basically the world’s web 2.0 epicentre, minus Silicon Valley and sure, it wasn’t some whole big different amazing world, just a bunch of hardcore geeks doing what we’re doing. Inspiring and motivational to say the least.

The last I heard was that they were just kicked out of the Google building by Google Security. The Security guy came down and found a bunch of pirates in his foyer and gave them the boot. Who wouldn’t?

This is nothing unusual for Atlassian. They have the most packed social calendar of any IT organisation that I know. Keep up the great work team.