Vesess : Web Design, Application Development, UI Design, Usability and Consultancy Services from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

A couple of weekends ago, the Vesess team took a much needed breather, and headed out for a weekend away from work, email and reddit. As a team with a lot of virtual members, the time we get to spend together in meatspace is limited. Although we’re used to always being in touch via email and IM, the weekend at Sigiriya was a chance for us to really engage each other IRL, and find out what makes each of us tick. From Python, to GNOME, Rails, and beyond, a lot of what we talked about was based on what we do.

Sigiriya, the ancient royal fortress that our coders use as inspiration when designing our data security policies.

Boring? Not in the least. What’s different about talking shop with a geek in his or her spare time is that the issues and projects that surface will most often be personal ones. From quick hacks used for everyday productivity, to complex applications written for class, I learnt a lot about each of our interests on this trip. It didn’t have to be just tech either. From general business sense, to global warming, rising oil prices, and the recent food shortages, I listened a lot, and learnt a lot.

As a recent graduate, I’d call myself lucky to be at a place like Vesess. While most people my age are filling out twenty page forms, and sitting in on meetings that last for hours and never seem to go anywhere, I get to push my ideas, voice my opinions, and interact with some genuinely talented people. In $BIGFIRM, I would be a PR junkie, a drone who spewed out manufactured, corporate prose. Over here at Vesess, I get to set the textual style and tone for each project. I get to design the flow of information, and map out where it goes, and how it is consumed.

Then, I think of our hackers. In a large company, they would be junior programmers, churning out line after line of code according to a specification they don’t even get to see in its entirety. Here at Vesess, they conceputalise, design and put together entire applications.

Lies, you say? Nay.

In fact, one such application is currently in private beta. Something which Lakshan, our resident RoR guru, wrote from the ground up, CurdBee is a great example of a pet project going prime time. While all the initial planning and hacking took place in his head, the entire team eventually pitched in to make it ready for the world at large.

CurdBee, a result of rapid Vesessination.

This, in essence, is what we call Vesessination - a single idea brought to fruition by everyone, working together. At Vesess, that’s essentially what’s we’re about. Small teams, big ideas, and a lot of experimentation. Well, that’s all for now, folks. Tune in next week for some quality time with Lakshan’s new baby.

Hello and welcome to another iteration of Vesess.com. We know we’ve been silent for a while, and we’re sorry, we really are. However, no posts does not necessarily mean no work. Behind the scenes, our crack team of code monkeys have been working overtime. So, as Vesess v5 launches, we’re also readying ourselves to release a brand spanking new project that’ll roxor your soxors (or boxors, depending on your persuasion).

What is it? Well, we’re not ready to reveal all just yet, but here is a wee hint to base your speculations on.

Now, on to the design. At Vesess, we’ve been through five redesigns, and think that we’ve finally found one we’ll be sticking with for a while. Simple, elegant, and easy on the eyes, Vesess V5 draws your attention to the content, which is after all, what we really want you to see. Indeed, at a time when websites are getting bigger, bulkier, and definitely more complicated, we’re proud to be going in the other direction.

According to tradition, a website should be static, and only redesigned once or twice a decade. Well, this is a myth, and an annoying one at that. We believe that a website is a dynamic entity, and that it should live, and breath and grow, just like an organisation. One year ago, we launched Vesess v4, and today we’re proud to have you with us as we take another step in to the world wild web.

Listen, create, evolve. This is what we continue to do, and as we launch v5, we’re really hyped about all new things we have planned for this next phase of Vesessination. Till we post again, the Vesess crew wishes you good speeds, and safe browsing!

During my formative years, I read a lot. From Enid Blyton books to short stories, and longer novels, I always had something made of dead trees in my hand. I had an active imagination, and books appealed to me because they allowed me to create a and inhabit a world of my own, even if it was just for an afternoon.

I would form parallel lives for myself, existences in which I would be a cop, a pirate, a skydiver. Books were not just entertainment to me. They were a far bigger part of my life.

Then, as I came in to contact with the Internet, I began to look at reading in a different manner. Did I read? Of course. I mean, find me a web junkie who doesn’t read. I read, and I read a lot. A lot of crap, it turns out. One of the biggest drawbacks of having a strong online life is that you constantly have to be up to date on the latest trends, memes, and lulz (epic or otherwise) to stay in the game.

You can’t, for example, have someone send you a lolcat, and not know what it is. That is Internet geek suicide. So, we, the geeks, obsessively refresh our feed readers throughout the day, looking for that bit of new information. In the real world, knowledge is power. On the Intarweb, having seen the latest youtube video first is enough to put you ahead of the rest.

Anyway, I digress. Today, I cleaned out my room. It was the first real cleanup it had received since I finished my secondary education, and believe me, it showed. After wiping away layer upon layer of dust, I stacked everything in to marginally neat piles, and began to sort through them one by one. What did I discover?

I had a lot of books. In fact, well over fifty percent of my room was literature. From Sue Townsend to Romesh Gunasekara, my room was full of books. Now, I would love to say that I had read most of them, and a few years back this would have been the truth. Looking at my stack of books now, however, I say with shame that I’ve read less than a quarter of them.
Is this because I’m a slow reader? Far from it. When I get started, it’s hard to stop me. Why, then? Why did I have so many unread books. Did I not like reading? No, I loved reading, and going through every one of them was on my todo list. After Slashdot of course.

And there lay my problem. Looking back at my five or so odd years of spending a lot of time online, I realized that I had wasted hours, days, and perhaps even weeks and months, reading some moron’s sarcastic comments about the latest linux distro. I had wasted time listening, and arguing with my fellow netizens about issues that would have never concerned me in the real world. Who cares if vim is better than emacs (which it is, make no mistake about that)? What does it matter if that dude on IRC just doesn’t get the difference between your and you’re? To be honest, who cares? Not me. At least not now.

After much thought and internal debate, I’ve come to the conclusion that the series of tubes killed my reading habit, and I’m going to do my best to recultivate it. Starting now, I’m going to read less tech news, and devour more literature. I’m going to read less blogs, and read more of the books that have shaped humanity in general. Now don’t get me wrong, I love geeky cat macros as much as the next net junkie. I’m just going to try and have more epic lulz while reading Bill Bryson.

Starting now, I’m going to make a conscious effort to spend less time online, and read more text straight from them good old dead trees. What about you? Think you can close that feed reader and go pick up a dead tree book right now? Try it, I dare you.