skillbit and Snow in Seattle
At first blush, it might not seem like snow has that much to do with a product launch, but in the case of skillbit(tm), I was paying very close attention to the weather the entire weekend. Thankfully, the snow held off until today. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.
Even people local to Seattle don’t always fully understand the odd dynamic we have with winter weather here, so I’m going to take the liberty of going all weather geek on you all (hey, Andrew hasn’t cut off my blogging access yet, so why not?) and give you a quick rundown.
First, it helps to understand that to get snow around here usually requires two distinct weather events to end up at the same place, at the same time. This hardly ever happens. Quite regularly, we go through an entire winter without getting both the cold from Canada (or more rarely - from the Alaskan gulf) at precisely the same time as we’re also getting moisture from the southwest. It’s tough for us to simply get cold air that also happens to contain the moisture needed for snow.
So maybe this happens once a year. Once in a while, we get two snow events in a single winter. More than that is practically unheard of.
On top of that, because of how we usually get snow, the snow around here usually either sublimates in the extra cold, dry air that sticks around afterward if it was moisture hit by cold… or gets washed away in a warm rain if the weather events came in reverse order. In either case, it’s all gone in a day or two, much to the disappointment of all the kids.
From there, it’s a rather predictable cascading effect. Now - if you were a city official trying to set spending budgets, would you bother with much in the way of snow removal or sanding equipment? No, you would not. So the roads stay slick.
And of course, drivers get hardly any practice driving around in snow, slush, and ice around here. But the real killer is all the hills. Put all three factors together with the understanding that if you just wait 24 hours, it’ll all be gone, of course everyone stays home. And those who don’t almost always have a problem, even if it’s because someone else didn’t know how to stop on the slick roads.
As tempting as the main roads look, all clear because they’re well traveled and well tended to by the snow equipment, the side streets are the biggest issue. Another kind of a “last mile” problem.
And if you’ve gotten this far and are still wondering what this has to do with Startup Weekend and skillbit, it’s this…
First, if the snow had hit over the weekend as had been originally predicted, it could have made it very problematic for people to get to the Adobe offices. In fact, I left the house a bit more rushed than I’d anticipated because I saw some snow start to fall and couldn’t be sure just how bad it would get. As it happened, traveling to and from Fremont remained easy all weekend - even for those of us who celebrated late into the evening Sunday night. For this we are grateful.
Secondly, with all the havoc that snow can wreak in Western Washington and the rarity of such events, anyone hoping for media coverage (as we were) really wants to avoid trying to get anyone’s attention in the face of a healthy snow event.
The media typically gets all in a frenzy over snow and so we were very glad to not be competing with snow yesterday to get airtime. And it’s a good thing too, because sure enough, the airwaves are filled with “all snow all the time” today. It looks like we may have had our few minutes of fame for now.
This is fine - it gives us a moment to catch our breath. Bash some of the more obvious bugs that are of course still evident this early in the launch. Maybe get some more sleep. And of course start figuring out the next steps for our new product and the new community that created it this past weekend.
There’s a lot of all of this happening today amongst the new skillbit family, and a nice quiet snow day is a perfect way to ease back into the real world. For all of you out on the roads, be careful out there.