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A Bag of Holding

The fundamental goal I have for a wallet via its design is that it prevents me from randomly collecting crap.

Years of folding leather wallets with myriad pockets and flaps all yielded precisely the same result: a Costanza-sized monstrosity that contained random crap that at one time I thought I needed, but eventually became useless clutter. This collection sat in my back pocket as a constant reminder of a tidying task I never did. Meanwhile, the massive collection of clutter ultimately destroys the wallet because no wallet is designed to perpetually hold everything.

The current wallet is perfect.

It’s perfect because:

1. There are zero moving parts. Whether it’s a flap or a mechanical money clip, moving parts fail.
2. There is limited capacity. The card sleeve barely allows me to hold eight card-shaped objects. Eight. This means that each time I attempt to keep a receipt I think I’ll need I have to fold it and slide it into the money clip. This means each time I handle my cash, I have to make a critical decision about the receipt — do I still need it? You’d be surprised by the half-life of items in your back pocket that you recently thought were important when you’re forced to look at them an hour later.
3. I’m not constantly stressing the architecture of the wallet attempting to contain everything. The current wallet has already lasted 4x as long as its predecessor.

It’s with this wallet design win that I embarked on a quest for comparable bag.

The Bag Requirements

My requirements for a bag start with those of the wallet, but with an important essential addition: my bag has multiple use cases. My bag needs to adapt to whatever journey I’m currently on, whether it’s a trip to work; a trip far, far away; or a trip where I’m sleeping in the dirt under the stars. A trip is either work or play, and since I work a lot more than I play, I chose to focus on work scenarios for my bag research.

I’ve heavily used two different types of bags over the past five years, and each has some win. To understand my initial requirements for a good bag, let’s quickly look at each.

A Christmas present, this Johnson & Murphy messenger bag was the first work bag I loved. I find it gorgeous. A large, comfortable shoulder strap and decent space made this my go-to bag for years. All that was missing was the addition of a Incase sleeve to give my MacBook a little cushioning and I was set.

In the past few years I began to travel more, and the travel exposed a core weakness: the bag doesn’t scale to far, far away. I found myself stuffing, shoving, and reorganizing headphones and power supplies in the bag, and while the magnet clasp works fine for a trip to work, when the bag is at capacity, it feels like it might pop open at any moment. I had a similar over the shoulder Tumi bag that was my workhorse for far, far away, but after sitting in a lot of airports, I’d seen a new development. Folks were wearing backpacks again.

I’m scarred by backpacks. My memory of backpacks was of these massive canvas-like bags full of immense and dense text books, crumbled paper, and a distinct smell of partially rotten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I remember constantly losing important papers in what was the seemingly infinite space contained within my bag, and I wasn’t interested in returning to that frustration.

However, after countless hours watching travelers sport backpacks, it was time to get past my scarring and give backpacks another try. Tom Bihn’s Smart Alec backpack was a chance to test this development.

After six months of steady use of my Bihn backpack, not only do I understand why people love them, I also better understand the complete set of questions and requirements I have for a good bag.

Does this bag make me look like a nerd? (Because I am.)

Bag religion is rampant. The only thing I’m looking forward to more than finishing this article is the crazy, foaming at the mouth bag nuts that are going to comment on this piece. My research is far less complete than in prior obsessive excursions, so bring it. I want to hear it. I’ve seen a lot of different bags, and my first requirement is that while I need my bag to be nerd-compliant, I don’t want it to scream “nerd”. This was part of my love affair with my messenger bag. It looked like I was part of the Pony Express when I was actually just a nerd hoofing my nerd crap hither and yon.

My bag needs to walk a delicate line between form and function. I need it to elegantly contain my various nerd crap, but I don’t need to broadcast to the world that, yes, not only am I sporting my nerd gear, I also have a back-up of the aforementioned gear because I’ve built in redundancy. That’s how I roll. I’m a nerd.

The messenger bag is a slight winner in this very subjective category. While the Smart Alec avoids most design disasters that remind me of JanSport-esque high school backpack monstrosities (straps, zippers, every kind of fabric everywhere, minimal pockets, and the color taupe), it makes less of a statement. It’s slightly more function than form. However, it is a better answer to the question…

Am I going to beat you through the security line?

The hands down collective best measure for any bag is its relationship to your situation in the security line at the airport. Let’s start with my mindset when I’m standing in line at security. I’m furious. Everyone’s furious. While we suspect the security line is essential, as we stand in that endless line, we know — we’re absolutely sure — there is a better way.

I’m fuming with this frustration when I finally get to the front of the line, but more importantly, I want to prove a point: I will now demonstrate to everyone the value of efficiency. Grab two trays, slip shoes off and put them in tray #1. Stuff wallet, iPhone, and boarding pass in shoes, belt off — NEXT TRAY — MacBook Air in second tray. Bag behind second tray, luggage behind that. And done. Why yes, I can do this and move the trays at the same time — WHY CAN’T YOU?

No where in the above process did you see “futzing with my bag and looking for shit”. In times of stress, a good bag demonstrates a couple of essential design points:

• Easy access to the items I commonly need. This means my computer is a single zipper away, but this ease of access does not mean the safety of these essentials is compromised. The Smart Alec is a clear winner here. In addition to the main compartment, there are two external side pockets that are large enough to hold the answers to most travel questions.
• Simply amazing zippers. My messenger bag has a magnet clasp and that works, but when I’m moving quickly, I’m wondering when this bag held together with a magnet is going to explode. When I close any pocket on my bag, I want to be left with the clear impression that the pocket is seriously closed.
• A minimum of crap hanging from the bag. Each strap is an opportunity to snag myself on a random piece of crap that I didn’t happen to see at the least opportune time. Traditional backpacks are the worst offenders when it comes to these straps. The designers seem to think I’m always mere seconds away from base jumping off a bridge where I need my backpack affixed to me in seven different ways. I don’t. I need two straps. That’s it.

However, I do want to know…

Can I go ninja?

The rule is: the further you are from your cave, there’s the exponential increase in the chance something will go wrong at the least opportune time. The best example of this is standing in front of 1,000 people who are expecting you to smoothly and expertly talk for the next hour and you’ve just discovered your MacBook doesn’t connect to the venue’s projector.

In my bag, I’m certain I have video connectors for most projectors on the planet. Furthermore, I have a universal power converter, a power supply, two presentation remotes, and sundry other essential white cables. All of these items are expertly collected in what Tom Bihn calls a Snake Charmer bag. This mesh bag is not only of a size that it can handle all of these items, it takes oddly shaped items such as power supplies and Jamboxes and molds them into an easily transportable rectangle that fits inside of my bag.

To allow for ninja-like moves, a good bag is designed to maintain state, which means:

1. There is a knowable set of intelligently aligned pockets of a size and shape that make sense. This is where my messenger bag fails. In order to maintain that Pony Express feel, the messenger bag design assumes that everything I’m going to lug about is roughly shaped like a stack of 8.5x11 paper. While the MacBook and the iPad are paper-shaped, I have essential items that aren’t square: delicate sunglasses, clumps of pens, and bizarrely shaped collapsible headphones. When I attempt to gear up for the long trip, it’s clear from the resulting lumpiness that the messenger bag was designed for a pleasing form and not useful function.

   The Smart Alec backpack not only has a sensible number of pockets, they are of a size that accounts for the fact that oddly shaped items follow me on my travels. More importantly…

2. In time of stress, the items are readily accessible, remain safe, and don’t shift around. I can’t predict when I need to go ninja. I don’t know when it’s absolutely essential that I have a pen ready to go in five seconds. When this moment does arrive, I don’t want to be digging feverishly around my bag, placing various items on the floor as I search the bottom of the bag where the small stuff has fallen. The Smart Alec backpack not only has a sensible number of pockets, they are readily accessible and not cavernous. At this moment I can tell you: right side external pocket is notebooks and the essential small crap bag (which I’ll explain in a moment), left external pocket is pens, mints, and playing cards, and the internal top pocket is safe and easily accessible for sunglasses, random small pieces of paper, a passport, and the occasional stash of hard candy.

All my stuff, readily accessibly at a moment’s notice — that’s pretty ninja. Still…

Is my bag smarter than I am?

Everything is exponentially and unnecessarily harder when you’re stressed, and it’s in these moments that you appreciate the design of a good bag. A well-maintained state allows me to go ninja, but knowing precisely where my stuff is safely located is just the first step. A well-designed bag is thinking for you when the last thing you’re doing is thinking. Some examples:

• Sub-bags. In addition to intelligent pocket size and positioning, Bihn pushes an idea to help me maintain state: sub-bags. For everyday trips, I have a single sub-bag that I’ll call “essential small crap”. Everything I’d normally lose or constantly be untangling is in a small bag that is transparent on one side, and which sits well contained precisely in the same pocket.
• An unexpected sense of space. This is a direct contradiction to my requirement that my bag prevents me from randomly collecting crap, but part of being ninja is the need to scale. I will randomly need to lug around a randomly shaped something from here to there and my preference is that my bag does this without fuss. The messenger bag fails here, especially on longer trips. I’m at max capacity on a long trip, which means I’m shoving newly acquired items in coat pockets or onto fellow travelers. As for the Smart Alec bag, I never felt I’ve filled it. Sure, I can lug your randomly shaped something… anywhere.
• Agility. My agility test is relatively simple: how many people are impacted/aware when I attempt to retrieve my MacBook while sitting in the middle seat? Any answer higher than one is too many. For the messenger bag, I first need to find the handle, which, given how it was shoved under the seat in front of me, is trickier than it needs to be. Then, I slide the bag out, lift the flap, unzip the Incase, and slide out the hardware. If you’re sitting on either side of me, you’re going to be well aware of this process because of my odd elbow gyrations.

  The backpack is shaped like a bullet. You slide the base easily under the seat in front of you, leaving the tip pointed directly at your feet. When I need something, the handle is at the tip of my toes, the zipper is easy to grab and works every time, and the Brain Cell holding the MacBook is right there. If you’re sitting next to me you’ll end up wondering, “When did he pull his computer out?” Whether it’s shoved into an overhead compartment, slid under a seat, or thrown in the back of a taxi, my bag needs to remain accessible and useful. This means I can get to it, and once I get to it, I can perform whatever action I intend without annoying every single person around me.

• Full range of motion. The defining aspects of a backpack are its most obvious — it’s on your back. After many years of single-strap messenger bags, I was shocked when I moved to the backpack and suddenly had two hands. A messenger bag does not full occupy one of your arms, but your shoulder is in a constant balancing dance with the bag to make sure it’s in the right place. With a backpack, this is a non-issue. When it’s on your back it’s gone and you’ve got a full range of two-handed ninja motion.

Through its design, a good bag makes me look smarter by giving me deft answers to most travel disasters, but I have one more request.

Can I take a bullet? Do I look good after I’ve taken a bullet?

As my bag accompanies me everywhere on the Planet Earth, it’s apt to encounter small random disasters. Briefly dragged on the asphalt, being drenched by half a cup of airplane coffee, or being unceremoniously thrown in the back of a cab. When these micro-disasters are going down, I need two things of my bag:

1. Everything in it needs to admirably survive and generally remain in the same location, and,
2. The disaster results in the bag acquiring additional character.

Sturdy is the word you’re thinking. Good solid craftsmanship. Yes, this is all true, but the art lies in building a bag that doesn’t look tired after the unexpected has occurred — the bag needs to look like it’s lived.

The messenger bag is a solid winner here. The bag has had the shit kicked out it, but it doesn’t look like it’s beaten, it looks worldly. The Bihn bag is well constructed out of impressive sounding materials such as ballistic nylon. It looks sturdy, it looks like it can take a bullet, but once the damage is done, I don’t know what story the damage will tell.

Efficient Disaster Management

When I stand up to go somewhere, the routine is precise. Right pocket, wallet. Left pocket, iPhone. Keys in hand, grab my bag and go. It’s this sort of workflow precision that allows me to stay cool when the unexpected occurs. My inner dialog during the situation is, Well, see, I’ve got my shit together, so even though this unpredictable thing is going down, I’m doing my part to support predictability.

Whether it’s a wallet or a bag, its design needs to encourage and support my irrational worldview that with the proper level of organization those disasters, large and small, are all manageable.

How Can I Help You?

Being computer literate means getting asked to help. I’m happy to help. I believe the less you fear your computer, phone, or tablet, the more you’ll get out of it, so, absolutely, How I can help you?

However, this free tech support does come at a cost. I have a system for evaluating a problem which is accompanied by colorful inner monologue. The following flowchart explains both the details of how I triage a problem, how I might fix it, and how and why I’m likely to swear while I’m helping.

Download the larger version.

Why?

Early in the design discussion for the logo for the latest Rands in Repose charity t-shirt, Robert Padbury responded to my early design feedback: “You know, I realized something when I was thinking about this the other day - People don’t really have more than the following three responses to a design:

1. It’s awesome.
2. It sucks.
3. Apathy.”

This short list of responses captured me with their lack of subtlety. Three bullets effectively describe the majority of opinions people have about topics that often deserve more consideration. While Robert’s eventual point was different, his observation serves as a starting point for understanding why I’m once again offering a t-shirt supporting a literacy charity.

As with all other prior shirts, all of the profits go to First Book, a charity focused on promoting children’s literacy. The reason I continue to choose this charity is simple: I think the more people take the time to read increases the likelihood that they can build a defensible opinion.

Having a defensible opinion takes work. There is infinite information out there and that means you need to pick and choose the topics where you want to stop and ask, “Wait… why?” I’ll explain via a creepy story.

Back before there was a publicly available Internet, a doctor told my mother that smoking would keep the baby’s birth weight down. Funny thing is, it’s true. The unfunny thing is that low birth weight babies are at an increased risk for serious health problems and lasting disabilities. The decidedly unfunny thing remains — it was her doctor who told my mother this “good news”.

History is full of lies and ignorance propagated by people who’ve put their trust in the ideals of allegedly qualified others. Now, as we live in a world divided by opinions acquired via Twitter, it’s never been easier grab onto a clever 140-character quip and assume it’s the truth. The fires of ignorance burn wildly on these acts of intellectual laziness.

Having an opinion takes work. It means stopping in your tracks and staring conventional wisdom in the face and asking it to explain itself. It means drilling deeper than the conventionally polarizing opinions that a topic is simply awesome, it totally sucks, or it’s completely irrelevant to you. Chances are, it’s a little bit of all three, but that type of ambiguity is mentally exhausting, right? Can’t we just love or hate? It’s so much easier to yell when it’s right versus wrong or us versus them.

Having an opinion means starting to explore in Wikipedia as a means of defining and refining your curiosity, but not trusting that it’s true. It means researching and building an intellectual map around a question. It means having the confidence and the courage to open a book, find the facts, and working to build a complex and defensible opinion so you can personally answer the question: “Why?”

And I think it’s a habit we want to encourage as early as possible.

The third version of the Rands charity shirt has a new purchase option. You can either purchase the lovely red shirt or the limited edition gun metal version, which also includes a set of customized Field Notes. The clingy bamboo stylings of previous shirts are gone and replaced with American Apparel’s finest short-sleeve cotton t-shirt. Again, all proceeds of both shirts go to First Book.

I’d like to thank Robert Padbury and Jim Coudal for their generous donations to this effort. They are both awesome and now you know why.

Building Serendipity

Blake looks tired. He’s sitting in the food court at O’Hare Terminal 1. He’s halfway through a beer and the jokes are coming out, but they’re a little labored. Blake is tired.

Blake’s tired because Blake goes to a lot of conferences. Earlier in the conversation, he was explaining the next month of travel and I lost track of the number of conferences he was attending somewhere between Peru and Brazil. I feel like I attend a decent number of conferences over the course of the year, but Blake’s list quickly demonstrates that I’m a conference rookie.

Still, I know why Blake is tired.

That One Person

I have exactly one goal when I attend a conference. Through some bizarre and unpredictable sequence of events, I’m going to meet that one person I absolutely need to know. Who they are, what they’re building, or what they’ve done — it’s mind-blowing shit that, once identified, forever alters my perspective. In hindsight, after each conference is complete, it’s obvious who this person is because I can’t stop fucking talking about them. Before the conference this person is a mystery and there is no reliable way to predict who they might be.

My evolving experiences with conferences over the past two decades both conveniently enable documenting the three types of conferences out there, as well as my strategy for building the possibility of serendipitously meeting that person who will rock my world.

The Everybody Conference

Comdex was my introduction to both conferences and Las Vegas. In my late teens, my Dad was making a tidy profit building clone PCs, and Comdex was the place to see the latest developers in the PC world. I remember when Bill Gates got up on stage and showed a new feature in Microsoft Word that allowed you to visually draw tables in a document. Times were simpler then.

The Everybody Conferences are defined by their hugeness. Present day WWDC, SXSW, and JavaOne are similar beasts where each and every one of the faithful gathers to drink deeply of the Kool-aid. The food sucks, presentation quality varies wildly, and you seem to constantly be in line, but everyone is there and how often do you get an opportunity to hang with everyone?

For me, the Everybody Conference is a stressful affair. I am uncomfortable in large crowds and standing in lines drives me insane. However, I appreciate that both lines and crowds are significant opportunities for serendipity, so where’s the middle ground?

I’ve refined the compromise strategy after many years at SXSW: find a conveniently located bar near where everyone is stumbling, invite two close friends and buy them a lot of booze, and then tell anyone who might care where you are. This event comfortably starts with just the three of you and becomes even more comfortable as the booze begins to flow. Serendipity is encouraged both by being in a public location where folks randomly show up as well as via your invite to those who might care.

At SXSW, I rarely attend sponsored events (lines), I rarely attend talks (panels? really?), and while I might wander the conference hallway a few times, my strategy of hiding in plain sight allows me to balance avoiding the hugeness while still encouraging serendipity.

The Specific Agenda Conference

The Specific Agenda conference is a smaller affair and has a specific theme, whether it is technology or audience. There is delightfully less pomp and circumstance with the Specific Agenda conference, but more importantly, there are fewer people. Whew.

A smaller conference is more palatable to me not only because the horde isn’t there, but because the conference can be comprehended. I can get both the entire theme and audience in my head, which, as a nerd, gives me the illusion of predictability and knowability. However, the decrease in population size means more aggressive steps are necessary to encourage serendipity. I can’t hide in a bar and tweet my location: I need to be proactive.

The strategy at the Specific Agenda Conference is: attend everything. After I’ve arrived, checked in, and am sitting in the hotel room reviewing the conference, I invariably find an event and think “lame”. I still go. Yeah, I don’t need a job, but I’ll check out the job fair. Yeah, there’s an awkward corporate speaker whose presentation is more advertising than content — I go to that as well. I might walk out after three minutes, but I still show up because at a smaller conference I want to know the Story.

Because of its size, the Specific Agenda conference builds a discernible shared story. It starts when the keynote speaker is simply awful and you lean over to a stranger and ask, “Is he that bad?” In a moment, the stranger becomes slightly less strange when she nods, “Yes, he’s really awful. And he’s my boyfriend.”

Oh.

There is now one less stranger at the conference and the first page of the Story, which is titled, “Wherein I make a new friend by ripping on their boyfriend’s crap keynote” and it’s a great story that everyone has a version of because they’re all sitting there with their own experience of the horrific keynote.

By including myself in the majority of the Specific Agenda Conference, I see what everyone else sees, and we collectively build a Story that introduces and intertwines us. I can think back to every Specific Agenda conference and feel the Story that was built. There was that one in Montreal where at 2am we ended up in a line in subzero weather waiting to eat poutine. Yeah, I was in a line. You know why? Because I knew I was in the middle of a great Story and great Stories are great fodder for serendipity.

The Welcome to Our Home Conference

The final conference is just a variant of the Specific Agenda conference, but I’m calling it out because this conference is one built with serendipity in mind. To date, I’ve only attended two Welcome to Our Home conferences: Webstock (three times) and Funconf (twice).

This conference is what it’s called: an invitation into someone’s home. It has some technology, design, or open source theme of some sort, but that’s just there to get your attention. The real intent of this conference is building serendipity, and they do in three increasingly important ways:

Quality of speakers. Each year, Wellington, New Zealand’s Webstock shocks me with their speakers. Go look now. Yeah, you’d go for just half of those folks. Dublin, Ireland’s Funconf is less forthcoming with their speakers, but that’s because they sell out tickets simply on the strength of word-of-mouth from the first conference, which included a bevy of fascinating speakers.

The Venue. Webstock is held in Wellington’s town hall, which looks like this:

This Funconf was held in a castle and that looks like this:

The venues for both conferences go out of their way to make you feel like you’re not at a conference, but rather hanging with your friends, well, in a castle. More on this aspect in a moment.

The Organizers. In my opinion, the defining characteristic of the Welcome to Our Home conference is the organizers. Whether it’s Webstock’s Natasha Lampard and Mike Brown or Funconf’s Paul Campbell and Eamon Leonard, each conference is a reflection of the care of these organizers. I just returned from my second Funconf and I know that it was held in a castle because of Paul, and I know there was a clown, a DeLorean, a llama, and a donkey in the courtyard thanks to Eamon. You’re right — it doesn’t make sense — but that’s because you weren’t there and you weren’t a part of the Story.

There is very little strategy in play when it comes to the conference. They tend to be small enough that I don’t hide and there is rarely an event I’m not tripping over myself to attend. The Story builds itself with little effort on my part and there’s serendipity everywhere.

Welcome to Our Home

I’m eating an awful ham and cheese sandwich and drinking a Sam Adams when I ask Blake what his favorite part of Funconf was, and he gives the same answer everybody does about any conference: “Well, it’s the people, right?”

Blake knows what I know. Whether it’s Everybody, A Specific Agenda, or A Home, a conference is defined by the people. And that’s why I’m a little a jealous of Blake. I know why he’s tired. He was up until 6am drinking with the CTO of Amazon in front of the fire… in a castle.

And that’s a great story.

The Anatomy of a Notification

In an otherwise elegant and well-integrated operating system, the notifications user interface in iOS 4.x feels like a wart — a tacked-on afterthought that offers a bare minimum of usefulness.

Competitors have jumped all over this weakness. An early Microsoft Windows Phone ad implies a strategic notifications deficiency by showing users glued to their iPhones… because of the platform’s alleged inability to give users aggregate, at-a-glance updates. The ads’ strange reasoning ignores the idea that iPhone users might be glued to their phones not due to the fact that they didn’t know something occurred, but because the phone is so damned useful.

The Microsoft ad while entertaining is ultimately confusing and contradictory. It implies that you’re going to miss something important while you stare at your iPhone, i.e. the entire point of an elegant notification system is that you miss nothing.

An elegant notification system and application will come to iOS — likely this week. Apple hired the designer of WebOS’s notification system a year ago in May, and that’s good news because there’s a ever-growing mountain of evidence that notifications are a big deal.

The Evolution of Notifications

At the tail end of Web 1.0, Google busily indexed the entire web for us and gave us a reliable, useful, and easy way to find content. In a world previously governed by the Dewey Decimal System, Google was a goddamned miracle. In 7th grade I was asked to write a report on clepsydras. I had to wait a week until my Mom drove me to the library just to figure out that a clepsydra was a water clock. A week. Can you imagine a world where you couldn’t curl up on your couch eating Doritos and cottage cheese and simply click a link on your iPad to learn everything about David Hasselhoff?

I can’t.

The Pandora’s Box opened by the arrival of the Internet is that we are now aware that all the information is out there, and it’s readily available, but we lack the time to surf its infinite enormity. You don’t have time for everything. In fact, you don’t have much time for most of the what’s on the Internet because you’re just one person with strange eating habits. You pick and choose. Yes, I will read Suck. Yes, Kottke appears capable of finding content I care about. You delegate the filtering of the Internet to trusted others and you were grateful when RSS and RSS readers showed up because the technology gave you one-stop shopping for your then inefficient content consumption.

RSS represented a leap forward. You now had a means of aggregating and reading the content of your trusted others at your convenience. And more importantly, when that content was updated, you received a handy notification that something had changed. Oh look, 23 new articles. We were content with this standard, but then something happened. RSS was killed.

It wasn’t a deliberate hit. There was an information explosion and RSS was collateral damage. The content you cared about grew exponentially. It wasn’t just blog articles, it was tweets, likes, status updates, new followers — an endless list of micro-information and RSS hasn’t evolved. The likes of Twitter and Facebook tried to keep RSS around, but in a world where advertising is king, a standard that provides a facility for consuming content and skirting ads doesn’t make business sense. RSS is still sprinkled around these services, but it’s hard to find and when it breaks no one seems to care to fix it.

RSS lost.

In a daily information consumption routine, RSS has effectively been replaced by different systems of notifications. While notifications are neither a functional replacement nor a standard, they’re a timely and important idea. If RSS is a standard for structured document-based pulls, notifications thrive as standards-free, chaotic, atomic pushes… and we need to wrangle them.

The Anatomy of a Notification

Before I explain how notifications are slowly taking over your life, let’s agree to a definition. To me a notification is a small piece of information that is:

• Human Consumable: built for a human to assess, not for a machine.
• Brief & Relevant: the content inside of a notification takes only a smidge of your attention in order to assess a next step.
• Portable: a notification stands on its own; you need no additional external application to assess it. They stand outside of the data or application they might represent.
• Disposable: if for some reason the notification doesn’t get to you, you have an obvious means of recourse to find the data.
• Timely: the usefulness of a notification decays as a function of time. Late notification arrival incites nerd rage.

Try the definition on:

• Is a tweet a notification? Yes, unless it’s a tweet that’s part of a continuing conversation chain.
• Is your phone ringing a notification? Yes, as long as you have an answering system for when you’re not there, thus making the notification disposable.
• Is an email a notification? No, an email usually fails to meet all the criteria in that it usually isn’t brief, it often heavily depends on the context of other emails, isn’t always disposable, and, well, sometimes an email isn’t coherent even to humans. However, a Growl notification containing the subject line of an email is totally a notification.
• Is an SMS a notification? How about an instant message? Like a tweet, only the first message in a chain is a notification. The first message is your alert: “Should I converse with this person right now on this particular topic? Yes or no.”

Make sense? Think I’ve gone around the bend over-thinking notifications? Keep reading.

An Economy of Notifications

The Internet is a flurry of notifications. Likes, updates, points, favorites, and retweet buttons beg everyone to click them to capture the micro-opinion of the moment. It’s no longer a badge of honor to have a blog; the question is: how much karma have you amassed on Hacker News?

It’s a goddamned sea of notifications. I know this because of the amount of time I’ve spent hacking together a notification strategy. I’m regularly updating mail rules to account for the various notifications emitted from Twitter, Quora, Facebook, and the like. It’s a growing pile of work and therein lies both a problem and an opportunity.

The problem with notifications is that the cost to create them is close to zero — just hit that Like button or go ahead and click that retweet button. As their creation cost approaches zero, notifications rapidly become spam-like as the noise of their quantity masks the quality of their signal. But we learned our lesson with spam. We knew what happened when we lost control of our inboxes and spent our time sorting through the useless noise searching for the signal. We learned how to curate. Curation is social-media-douche-speak for “deliberately choosing and pruning the content you care about” and I think part of the next Internet is curation at scale thanks to notifications.

I Want To Know What I Want to Know When I Want To Know It

With social media companies having little incentive to open up their notification streams, we need new leverage. We need a platform to insist on the collection, organization, and management of notifications, and that’s the platform sitting in your back pocket. Open or closed, iOS and Android are in a unique position to standardize notifications in order to keep them useful.

As Microsoft clumsily demonstrated in their ad, a mobile interface is an interface for a moment. The goal isn’t deep consideration of a thing. The goal is instant assessment of, well, everything. When I pull my phone out of my pocket, I want to answer a fairly impossible question: “How has everything I care about in the online universe changed since I last checked?”

Tall order. And one that can partly be conquered by notifications with a feature set that is defined by the definition of notifications:

• Human Consumable: We need a centralized, highly visible and beautiful place that contains all notifications for the apps and services we care about. The logical place is the first screen you see when you launch your phone.
• Brief & Relevant: The use case for this screen is: “How quickly can I pull the phone out of my pocket and assess what the hell is going on?” The faster, the better. Preferably before I crash the car.
• Portable: The interface must be the interface for all notifications. The triage experience is exactly the same whether I’m scrubbing Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. It’s cool if drilling down into a notification requires automatically jumping to a different app, but enough information must be presented to allow me to make the decision of “Should I proceed?”
• Disposable: If a long period of time passes between when I check in, the triage experience is the same — tell me what is changing right now. I don’t care what happened yesterday. Old notifications are meaningless to me. I have other elegant means of assessing the changes of the week or month.
• Timely: While notifications are disposable, their timely arrival is essential. The real-time push aspects are fully aligned with my attention deficiency disorders.

Lastly, this entire system needs governance by a well-designed notification application. iOS 4 already has a system-level notification system, but the presence and success of applications like Boxcar are a clear sign of the functional deficiencies of the system. We need a notification system that accounts for the fact we’re constantly signing up for new information, but don’t have the time or the tools to pay attention to it. We need a tool that allows us to adjust the level of detail of the data we receive to align with the level of attention we have to give it.

RSS Didn’t Lose

I realize a comparison between RSS and notifications is not a fair one. I’m effectively comparing a family of web feed formats designed around slowly changing content with an application and a system service. But where the standards and the application intersect is the use case: tell me what has changed.

Notifications are the smallest bit of disposable, human-readable information that conveys something you care about. Their real-time nature gives notifications an immediate sense of importance. Well, my ass is vibrating, so it must be important.

If you want to rip on notifications, you can angrily wave your finger at the folks who believe discovering a thing has anything to do with understanding it. Notifications reinforce our addiction to the now. That vibrating ass of yours gives you the false impression that you know something, but all you really know is that something is different. The value of information does not decay as fast as the immediacy of the notification would have you believe.

Anyone who’s ever lost three hours to “choose your own adventure” on Wikipeda knows that infovores want to know what they want to know when they want to know it, but that “it” is never fully covered by notifications. My nighttime routine always involves RSS. I curl up around my iPad, fire up Reeder, and see where the Internet takes me because sometimes we need to go deep.

[Post-WWDC Update] Just about everything I wanted fixed in notifications was addressed with iOS 5. While I had limited hands-on time with the feature set, notifications are now a first class information citizen throughout the OS. Notifications are easily consumable regardless of where you are in the OS and equally easy to act upon. You’re able to set the visual intrusiveness of a notification (say, if you love the old modal dialog for important notifications) on an app-by-app basis - I’ll use that.

Is Boxcar dead? I don’t think so. Notification Center replaces Boxcar’s aggregation functionally, but I never used that feature. What’s useful to me in Boxcar is the ability to build customized notifications on top of other services. My gut says that is Boxcar’s sweet spot and notifications in iOS 5 will give those Boxcar notifications a place to shine.

Is this notifications UI way similar to Android? Yup. Here’s the rule: you copy great ideas — that’s how we know they’re great.

Summer Intern Field Guide

Dear Summer Interns: Your stock is up — like way up.

Ten years ago when I was hiring interns at the mothership, my incredibly flawed and shortsighted policy was to hire as many as they’d let me, dole ‘em out to the teams that screamed the loudest, and see what happened. There were successes, we found some good people, but my memory is shoddy because I just wasn’t paying that much attention. For shame.

Fast forward to the present day and the internship landscape has drastically changed in the Silicon Valley. Competition for interns is fierce for a couple of old reasons and an emerging new one.

• Internships remain a low-risk way for both candidate and company to evaluate each other in a short time frame and with a deadline.
• We, the hiring companies, have an ever-increasing crapload of work to do, which provides an excellent crucible for this evaluation. And, finally,
• In the last decade, interns have continued to arrive with an ever-increasing pre-existing skill set that allows them to hit the ground running.

That said, even with everyone cheering for you, you can still screw up your internship - easily.

The following guide walks you through what I’ve learned are essential moves for your summer internship.

A Swell Gig

Whether you’ve landed a summer internship, co-op position, or contracting gig, the defining characteristic is the tick-tick-tick of time. On the day you start you know the day you’re leaving. Given this clear deadline, there are two things I want you to do before you set foot in the gig.

First, pick one thing you want to learn. You’re likely starting this whole process with the idyllic perspective that, “Golly, it’s swell they gave me a gig”. This is factually true, but I prefer the perspective: I am choosing to work with these fine people because they have a thing to teach me. Every job I’ve loved shares the same characteristic: I’m learning from people I respect.

Before you show up and are overwhelmed with the inevitable flood of projects, people, and personalities, you need to make a choice about what you want to learn:

1. I want to learn how to become a better developer.
2. I want to know how to build a team.
3. I want to learn how to ship products.

Don’t stress about this - pick two if you want. Just choose and understand the choice is not written in stone. In fact, careful adherence to the advice below pretty much guarantees that you’re going to change your learning goal a couple of times. The absence of this goal is a great way to start your summer with the aimless and listless perspective of: “What are they going to bring me?” Goal in hand, you start by asking, “How am I going to find what I need to learn?”

While you figure this out, you also need to figure out what the company is bringing to the table and you can start to deduce this investment in a couple of ways.

How much communication are you getting from the company leading up to the internship? How quickly are you getting answers to questions? Do you know whom you’ll be reporting to? Is it clear what you’re going to be doing before you show up? Are you getting schwag? Are you getting homework? Are they building excitement?

This assessment doesn’t stop on Day 1. You need to keep watching: Are you getting a script the moment you walk in the door? Is it obvious who is in charge? Are you sitting there staring at your screen without a machine wondering what to do on day 2? Uh-oh. Is it Friday and you have no idea where the week went? Good.

I’m not suggesting that a lack of engagement by your employer guarantees a crappy internship, but it does change your opening strategy. A well-constructed internship program is about creating opportunity for interns to both deliberately and randomly kick ass, and the sooner you detect the quality and depth of the program the sooner you’ll know how much opportunity you’ll need to create on your own.

Whether the early signs are positive or negative, you’d better get started because: You’re in a hurry. Again, an internship is defined by time. For a summer internship, you have 90 days. That’s it. It’s going to feel like forever when you arrive, but in my experience it’s usually barely enough time to really figure out whom you’re working with, what they’re working on, and what they care about. Your internship has an expiration date and you need to accelerate the assimilation process, and that means understanding that…

Products are Built by People

My second summer working in high tech was at Borland and they were deep into the first version of Paradox for Windows. I arrived in the middle of a push towards Alpha, which meant I got a cursory handshake, a computer, an office, and the well crafted, detailed instruction to “Find bugs”.

If you believe my program assessment advice, I should have rated myself a solid “screwed”. No initial support, no investment, no clear direction. Thing was, it was the best damned internship ever. These people were in a hurry — they didn’t have time to explain the intricacies of the product development process to me because they were living and breathing it. They had no problem grabbing me for a design meeting halfway through my second day and throwing me squarely in the deep end.

“You - new guy - we need to know if this new Create Table dialog is crap and we need to know by 3pm. Got it? Good?”

Create what table? In what part of the product? What does crap mean anyway?

Devlin, the lead QA guy, who wore the hair and attire of someone who hadn’t slept in weeks, grabbed me as we walked out: “I’ll help you install the latest build. You need to get the bug tracking system up and running while I’m doing that and figure it out. I’ll walk you through the three create workflows. If you find three bad bugs, it’s crap.”

Software built in the real world has nothing to do with what they teach you in college. There are no courses entitled:

• The Mountain Dew-Fueled Development Cycle
• The Myth and Madness of Zero Bugs
• Done is a State of Mind.

There is plenty of value in university, but until you build a complex product, beginning to end, with a team, you have little idea how product is built. An internship provides essential real-time lessons to understand both how a product is built and who is building it. Start with:

Finding a mentor. Most intern programs take the time to assign a person in the trenches who isn’t your boss and who is responsible for your daily care and feeding. A good mentor is someone you see regularly, and neither of you feel like these visits are a chore. If you’re getting the chore vibe, you need to find another mentor, which ties in with another assignment…

Finding a cohort. If a mentor’s job is to answer questions, a cohort’s job is to find more questions with you. Your cohort is your invaluable second set of eyeballs. They are likely on the same schedule as you and share an interest in what you want to learn. You can go it alone during an internship, but it’s inefficient. You’re going to screw up; you’re going to waste time chasing something useless, and a good cohort will call bullshit on these activities faster than your boss or your mentor because they share your interest. More importantly, your cohort identification and selection might be your first professional attempt to build a team. Wondering where they are? How about…

Talking to everyone. As an engineer, you may have anti-social nerd tendencies. You might be supported by a phenomenal intern program that accounts for your every need. But if you’re heads down simply fixing bugs, you’re not learning how to build product. You need to attend every single intern event where you are exposed to as many people as possible. You need to frequently stand up, walk around, and investigate what each group does, how they fit together, and how they each contribute to the product. And you do that by…

Incessantly asking questions. I understand that it looks like everyone is darting about with purpose, and I know that you think your question about security certificates is insipid, but we want you to ask. We want you to be unblocked so that you can get to the meat of building things. More importantly, we learn both about you and ourselves via your questions. We see our products and our processes in a fresh light through your eyes. The rule is: the sooner you ask, the faster you’ll know.

Understanding that you have little time for drama. You might not know what office politics look or sound like, so here’s a familiar scenario: remember those uncomfortable cliques that showed up in high school? Those folks walking around like they hit the popularity lottery? When someone walks by and you sense the familiar twinge of douchiness, find a reason to walk away. It’s not a guarantee, but there’s a good chance there are politicians, malcontents, and jaded curmudgeons somewhere in your company, and they are recruiting for their cause because they need cynicism to feed their agenda. All you will discover by hanging with these folks is the disenfranchised sub-culture of bitching and moaning, and while it is worth noting that this culture has been allowed to exist in your company, it is not worth your time.

Your Goal is Not an Offer

And it’s suddenly over. It’s late August and you’re two weeks from returning to school. Went faster than expected, right? So, what’d you do?

“Well, it was pretty cool. I worked on the search infrastructure for this analysis tool. I learned a bunch about Lucene, and…”

No, that’s not what I’m asking. What did you do?

Your reputation with your team and the company will be defined by something you cannot predict. If you diligently complete the work assigned to you and attend all the social events, you will have a fine internship, but the flavor of this internship is vanilla, and vanilla is reliably boring.

What is the thing you built that:

• You initiated and completed
• Supported your learning goals
• Included your mentor and cohort, and
• Unexpectedly kicked ass?

An offer at the end of a summer is a happy by-product of a successful internship, but your goal is experience. We’d be happy if you joined the crew and that might be a good move, but we know your stock is way up.

What has changed in the last decade is that everything you need to build your own company is actually just a keystroke away whether it’s tools, infrastructure, or cohorts. This ready availability of resources allows for the one of my favorite discoveries when reading a resume: “Last quarter, in my spare time, I founded a company”.

Never before has there been so much potential for bright people, college degree or not, to build something that might change the world, and your internship is one way to learn how we construct our teams and our products, not so you can replicate our success, but you can define your own.

The Noise

It started that morning when you actually had time to go to your favorite coffee shop on that Wednesday morning. You, like many of us, had a bunch of time off for Christmas, so you decided, “I never go to that coffee shop and it’s one of my favorite places to think. Fuck it, I’m going.”

You threw on your favorite sweater — that one with the holes in the elbows — and your blue baseball hat. You ignored the urge to invite a co-conspirator on this visit. You just wanted an uncomplicated, unencumbered, easy trip to the coffee shop.

You arrived, grabbed a cup of black coffee, found a small, round, wooden table with two chairs, and sat down amidst the chorus of dozens of coffee drinkers discussing topics you could hear, but not understand.

With your hands firmly around your coffee cup, you stared around the room and your mind drifted. I love this place. All coffee shops should be built of dark wood. And all furniture. In fact, I need a new desk… made out of dark wood because… I hate my job.

There it is. It’s certainly a topic that’s been on your mind, but it took a solo trip to the coffee shop during a post-Christmas decompression period for you to actually hear what was important to you. More importantly, it sticks.

During the drive home you realize: I hate my job because, while I’m busy, I haven’t learned a thing in the last six months. That night over dinner, you find yourself shaking your finger at your best friend: Shame on me, six months of uselessness and that changes — now.

Frustration has blossomed into the beginnings of strategic resolution and the reason that happens is a lack of Noise.

The Noise

The Noise wants you to believe it’s Signal. The Noise is things you need to do, and they are approachable, knowable, and accomplishable things. You do them — one by one — and mentally pat yourself on the back as you finish them because you have a sense of moving forward.

The Noise surrounds you. People walk in your office with their Noise and they write it on your whiteboard. You nod and agree, “Why, indeed yes, that’s noisy” and they leave comforted — thinking your agreement was somehow progress.

And that’s the greatest lie of the Noise. The idea that listening and reacting to the Noise is significant progress. Yes, these small bits of work we do all day are essential to getting things done, but go back to your last big vacation. After the first three days of decompression, when you were sitting in that hammock with a glass of red wine, under that oak tree that is older than anyone you know… tell me what you were thinking about. Was it the 27 bugs you left in an unverified state, or was it the epiphany that in the first three decades of your life you haven’t come close to building something as impressive as this damned oak tree?

The Noise wants you to believe it’s Signal and its omnipresence in your life slowly and deviously convinces you that the Noise is important. But all listening to the Noise does is deafen you to the things that are important.

Taking Time to Think

You return bright and shiny from long vacations because you’ve no longer been dulled by the Noise. Your job once you’ve returned is to maintain that shininess, which is hard… the Noise is everywhere.

This is why I believe you have to work to make a 1:1 a conversation and not a status report. This is why you’ve established a regular communication cadence with your team, but don’t panic when that cadence is altered. This is why you force yourself outside of the building where you seek unbiased external perspectives willing to not only explain their part of the world, but also hold a mirror up to yours. And this is why I believe you get up and radically change your gig every three years.

These habits are designed to create unexpected moments with Signal. Each moment with Signal is a moment that you’re killing the Noise and they exist so you remember what it feels like to care rather than just do.

Interview: Marco Arment

On my list of horrendously bungled acquisitions, I put Delicious near the top. Since its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, the biggest user-facing change to the site was a visual refresh in 2008. Even with this rampant feature stagnation, I’d stuck with the site because it solved a daily need for me — bookmarks anywhere.

Yahoo’s strategic negligence is mind-boggling. In a world of exponentially increasing information, coupled with increasingly different ways of accessing it, the idea of investing in a social service that tells you precisely what your users care about strikes me as a no-brainer.

Fortunately, nature abhors a vacuum and Marco Arment’s Instapaper has deftly stepped in to replace Delicious. I spoke with Marco via email to understand the origins of Instapaper, the valuable lessons he took from his first company — Tumblr — and how he manages one of web’s most useful sites as a one-man shop.

RANDS: Where did the idea for Instapaper originate and how long until you had a usable product?

MARCO: In the fall of 2007, I had just switched to the iPhone, and I had a long train commute every day. I never knew what to read on the train, but I’d find stuff all day at work that I didn’t have time to read, so I made Instapaper as a simple, one-click link-saving service for myself to time-shift links from the work day to my train commute.

The original web app took only a single night to write. It was usable, but it was very simple.

Over the next couple of months, I added a few useful features, most notably the “text” mode to strip articles down to iPhone-formatted text. This was so the EDGE-only original iPhone could download them quickly and keep more tabs in RAM without needing to reload them when I was potentially underground and offline.

When did you know you had something viable on your hands?

I just used it myself and didn’t tell anyone for a few months. I then showed it to a couple of friends. After a week of using it, they were already raving that it was amazing and it changed the way they read, so I gave it a few nights of polish and posted a simple link to it on my blog.

Within days, it had thousands of users and was getting widespread acclaim. I had no idea it would get so big so quickly.

What’s your favorite stat or fact regarding Instapaper?

Most people assume that online readers primarily view a small number of big-name sites. Nearly everyone who guesses at Instapaper’s top-saved-domain list and its proportions is wrong.

The most-saved site is usually The New York Times, The Guardian, or another major traditional newspaper. But it’s only about 2% of all saved articles. The top 10 saved domains are only about 11% of saved articles.

You’re a one-man shop and are, among other things, developer, support, and operations — how do you pull that off?

A lot of coffee and Phish.

Were there design decisions you made early on in order to manage that? What were they?

Absolutely.

The biggest design decision I’ve made is more of a continuous philosophy: do as few extremely time-consuming features as possible. As a result, Instapaper is a collection of a bunch of very easy things and only a handful of semi-hard things.

This philosophy sounds simple, but it isn’t: geeks like us are always tempted to implement very complex, never-ending features because they’re academically or algorithmically interesting, or because they can add massive value if done well, such as speech or handwriting recognition, recommendation engines, or natural-language processing.

These features — often very easy for people but very hard for computers — often produce mediocre-at-best results, are never truly finished, and usually require massive time investments to achieve incremental progress with diminishing returns.

If a one-person company is going to build a product, it can’t have any of those huge time-sink features. At most, I can afford to have one or two components of moderate complexity, such as the HTML-to-body-text parser and the Kindle-format writer. But even those are barely worth the time that I put into them.

What were the biggest lessons you took from Tumblr that made the design, development, or deployment of Instapaper easier?

Tumblr didn’t have a dedicated server administrator until a few years into its life, so I had to be our de facto server administrator in addition to my primary developer role from Tumblr’s start until we had 48 servers handling about 5,000 requests per second.

Since that’s a sizable infrastructure, but we had very little time to devote to maintaining it, I had to choose mature, stable technologies with great tools and very low administration needs. And I built Instapaper on the same technology: PHP 5 with a custom high-performance MVC framework, MySQL, Memcache, Apache, and CentOS, on high-end dedicated hardware.

This proved invaluable to both Tumblr and Instapaper, since I don’t need to deal with webserver processes crashing, corrupted databases, or any serious platform issues. All of these tools are used by many other companies with deployments much larger than these, so nearly all of the bugs get worked out long before they get a chance to affect us.

The result of all of this platform conservatism is that I can spend my time improving the product in meaningful ways instead of fighting with my server software.

What part of Instapaper’s infrastructure are you most proud of?

The bookmarklet has a mechanism to save pages from sites that require logins for full content, such as the Wall Street Journal and Harper’s, by sending a copy of the page’s HTML from the customer’s browser to the server. It’s like automating the “Save as…” menu item: if you have your own account for these sites and can see the page in your browser, you can save it to Instapaper.

The way it does this is ridiculous: instead of calling a simple GET request to save the page, since an entire page’s contents would quickly overrun any URL-length limits in the stack, it injects a FORM with a POST action and populates a hidden value with the page contents.

But form-data requests from browsers aren’t Gzip-compressed, so the resulting data is huge and needs to be sent over people’s (often slow, often mobile) upstream connections. So I found an open-source DEFLATE implementation in Javascript — really — and the bookmarklet compresses the page data right there in the browser before sending it.

The whole procedure is hideously complex, but works incredibly well.

Instapaper integration seems ubiquitous in any information consumption application that’s been released in the last year - how did that start?

This started as a fortunate side effect of having a few influential developers who were fans of Instapaper, most notably Loren Brichter (Tweetie, now Twitter), Craig Hockenberry (Twitterrific), and Brent Simmons (NetNewsWire), who integrated send-to-Instapaper features into their respective products a long time ago. And since the Twitter and RSS client markets are so competitive and innovate so rapidly, many other developers quickly followed suit.

Now, it’s almost always a highly requested feature for new content-finding and content-consumption apps, especially on iOS. I’m just honored and humbled that it has become this widespread.

My impression is your feature development process is very iterative — do you start with something that you want yourself and then slowly develop for your users? Does it work? How do you know when you’re done?

That’s correct. I don’t plan specific, major releases very often — I just incrementally build on the product in development, test features on myself for a while, cancel those that don’t work, and roll up the successful ones into a release every few months.

Generally, I know I’m done because as I’m testing the migration from the current in-store version to the new version, I cringe at how bad the in-store version is relative to my shiny new development copy. I think, “I can’t believe *that* is what customers are using right now, when they could be using *this*.”

That’s when I freeze new features, fix any known bugs, polish any rough edges, begin final testing, and prepare to issue the release.

What productivity tip have you discovered that now you can’t live without?

Keep a to-do list.

A real one. One that you actually use and update throughout the day. It doesn’t need to be fancy, like the getting-things-done task managers — I use TaskPaper, which is essentially a text editor with optimized syntax highlighting for to-do lists, against a text file on Dropbox.

I’ve never been a note-taker. In high school, I was that smartass kid who never had any notebooks or anything on his desk in class. Just a blank desk to slowly fall asleep on. I thought I could just keep track of everything in my head, which is true in high school if you’re a smartass slacker, but doesn’t work very well after that.

If a task isn’t written down in a list or set to alert me in iCal, it’s gone. Forgotten. Doesn’t get done.

Oh, and dump your cable TV service. Get the shows you actually enjoy from iTunes and Netflix and stop wasting time watching whatever’s “on”.

What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not being an engineer?

I love to write. Not anything substantial, like novels or stories — just blog posts. Writing about a subject helps clarify, mature, and sometimes even change my opinion on a topic. Afterward, I feel accomplished and productive, and the responses I get are fulfilling, constructive, and often more numerous than I expect.

The Art of Not

I sign up for every single beta, trial, or preview that crosses my inbox as a virtual land grab for the “rands” username. Yes, I am very interested in whatever bleeding edge thingamahoo you’re up to, but the chances are this will be the only time I’m going to login into your service.

It is a function of my time, not your hard work. I’ve just searched for the word “invite” in the subject line of emails received since the beginning of the year and I’m looking at 20 new applications and services that showed up, and ironically, the one new service I’m using the most is the one for which I didn’t get an invite.

Yes, there are exactly zero emails from Instagram in my inbox, and that’s just the beginning of things they are successfully not doing.

Instagram Explained

Delivering the Instagram pitch is usually a study in disappointment.

Me: “You take pictures, tweak them with filters, and then share them with your friends.”

You: “Yeah, I have three of those.”

Same here. I grabbed Hipstamatic, took five shots, and didn’t use it again. I checked out Photoshop Express and ran screaming. I still regularly use TiltShift Generator, but that usage pales in comparison to how Instagram has become part of my day, along with 300,000 others and counting. And that’s with an impressive list of features Instagram doesn’t offer, including:

• A significant web presence: the interface is the iPhone application.
• Options for rotating or otherwise altering your photos, other than 11 filters.
• Complex social networking features.

Yet in a crowded market of low-end mobile photo editing tools, Instagram has become an overnight success. Why? They said no — a lot.

The List of Not

Granted, one of the documented reasons for Instagram’s spartan feature set is the size of the team. As noted in the Quora article, the team allegedly spent a year working on the foundation for what became Instagram. But it was in an eight-week period that Instagram was designed, developed, and deployed. They could have waited another eight weeks and added a bunch more features, but they didn’t. I think each omission is interesting.

The lack of a significant web presence. Yes, you can share the URL for an individual photo via the website, but virtually all other interactions with Instagram are via the iPhone application — the website is currently an afterthought. This type of product launch is a testimony to the buzz and strength of iPhone as a platform, but I think it speaks more to Instagram’s tight focus on the one key workflow: “Grab a photo in a moment, make it better, and share it — with everyone.”

Nothing in that workflow needs to involve a traditional computer. Everything you need to participate in this workflow is sitting in your back pocket. Yes, the social angle of Instagram would be improved by a vast swath of eyeballs from the web, and I’m certain that’s coming, but the opportunity for that feature to matter has been created by Instagram’s choice to first intensely focus on the one workflow.

Limited options for altering photos. Ok, I didn’t run screaming from Photoshop Express. It’s a well-thought-out application that provides a solid set of photo editing tools, but after brief experiments I’ve never used it again for the same reason I’ve never written much of anything on my iPhone.

The interface of the iPhone is moment-based. You’re in; you’re out. Yes, I’ve lost many hours getting angry with Angry Birds, but for most interactions I want to get in and get out as quickly as possible. When I fire up Photoshop Express, the application asks, “Are you ready to spend the next 5-10 minutes of your life adding effects and borders to that photo of your cat?” The answer is no.

Other than cropping a photo to a pleasing Polaroid-esque square, the only options for photo alteration are a minimal set of 11 filters. No color correction. No brightness. No contrast. Where Instagram chose to invest their time (and yours) was choosing a diverse set of filters that seem to improve just about any photo.

Too dark? Try the 1977 filter. Flat color? How about X-Pro II? Too much color, but lots of detail? Try Inkwell.

The Instagram folks could’ve lost their frakkin’ minds including any number of filters in their initial release, but they didn’t. They picked a sweet spot for filters that improve just about any photo without overwhelming you with choices.

Minimal social. Unlike many of the other mobile photo editing tools, Instagram does have a social component. There’s a backend service that uses a Twitter-like “we’re sharing everything unless you tell us otherwise” privacy model, but similar to other Instagram design choices, the social angle is simple.

Instagram heavily leverages the work of others with their social strategy. You comb your Facebook and Twitter friend lists as a starting point for a follower list, but more interesting is Instagram’s publishing feature set. It’s one area that’s feature rich. You can take your recently Instagramed photo and publish it to a bevy of services: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and Foursquare.

While this represents a lot of functionality, I still see Instagram’s social angle as a study in Not. In the battle for eyeballs, Instagram knows they’ll be more successful long term by not trying to be any of these established services, so they embrace them. Once again focusing on the last step of the workflow: “share it — with everyone.”

Regarding Product Market Fit

There’s an inflection point in product development dubbed “product market fit”. It’s a milestone when a given service or product has found its market and can now focus on building a business.

It’s comforting, the idea that there’s a moment where you can safely say, “All that hard work has successfully resulted in our fit in this market “. Unfortunately, it’s only an event you discover after it appears. It’s a milestone, not a blueprint.

So, how’d Instagram do it? How’d they swoop into a cluttered market and grab 300,000 sets of eyeballs in eight weeks? Were they lucky? No. Did the have the benefit of examining the work of those that went before them? You bet, but that’s not the biggest reason.

The Instagram team could have gotten lost in any number of distracting feature buckets. In fact, based on the Quora article, it looks like they did, but then they threw away that application and built one intensely focused solely on photos.

There’s lots more coming from Instagram. There are subtle clues throughout the application that it could be adapted to share any type of media. Whatever they choose to do, they now have the opportunity to choose because of what they chose not to do.

Your Cat. My Socks.

We need to talk about your cat because your cat is pissing me off.

Your cat is eating my socks. No. Really. Your cat has eaten four pairs of my socks.

Yes, I know cats can’t digest cloth. Your cat does not have super-feline sock-eating and digestion skills. Your cat nibbles the toes off my socks and then throws up these toe parts all over my closet floor as little gooey sockballs.

Your cat is pissing me off and we need to have a conversation about it.

The Topic of Conversation

In How to Run a Meeting, I describe a conversation as “verbal ping pong… you bat the little white verbal ball back and forth until someone wins”. This describes a simple conversation, but conversations are rarely simple. They have a variety of structures that are carefully negotiated and molded by the participants.

To understand the different type of structures, we need to define a base unit of conversation and the actions that potentially surround it. Let’s call this base unit of conversation a topic.

A topic is the headline you’d give to the current content and state of the conversation. Examples:

• The problem with our bug queue.
• I can’t stand Stan.
• You are bugging me in indescribable ways that I will now attempt to describe.

In my head, a topic looks like this:

The key parts of this model are:

1. Stop button. For any number of reasons, a conversation can stop or be interrupted. When this occurs, all conversation participants are effectively agreeing: “This topic is done and there will be no further discussion during this conversation”.
2. The agreed upon Topic of the conversation.
3. Progress Bar. This is a totally subjective measure that indicates how close a conversation is to being resolved. If the bar is moving, this topic is currently in play.
4. Pause button. A healthy conversation is rarely only focused on a single topic. Conversations meander from one topic to the next. When paused, a topic is no longer being discussed, but it remains open and unresolved in the minds of the participants.

This is a lot of preamble to describe an act we do automatically. If this model strikes you as overly complex, know this — you are going to spend half of your goddamned life suffering through the alignment of differing perspectives in any given conversation. It’s the single biggest waste of your time in dealing with other people and the better you understand, the less time you’ll waste. So, let’s circle back to…

Your Goddamned Cat

As we sit down to have our conversation regarding the sockballs littering my closet floor, I’m thinking about how I’m going to successfully convince you to keep your cat on a tighter leash. In fact, I don’t want the cat in the house at all, but you pay half the rent and we did agree when we arrived that the cat was cool. I need to figure out how to verbally amend that agreement, which means we’re going to need to negotiate. I’m going to have to concede something in order get the goddamned cat away from my delicious socks and out of the house.

In this case, I don’t know what my concession is — it’s something we need to discover via our conversation, which means there are a couple of potential topics:

1. Regarding your cat eating my socks.
2. The cat eviction negotiation.
3. Things I know that piss you off.

With these topics in mind, our conversation starts gently, in the living room. I explain, “I would like to discuss the matter of your cat eating my socks,” to which you respond, “I am sick and tired of you not cleaning the bathroom”.

Whoa. Wait. What?

In my head, the conversation looked like this:

But you just hit the pause button on our first topic and started another topic:

The second topic introduces a new element in the model — the segue. This handy line is the context that ties one topic to another, which, in the case of the sockball situation, is currently a confusing, “Wuh?”

The point: it takes at least two people to have a conversation, but the real work is in making sure you’re both having the same conversation.

I can help.

A Conversation Structure

In computer science, there’s a concept called data structures. The idea is that a data structure is a model used to organize data so that it can be used efficiently. One of the simplest structures is called a list and it looks like this:

In terms of a conversation, think of lists as the most basic and easy to follow type of conversation. Using the model I describe above, no topic can be paused or stopped until the topic is resolved. There are no segues, tangents, or sidebars.

You’re thinking conversations as simple and structured as these don’t exist, and you’re right. This type of meeting does occur, but it’s called a presentation — where the speaker is click-click-clicking through his topics on his merry way towards the undisputed end.

While this basic list of conversations doesn’t exist, there are people who want them to exist and will make this clear as part of the conversation. They sound like this:

• “Wait, wait, wait, we’re not done with topic #1. Can we talk about topic #1?”
• “Hold it, before we go there, what about the issue at hand?”
• “This new topic has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re talking about.”

The intricacies and implementation of various data structures are not the topic of this article. What’s relevant is understanding that there are different conversation models you might find yourself in and then figuring out how to adapt.

The Stack

A slightly more complex data structure, and one that is more representative of a real conversation, is the stack. This is where our Pause and Stop buttons come into play. Let’s go back to that goddamned sock-eating cat to understand. Our conversation started with the sock topic, but you immediately put a Pause on that first topic and fired up a new one. In my head that looks this:

This is a stack. The topics are literally stacked on top of each other because, in my head, we’re actually talking about both topics, and the successful conclusion of all topics is key to this entire conversation coming to a successful conclusion. The question is are we both prepared for this type of conversation?

My definition of an effective conversation is if, at any moment, you could ask any participant in the conversation to point at precisely which topic was being discussed and how that topic was progressing. Bonus points for walking through the stack and explaining how you got there.

When conversation participants lose the context of the conversation, when they lose track of where they are, they stop listening and stop participating. The conversation no longer has a chance of resolution because resolution requires their active involvement and all they’re doing is fake listening to your speech.

Conversation Tolerances

A stacked conversation, one with multiple topics tied together with segues, is where everyone involved needs to keep track not just of the complexities of the conversation, but of the tolerances of those participating. Again, this is not a meeting with a well-defined agenda and anointed leader; this is a conversation where everyone needs to keep their wits about them.

When a conversation gets complex, this is what I’m watching for:

How many open topics can we handle? Each segue moves us slightly further from the starting topic. Are you cool with that? Ok, how many topics can you keep in your head? There’s a point where everyone will lose track of where they are if we have too many open topics — what’s your threshold? Wait, now I’m lost, so I’m going to ask: “How’d we get here?”

What’s our segue tolerance? How deliberate do I need to be switching from one topic to the next? Do I need to explicitly say, “We are switching topics now,” or can you keep up? How much segue detail do I need to give? Can anyone hit Pause and pivot to a new topic? Will you? Ok, you just did, but I don’t understand your segue, so I’ll ask: “Please explain how this relates to that.”

What’s our closure tolerance? How much progress do you need to make before we switch topics? Will you get cranky if we don’t even try to resolve something? Is this topic more important to you than other open ones? Will you freak out if all is not resolved? Can the conversation totally mutate into something else? Is that a bad thing?

Understanding both your own conversation tolerances as well as the ones of those you converse with is essential to having a successful conversation, and the best way to know where they’re at is to look. Humans wear a bevy of visual cues that indicate their comfort with a conversation. Nods, sounds, and eye contact — these are potential signs of engagement. The rule is, if they look lost, you ask: “What did you just hear?” If you’re lost, you say: “I’m not following you.”

The Tree

Problem solving is the art of a finding a solution acceptable to everyone in the conversation. If everyone knew the solution to the problem, you wouldn’t be having the conversation in the first place. If there is no problem, then, well, you’re shooting the shit. Problem solving means getting conversationally creative, and being creative means letting yourself mentally wander — eschewing structure. This is why my favorite conversation structure is the Tree.

The Tree is the pinnacle of advanced conversations. Where a stacked conversation looks like this:

The tree appears chaotic:

The simple explanation of the Tree conversation is that it’s multiple conversations. In the image above, you’re looking at three seemingly disparate conversations, except they’re not. The reality and the definition of the Tree-based conversations are the inspired segues. Think of a conversation with your best friend. Would anyone listening to this conversation actually be able to follow it? Could they diagram it? Of course not.

Could you? Of course.

For qualified participants, the Tree is pure conversational joy. Topics vary wildly, being held together by only the thinnest of segues that are often unspoken, but there is a structure. And more importantly, there is mutual understanding and appreciation of this wonderfully chaotic verbal mess, because it’s in this mess where you have the most potential to resolve the topic.

Remember, this is a conversation; it’s not a story and it’s not a meeting. There is a topic to be resolved and no one is happy until that topic is resolved. If this was a trivial topic, if we could just tell your cat to stop eating my socks. Resolution might be easy, but it’s not. My spoken frustration about your sock-eating cat has triggered your response about my inept cleaning skills, which means now we’re going to do some heavy-duty roommate therapy.

The resolution might be tricky and it might involve verbally wandering to disparate topics, but you and I have known each other for years. We’re ok with a deep stack of topics that eventually transform into a forest of conversations. We know that part of big discovery is verbally wandering into strange mental places.

How to Be a Douche

Douche is trending.

I’m going to start by saying this is a dangerous article to write because an article that attempts to define the characteristics of douchery is, well, kind’a douchey. However, usage of the word douche has been on the rise in current culture and I believe I know why, so I’m going to risk it.

In the preface to Being Geek, I briefly explained the definitions of geek, nerd, and dork. While my research found no meaningful distinction between nerd and geek, the term dork was interesting — while being a geek about a topic (say a music geek) means that you are self-declaring that you deeply appreciate a thing, dork is used by geeks to position their geekery above another geek’s field. For example, I’m a computer geek, but those movie geeks are dorks.

See?

It’d be easy to simply map douche to dork and say that douchery was in the eye of the beholder, but I think there is something bigger going on with douche. The label of douche, while slightly hilarious, is also slightly serious.

The Douche Spectrum

To begin to understand the deviousness of the term douche, we need to explore its basic usage. There are three douche use cases:

Self-declaring as a douche — “I can’t figure out how to write this bio without sounding like a douche.” A mostly harmless usage.

Labeling as douche in person — “Your unearned high self-esteem… is kind’a douchey.” Again, a face-to-face douche label is, in my opinion, just good constructive criticism.

Lastly, labeling as douche in absentia — “I’m tired of his transparent self-serving bullshit. He’s a douche”. In an Internet full of individuals screaming for attention, this label is the kiss of death. Here’s why:

The Sell

If you’re taking the time to create and post content on the Internet, you are in the sales business. You’re interested in someone buying the content; otherwise you’d be quietly taping that content to the wall of your office.

Rands, I want no money. There is nothing to buy.

Doesn’t matter. Just because you’re not charging for it, doesn’t mean you’re not selling it. Yes, there’s a wide spectrum to selling varying from “I’m selling you on this idea” to “Please buy this poster regarding how to pet a cat”, but the act of sharing something with the Planet Earth has a very different motivation than sharing with yourself, and it’s within this act that the dangerous label of douche is hiding.

A Douche Criteria

The label of douche is the end result of a confluence of terribly subjective and contextual cues. As I’m reading your writing or watching your presentation, I mentally measure the following:

Are you for sale? Is it clear that your opinion is being motivated purely by money? Can I literally see the monetary strings dragging you hither and fro? Can I hear your thoughts above what is clearly your business plan? Am I hearing what you’re selling before what you think? Are you never missing an opportunity to self-promote?

Is fame your goal or a consequence? Is your content deliberately inflammatory because you like to see shit burn? Are you enthusiastic with purpose or just annoyingly enthusiastic? Are you just trying to get attention? Wait, are you telling me you’re famous? Really?

Are you human? Are you letting a bit of yourself into your ideas? Can I see you thinking? Do you have moments of humility? Empathy? Where do you end and your ideas begin? Are you just a mouthpiece? Can I discern your motivation?

Is there substance to your style? Did you earn your arrogance? Are you adding something substantive to the planet or are you just noisy? Are you pitching refinement as a mask for aggressively bad taste? Do I have a sense of your experience? Are you beating me over the head with it?

Are you aware that anyone else is here? Are you giving me room to think? Do you speak without understanding consequence? Are you aware of the world around you? Are you transparently self-serving?

Are you a douche?

The Douche Threshold

What matters to you is different than what matters to me. I have a douche hot button — blatant self promotion — but you couldn’t care less. Still, when you label someone a douche, I giggle bit and then I wonder, “What do you actually mean?”

In this age of the empowered individual voice, we are flooded with opinions in blogs, tweets, and likes. As a means of managing this flood, we need a mental model to partition these unincorporated individuals — we need a new vocabulary regarding who is worth listening to and not — I believe that is why the term douche is trending.

The extreme subjectivity of the Douche Criteria can get you in a lot of trouble. If I had to boil all of the criteria down, I’d say the lazy version of the Douche Criteria is, “Do I like you?” Human beings are most comfortable when surrounded with those who look and sound alike — who share the same values. Outsiders are viewed first by their differences rather than their potential. Yeah, it sucks.

My optimistic hope is the Internet hides the individual differences that don’t matter while providing a stage for ideas. This is why the term of douche is not a goofy label that says, “You’re different”, it’s a personal and essential judgement of authenticity.

(This post would not exist without the fine suggestions of the very-non-douchey folks who follow me on Twitter.)

An Unexpected Connection

Blue whales.

I couldn’t fucking stop researching blue whales. I was 12 and my teacher had just explained to the class that blue whales are the largest mammals on planet Earth.

In hindsight, this reaction was my first confirmed sighting of what in The Nerd Handbook I call the “annoying efficient relevancy engine”. Something in the phase “largest mammal on earth” started the relevancy engine and once it starts, it’s not going to stop until the relevancy is understood.

Two Buckets

The relevancy engine is the nerd’s ability to instantly and with little conscious effort parse all incoming information into one of two buckets: relevant or irrelevant. It’s a defensive information management strategy built as a reaction to the nerd’s innate passion for information — for understanding. See, a nerd can and will find out everything about anything, and left to their own devices, they’ll do this… endlessly.

Items placed in the irrelevant bucket are aggressively ignored, whereas the items in the relevant bucket are flagged as compelling and are, if possible, immediately investigated.

The reason for this often-unavoidable research compulsion varies by topic. There is something tucked inside of the idea — a puzzle, a game, a system to be discerned — that triggers the nerd’s pleasure centers, and, once triggered, the only course of action is understanding. This is why, when you’ve piqued my interest, I keep asking questions, incessantly, while staring you in the face… never blinking.

The Value of Relevance

The real value comes when we’ve vetted the relevant. The act of obsessively researching yields even more relevant data that allows the nerd to fully index the idea. A mental notepad is created that reads “Blue Whales” and on this notepad is written the three most relevant and interesting facts that make blue whales intriguing. This card is then carefully filed away.

This collection of esoteric indexed data is why a nerd’s knowledge feels five miles wide and three inches deep and why we’re randomly great at games like Trivial Pursuit. See, four years ago, someone mentioned the largest organism on the planet was a Quaking Aspen tree. We heard that one relevant fact and then spent two hours investigating the various methods by which a largest organism might be measured, we read about the largest known fully connected Quaking Aspen grove in Utah, and ended up reading about the world’s largest single stem tree, a Giant Sequoia named General Sherman.

It sounds like a lot of work until you understand the payout.

To Wit

Nerds are fucking funny. It’s another point from The Nerd Handbook that I suggest is related to the relevancy engine, but I never explain. Let’s try now.

The processing of relevancy has three steps and it’s the third where the magic happens:

1. Collect the Relevant
2. Research and Index if necessary
3. Connect the Relevant in Efficient and Entertaining Ways

So, how is The Funny created in this flow? It’s a big question: what is funny? I’d say there are two big classifications of funny. There are jokes and there’s wit. Jokes are memorized comedy retold with moxy. Wit is original comedy created in real-time and delivered with precise timing. Nerds are fucking witty because they connect the relevant to the present quickly and in clever ways.

Have you ever sat in a meeting full of engineers? What’s the game? The game is “Who can say the funniest and/or snarkiest thing and get the biggest laugh?” and to play you need to kick the relevancy engine into high gear. You need to hear everything being said, parse it, compare it to everything you know, and then find the most relevant connection possible. In nanoseconds.

Laughter is often the by-product of these observations, but an equal amount can be the hard silence found amongst the discovery of an uncomfortable truth. It’s at that moment you realize the primary goal is not laughter, but the art of the impressive connection.

Connecting the Relevant

The art of the connection is the end result of a nerd’s highly obsessive due diligence performed on anything that falls into the relevant bucket.

Laughter is sometimes the end result of connections — the recognition of the Clever between two dissimilar items or the absurd lack of any connection at all — but the result in the nerd’s brain is far more satisfying. A successful connection brings efficient order to the two heretofore-unrelated objects, and you know what that means: we’ve discovered structure. This is related to that. I know more than I did a moment ago.

Discovery of structure in a chaotic world means less chaos, and while we’re happy to make you laugh, the idea of a more orderly, structured, and knowable world is what drives us and keeps us warm in bed at night.

Being Geek: The Trailer

Being Geek by lonelysandwich. Available on O’Reilly and Amazon

Chill

In my teens, I got migraines. Maybe it was growing pains, but all I knew is that randomly and without warning, I’d get a splitting, seeing spots, curled up in a dark room headache. Painkillers didn’t help. Meditation merely distracted, diet was out of the question — hello, teenager — and I got regular exercise as part of the cross-country team.

After a particularly bad July, the girlfriend at the time suggested, “My Mom does biofeedback, you should give it a whirl,” to which I responded, “Does she sell mood rings, too? How about pet rocks? Hulu hoops?”

She ignored me. “It’s not like that. She can show how your body reacts to different stimuli.”

“Do I have to sing Kumbaya?”

“No.”

I Think I’m Breathing

The process of being wired up for biofeedback is intimidating. A variety of sensors measure brainwaves, heart function, breathing, muscle activity, and skin temperature. Once wired, you can literally see the collection of systems that is your body working in concert.

It gets interesting when you start ignoring the feedback. “Rands, we’re going to try different relaxation techniques and see what works. How do you relax?”

TV? She turned the TV on for ten minutes. “Yeah, that doesn’t relax you. Your brain is working.”

Closing my eyes and breathing deeply? Five minutes later, “Again, it looks like you’re thinking too much about not thinking. You’re not relaxing.”

What about reading? She pulled a book off her shelf and I started reading. Within a few minutes, all of the feedback pointed out that my body was diving into a deep relaxation.

“Rands, reading chills you out.”

Weeks later, when the next migraine began to creep up the back of my head, I grabbed Ender’s Game and read. In 30 minutes, the tiny tendrils of pain began to vanish. In an hour, the migraine was gone. Reading was never a cure-all for every migraine, but reading gave me shot at by-passing a crippling day of pain.

Chilling Out is Essential

If my prior report that a third of high school graduates never read another book didn’t freak you out, here’s a different pitch on why we want people to pick up a book: reading chills you out.

I’ve no idea whether my biochemistry is indicative of the rest of the planet or not, but I know if the world is freaking me out, reading calms me down. The act of pulling words off a page and constructing a thought forces me to clear my head, discard stress, and find my mental footing. In a world where whomever is screaming the loudest sound bite is considered to be providing information, I think the act of chilling out is essential.

And you can help with the chill. I offer you the second Rands in Repose benefit t-shirt.

This year’s logo is designed by Victoria Wang, who designed the shirts for the now scuttled C4 conference. The shirt itself is a product of the Continental Clothing Company and is constructed of insanely soft 70% bamboo. If you haven’t given a bamboo shirt a try, you haven’t really chilled out. Once again, the folks at buyolympia.com have made finding, printing, and selling shirts a simple process.

As with the previous shirt, 100% of the proceeds from each shirt go to First Book, a nonprofit organization with the mission to give children from low-income families not just the opportunity to read and to own their first new books, but a chance to learn how to chill.

The Shop I Want

Until recently, I’d never been to IKEA, mostly because of fear. I knew there would be things I wanted, but the IKEA reputation kept me away.

What I heard:

• It’s huge
• It’s a maze
• You can’t get out in less than three hours
• It’s full of people.

While I guess I need flat-pack design furniture at affordable prices, this is not the shop I want.

You know, Everything

Back when eBay was novel, I played a game with the family before a Thanksgiving dinner. As a means of introducing the idea of eBay to them, I asked each member to describe a thing they wanted that they believed would be hard to find. The sister wanted an antique printer’s box, the Mom was looking for a vintage lens, and the Dad, an electrical engineer, requested a now forgotten device that I will dub a hibblygizmo.

“Ok, so these are things you want that you believe would be hard to find, right?”

Collectively, “Yes”.

“And how would you go about finding them?”

Again, collectively, “No clue”.

I spent the next ten minutes confirming what I already knew. All of these items, however esoteric and including the hibblygizmo, were readily available as active auctions on eBay. I printed out each of the auctions and handed the paper to each member of my family, saying, “Happy Thanksgiving. You now live in a world where a shop exists that has everything.”

Unfortunately, this is also not the shop I want.

Regarding Abundance

The shop I want is owned by a person I know and respect. Inside of this shop are two button-up shirts, a pair of jeans, three pens, a desk, and a small white marble polar bear. Each of these items is picked out specifically for me, and more importantly, they are items that, given my own devices, I would never choose or possibly even discover for myself.

As I walk in this shop, the proprietor sees me and grins. “Rands, I have the perfect desk for you.”

“I don’t need a desk.”

“You need this desk. It’s vintage Stow Davis. It’s walnut with solid brass and wood handles. It’s the perfect size for your Cave.”

“I don’t need a desk.”

“Stow Davis. Founded in 1879. Did you know Frank Lloyd Wright commissioned them to produce furniture in the ’30s?”

This mythical person is not going to stop until I’ve purchased this desk because this person knows me and knows that this desk is perfect for me.

I Said, Everything

We’re in a world where you can find anything you want, which is great, except when you realize there’s a lot of everything. Google was created and thrives attempting to solve the everything problem for us. Google has made it wonderfully simple to find a thing, but just because you find a thing doesn’t mean you care about it. As you stare at a PageRanked list of stuff, you have a choice:

You can sit back and be force-fed the decisions and opinions of others. Many of the people who are making these decisions are not evil. They are well-paid, well-intentioned, bright people whose publicly traded companies have built astoundingly profitable businesses building and marketing things they want you to think you need.

These people think they know you because they’ve done the math. They believe you fall into the Stow Davis-inclined IKEA-fearing writer slash surfer demographic, and that’s a strong demographic. Knowing this demographic, they can answer the question: “How can we move 72,000 more of those things on this demographic? How are we going to give the impression the mundane is unique?”

Or…

You can have an opinion. It sounds like work, but it’s really not. An opinion is not the definitive view or judgement regarding a thing; it’s you staring at that desk and saying, “You know, I like the look and the feel of those brass handles. I also like the drawers that squeak just a bit when you open them. It speaks to the character of the whole desk.”

It’s not that I want a Stow Davis desk, it’s that I want to find that desk. I want to go to seven different antique shops and spend a weekend developing an opinion about the state of antique desks. I want to find someone who knows the entire history of Stow Davis desks and won’t fucking shut up about them.

Half the fun of having an opinion is the quest to find one, but the everything problem remains. You don’t have the time to have an opinion about everything, but someone has the time.

My Shaving Cream is Crap

It is. It’s waxy pumpkin-smelling crap and when I ran out, I thought, “Good riddance”. I am now faced with two problems: first, I need new shaving cream, and second, my instinct is to spend the entire goddamned weekend researching shaving cream in a compulsive quest for complete understanding of all there is to know about the shaving cream world.

While I want to have an opinion, I do not have time for this exquisite shaving cream expedition, but someone has already completed this quest and has an opinion I can trust. I just need to find them, so I do:

An amazing thing happens when you ask for help, people respond. In their response, not only do you get their opinion, you also get brief glimpse into how they tick, and whether or not that ticking is aligned with yours. When I asked on Twitter for shaving cream help, not only did I learn more than I ever thought possible about wet shaving, shaving cream, straight razors, and a bevy of other shaving topics, I also found five more people to follow because in 140 simple characters, they told a story that reminded me that the best way to search the Internet is with someone you trust.

The Shop I Want is Full of Stories

The shop I want does not exist because this impossible shop is full of people spread across the planet. There’s Tasha who can explain anything about grammar. Scott can tell you anything about the Smashing Pumpkins and he also makes a Mac’n’Cheese for which I will fly across the United States to reverse engineer his recipe. Boris is in this shop and he’ll talk about scuba diving until I ask him to stop. I’ve collected each of these people and placed them in this impossible shop because, at some point in the past, we discover a common trait or idea that tied us together - we discovered that together we could explain the world to each other.

I don’t need flat furniture nor do I need a desk. I have enough pens and journals. My closet of full of shirts and while I still wonder what a hibblygizmo is, I’m certain I don’t need one. What I need is shop full of people with opinions — because it’s not what I know that I’m worried about, it’s what I don’t know that’s really interesting.

The shop I want is full of people who are dedicated to their opinion. Who are happier understanding a thing rather than wanting it. These people will happily tell the story of happened upon this opinion and I want to hear it because the opinion of someone I trust is just as valuable as my own.

Bits, Features, and Truth

There’s a meeting going on right now. It’s a cross-functional meeting, which means that not only are multiple departments in the organization represented, but multiple expertise types, attitudes, and agendas as well. The cross-functional nature of this meeting means a program manager is present and they are likely serving in their role as translator.

See, good program managers speak all the regional dialects of the company, so when engineering says, “It’s done,” they jump right in and translate: “Done pending function testing, production testing, and final documentation review,” so that product management doesn’t tell sales, “It’s done,” and they start selling something which actually isn’t done.

In this well-attended multi-lingual meeting, a decision is on the table and it’s a decision that’s happening in every single software company right this second. It’s not really a decision, it’s a negotiation, but it’s on the table and people are tense because this decision is under heavy scrutiny:

Product management: “What’s it going to take get this feature done?”

Program management: “What he’s asking is…”

Engineering: “Quiet, I know what he’s asking. The answer is, do you want to sacrifice TIME, QUALITY, or FEATURES?”

Program management: “What HE’s…”

Product management: “Yeah, I’ve heard this before and I still want it all.”

More talking. More translating. Action items are assigned, which gives everyone the illusion that progress was made. And we all return to our respective regional offices and wait until we have the same meeting again, where we attempt to communicate intelligently with each other. But all we really do is schedule meetings… when what we need to do is figure out who makes decisions.

That Damned Triangle

Time. Quality. Features. It’s usually described as a triangle, which somehow represents the state of your product or your feature. I believe the idea is that in a perfect and unattainable world, this triangle is perfect, equilateral, and seemingly at rest. There is balance among the time you have to release, the quality you are seeking to attain, and the features you want to ship.

In reality, this triangle is never at rest. It’s constantly shifting and, well, I don’t think it’s actually a triangle. It’s just a mental model that gives you just enough ammunition to lie. The conversation goes like this:

Product management: “We need this feature to be competitive.”

Engineering: “Ok. We need four extra weeks to do that feature since it’s new and you’re asking late.”

Product management: “The date can’t shift, we made commitments.”

Engineering: “So did we. Listen, something has to give. You’re adding more work or features, which means we need more time, or, if you want, less quality. Make a choice.”

These black and white arguments don’t hold water. The idea that there are three simple levers that define a feature or a product is passive-aggressive professional absurdity. There are myriad levers the team can adjust, but to understand them you need to understand the people who are actually building the software.

Bits, Features, and Truth

Let’s start with an exercise. I want you to think about the project that you’re working on, or, if your project is ginormous, I want you to think of the feature that you’re developing. Relative to this product or feature, I want you to walk up to your nearest whiteboard and draw three large circles:

Now, a name belongs inside each of these circles and it’s the name of a specific role on your team. The traditional titles for these roles are engineering manager, product manager, and program manager, but I don’t want you get to get hung up on titles. I want to you to think about the person who is best qualified to make a decision regarding the bits, the features, and the truth.

Bits: Who is the engineer who has the most influence on the bits? There are likely influencers, but who is the engineer that everyone goes to when they have a question. Your manager’s name is a good knee jerk name to put up here, but just because they have “manager” in their title doesn’t mean they know what’s going on as well as where to go. I want the name of the person who not only gets the call in the middle of the night where there is a bit-related emergency, but also the person who makes the large bit-related decisions. I want to know the name of the person who, when they say no, the debate stops. Got it? Ok, next.

Features: Who is the person who defines the content for the product or feature? This is the name of the person who is constantly asking for more without regard for cost. This is the person who can eloquently and calmly explain the need for this feature with an argument stronger than, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?

Truth: This might be the hardest to define because it’s a role that could live anywhere in the building. While it took years to form this opinion, I believe the person who is responsible for the process is the one most likely to be the keeper of the truth.

There’s a constant ebb and flow of information in any group of people. Important decisions are made in the morning that can take hours or days to move to the other side of the building. Information is tucked away for nefarious purposes. Information is laundered, adapted, and misinterpreted.

The truth is the aggregate best set of information that exists in the building, and the person who consistently has it is the keeper of the truth. You know this person; it’s the person you go to when you’re wondering, “What the hell is going on here?” This is the person who knows the politics and the players, they know the real reason the product is late, and this is why this is usually the job of the program manager.

The complaint I hear most about program management is the same complaint I hear about managers: What do they do all day? What do they actually own? Practically, the most important part of the product they own is the schedule, but their larger contribution is information management.

Yeah, I know you start-up folk believe you’re doing just great without a semblance of program or process management. You believe that these types of folks are going to slow you down with their agendas and to-do lists. Here’s the deal: just because no one has the title in your garage doesn’t mean the role doesn’t exist. In any group larger than one, someone has taken the role of keeper of the truth and their key skill is information wrangler. They constantly gather the information from the group, synthesize it, translate it, and, sometimes forcibly, present this information to the folks who are busily lying to themselves.

Me: “We have six weeks to shipping, we’re good.”

Keeper: “Feature complete was two weeks ago and we’re still writing code.”

Me: “But the team is fired up, working weekends, and…”

Keeper: “Steve and Ryan are on vacation for two weeks starting tomorrow.”

Me: “Oh.”

A good program manager cares about the program and the product, but they also have a calm professional ambivalence. They have to — they’re always uncovering and then surviving the worst-case scenarios. These discoveries often give them the most complete picture of how the product is doing. Their ability to survive them has made them unflappable - they don’t freak out because they’ve lived through it and know there’s always a way out… somehow. All of this experience is why they usually end up owning the schedule. I’ll explain why when we get to analysis.

So, who is this calm, truth-oriented, well-informed person on your team? Who is the person who doesn’t lose it? Who is the person you go to to understand the intent of the other parts of the organization? They very well might not have the title of program manager, but they are there.

Circle of Comfort

Before I analyze your circles, I need you to do one more pass where you ask yourself two questions.

Great, you’ve got a name in each circle. Maybe the same name is in two circles. We’ll talk more about that in a moment. My first question is: for each name, what’s the person’s circle of comfort? It’s fine that you put Ryan in both Bits and Features, but where does his heart lie? What is his professional background? Which circle is he going to instinctively optimize for? For each circle, if you think the occupant’s natural circle is different, write that name underneath their circle.

My second question is: have you picked leaders? Look at the Bits circle. The name you put in there is the brightest engineer in the building, and any time anyone needs someone to explain the architecture, he’s the guy paraded across the building, but is he the leader? Does he make decisions about the direction of the product? He has incredibly strong and informed opinions about where it’s going, but when it comes down to the commit, is he the guy? No? Ok, who is?

Leaders have deep experience in their circle. It’s not chutzpah, it’s not spin; it’s the knowledge and analytical skills developed from doing the job. It’s because you can walk up to them, present a hard problem, and have an immediate, informed, and comforting answer. That’s the name that belongs in the circle.

Leaders make decisions. Sometimes it appears they’re doing it with little data. Some decisions are great, others are crap, but for the purpose of this circle exercise, you need to identify the three leaders relative to the Bits, the Features, and the Truth.

Circle Analysis

Ok, what’ve we got? Let’s walk through different circle scenarios:

- Something is empty. We don’t have program management, nor do we have any product managers. Again, don’t get hung up on titles. Just because your company hasn’t hired these folks doesn’t mean the work isn’t happening. Someone is picking features. Someone is designing the schedule. In fact, if you’re really small, there’s a chance the same name fills all three circles. Let’s talk about that.

- Same Name. All three circles. Edgar is the man. He’s our one-stop decision machine. It’s awesome. While I appreciate your velocity as well as your enthusiasm, I have concerns.

I believe an effective team eventually needs each of these roles clearly defined and owned by three separate people. Rands, where’s QA? What about design? HELLO SALES. These are essential parts of the business. WHERE ARE THOSE CIRCLES? This model is not about describing an effective business; it describes an effective team. Sales, design, QA, marketing, customer support — the list goes on. You need some version of these in order to have a business, and yes, they feed essential data into the product, but my assumption is that one of the reasons you wrote Mitchell’s name in the Feature circle is that he has a solid relationship with the design team; he knows that an essential part of his features is the design.

Three leaders. One who makes decisions regarding the bits, another who is responsible for the features, and another who cares about the truth. The theory is, these leaders are sitting in these circles because they have the ability to make good decisions relative to their expertise and the reality is these folks do not get along.

Program management believes engineering will never ship, product management believes the product would be nothing without them, and engineering thinks everyone else is useless because they don’t know how to code. It sounds pretty hostile, except when it comes to these three leaders. See, in addition to decision-making authority, these folks have healthy tension with their circle peers.

I divide healthy tension into two equal and opposite beliefs:

- First, there’s the reality-affirming belief that most everyone in the building shares. It’s the belief that my job is the most important job in the building and in my absence it’ll just fall apart. It’s a quiet belief that we tell no one, but it’s a silent strengthening belief that gives folks the confidence to make a decision. I’m an expert, I’m brilliant, and I’m right.

- Second, and specific to our circle denizens, there’s the grudging respect for the other circles and the trust of their expertise. This is a tenuous arrangement given the first belief, but part of leadership within the circle is the ability to step back from a massive decision and say, “He knows better than I”.

The idea is that the ability, skills, and experience that define each of these leaders are fundamentally different. An engineer who has seven years of coding experience has a vastly different perspective regarding features and products than a product manager who has transformed an MBA into a product management gig. You can fake it — an engineering leader can have a passionate opinion about a feature or a product — but there is a skill to defining, explaining, and justifying a feature that years of development won’t give you.

If you’re staring at your three circles and the name is the same in all three, I have two questions:

Are they all that? Can they consistently make correct bit-related decisions along with feature decisions while realistically balancing the truth? Really? If it’s the two of you in that garage, I get it, but if it’s 100 of you and one person is responsible for all three circles, I bet they are optimizing for their circle of comfort and that means two other circles aren’t being represented.

Who do they argue with? Without the healthy tension between Features and Bits, there’s no debating feature roadmaps and technical realities. A diversity of opinion takes any idea and hopefully shapes it into something unpredictably better. We can see good examples of this by looking at two other circle configurations.

- Bits and Features are the same. So Ryan, an engineer by training, is making both engineering and feature decisions. Great. That gets rid a lot of those pesky feature prioritization meetings, right? What other meetings aren’t happening? Where else is the feature set of your product not being debated because Ryan is making unilateral decisions as owner of the bits and the features?

Again, I’m being an alarmist and I’m exaggerating, but I believe you cannot effectively (and don’t want to) remove yourself from what you do to make a well-informed decision outside of your circle. Think of it like this: is Ryan the customer or does he have direct access to the customer? If the features are for engineers, there’s a solid argument that he could make decisions for both the bits and the features, but if the product or features aren’t targeted for engineers, why do we believe Ryan can make informed decisions about them?

I’m not saying that anyone outside of the feature circle can’t have an opinion about the product. You want a culture that encourages everyone to care deeply about the product you build, but if you’re developing software for regular human beings then you need a regular human being to speak to their needs.

Let’s look another variant.

- Truth is the Same as Features. Tony the business guy owns both the features and the schedule. This is a pretty common configuration because the belief is that those who make feature decisions for the user should also make scheduling decisions. We need feature X in May. What’s the hitch?

Well, you’ve got the truth bundled with the features and I’m uncomfortable with that because the truth needs to be neutral. The truth needs to be unbiased, and with Tony’s name in both circles, you’ve got the guy who is calling the shots for the features almost making the schedule decisions. He might have solid healthy tension with your Bits circle, but how is Bits going to argue with the guy who owns the levers for both content and time?

The healthy tension created by having three distinct leaders creates diverse debate about your product. Yes, this is the same debate I talked about at the beginning of this article, but the difference is when you have three leaders equally representing a well-defined viewpoint along with a sense of ownership, it’s a balanced debate where the needs of the technology are weighed against the desires of the customer and the realities of the schedule. When one leader is representing two circles, their two votes are pushing decisions in their favor.

Let the Negotiation Begin, It’s About the Debate

This is just another model. I’ve replaced the Time/Quality/Features triangle with circles. There are just as many ways to screw up and misrepresent this model with politics, inexperienced people, and poorly defined features. The difference here is I believe this model not only realistically describes the forces that pull your product in different directions, it also gives those forces a proper name.

Let’s go back to the endless debate where the Bits, Features, and Truth are equally represented:

Features: “I want feature X and I want it on the same schedule.”

Truth: “We need more time and since I know all the moving parts, I know that we’re ahead of schedule of one feature. I think we’ve got two weeks of wiggle room.”

Bits: “Two weeks isn’t enough. Can we cut this one feature that we haven’t started and no one cares about in half?”

Features: “I can live with that.”

Truth: “Sold.”

Software is built by people. The best Gantt chart only tells you half the truth about the schedule; the most complete marketing requirements document can never describe why a feature is compelling; and the most detailed technical specification will never tell you what makes for beautiful code. These are only tools and they tell little about the people who are building the software.

These people have names and they’ve earned them by not only making consistent great decisions for their area of experience, but also knowing when to ask someone else for advice.

B.A.B.

My management team was bickering. Two managers in particular: Leo and Vincent. Both of their projects were fine. Both of their teams were producing, but in any meeting where they were both representing their teams, they just started pushing each other’s buttons. Every meeting on some trivial topic:

Leo: “Vincent, are you on track to ship the tool on Wednesday?”

Vincent: “We’re on schedule.”

Leo: “For Wednesday?”

Vincent: “We’ll hit our schedule.”

Leo: “Wednesday?”

Endless passive aggressive verbal warfare. Two type A personalities who absolutely hated to be told what to do. My 1:1s with each of them were productive meetings and when I brought up the last Leo’n’Vincent battle of the wills, they immediately started pointing at their counterpart: “I really don’t know what his problem is.”

I do. They didn’t trust each other.

On the Topic of Trust

There’s a question out there regarding how close you want to get with your co-workers in your job. There’s a camp out there that employs a policy of “professional distance”. This camp believes it is appropriate to keep those they work with at arm’s length.

The managerial reason here is more concrete than the individual reasoning. Managers are representatives or officers of the company and, as such, may be asked to randomly enforce the will of the business. Who gets laid off? Why doesn’t this person get a raise? How much more does this person get? Profession distance or not, these responsibilities will always give managers an air of otherness.

Here’s my question: do you or do you not want to be the person someone trusts when they need help? Manager or not, do you see the act of someone trusting you as fitting with who you are?

Yes, there’s a line that needs to be drawn between you and your co-workers, but artificially distancing yourself from the people you spend all day every day with seems like a good way to put artificial barriers between yourself the people you need to get your job done.

Is that who you are or who you want to work for?

The topic of trust is where I draw a line in both my personal and management philosophy. My belief is that a team built on trust and respect is vastly more productive and efficient than the one where managers are distant supervisors and co-workers are 9-to-5 people you occasionally see in meetings. You’re not striving to be everyone’s pal; that’s not the goal. The goal is a set of relationships where there is a mutual belief in each other’s reliability, truth, ability, and strengths.

It’s awesome.

And it’s something you can build with a card game.

BAB

It’s pronounced how you think. Rhymes with crab. It’s an acronym for a game which, with practice, will knit your team together in unexpected ways. It’s Back Alley Bridge. Here are the rules, but before I explain why this game is a great team building exercise, you need to understand a few of the rules.

BAB isn’t bridge. The game does have a few important similarities. First, it’s a game for four players, involving two teams — the folks facing each other are on the same team and share their score. Second, it’s a trick-based game where the goal is for each team to get as many tricks as possible. A trick is won when each player turns up a card and the highest wins, unless someone plays a trump suit, which, in the case of BAB, is always spades.

Bidding. Also like bridge, BAB has bidding, meaning each team bids how many tricks they think they’re going to get after the cards have been dealt. Scoring is optimized to reward teams who get the number of tricks they bid and heavily punishes those who don’t get their bid. Bidding is a blind team effort — you have no idea what your teammate has in their hand other than what you can infer from their bid.

Decreasing hand count. Unlike bridge, the number of cards each player gets decreases with each hand. Each player gets 13 cards in the first hand, 12 in the second, and so on. Play continues down to a single card and then heads back up to 13. A work-friendly modification I’ve made is to only play every other hand (13-11-9, etc.) This number of hands fits nicely into a lunch hour.

Hail Mary. There are two special bids: Board and Boston. A bid of Board indicates the team is going to take every single trick. A board of Boston indicates the team intends to take the first six. Achieving a Board or Boston can be an impressive feat and is rewarded handsomely from a scoring perspective. Failure results in a scoring beat-down. Both of these special bids allow for wild variances in the score, which can be handy for teams who are falling behind.

Scoring, game play, and other information are in the complete rules. Now, let me explain why I picked this game as a recurring weekly lunch meeting.

In BAB, you talk shit. I’ve landed BAB in three different teams now and in each case, the amount of trash talking that showed up once players became comfortable with the game was impressive. This is a function of my personality, but it’s also a byproduct of any healthy competition amongst bright people. It’s also a sign of a healthy team. I’ll explain.

Trash talking is improvisational critical thinking — it’s the art of building comedy in the moment with only the immediate materials provided. As I’m looking for candidates for my next BAB game, I’m looking for two things: who will be able to talk trash and who needs to receive it?

The art in talking trash is the careful exploration of the edges of truth. When someone effectively lays it down, they say something honest and slightly uncomfortable. The ever-present risk with trash talking is when that line is crossed. It’s that one thing that is said that goes too far and offends, but it’s the presence of that line which makes talking trash so much fun.

It’s these honest and dangerous observations that form the basis of trust. When a co-worker makes a big observation about you and shares it with the other players, you take note - someone is watching. It sounds problematic, but remember, we’re just sitting here playing cards. It’s safe.

In a new BAB game, it takes players time to get used to the trash talking, especially in a situation like Leo and Vincent’s. Adversarial co-workers playing on the same team need to learn to ditch the business for the game. They need to understand there is a relationship outside of the daily work and there’s nothing like a comedic verbal beat-down to remind them to lighten up.

In BAB, you learn things unintentionally. Once you’ve got an established game with regular players who all know the rules, you’ll learn two things: people get better at trash talking with practice, and information travels in unpredictable ways in groups of people.

It goes like this:

• Player #1: “I bid 3.”
• Player #2: “I bid 1.”
• Player #3: “Pass.”
• Player #4: “Kevin’s quitting. I’m sure of it.”
• Player #1: “Yeah, I know.”
• Player #2: “Sucks to be you.”

Out of nowhere, in the middle of the game, you’re suddenly assessing the departure of a co-worker. I see this as a sign of a thriving, healthy BAB game because the team has begun to trust each other more. In the safety of the game, they’re letting the worries of the moment spill onto the table for all to see, which is impressive, since everyone knows that anything on the table at BAB is fair game for talking shit.

In BAB, you’re having work experiences without the work. Relationships need time to bake. Trust doesn’t magically appear; it’s cautiously built over time via shared experience. The majority of these experiences are created during the regular work day and I’m certain there are a great many healthy professional relationships that are defined and maintained in this manner, but I want my teams closer. I’m not suggesting group hugs and voices united singing Kumbaya. I’m looking for each team member to have the opportunity to understand each other slightly more than what they see when they’re at work.

The more you understand how your co-workers tick, the better you’re able to work with them. You’ll stop seeing them as the role, the title, or the keeper of a particular political agenda. They are just… Phillip. And you know what I know about Phillip? He’s the manager who used to wait too long to speak in a meeting. He had plenty to say that mattered, but he used to be too shy to say it.

Two months of trash talking over BAB showed me his reservations, so I learned to pull Phillip into the meeting conversations as quickly as possible. After a few pulls, he started to do it himself. After a few weeks, you couldn’t get him to shut up.

The Second Staff Meeting

The inspiration for the game came from a regularly scheduled bridge game at Netscape, and there’s nothing special about BAB that makes it the perfect lunchtime game. I chose BAB because a team-based game that fits nicely in a lunch hour.

You bet I maneuvered Leo and Vincent onto the same team for weeks on end. There was no magical moment during one game where they suddenly understood each other. Leo and Vincent continued to bicker in meetings, but over time the tone changed from the passive aggressive to the playful talking of trash. They turned competition into something healthy and fun.

In the safe competition that is BAB, you learn not only how to work better together by understanding that winning doesn’t always mean hitting your dates, getting paid, or receiving a promotion. Winning can be a simple, playful thing, “We were awesome as we kicked your ass.”

More importantly, BAB is a regular forum for experiencing that relationships are not defined just by the work we do together, but who we become with each other when we aren’t looking.

A Story Culture

The Editor and I don’t argue, we discuss.

We’re arguing… discussing over a glass of red wine my concern over our collective attention spans. Not just she and I, but everyone. The whole damned planet.

I say, “Information just keeps getting smaller. We’re sharing our bright ideas in 140 characters now and no one is taking the time to construct a strategic thought. All these micro-ideas are free and everyone is taking them for granted. We’re just tactically stumbling through a day full of intellectual sound bites stuffed with shortened URLs. There’s no deep now. Just shallow passing seconds.”

“No one is learning. There’s no work involved in knowing a thing, so we’re becoming mentally flabby. I want people to read more.”

To which the Editor retorts: “I don’t think you know what information is.”

Hmmmm.

Information has a Hierarchy

So I looked it up. According to Ray R. Larson at Berkeley, information has a hierarchy that looks like this:

• Data - The raw material of information
• Information — Data organized and presented by someone
• Knowledge — Information read, heard or seen and understood
• Wisdom — Distilled and integrated knowledge and understanding.

If you ignore the fact that the word information is used to define a hierarchy about information, this hierarchy makes sense, but it dances around a key point.

Another version of this hierarchy describes the same categories as above but focuses more on what happens to information once we get a hold of it. Not just consumption, but synthesis.

• Data — Raw material. Facts. Got it.
• Information - Organized data. See what happens here? Someone showed up and organized the data into something else. Why’d they do this? How’d they know it was the right thing to do? Let’s keep moving.
• Knowledge — Information seen, heard or read and understood. To me this is when information is transformed by the understanding of why. Our data is organized into information and that is passed onto someone else who can now recognize the value in the information and thinks, “Oh, wow. Now I understand how a trash compactor works. Slick.”
• Wisdom — Distilled, integrated knowledge and understanding. The idea here is that higher order constructions of information are based beyond our ability to consume, combine, evaluate, and interpret information. The information becomes a catalyst for creation. Think of it like this: maybe a lot of people understand trash compactors, but you know so much about trash compactors that you could build one yourself and perhaps advance the art of trash compacting in the process.

Still with me? This is going to take more than 140 characters and there’s a point. Just wait a tick.

Take a look at this list:

• New York is a city.
• It takes me about five hours to fly to New York.
• I’ve been to New York three times this year
• I never believe I’m in New York until I’m in a cab or smoking a cigarette.

Is this data, information, or knowledge? Or just four boring tweets? That would depend on whether or not you’re interested in my experiences in New York. But what I provide in this list is the opportunity for increasing amounts of understanding, and understanding is the progression through, and synthesis of, increasingly complex pieces of information. Right?

There’s another thread that ties this information together, and you may not initially see it, but if you’ve started mentally asking questions - Why does Rands go to New York? What does he do there? Did I know that he smoked? - you have started to find it.

I’ve begun to tell you a story.

A Shattered Narrative

The reason no one watches or cares about the evening news anymore is because there are a great many other ways to find your news. A weblog here, a Twitter status update there. In the deluge of information variety we’ve realized that the evening news is just one set of facts and just one carefully constructed story, and increasingly one with its own specific agenda. Who wants to be spoon-fed 30 minutes of ad-infested evening news when I can figure out what my world thinks is important by glancing at The Daily Show, Twitter, and NetNewsWire?

The traditional narrative has been shattered into bits of well-indexed information. Google wasn’t the first indexing tool, but it’s certainly the best. Still, Google is powerfully dumb. Yes, I can find whatever piece of information I’m looking for, but what’s more interesting are all the related pieces of information. How do you query for knowledge via Google? How about wisdom?

If you’re buying my definitions of the informational hierarchy, there’s no replacing the process of understanding if you want to delve into more interesting forms of information. There’s no replacing a human being combing through seemingly disparate pieces of information to evaluate, interpret, and combine it into something unexpected; into a new work. Into a story.

Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.

This is what is going on all day. It will start with a random tweet about conferences and you’ll think, “I don’t understand why everyone goes to conferences”. You won’t act on this thought; you’ll leave it buried in your head until you see that link on del.icio.us where someone important rails on the lack of women presenters at conferences. And in that moment, you’ll remember that drunken thought you had at that conference last March when you discovered the basic truth about conferences: it’s not what you learn, it’s who you find.

From a disparate set of information, you continually find your own arc, your own story, and my question is: What are you going to do with it? You’re an information nerd, you’re adept at consuming massive amounts of micro-information, and those who watch you do this are saying you’ve got a short attention span, and you might.

But I think all this micro-information has macro-story potential.

Rands’ Story Hierarchy

As we’ve established, there’s information. Like everywhere. You, as a consumer of information, fall into one of three progressively complex buckets regarding this data:

• You can understand the information — What does it mean? Why is it important? How does it relate to other things I care about?
• You can explain the information to someone else — Hey Bob, this is what this means. I can explain it to you and impart my understanding.
• You can create more information, building something new and telling a story - Hey Jim, actually, we discovered a better way to do X. Bob and I were working on Y one time and realized that…

But Rands, I’m not a writer.

This is a poor excuse and the death of many a worthy story. The construction of a story has very little to do with writing. It has to do with the semi-magical process of you taking disparate pieces of information, combining them into something new, which includes your experience and understanding, and then giving them to someone else. Look around the walls of wherever you’re reading this and pick two random objects. Got ‘em? Ok, now tell me how they relate. No, you can’t say, “They’re both in the coffee shop”. What’s the first novel thing that crosses your mind about the intersection of these two items?

But you don’t have a story, yet. Just like information isn’t knowledge until it’s understood, your tale isn’t a story until you give it someone else — until they have a chance to see what they think about your inspiration.

But Rands, my thought is really, really stupid.

I understand what you’re saying but I don’t think that’s what you mean. I think what you’re saying is, “I don’t think that anyone will find anything of value in my thought,” and you’re wrong. You’ve got two things going for you. You’ve got the inexplicable moment of inspiration that created your idea, and it’s the closest thing to magic you’ll experience in your life. Second, you’ve got the entire planet listening and there’s just no telling what any of those folks are looking for.

The value of the idea is one part that it is yours and one part that you gave it to someone else. It’s you and something new.

Information Is Getting Smaller and Faster

Look at the historic progression of popular personal written information containers over the past 10+ years:

Home pages > Blogs > Lists of Links > Tumblr > Twitter

I see two symbiotic trends. First, I see a reduction in the average size of a piece of information. I see information that feeds our short attention spans. Second, and more important, I see our tools increasingly removing barriers from producing information. Remember when you needed a nerd friend to set up a weblog? Did you have any issue figuring out how to publish a thought with Twitter? I hope not.

Yes, these frictionless tools make it so anyone can say anything about any topic, but these tools are built with you in mind and I do mean you. Imagine if Twitter forced you to follow certain people. What if Facebook randomly added folks to your friends list? You know what you’d have? The evening news. Random stories from folks you don’t know and probably don’t trust.

We’re in a share everything world and you get to choose your role. You can be overwhelmed and sit in the coffee shop with your friends and say, “Twitter: what’s the point?” Or, you can jump in with both feet, grab those three random ideas and tie them into a story that no one has ever seen.

An Essential Skill

I wrote, edited, and published an entire book without physically interacting with a single person at my publisher. The t-shirt I produced last year and the one I’m doing this year were entirely designed, developed, and shipped by interacting with two different organizations that I never met. Paradoxically, it’s never been easier to share or meaningfully interact with more people with less physical, in-person effort.

Your ability to compose and convey information as well as express yourself through your fingertips is a skill that is only going to increase — and increase in value — as people become more comfortable with their place in communities that span the planet, and as the tools to connect them become more commonplace.

In this digitally distant world full of information that appears to only be moving faster and faster, you get to choose: how much will I consume and how much will I create?

Up to Nothing

In Silicon Valley, you burn a lot of calories.

It’s not just the daily burn of your gig, it’s everything else involved in staying afloat in a valley which is constantly reinventing itself. You sign up for every new service and spend the prerequisite 3.7 minutes to determine “Does this matter?” You surf the web, you tweet, you update your Facebook, all of which brings a constant flood of new data that needs to be sifted, sorted, and assessed.

You have compatriots in this caloric consumption. They randomly walk into your office or your life and with them they bring additional reasons to burn more calories. Have you seen this? You have to try it. In fact, I’m not leaving until you’re jumping up and down excited about this very important thing.

We are part of an industry that is addicted to enthusiasm, to getting things done, and discovering the new, but sometimes the right move is stopping and putting this world on hold. You need to learn how to build quiet moments of nothing as a measure of balance.

… Which is why I go to a bookstore.

An Essential Exercise in Inactivity

The moment I walk into a bookstore I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it’s the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it’s the social reverence for the library-like quiet — you don’t yell in a bookstore, you’ll piss off the books.

A bookstore is where I rediscover that while I might be addicted to the non-stop calorie burning Silicon Valley lifestyle, I also need the serenity only found in the deep quiet of the consideration of nothing. Considering nothing takes work and practice, and the act contains a contradiction: the more I think about what I need to do, the less I’ll discover the thing that I don’t know that I’m looking for.

It’s confusing, but you need these skills because you have days full of somethings. Your day is probably spent at one of two sides of a spectrum. You’re either reacting to whatever is showing up on your doorstep or you’re proactively looking for new things to place on your doorstep so you can figure out what to do with them. Reactive. Proactive. It’s how you spend your entire day.

Excursions to the bookstore are essential exercises in inactivity where the whole world stops being a thing to do.

My most recent trip to my local Borders was in the middle of a two-week period where I’d spent time in both Tokyo and London. Forty hours of flying resulting in five days of meetings which required constant thought, creativity, and focus. During a brief stint back in normality in the States, I had instructions to acquire a children’s book for a nephew.

Now.

The children’s book section at my local Border’s has been voted “Most Likely to be a Total Fucking Disaster” for three years running. Combining this unique cluttered chaos with a head full of jetlag means my head is overflowing with disorganized somethings and I’m predisposed to be annoyed. Even worse, I’m not looking for a specific book. I’m running on “get something he’d like” orders, which means I need a modicum of inspiration in order to be successful.

I need to discard everything in my head that’s preventing me from looking and being inspired.

This is a surprisingly hard mental maneuver because you and I are both used to days that are not only full, but full with well-defined things to do. A lack of structure, direction, and measures throws your brain into fits and this usually when I throw my hands up in frustration and walk out of the bookstore. My brain is rejecting the unstructured ambiguity involved in the search for the unknown.

Look in my head when I start: Where I am? This looks like the children’s section, but this part is full of toys and I need books. I haven’t read a good book in forever. Ok, keep moving until something looks right. Since when did they sell candy at a bookstore? Edward Cullen Sweet Tarts? Please. You know, I don’t even know what day it is. Ok, dinosaurs, he likes dinosaurs. Wait, can he read?

My analysis is: “this place is fucking confusing” and I think I’m talking about the bookstore, but I’m actually talking about my brain.

Up To Nothing

Go back to work and think about your average day. How often are you not clear what you’re doing? How often is the goal of the next 30 minutes completely undefined? Yes, you’ve suffered through meetings where there was no clear agenda and you felt like you were wasting your time, but that’s still a known quantity — I’m currently in the poorly run meeting scenario. Been there, done that.

What happens when there is no meeting, no burning task, no one in your office? You wander, you surf the web, you stare at that calendar on the wall and think, “Why do we have leap years again? I forget.” And then you feel bad. I should be working. I should be doing something. They’re not paying me to reverse engineer leap years. I have things to do.

You’ve built this guilt into your office. It’s why your screen is not facing folks who walk through your door. You’re worried: “They might see me doing nothing”.

You’re not up to nothing. You’re aimlessly mentally wandering — an act made famous by every bright idea ever had in the shower. Think of that moment. Your body is busily on task with the cleaning and what does your brain do? Sure, if you’re stressed about layoffs, you’re going to worry about layoffs, but those mornings when nothing is pressing — what happens?

Your brain builds something from whatever mental flotsam and jetsam is in your head. Perhaps it’s a useful thing, an answer to a question you didn’t know you needed. Perhaps it’s just an interesting combination of thoughts put into a story. It’s dreaming, but you’re awake.

Back to the bookstore. Remember my orders, a good book for the nephew…

If I survive the mental rejection of ambiguity, the next moment I need is one of discovery. In order to ground myself in the silence, I need to discover a single bright and shiny thing and there’s absolutely no telling what that thing is until it shows up. It might be based on my mood, the last ten things I cared about, a random word someone said to me, my favorite color… the list is endless, indefinable, and entirely locked in my head.

But there is nothing ambiguous or unclear about the discovery. It’s obvious. It fills an immediate gap I did not know I had.

In this bookstore excursion, it’s a black book. It’s odd to see a black book in the endless rainbow of the children’s section, but there it is. Black cover with masking tape surrounding what looks like a handwritten title: Wreck This Journal. Ok, interesting. I flip the book open to the handwritten instructions:

1. Carry this with you everywhere you go.
2. Follow the instructions on every page.
3. Order is not important.
4. Instructions are open to interpretation.
5. Experiment. (Work against your better judgment)

And there it. Exactly what I needed. A reminder of why I go to the bookstore in the first place — to mentally stumble around, defying my better judgment, in a nourishing environment of nothing.

Wreck This Journal was created by Keri Smith, who calls herself a guerilla artist, and I’ve no idea what her book is doing in the clutter of the children section. It’s a journal dedicated to its own destruction. One pages instructs you to Rub Dirt Here. Another asks you to scribble wildly using only borrowed pens (document where they were borrowed from). The journal is full of ideas to create unstructured moments of seemingly meaningless activity designed to get you to stop and let something else in.

Don’t Look For It

Stop and let something else in. It’s a confusing skill, which starts with a question: how are you going to find what you don’t know you need by not looking for it?

A day in high tech rarely encourages the activity of doing nothing. Nothing is not cost effective. Nothing is not something you’ll put in your review. Nothing gets a bad rap and the more I attempt to define it, the less useful it will be to you because what I need out of nothing is different than you.

Moments of nothing are not moments of creativity or consideration. (They might be.) These moments don’t last long because your brain can’t sit still; it’s been trained to burn calories all the time. (The longer it sits still, the better.)

Your brain instinctively and naturally attempts to build something given whatever world it’s currently in. In a bookstore, with effort, I can shed the somethings of my everyday and find the nothing that I don’t know I’m looking for. (And that rules.)

The Foamy Rules for Rabid Tools

The brother-in-law lives in the ‘burbs and needed five trees removed. Not big trees — 10 to 15 feet tall, six-inch trunks. Not a problem.

I live on the edge of a redwood forest in Northern California. There are sturdy oaks, playful maples, lovely madrones, weed-like bay laurels, and, of course, giant redwoods. But the pleasure of living in a forest has a tax. Trees fall and trees die, and in a forest of any significant size, this is always happening.

You need a chainsaw. In my case, I need three. There’s Junior, who is great at handling the small jobs. He’s light and ladder friendly.

Then there’s Marty. He’s the everyday mid-sized saw that is enough to handle almost any job. Marty would be perfect for a job in the ‘burbs.

Last, there’s the Rocket. Any tree is the Rocket’s nemesis.

Even if you’ve never handled a chainsaw, you’ve probably used a handsaw. It’s a physical, grinding affair. It’s fun for about three minutes and then you start wondering… am I making progress? The brother-in-law had taken it on himself to use a handsaw on one of the trees. In his three minutes he’d sawed off… a branch.

When Marty and I showed up, we dropped all five trees, cut up the trunks and branches, and stacked them into disposable piles in an hour.

The lesson: the correct tool is exponentially more productive.

That’s a long introduction to say an obvious thing, but I’m going to make it even longer. Take a moment and step inside the mind of the brother-in-law. I’ve got several trees I want to get rid of… and what do I have in the garage? Two hammers, a paint can full of nails, some leftover wood and… a saw. Perfect. A saw.

Context shapes perspective, so thanks to the contents of his garage, he knows of no universe where there are chainsaws. He’s heard of them and suspects they’re much faster than the laborious sweaty grind of this sawing, but there’s no chainsaw here, so he’s semi-happily hacking away. To me, standing there with my arsenal of chainsaws, it’s absurd. It’s a criminal waste of his time.

The lesson again: the correct tool is going to make you exponentially more productive.

The Foamy Rules

As an engineer, there is a short list of tools that you must be rabid about. Rabid. Foaming at the mouth crazy.

This is an obvious list of tools and there’s nothing here that you haven’t heard before. The news is that you need to care. You need to be able to explain in great detail why using green-colored text on a black background is THE ONLY WAY TO CODE. You need to be a zealot about your tools and zealotry starts with fit.

I was a database guy then I was a shrink-wrap guy and then I became a web applications guy. Each of those professions came with their own set of bright and shiny tools, but the tools were not important. Even a specific feature inside of that tool is not that interesting. I believe you can be just as productive sitting inside of a rich development environment such as Xcode as you can inside of TextMate and a slew of terminal windows. The point is not which tool, the point is that the way that tool - your tool — looks, feels, and functions fits how you see, move, and work.

These are my foamy rules and they may differ wildly from your list. That’s cool. My development experience is different than yours. I started working with computers before the mouse which means I trust my keyboard more. Integrated debuggers had just landed when I began developing which means, yeah, I like debugging at the command line. Again, the point is to get foamy, because what makes you foamy makes you your best.

My foamy rules:

My tools appear deceptively simple. TextMate. Terminal. Transmit, LaunchBar, DropBox. The mean time to get one of those tools set up is just a few minutes. I can build out my development environment on a new machine in a half-hour. This has a couple of handy implications. My tools are readily available and lightweight. I can download and install everything except for an operating system in a short amount of time. Similarly, setup and configuration of these tools is close to zero.

You might think this setup means I’m expecting my computer to randomly explode. No. These tools are not simple; they are well-tuned. A TextMate user knows it’s an onion application. You can keep pulling back the layers and finding new functionality, which is going to make your development experience faster. The same goes for Terminal and LaunchBar. The base functionality just works and if you have a particular development itch you want to scratch, the tool can scratch it.

My tools do not care where my work is. How many times have you experienced this? You write a quick script on your local machine to do something clever. You fine tune it and then plop it on your server and rediscover the rule — there’s nothing quite like production.

Any tool that does not allow me to develop live in production is slowing me down. When someone showed me how to set up Transmit to do editing on remote files, I saw hours of heretofore unknown production debugging issues vanish.

Yes, editing locally is fast, especially when you live on the edge of a redwood forest where DSL latency blows, but a tool which doesn’t allow me to develop over the wire isn’t a tool, it’s a debilitating hindrance.

Rands, edit? In production? Are you insane?

No. The tangential background rule is: “If you don’t know what you’re doing in production, you don’t belong there”.

There’s a corollary, which is: “I don’t care where my work is”. This is recent foaminess brought on by Dropbox. For non-production work, like, say, writing a book, I don’t want to think about where the most recent version of the work is sitting. Yes, I’m talking about version control — but shh, don’t call it version control — just call it Dropbox. Providing I have a network connection, this tool magically refreshes a shared directory sitting on each of my machines. I can’t think of the last time I worried about which version of a document I was on, and that means I’m spending more time working than worrying.

My tools are designed to remove repetitive motion. One of my first algorithmic holy shits was during my second computer science class as we were learning sorting algorithms. The professor elegantly walked us through the construction of different algorithms, explaining the pros and the cons, and then he landed Quicksort. Holy shit.

It wasn’t just the elegance. It wasn’t the recursive simplicity, it was the discovery that with imagination there were approaches that were wildly more efficient — and simpler. Whether you’re formally trained as a computer science nerd or not, you’ve learned the value of efficiency — to make each action that you take mean something. You know that when you’re efficient, you have more time to do what you love.

This is why I have a simple requirement that any tool I rely on has complete keyboard support. I will fall back on the using the mouse for one-off activities, but for any action I take that I know I’m going to do again, my question is, “How do I make this action cost less?”

Think of it like this. What if I told you that each time you wanted to save a file, you had to stand up, climb up on your chair, and jump up and down, yelling, “I would like to save my stuff now!” The first time you had to do it, it’d be kind’a fun, but after that it’d drive you bat shit crazy. It’s a similar feeling each time I reach for my mouse. I feel I’m engaging in an unnecessary task, which is always going to waste my time, because with a mouse sometimes you miss and missing is a tremendous waste of time.

Finding any file or application is, ideally, four keystrokes. Cmd-Space (LaunchBar), Letter #1, Letter #2, Return. Sometimes I get lucky; sometimes it’s three and you know that puts a smile on my face every single time it happens.

My tools only do what I’ve told them to do. Back when Dreamweaver first landed, I wanted to love it. I was so tired of the repetitive motion of developing HTML pages and the idea of a tool that was going to visually handle that laborious process was appealing. Problem was, Dreamweaver changed my code… without asking.

It what?

Dreamweaver was attempting to be helpful, but the moment it reformatted my code, I threw a fit. YOU TOUCHED MY CODE. Dreamweaver never recovered from that horrendous first impression.

My impression and my opinion of robust integrated development environments is that they can do a lot of good in terms of helping you visualize what the hell is going on. Borland developed some of the best environments for building code back in the day, but I still find myself with extremely primitive development environments where I’m tweaking code in TextMate and debugging inside of a couple of Terminal windows.

Yeah, I know all about the glory of integrated debugging and I see all you Eclipse guys having a ball, but what I found in many years of development is that embracing the fancy tools means spending time tinkering with your tools to get them to behave how you want.

The corollary to this rule is: “My tools don’t have a lot of moving parts”. Dreamweaver-grade code offenses are few and far between with solid development tools, but the fancy still comes with a cost. You may be fully willing and foamy to embrace that cost, but I’m not.

Am I more efficient than you? Maybe. Do I know where I stand relative to my tools? Yes. Do I have to relearn my development process when the people behind an elegant tool shoot for more elegance? Nope.

My tools are my tools. Choosing a thing makes it yours. The choice is the result of that unique mix of logic, superstition, stubbornness, and experience that fits you.

You read that right. Green text. Black background. I’ll tell you why right now. I’m an old school DOS guy. My first word processor was Wordstar and that’s the word processing program I came to associate with the fugue-like state of maximum productivity: the Zone. This is why I continue to favor colored text on a black background in my current favorite editor, Textmate. The coloring reminds me of an primal safe place where the tool is serving its purpose — to get the hell out of the way so I can go be exponentially more productive.

This is why, as engineers, we stick with something that works for us. This is why the ancient likes of vi and Emacs continue to flourish. Once we find a tool that works for us, once we’ve chosen that tool, it becomes ours and remains ours. It allows us to get foamy.

An Evolving Foaminess

My brother-in-law doesn’t need a chainsaw. When I took out his five trees, I eliminated half of the population of trees on his property. While a chainsaw is a delicious combination of sound, power, and sawdust, my brother-in-law didn’t choose a home where the trees are on the offensive, so he doesn’t need defensive weaponry.

He does need to know about a universe where chainsaws exist because every moment of his time is valuable. What differentiates us from the monkeys is not our ability to pick the right tool for the right job, but to pick the best tool.

And you never stop looking — this is why the last foamy rule is the most important: my tools are always fighting for their life.

My current tool set is influenced by all of my experience. Yeah, the elegant simplicity of vi is attractive to me — it reminds me of the uncomplicated early days of development, but vi can’t compete with the holy shit I experienced when I first ran into TextMate. This tool is always five steps ahead of me. I love that.

But TextMate, like all of my tools, must evolve.

Try this right now. Stand up and walk into the office of the best developer in the building. I promise two things: they will be happy to, at length, foamily show you their development set-up and you are guaranteed to learn, at least, one thing about moving faster. Perhaps it’s a tool you’ve never heard of or maybe it’s the way they deftly manage a tool you’ve taken for granted.

I don’t know what you’re going to learn, but I do know you’ll see one thing that will instantly and obviously make your universe a smaller, more productive place.

The Leaper

On my short list of professional competitive differentiators, I would list my inbox strategy. I have a zero tolerance policy for unread mails. Zero. Any mail, however big or small, which lands in my inbox, is instantly read. There is an industrial strength set of mail filters that move mailing list noise out of the way, and yes, that means I ignore a good portion of my incoming mail, but most mail addressed directly to me is consistently and expediently read.

There are other inbox strategies I employ to figure out when and how I respond, too, but I admit the combination of these strategies is not foolproof. I read mails and never respond, despite having good intentions to do so. I passively aggressively ignore mails I just don’t want to answer, and sometimes I just forget to respond. I have a carefully constructed excuse when I’m called on these mail transgressions. It’s a standard preface in all emails and phone conversations where there needs to be an acknowledgement of neglect and it’s…

“Sorry, I’ve been swamped…”

This isn’t a lie; it’s an excuse.

Now, there is a bit of pride in that I have a life where I’m scrambling. Yes, I’m proud that I’m busy. I’m a happy member of the busy club because I’ve been to the bored club meetings and, well, they’re boring.

The pride vanishes in the guilt that there was neglect. I forget to respond, I fucked up in some manner, and here I am with my standard disclaimer: “swamped”. The guilt is the emotion that lingers. I just checked my Sent box of 20,483 messages and found the word swamped 712 times… in the last year. How unoriginal and pathetic.

And then I remember the worst part. It’s pathetic because when I use the excuse that I’m swamped, I’m telling you absolutely nothing.

On Excuses

I had a boss — we’ll call him The Leaper for reasons you’ll understand in a moment. The Leaper was a bright guy, a worthy mentor, politically savvy, and generally a person who would look out for his team. The Leaper had a lot of responsibility as VP, so his management strategy was to randomly sample his teams looking for — you guessed it — places to leap.

The Leaper’s skill lay in his ability to detect bullshit. Being bright, a former engineer, and familiar with the problem space, he could tell when he was being spun. He knew when he was hearing less than the truth. Generally he was understanding when he sampled ambiguity, but there was one sure way to get him to leap: answer a question with an excuse.

The Leaper attacked excuses as a personal affront. He wouldn’t let anyone leave the room until it was painfully clear that the excuse card had been played, that it was unacceptable, and that the proper steps were taken to make sure it would never happen again.

For first time excusers, it was a painful perspective adjustment. See, when The Leaper asked a question where the answerer wasn’t comfortable answering, they did what I did when I ignored a mail — they made an excuse. It’s a knee-jerk reaction with seemingly little consequence, but that’s not what The Leaper saw. He saw the lame diffusion of blame and a weak defense.

An excuse is an abdication of responsibility. There are no healthy excuses. I’ll explain.

On Delivery

“But Rands, it’s really Antonio’s fault! He owns the deliverable, he missed the date, it’s his fuck-up.” Calm down. You’re arguing about the wrong part of the excuse.

An excuse has two parts: the content and the delivery. Your Antonio content may be spot on, but the reason The Leaper is going to leap on you is your delivery. It sounds like you’re diffusing, it sounds like you’re spinning. You’re not delivering the facts, you’re delivering emotion and weak opinion. The best data in the world is useless if your means of conveyance is suspect.

Yes, with confidence, you can deliver weak content and not trigger a leap, but this only delays the inevitable. Your chutzpah may disguise the content, but since your content is weak and you don’t actually know what you’re talking about, you’re eventually going to take the reputation hit… twice. First, when the crap content is discovered and then again when everyone realizes you were pitching your facts on false confidence.

Well done there.

The irony is thick. In order to avoid looking like you didn’t know what you were talking about, you opened your mouth and only added to the confusion. If you told The Leaper, “I don’t know, but I will know tomorrow,” he’d be cool.

Life in a big or small company is an information game where you are judged by the amount and accuracy of your information. This game becomes more complex as you leave the individual contributor role for management, but even as an individual, you are expected to be aware of your surroundings and able to describe them to others.

I know that feeling when someone in authority spends 30 seconds looking at something you’ve been working on for six months and immediately finds a painfully obvious flaw. The mental conversation starts with, “There’s no way he could…” and it finishes with “Holy crap, how could I miss that?” It’s disorientating, and when the question is asked of you: “Why didn’t you think of that?” I know where the excuse comes from. It’s alarmed spin, it’s poor marketing, it’s the uncomfortable admission of guilt.

So, what are you going to do? Clearly, there’s a reputation hit here, so what’s the right move?

My advice is to take a small amount of time to say something real. Honest, clear, and brief. Sure, these are executives and they might be pissed, but the last thing to do in that scenario is to add fuel to the fire by actively demonstrating your discomfort.

There are executives who like to see you squirm, who revel in the discovery of flaws. While they might be right, this does not give them the right to be cruel. I’m talking about that deliberate dead silence after the flaw has been exposed, and everyone sees it now and everyone is wondering, “How could we miss that?” In that moment, someone is expected to say something. This is your opportunity to say something of value.

An Opportunity to Communicate

Working for The Leaper for years, I can now sense the moment before I’m about to employ an excuse. I can feel the chain of events that are about to occur as I construct my weak redirection of responsibility. I hear what I’m about to say in my head — It’s not my fault — and then I stop.

I want you think of the very last conversation you had and I want you to think of one thing that you did not say. Maybe you were in a hurry and you blew off someone’s question. Maybe you were in a great conversation. Perhaps you were talking to your Dad. What is the topic you should have brought up? What is the small thing you could have said to make that conversation more valuable?

This is everything that crosses my mind after I stop with the excuse. I think about all the throw-away phrases I use where I could have actually said something valuable. I once wrote, “Every time you say blah blah blah, a creative writing teacher dies,” and I meant it. Each time you open your mouth, you have an opportunity to build something. That’s the perspective you want during the uncomfortable dead silence, not the victim-based emotion of excuse.

I’m in a hurry, but being in a hurry isn’t an excuse for not taking a small amount of time to say something real.

Hurry

Most interesting ideas come to me between 8am and 10am. This is sacred time. The day is young, I am rested, and the coffee is fresh. I spend most of this time in the car driving to work. The music is providing a creative, catalyzing ambiance to structure my thinking. I create two or three start-ups during the average drive to work.

And then I get to work and I google my ideas. “How about a service that adds threading to Twitter?”

Fuck.

“Wait wait wait, what we need is people feeds. An RSS-type thing that shows me the relevant events for the people I care about.”

Goddammit.

You’re in a hurry.

Do the math. We are all staring at the same set of data. Yes, there is a lot of data and there is a very low probability that you’re able to surf it all, but here’s the rub: There’s a lot of us. In fact, there’s a shitload of us, and when you combine all of us with the equally huge amount of data, you understand that when I arrive at work and google my great ideas, I’m no longer surprised when my precisely designed drive-to-work business model is already in play.

Fuckers.

You’re in a hurry.

The epiphany I want to talk about is this: What are you waiting for? Seriously. I know you’ve got a mortgage and 1.5 kids, but during your sacred time when you discover that bright idea and subsequently discover that no established competitor exists… why aren’t you making the leap?

I know what you’re waiting for.

See, you’ve been doing the same comfortable thing I’ve been doing for twenty years. You’re obeying the structure of the organization where there are charts that describe who owns what and who owns whom. I am intimately familiar with the mindset that reads:

“We will complete our work by following the rules of mediocrity.”

Do just enough. Don’t rock the boat. Make yourself indispensable without being noticeable.

And it works. There is absolutely no way to argue that following the rules doesn’t result in a comfortable life, but…

You’re in a hurry

Maybe you’re waiting for validation. You’re waiting for that someone you respect to say, “Yes, you bright person, you should do that thing.” It was your parents when you were a kid and then it was your first boss, but now it simply needs to be you.

What you need to understand about these people that support you is that they’re not here to slow you down, they’re here to get the hell out of your way so you can be brilliant. You need to discover the moment when you actually know better than everyone around you — when you make the first move without asking permission.

Try it. You don’t need to quit your job and go build the next Twitter. Try it with something small. A thing where you’d normally preflight it with your boss, bounce the idea around the hallway a bit, and then move forward. Skip the preflight. Skip the hallway and move on your idea.

Don’t worry if someone else is already working on your idea. I’m certain they are, but they are decidedly not you and it’s the you that makes your idea unique.

Whether you’re successful or not, it’s a terrific way to get in a lot of trouble. There’s a long list of established rules and regulations that you violate with your creative impertinence, but it feels great, right?

Trusting your gut and charging forward. It can be addictive.

It’s not your only operating procedure. There are teams to communicate with and strategic corporate alignment that needs to be maintained, but then there’s you, on the subway to work, drinking a Starbucks when inspiration strikes, and rather than just soaking in that brief moment of illumination, I want you to do something about it because…

You’re in a hurry.

The Crisis and the Creative

If you polled my team about my daily agenda, they’d say, “He’s either running to meetings or in meetings.” Glancing at my calendar confirms this: 14 meetings this coming Monday - double-booked for five of them. Sweet.

Yes, I go to meetings all day, but it’s more than that. I’m also managing a constant distracting flood of interesting decisions that find me no matter where I’m sitting. When they arrive, I must make an instant prioritization call: Crisis or Creative?

A Spectrum for Everything

This will be the third system I’ve described regarding prioritization. The Taste of the Day describes how I deal with tactics, identifying and recording tasks that need to be done, as well as a system for punting tasks that are lingering aimlessly. The Trickle List goes strategic and imparts direction for my day — what are the daily investments I want to make in my people and myself?

The Crisis and the Creative is less a system and more a mental model for all of the work on my plate. It’s similar to The Taste of the Day in that it’s a lens by which I look at the health of everything I’m responsible for. The model looks like this:

As my day moves by in a rapid progression of people, tasks, and meetings, I often need to stop and make a snap decision regarding whether or not to engage in whatever is sitting in front of me. In that moment, I place this thing in the model and assess. This is what I’m thinking:

The Crisis — This is any item I’m responsible for which is in Crisis. The definition of Crisis varies on a daily basis and can mean anything from “Word on the street is the quality of this feature blows” to “The program managers say we’re going to miss our date”. Crisis means it’s not working and I need to pay constant attention. Oddly (or sadly), there’s always something in this category. More on this aspect of management in a moment.

The Creative — The title for the other side of the spectrum should be The Strategy, but I’m incapable of not using alliteration, so it’s The Creative. This is anything I’m responsible for which, by investing in or completing, means I’m growing, I built something, I took the team towards new. The Creative are my responsibilities, which take us places either because I have the experience to recognize that they will or because through pure force of will I will make them so. They rule.

These edges are the main reason I’m running to all of those double-booked meetings. Whether it’s Crisis or Creative, activities in these buckets run hot. Whether I’m making sure that someone isn’t going to quit or I’m jump-starting a brand new project at a time when no one has a free second, when I’m working the edges, it’s fast and furious. The issue is that I’m responsible for a lot more than just the work that’s running hot.

See those boring lines in the middle between Crisis and Creative? That’s an important part of the model. Items in the middle are the silent non-Crisis, non-Creative responsibilities that are my team just making it happen. It’s all very important work, but it’s work that occurs with very little investment from me because I’ve hired, manage, and work with competent people who excel at what they do. The middle isn’t responsibilities that I’ve delegated and need to check up on, this is work the team just does, and to understand how to get the work there, you need to understand the edges.

The Crisis

There are those who love the panic associated with the Crisis. They love the motivating threat of imminent disaster. This is especially true for managers because a Crisis gives them super powers. When it hits the fan, the team can be freaked to the point that they are incapable of making a decision because they don’t want to make it worse. This is why, when the manager shows up and starts making decisions, the decisions are often followed without question. The team is happy, they’re thinking, “Whew, ok, good — someone is driving us out of this mess.”

The larger question is — where’d the mess come from?

There are two standing goals when managing work that is in Crisis. Goal #1: Make sure the sky doesn’t fall. Goal #2: Figure out how to prevent future sky falling situations. It’s a balance. You can’t truly perform a post-mortem while holding the sky up, but, then again, you can’t truly remember what it’s like to hold the sky up a month after it happens.

When I’m standing in the middle of a Crisis, I’m doing two things at the same time. First, I’m frantically trying to fix the issue by any means possible. I’m also carefully looking to identify the root cause of the Crisis. This is information that vanishes in the joy of no longer being screwed once the Crisis has passed. Sure, we’ll still have a debrief once everyone’s caught their breath, but I’m going to learn more about what actually happened by asking questions at 10pm on a Saturday night after two weeks of not having a day off.

The thing I remind myself of throughout the Crisis is: if I’m responsible for resolving this Crisis, there’s a good chance I’m just as responsible for its creation. I don’t want to be grilling anyone at 10pm on Saturday. I want the Crisis to never occur again, which means being Creative.

The Creative

The panic junkie is the person who is addicted to Crisis and, in the absence of it, will manufacture drama in order to create additional Crisis. Their intent was originally good; they wanted to get stuff done quickly and discovered that the umbrella of a Crisis removed traditional organizational roadblocks. Problem is, they’ve becoming addicted to the power and momentum granted to them by driving the crisis. As soon as the current Crisis appears to have passed, they deflate, thinking, “Blah, back to the normal,” and immediately start looking for another Crisis. If they don’t find one, they create it.

I was one of these people and burned a lot of calories getting a lot done, but management by Crisis is a losing strategy. You become a corporate arsonist — burning through people and process in your apparent endless hurry, but you aren’t actually building anything.

There’s always a Crisis in progress. It’s a statistical fact that in any decent-sized group of people there is one person who needs help with some part of a Crisis. Get used to it. The question I ask myself each morning as I stare at the day’s selection of Crises is: “Am I going to play in the Crisis or the Creative?”

I’m not talking about being Creative about solving a Crisis such that it never occurs again, I’m talking about work that is purely Creative — where you’re actively improving or building a thing. It’s writing that piece of code that nobody but you wants; it’s spending two hours recruiting that guy you’re never going to get; it’s standing in the design room with a variety of dry erase markers and just filling that whiteboard with random.

I’m not talking about impossible tasks; I’m talking about Creative ones. I’m talking about inspired investments in an uncertain future. These are often hard tasks to measure, which means they are equally hard to justify to those sitting around you, but they occasionally, infrequently hit. You get the guy. You find the idea. You build something new.

Given the constant presence of Crisis and things to do, the act of choosing to devote part of your time to a purely Creative activity can be rough, but if you’re going to grow, there have got to be times where you let things go further to hell in the now because you’re choosing to invest in the Creative for the future.

That’s right. You are going to actively ignore a burning Crisis so that you can hide in the design room and doodle on a whiteboard. The panic junkies are going to be pissed. They’re going to walk by, laptops in hand, and wonder, “Why the hell isn’t he all over the Crisis? Doesn’t he know it’s, ya’know, A CRISIS?”

Yes, it’s a risky move. Yes, there are crises that can’t be ignored. Yes, if you piss off the wrong panic junkie, you’re going to hear about it — quickly — but the bigger risk is a panic-filled career reacting to disasters versus one where you’re recognized for what you’ve built versus what you’ve fixed.

A Personal Model

The Crisis and the Creative isn’t a productivity system, it’s an identification system — it’s your personal view of your world and, for me, it’s a set of reminders. First, I choose how I invest my time. Second, that a Crisis is an opportunity not only to save the day, but to make certain that future days never see this Crisis again by Creatively moving something into the predictable Middle.

And I want more Middle.

The more Middle, the happier I am because that’s more time for the edges and undiscovered opportunity always hides at the edges.

Your People

In your career as a geek, there’s a list of essential career intangibles. These are the things you need to do in order to be successful, which are also maddeningly difficult to measure. There is no direct correlation between completing these activities and a raise. It’s unlikely that accomplishing these indefinite tasks will end up in your review, but via organizational and social osmosis, you’ve learned these intangibles are essential in order to grow.

I want to talk about one: networking.

There are two types of networking. Basic networking is what you do at work. It’s a target rich environment with co-workers, your boss, and those of interest in close proximity. It’s work, but it’s easy work because your day is full of those you depend on and you’ve learned that professionally befriending these people keeps you comfortably in the know.

The other type of networking I’m going to call people networking and it’s harder work. This is when you put yourself out there. It’s attending a conference where you know no one. It’s driving to the city to sit in a coffee shop with ten strangers bonded by a programming language. It’s a leap for the socially awkward, but the infrequent reward is that you discover Your People.

I don’t have a good definition for these people, so I made a list. My hope is that as you read this list you’ll think of at least one person you know who is already Your People:

• Your connection with Your People instant and obvious; it transcends age and experience.
• The best way to discover if someone is Your People is absence. If, when they return, it’s as if they never left, they are Your People.
• There are more of them than you expect, but their number is disguised by the ebb and flow of their presence in your life.
• An investment of time with them will be repaid, but not in a way you can predict or expect. That is the point.
• Your People will piss you off because the relationship is genuine. They do not coddle and they do not spin. Consequently, Your People error-correct you in ways that others cannot.
• You may call on each other without reason, randomly. During these random visits, hours of time will vanish and neither you nor Your People will notice.
• Conversely, long silences are also acceptable and comfortable.
• Your People have a knack for showing up when you need them, even if you didn’t know you needed them prior to their arrival. I don’t know how they do this, but the more People you have, the more likely it is that this will happen.
• Your People rarely demand anything. But when either you or they make a request, neither the request nor the agreement to do it is ever in question.
• Your People keep in you in balance. Their presence reminds you first that that you’re never flying solo and, second, that there are two sides to every story.
• Your People instinctively know who you are and are able to say accurate and valuable things to you and about you with stunningly little data.
• You get mail all day from everyone, but you always stop to read mail from Your People.
• Your People will always be Your People — even if they leave and never return.

When I’m talking about Your People, I am not thinking of your best friend. Sure, your best friend might be Your People, but I’m talking about a larger population who aren’t necessarily your friends and who isn’t your family. These are a strange lot of people you’ve discovered in a motley array of places because you were searching for them.

Furthermore, I am not suggesting that those who are not Your People are somehow less valuable. In fact, the majority of the folks in your life are going to be extraordinarily more work than those who are instantly familiar. The work in bridging the gap between you and those who are harder to know is also an essential intangible skill.

Lastly, while Your People may be less work, they are harder people to have in your life. These are not people that let you sit in place, these are people who hold a mirror up to your fuck-ups, and who explain, in excruciating detail, exactly what you don’t want to hear. If they did not do these things, they would not be Your People.

You Tell Stories

All day. It’s a constant story being composed in your head. You’re doing it right now. You think you’re reading this paragraph that I’ve written, but what you’re actually doing is telling yourself the story of reading this paragraph. It’s your inner dialogue and it’s often full of shit.

I’m not saying you deliberately lie to yourself. Ok, maybe I am, but we’re all doing it. We’re all gathering data through the course of the day and creating a story based on that data, our experience, and our moods. It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon to guide the narrative in our favor. We see the world how we want. A carpenter sees all problems as a nail. I see problems as finite state machines.

As we edit our days into these stories, there is always a risk of fiction. This is why you need to identify and nurture Your People.

You tell these stories to Your People without reservation. Your People love your stories — fiction and all. They love how you tell them, they laugh about the lies you tell yourself, and then they stop and they tell you the truth.

Networking is the art of finding those who are willing to listen to and critique your stories, so go look at your Inbox. Better yet, go look at your Sent box. Check your phone and see who you call the most and who calls you. I’m certain that, right now, one of Your People wants to hear a story and they have one for you, too.

The Book Stalker

The recent creepy incident involving Amazon remotely removing purchased content from the Kindle has me back on the fence regarding purchasing one. There are contradictory forces at work here.

First, as a geek, I’m unable to sleep when I do not own the latest cool. The first Kindle’s industrial design was intriguing, but the second version nailed it. The second generation is a pleasure to hold and to read and I’m a fan of anything that gives me a reason to read more.

But here’s the contradiction:

My office bookshelf. Slightly in disarray, but a massive visual reminder of what I love about books… you hold them.

When a Kindle-maniac is running down their list of compelling reasons to purchase, they inevitably invoke the “that’s what your parents said about CDs” argument. Remember that? A generation of music lovers decrying the death of vinyl because the CD’s size didn’t do justice to the cover art?

The cover is part of music.

Sure.

It’s not about the song; it’s about the album as a WHOLE.

Maybe. Ok, yes, I love listening to the entire Dark Side of the Moon, and yeah, that prism cover is bitchin’, but the main difference between a book and an album or a CD is you hold a book when you read it. If you want something from a book, you need to touch it. Part of the reason I read Catcher in the Rye once a year has to do with the ratty, dusty-smelling version I own. Part of the character of a book is how it is read.

But a technological evolution away from books, for me, presents an even larger social problem.

More People Less

The name is Rands. It’s not my real name; it’s a leftover from the mid-90s when everyone was still freaked out about typing their real name into the computer, let alone the Internet.

A quick scan of my Twitter stream reveals that apparently real names have replaced nicknames as a means of identification, but this doesn’t change the fact that never in our history have we known more people less.

We spend the day swimming in the 10% of the information that others have deliberately chosen to share with us and while it is overwhelming in volume, it’s only so because there are so many people… who are actually sharing very little.

There is a time and a place that I want to know more, and no amount of Facebook updates is going to placate this curiosity. Perhaps this is a function of my generation, but there are two defining moments for me in the getting-to-know-you phase of a relationship:

#1 Can you talk shit? I’m not talking bland sarcasm, I’m talking about a full court comedy offensive that demonstrates not only that you are aware of your surroundings, but you have a gift for improvisation and the courage to use it.

#2 Where’s your bookshelf? It’s this awkward moment whenever I first walk into your home. Where is it? Everyone has one. It might not be huge. It might be hidden in a closet, but in decades of meeting new people, I’ve never failed in finding one and when I do I consume it.

See, I don’t really trust you until we talk a little shit and then I see your bookshelf.

The Book Stalking Process

This is my process and this is not a process of judgment, but one of assessment, and it proceeds in three phases:

Phase 1: Where are they?

• Where does you bookshelf live in your home? Is it in an obvious place or are you hiding it? Why are you hiding your books?
• Is the bookshelf built around the room or vice versa?
• Do you have a room specifically for books? Hot.
• Can I see your bookshelf after you’ve sat me down with a glass of wine? Even better.
• Did you spend money on your bookshelf or is it an IKEA atrocity? Wait, you built that? Awesome.

Phase 2: How are they arranged?

• Have you committed to a pure bookshelf? What’s the breakdown between books and non-books? This isn’t where I store books; it’s where I demonstrate that I love books.
• Is the arrangement chaotic or calm? Is this is a shrine or a utility?
• Vertical or horizontal stacking? What’s the rule? Is there a rule?
• Is it full? I read. A lot.
• Does your book arrangement tell a story? Can I find that story quickly or do I need you to tell it? Do you offer it?
• Do you use bookends? Are they functional or ornate? What’s their story?

Phase 3: And what do you read?

• Are these the books I expect based on what I know about you?
• Do these books represent your entire life or just right now?
• Can I tell, at a glance, the three most important books?
• Which books are you… hiding?
• How do you react when you see me stalking your bookshelf? What’s the first story you’re going to tell?
• Is there a glaringly obvious book that does not belong? When do I get to ask you about it?

What I’m learning during this stalking is my deal. The intricacies of my assessment aren’t the point. You are decidedly and blissfully not me, which is why I’m standing, wine glass in hand, totally and completely lost in your bookshelf. Dr. Seuss and Calvin and Hobbes… interspersed on single shelf. That… is fucking brilliant.

Seven Precious Books

As you grow up, the guarantee is that the world will change, often faster than you are comfortable with. There are two approaches to handling change: either you embrace the change because the change has something to teach you, or you can dig your heels in and say, “Nope, not changing. What worked for me then works for me now and will work for me later.”

It’s my job to observe and embrace change, but I’ve always wondered when I’d grow stubborn enough to hold onto something the next generation had begun to view as an antique.

This is what you need to know. I have three shelves. There’s one in the closet that you’ll never see. It’s full of trashy science fiction, gifts I’ve never read, and an embarrassingly large collection of Far Side books. The second shelf is the one you see above, a place of honor. These are the books that I read once a year, these are the books that I’ll have for the rest of my life. And then there’s the small shelf next to the bed. Seven precious books. A few I’m reading right now and a few… I just need nearby.

See, I can’t imagine a world without books.

The Words You Wear

In business, words are like fashion. You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means.

Every group in the company has their own unique set of words and every group uses these words to verbally define who they are, what they know, and what they own. These words, these phrases, have value when everyone is in agreement as to what they mean, but used outside of your part of the organization, their value decreases, especially the closer you get to engineering.

The engineering burden is that when it comes to the product, we know how it works. Everyone else outside of engineering has vastly less working knowledge of the product; they don’t need that depth for their job. The engineers know the intricate details of the system, the people who built it, and what it is capable of.

This is why, when fashionable words show up in our day, we grind our teeth. We’re cynical because we don’t trust fashionable words. They sound important, but over the years we’ve found they obfuscate our product’s capabilities, they portray our development process as trivial, and they create productivity destroying expectations elsewhere in the building.

I’m guilty of using these words. I’ve written about them before, but they still stand out in my day. They hang in the air sounding like buzzing rather than communication.

This is not what you think you’re saying, but this is what we’re hearing:

• Actionable — A label applied to an idea or plan to make it sound achievable.
• Alignment — “I’ve yet to convince people that I am correct.”
• Best Practices — A phrase used to convince you to do something different that assumes you don’t actually want to know why it’s a better approach.
• Business Critical — “You are fired if this fails.” (See also: Mission Critical.)
• Capacity — How MBAs measure your productivity. I’m not kidding.
• Cross-functional — A hyphenated word everyone starts using when they decide to not fail alone.
• Executive Summary — A brief assessment given to executives. If this summary were shown to those who actually do the work, they would giggle.
• Future Proofing — Architecting a product so that it accounts for things that don’t yet exist and can’t be predicted.
• Key Takeaways — The three bullets of information you actually needed in that two-hour meeting.
• Heads-up — “You’re screwed.”
• Initiative — A new process designed by someone who doesn’t understand the old process.
• Lock-in — Designing a product to be both indispensable to your customer while also screwing them.
• Milestones — Magically created dates that mean nothing, but give executives the impression that progress is being made.
• Mission Critical — “We are out of business if this fails.” (See also: Business Critical.)
• Offline — A tactic to delay a decision until they can say no in private. “Let’s take this offline.”
• Organic — An adjective used to attempt to avoid actual planning. “We’re using an organic process.”
• Paradigm — A model you need in your head to explain something very complex to someone else.
• Social Media — Two words used to kill newspapers.
• Sanity Check — The meeting just before the meeting when you explain that things are going badly.
• Silver Bullet — The last ditch strategy to beat up another company who is currently kicking the shit out of you.
• Socialization — The process by which an idea that no one wants to do is forced on others.
• Solution — “I don’t know what your product does.”
• Stretch Goal — Engineering speak for “if it makes you feel better that we might get this done, that’s cool, but there is no way this is happening.”
• Taking One for the Team — Announcing that you’re doing something exceptional after you’ve fucked up.
• Thought Leadership — The act of talking rather than doing.

Cutting edge fashion looks freakish to me. When I see a model walking down the runway wearing a black and white geometric monstrosity, I wonder, “How does anyone make money doing this?” These aren’t the designs that end up in your local department stores. They’ve traveled through many different designers who have watered them down and made them palatable versions of the cutting edge.

New ideas, like fashion, have to start somewhere. When Jordan in Marketing lays down an energetic thirty minutes of incomprehensible marketing buzz-speak, I take a deep breath and attempt to hear his enthusiasm rather than his seemingly meaningless words. I remind myself of the time I walked to his office and threw down twenty minutes of arcane engineering reality and he gave me the benefit of the doubt. He clarified and we found a comfortable place to communicate.

The Screw-Me Scenario

It had all the signs of a good meeting. And I hate meetings. We were:

• Talking about a product we loved
• In great shape from a feature, quality, and schedule standpoint
• A group that historically did not kick ass
• A group that was kicking ass.

The slides looked great and the dry-run was flawless, so why hadn’t I slept in two nights?

I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t see the Screw-Me.

You Might Be Lying

There’s an article to be written about the different kinds of meetings you’re going to be exposed to, but for now I want to talk about the executive cross-pollination communication clusterfuck. The point of this meeting is alignment. Big alignment. You’ve likely got several different groups who don’t normally spend a lot of time together being forced to sit in the same room so the execs can compare stories, measure reality, and figure out who is lying.

Before I explain how to get your head around this meeting, I want to talk about intent. Intent starts with a question: “Why does this meeting exist?” If you’re responsible for the presentation in this meeting, it exists because someone hates you.

It’s not personal hate. It’s professional hate and it’s exacerbated by a simple fact of organization: different groups speak different languages. Marketing speaks marketing, Legal speaks legal, and Engineering speaks engineering. There’s a fundamental communication breakdown somewhere in the building and someone is feeling wronged. They’re feeling bullied and since they don’t speak your dialect, they’re complaining up rather than across.

Normally, we deal with these Tower of Babel situations with the direct application of middle management, program managers, and other folks we pay big bucks to sit in meetings and translate between organizations. However, translation has not worked in this case. Someone high up on the org chart is hearing two very different stories and wondering which is true. Story reconciliation is certainly on the top of your list of items to resolve in this meeting, but job #1 is to figure out who hates you.

A Rubber Stamp Affair

For these critical meetings, your goal is to make them a rubber stamp affair. In the week before the meeting, you will have personally vetted your slides with each of the meeting invitees. You will have heard their concerns and made the appropriate adjustments to your deck. When the cross-pollination meeting arrives, your goal is an utter lack of drama and the finishing pronouncement of, “Yeah, we should do that and you know how.”

It never happens like this.

We’re “busy” and we have “things to do”, but mostly we’re “looking forward to blindsiding you with a Screw-Me at the least convenient moment in front of your executive team.”

It’s a disappointing trait of human nature that folks who feel wronged like to exact their revenge by flaunting their knowledge and dishing out the Screw-Me at the worst possible time, but, roll with it, you’re already a step ahead just expecting to be screwed. Besides, your enemy is working more with emotion than content and that will turn into their own personal Screw-Me Scenario at a later date.

Right now, your job is data.

No Guilt, No Doubts, No Fear

Ideas get better with eyeballs and before this meeting goes down, your job is to get as many eyeballs on your presentation as possible. You’re not going to get everyone in the meeting, but that’s not the point. The task is cross-pollination. Casting the information net as wide as possible and incessantly asking:

• Does this make sense?
• What is missing?
• How am I going to get screwed?

I’ve got the Russian Lit Major for vetting my strategy; who do you have? I’m not talking about your boss or your co-worker, I’m talking about the person who can objectively look at your presentation and start poking holes. These people are rare because it’s another disappointing trait of human nature that we often think we’re doing each other a favor by listening well, but then tell each other what we want to hear.

You lose yourself in any significant project. You’ve long forgotten your strategic initial assumptions, but, more importantly, you’ve forgotten what other people need because you’re furiously worrying about the daily tactical fire drills. A fresh perspective is a chance to test your entire idea and find the Screw-Me. You need someone to poke holes. You need to find and fill the gaps, and as each gap is filled, you’re going to build confidence around your pitch because, well, that’s one less potential Screw-Me entry point.

You’re not going to find them all. That’s ok, because in the process of constantly refining your pitch, you’re mentally refining yourself. You’re preparing yourself by seeing each of the different perspectives in your deck,. That improves the chances that you’ll know what to do when someone starts dishing out the hate.

Game On

The meeting’s on. You’re walking in with a head full of data and my hope is that through your constant cross-pollination you are legitimately the most informed person on this particular topic in the room. There’s still work to do.

Size the room. Who is here? What groups do they represent? What do they want? Any unexpected visitors? Really? Why would they randomly show up? Who brought them? What possible Screw-Mes could they represent? Ok, let’s get started.

Carry the room. Start your deck. You’ve got it memorized, right? They can tell this is the 32nd time you’ve done it, right? Good. It’s smooth. You’ve already diffused two Screw-Mes by slide 12. Really well done there. Amanda, you have a question?

Manage the room. Questions aren’t Screw-mes. You can clarify and stay on track. You know that Amanda is going to ask about hard data, right? Don’t let her take over the conversation. Say, “I’ve got your data in the appendix, but let me get through this first, ok?” Yeah, you just shut down a Senior VP. Nicely done. No way you can do that without serious confidence in your preparation. Yes, Tim?

Tim’s got the Screw-Me and you didn’t see it coming. Total left field. Completely valid strategic observation and you don’t have a clue how to answer. Shit.

You will recognize the Screw-Me by the complete silence that fills both the room and your head. That’s the realization everyone is having that you’re Screwed. First, let’s not make it worse…

The Unforgivable Spin

Tim: “Rands, what about THIS?”

I’m a poker player and an experienced meeting surfer, so the room will not immediately know from the look on my face that This has Screwed me, but what I choose to do next will define my ongoing relationship with the room.

There are two options when you are cornered by This. Your animal brain, when cornered, will try to find a way out. You can taste this approach even before you begin. I am going to spin. I am going to talk quickly and confidently about This and I am going to hope that in my furious verbal scurrying they are going to believe I’ve got This handled.

That’s not what they’re seeing or hearing.

This is not your staff meeting where a little verbal soft shoe is going to entertain and delight. These are the execs and no matter how many meetings you’ve surfed, they see straight through spin, they know this dance, and the longer you sit there spinning, the longer you give your boss an opportunity to step in, try to make the diving save, and make you look like a blithering fool.

It takes a little practice to make the correct move when you feel the spin coming. You are going to do three things:

1. Acknowledge the Screw-Me.
2. Admit “I don’t know.”
3. Concretely explain the steps you’re going to take to find out and give yourself a deadline.

You have completely defused Tim. See, Tim was pissed which is why he waited until precisely the wrong moment to throw down the Screw-Me. He wanted to see you spin and make a fool of yourself in front of your management team and what you did with the instant acknowledgement was crush emotion with structured sanity.

You can get lucky with spin sometimes. There are times when you spin so hard that you actually talk yourself into a Screw-Me solution that actually makes sense. But this is rare and unreliable and in my experience this frenetic verbal journey erodes confidence and wastes time.

The only question on everyone’s mind during the cross-pollination clusterfuck is, “Do you know what you’re talking about?” It’s lame that Tim doesn’t speak engineer and waited until precisely the wrong moment to Screw you, but my hope is that through your incessant vetting of your slides that you can deliver the “I don’t know” with confidence. Tim just knows what he’s pissed about and you, through your preparation, can see the entire picture.

A Screw-Me Detection Policy

An aggressive Screw-Me detection policy is, I believe, essential to navigating groups of people. It’s not just constantly knowing the potential worst case scenario in any situation, it’s that you are instinctively always looking for it. When I am looking at any situation, I’m always trying to figure out what sequence of events could occur that will screw me.

This strategy sounds a lot like paranoia and yes, an unchecked Screw-Me detection policy can result in a conspiracy theory lifestyle where THEY are out to GET YOU.

Yes, only the paranoid survive, but paranoia is a lot of work. You can burn a lot of calories worrying about all possibilities, but this is not an approach I recommend. What I’m asking is that you look at specific key events strategically. Step back and look at the whole board. Ask “What sequence of moves is going to benefit me? Can I see what is coming? And how could I get screwed?” because teams which kick ass aren’t just ones that deliver, it’s that they deliver when they’re screwed.

An Aspirational Twitter

Big couple of weeks for Twitter. Biz was on Colbert. Ashton got a million followers and bought a bunch of mosquito nets. Oprah showed up sans shift key. Twitter seems to be on the front page of everything but, curiously, has done nothing functionally interesting. They’re just sitting there keeping the lights on.

Not everyone is just sitting there. Some are wondering, “What’s next?”

Birdhouse (Adam Lisagor and Cameron Hunt)

The best explanation (and compliment) I can give Birdhouse is that it’s just like Twitter — the more I attempt to explain what it is, the less you’ll understand. You’re not really going to get it until you use it, but here goes…

Before I begin, a quick reminder. My opinion regarding tweets can be summarized thusly: “I don’t give a fuck what you had for lunch unless you give me reason.” This colorful opinion has already been well documented in The Art of the Tweet.

Described by its creators as “A Notepad for Twitter”, Birdhouse is precisely the application you should be using if you want to bring some art to your tweets.

Let’s say that art is one part consideration and one part timing. Birdhouse supports both parts by providing a temporary safe haven for your partially formed thoughts.

I’ve got an approximate tweet rate of six tweets per day. That’s my thing. The rate at which I discover tweets varies as a function of time and caffeination, but almost always exceeds the publishing rate, which means I’ve often got a tweet pile-up somewhere. Birdhouse is a perfect place to park a thought or link.

While Birdhouse has a clean, usable interface, it’s the act of parking an idea that’s where the innovation lies. Birdhouse separates the act of creation from the act of publication. It replaces the unnecessary rush between “I just thought of this” and “I need to publish this” with calm consideration. This replacement, in my opinion, is essential to developing tweet content of value.

Try it. I know your quip tastes mentally delicious when it shows up, but is now the precise time to share it? Maybe it needs the larger Monday morning audience? Maybe you’ve already unleashed enough of the funny for that day? Your Twitter-schtick is your deal, but my belief is an idea gets better both by letting it ferment as well choosing the right time to open it.

Tweetie (Atebits)

When I first heard of Tweetie for iPhone, I sighed. The problem with explaining Twitter to the uninitiated is, well, you have to say Twitter. A lot. Then you end up saying “tweet” or “twittersphere” or “twoot” and then you flash back to the embarrassing conversation with your Mom when you tried to explain what a blog was.

“No no no Mom… it’s an important thing.”

“What is?”

Sigh. “A blog.”

Tweetie takes dorky, uncomfortable names to the next level. And it does so with stunning visuals and clean interaction design that will change how you use Twitter on your desktop. I mean it.

My measure for compelling visual design is, after installation, whether or not, in the first five minutes, I fire up xScope to see the pixel-by-pixel construction of a particular piece of UI. Exactly 12 seconds after I fired up Tweetie, I was applying the microscope to the breadcrumb bar in Tweetie because I wanted to know “How’d he build that?”

Build products that speak for themselves. It’s simple. The teaser video for Tweetie had no feature lists, it had no spin; it was a simple, kickin’ video with nouns and verbs where using the product was the best pitch. Take a look at the application window below and tell me how many words you can find that describe the functionality. I count one. How many do you count here?

The rest of the real estate is an elegant distillation of the four most important Twitter features:

• Updates — who said what?
• Mention — did they say it about me? to me?
• Direct Messages — only me?
• Search — if they’re not talking about me, what they hell are they talking about?

Twitter has been tidying up the layout of the site to focus on these features, but I don’t want to visit the website — that’s why I installed a rich client. After two weeks of regular usage, Tweetie has eliminated my daily visits to the website by providing simple access to all of the features I need and it does so by borrowing from the future.

Tweetie is a desktop version of an application of the same name for the iPhone which, in my limited experience, is the first time an application has migrated from the phone to the desktop. As a friend mentioned, “Platform merge in progress!” and he’s right.

The navigation in the desktop version of Tweetie feels… like the iPhone. Jumping from Updates to Mentions (via the essential and deliciously obvious keyboard shortcuts) feels like a flick of your index finger. Drilling down on an avatar accesses the user information with a clean horizontal scroll, again, inspired by iPhone navigation.

It’s delightful to navigate Tweetie. The application seamlessly integrates Twitter users, their information, and their conversations into a mesh of information that feels like more than the sum of their parts. And I believe Tweetie, like Twitter, is just getting started. Quick, look at the Tweetie interface and tell me exactly where a future Groups feature lands.

When I use Tweetie, I’m reminded that a maniacal attention to detail not only makes you want to reach out and touch the digitally untouchable, it describes the familiar as the new, and, most importantly, it speaks of an aspirational future.

Keynote Kung-fu Two

You’ve taken some hits. Being taken apart by the execs because they could smell you weren’t prepared. The slide deck you loved that the audience ignored. That guy… snoring. In the front row.

However, you’ve also hit it out of the park. The unexpected standing ovation. That seven-slide deck that turned into an hour of ad-libbed brilliance. The moment you know you’ve deeply connected with your audience.

Admit it, you’ve got some presentation-fu.

The original Keynote Kung-fu article describes how to set up and use Keynote for the first time, but once you’ve done a couple of presentations, you’re going to want more. How To Not Throw Up and Out Loud walk you through the basics of constructing and practicing your presentation, but there’s more to say about Keynote because, as with any well-designed tool, the more you use it, the better you get and the more layers of awesomeness you will find.

Pre-Game

Advanced Keynote Kung-fu starts in pre-game. Before you’ve written a single slide, you need to pick a theme. This process has been simplified in the latest Keynote with the new, ginormous theme picker chock full of interesting templates, but I almost always start with standard black.

I don’t want to worry about anything except the ideas and basic flow. Black is pleasantly generic. The rule is: if you’re starting a presentation by endlessly fussing with your presentation design, you probably don’t have anything to say.

With theme in hand, I follow all of the workspace setup advice I gave in the prior article, including the addition that turns on Master Slides via View | Master Slides. This puts the different types of base slides available in the black template at the top of the slide navigator. Rather than building a custom layout for each new slide, I stick to using this default layout as much as possible for early drafts. There’s a great reason why which I’ll explain shortly.

And then I create slides. Lots of them. More than I’ll ever need. It’s a slide explosion.

I’m an outlining zealot, so I’m going to repeat another piece of advice from the original Fu article. In Keynote’s slide navigator, hitting tab will indent the current slide and create a collapsible group under the prior slide. This simple, convenient feature breaks the linearity of my endless list of slides and is the first indication that I’m headed down an organized path to a well-constructed presentation.

A prior version of Keynote introduced a Light Table view to allow you see just thumbnails of your slides, but this view confuses me. In my head, my deck is linear, with a beginning, middle, and end. While looking at your complete deck is visually stimulating, the wrapping of slides destroys the shape of my deck that I have I my head. The Light Table view is useful only after my deck is done when I’m looking to poach bright ideas for other decks. See?

Organize and Design

The point when organization rather than creation becomes the primary activity is when I start to worry about design and layout. This presentation is far from done, but a design exercise is a great mental break from working on the message. If you haven’t already, take a look at the original Keynote article regarding preparing your workspace. In addition to the preferences tweaks and enabling the color and font inspectors, I enable the following:

• Rulers: you’re going to start worrying about spacing at some point.
• Presenter Notes: as you go through this first part of organization, you won’t be able to ignore the content, and rather than getting stuck endlessly rewriting your deck, use the presenter notes to capture your random inspiration so that you can focus on the organizational task at hand.
• Multiple inspectors: Keynote added an additional mini-toolbar, which includes many of the common inspector options, and I use it a ton, but I still need the inspector window. Actually, I need a couple. Option-Clicking on any of the inspector tabs creates additional windows and I usually have the Slide, Build, and Graphic inspectors open.

With your workspace prepared, let’s begin the deck design transformation. If you’ve stuck with the basic black or any of the base slides for any template, you’re about to discover that you’ve already saved yourself a tremendous amount of time.

Which Master slide did you use the most? I tend to riff on Title & Bullets quite a bit, but the Gill Sans has just gotta go. I also despise the spacing on the bullets, so how do I go back and change the 19 slides that use Title & Bullets? Just change the Master. Typography, artwork, animations, transitions — it can be all be changed at the Master Slide level.

If you ignored my Master Slide advice, you can slap the palm of your hand firmly against your forehead. Like CSS, Keynote slides inherit styles from the Master Slides, and while this is hardly revolutionary, it’s a presentation development must-do to avoid repetitive design tasks. By working with a base set of slides, you give yourself the flexibility to change your mind as much as you want.

Even better, once you’ve developed your personal base set of slides, you can save those slides as a Theme which then shows as up as one of the options in the Theme chooser.

Designing for Failure

At the end of this process, the slides should have a shape and a cadence. Go glance through all your slides. How does it sound in your head? Is it tap tap tap or taptaptappitylet’smovetap? What should it sound like? I don’t know; it’s your deck.

In order to effectively present you need to have a love affair with your clicks. You need to know them intimately not only so you can cleanly step through the slides, but for when something goes wrong. And something will go wrong.

Try walking through your deck backwards and forwards. In your practicing, you’re going to know the regular flow of your deck, but what about when you screw up? I love that multi-stage build-out you’ve got on slide 12 — it’s 32 seconds of transition goodness — but what happens when you accidentally hit Back after it’s done? That’s another painful 32 seconds that you’re going to need to improvise.

Your presentation is not a movie. Each presentation, while structured, is you standing up there waiting for disaster to strike, and when it does, where I want your head at is: “Disaster… failure… is only going to make this presentation better.”

Practicing for the unpredictable, improvising, is covered in How to Not Throw Up, but Keynote also provides a variety of disaster recovery tools.

URL Jump. Available via the inspectors, this feature allows you link any object on a slide to jump forwards, backwards, or to any other slide. My move is to hide these jumps in the navigation of the deck for unexpected moment when I need them.

Presentation Mode. Once you’ve fired up presentation mode, you have a slew of features to help you navigate disaster. All of these features are available by hitting the ? in this mode and here are are few of my favorites:

• Slide Switcher Overlay. You’ve probably already triggered this without knowing because clicking on a number will fire up this handy feature. Just type any number and the overlay will appear.
• Jump to Slide. When you accidentally back up over an animation-rich slide, you can simply jump over the slide rather than stepping through each build using the bracket keys.
• White Out / Black Out. There are moments when you want them to pay attention to you. Keynote provides two features which achieve this effect: white-out (via W) and black-out (via B) do exactly what they describe. Blank the screen with your favorite color so that the spotlight moves completely to you.
• Swap Displays. In presentation mode, X toggles the display and presenter screens while in presentation mode. Handy for those tense first few seconds where it’s not clear which display is showing up where.

Even with adept usage of these tools you’re going to screw-up. I like when a presenter stumbles. I like to see how they react to the unpredictable because non-catastrophic failure humanizes a presentation. I’m there to hear what you think, but when you stumble over that slide and attempt to recover, I get a glimpse of how you think.

A Slice of You

In the past year, I’ve seen two amazing presentations where there was a total absence of slides. One was, essentially, an author reading his essay. Another was two of my favorite people talking about finding your obsession and following it. Both parties, I’m sure, spent a tremendous amount of time constructing their talks, and the results of that work were a scathing critique of Web 2.0 and an intelligent, clever romp into why you should simply focus on building things you love.

You don’t need slides to say something big.

I’m not there yet. Yes, over the past few years I’m finding fewer and fewer actual words on my deck, and I can see a day where I can riff on a single slide for an hour, but I’m not there yet. Not sure if I want to be.

It’s you up there on stage. They paid to see you. If they simply wanted to know what you think, they could have read your weblog or bought your book, but they paid to see you. A presentation is not just the careful construction of your thoughts; it’s a means by which your audience has access to you — pacing, waving your arms, and cleverly recovering from that disaster on slide #32.

Mastery of Keynote can give your deck significant fu, but the slides are a prop. You’re the presentation.

The Pond

“Can I work remote?”

I cringe. It’s Ian and Ian is a senior engineer. He’s a rock. He gets it done. I never have to ask him twice and, after six years, Ian has every right to ask to work remote. But I’m still freaked because my first thought when anyone asks to work remote is, “This fine person is a year away from either quitting or being fired.” Why? Because they’re asking to leave the Pond.

The Pond

When I think of communication in a large group of people, I imagine a pond. Small, round, slightly green water. You can see the edges of this pond and there’s a willow tree over there looking both informed and sad. Metaphorically, all the people in the organization are standing somewhere on this pond. Our positions are based on whom we know and where we are in the organization chart. When something happens in the company, when something noteworthy is said, a drop falls in the pond and creates a ripple.

The ripple is the piece of information traveling from one person to the others. Big drop, big ripple… travels further.

With me so far?

There is a constant flow of information in your company. That means there are constant drips in the Pond, creating various-sized ripples traveling every which way, bumping into each other, and transforming each other into slightly mutated ripples. These mutated ripples are the rumor mill, gossip, and all those small pieces of slightly bizarre information that cross your path during the course of the day.

If you’re in the Pond, you’re gathering data, whether it’s intended for you or not. It’s inevitable. It’s what we do as curious humans; we receive information, digest it, alter it, and then send it on its way tweaked to our own personal wavelengths.

A remote employee is not in the Pond. Yes, he’s on the mailing lists and he aggressively updates the wiki, but the subtle, unintentional, tweaked, quiet information that is transferred throughout the Pond doesn’t leave the Pond. There are those whose jobs it is to look at the Pond and attempt to relay the interesting ripples, but while these program and project managers are well intentioned, they relay poorly because they’re just single observers of ripples. Real information is never conveyed by the individual; we understand by listening as a group.

The group forms a collective picture of the state of the Pond – it’s a distributed picture understood by everyone, but never completely known by one. It is the unspoken royal “we” and this intricate, immeasurable thing is absolutely essential to how a group gets things done well.

Do you mean it?

Remote has to work. It’s not just Ian. There are bright people in your building right now who are going to want to return home to Colorado, and you’re going to let them because losing them is not an option. Also, there’s a planet full of talented people who will always be at a distance, but who represent huge, untapped productivity for your team. Your challenge is how to augment the remote employee’s absence from the Pond.

This article is about how to decrease the risk that you will have to fire your favorite employee who decides to become remote. I’d like to give advice from the other side, on how to work remotely, but I’ve never done it. I don’t have the personality. My professional satisfaction comes from being able to look those I depend on in the eye and ask, “Do you mean it?” There is essential content to be discovered in that stare that will never be fully conveyed in an email, IM, or tweet.

My belief is that without deliberate attention, the remote employee slowly becomes irrelevant to the organization. Through no fault of their own, they can be gradually pushed to the edge of what’s important. And when you’re at the edge, you’re an organizational shudder from falling over it. Failure happens at the edges.

Avoiding failure involves asking four questions before they leave:

1. Do they have the personality?
2. Do they have the right job?
3. Does the culture support it?
4. Do you have a remote friction detection and resolution policy?

The Personality

Whether the employee has the right personality to be a productive remote worker is a tricky call because most of your data about this person is based on working with them. What’s going to happen when you can’t see them? How are they going to react when you forget to include them in the staff call? How are they going to feel when the product launches and they aren’t there to celebrate?

This is what I consider.

Are they eloquent in email? Every bit of communication is more expensive with remote folks, so they’d better be good at it – no matter the medium. Can this person construct and convey a complex argument in a single email? Can this person make an important point… via iChat? Written communication is bereft of much of the intangible value of the Pond. It lacks the nuance of face-to-face communication, which means the author needs to be painfully explicit about the details. Can this person do that?

Are they self-directed? How do they deal with ambiguity? If you’ve given them crap direction, do they bump around for a bit before admitting defeat, or do they immediately ask for clarification? Many of the subtle ways you check in and error correct co-workers leave when they leave. If they’re in the weeds, are they going to ask for help? How long until they ask for help?

How detail-oriented are they? If self-direction indicates how they start a thing, their detail orientation is how well they finish. Is this a person who needs help across the finish line? Do they get lost in nonessential details? When you ask for a thing, are you getting the end result you expect?

How well do they know the Pond? We’ll talk about their job in a moment, but whatever that job is, it will have dependencies on people they are leaving behind. Does this person know how the organization communicates? Do they know both the organizational structure as well as the social structure? Are they asking you who to follow up with or are you asking them? Are they instinctively aware of whom they might piss off and proactively account for this in the first mail rather than after the flame-o-gram?

Do they need the Pond? Knowledge of the Pond is great, but does this person thrive because of the Pond? How much of their day are they spending talking with co-workers? Is this conversation essential to what they do or purely social? Which part of them are you going to socially amputate when they’re no longer in the building?

Are they reliable? I imply at the beginning of this article that it’s a senior employee who has a better chance at being successful remotely, but that’s not true. The ability to work remotely is not entirely a function of seniority; it’s also genetic. There are those who do it better solo. Their standard operating procedure is to simply get it done. Seniority can improve personal efficiency and the quality of the finished product, but I’ve discovered innate reliability at all levels of experience. There are people who simply do what they say they’re going to do.

The Right Job

Typical corporate logic dictates that a remote employee should work on a project that is separable from the rest of the team’s. The reasoning here is flawed. The belief is that the inconvenience of communication and decision-making latency around their distance means they should be separated and placed on non-dependent work.

Every part of that reasoning is wrong. Every part is another reason that remote fails.

My most successful remote employee was a perfect anomaly. He wrote standards — protocols. The heart of his job was to define a structured means of communication where the primary goal was the removal of ambiguity. He was a phenomenal communicator. He went out of his way to completely and promptly answer every email. 24 hours a day. When he visited, he took the time to do a complete circumnavigation of the Pond, vetting all the ripples he could find. He instinctively knew that the skill in defining a protocol is creating a structure that is going to meet the needs of right now, but also the unimagined needs of five years from now. And he applied that not only to what he wrote, but also to how he worked. He was a wonderful anomaly and he taught me that a remote job must be perceived, in all ways, as equal to a local one.

There should be absolutely no consideration of a person’s location on the planet Earth when considering the work you need of them. Each time the concern “Well, they’re remote” comes up, you need to turn the concern around and ask, “What about my company, my people, or the work makes remote an issue?” because that is what needs to be considered locally.

The Culture

How are those back in the Pond viewing the remote employee? The means by which Pond-based employees discriminate varies from the discreet to the direct, from the passive to the aggressive. The reason for this discrimination always boils down a single, fundamental tension: remote creates productivity friction.

The friction sounds something like this:

• “I don’t know what the hell this remote person is doing, so I’m going to assume he’s stumbling around the house in his underwear.”
• “This remote person is messing with my deadline or deliverable.”
• “He doesn’t answer his email.”

How long does it take to build a thing of quality? There’s a cost and the question is how is the remote worker affects this cost. Anything higher than the cost of a local employee creates friction. What was a 27-second walk down the hallway to yell at Bob about his crap code is a now 30-minutes constructing an email. Staff meetings start with a wasted 10 minutes trying to get the videoconferencing to connect. Every single communication with a remote worker costs more and generates more ripples in the Pond, and both their job and yours is to either make this cost go away or justify it.

Respect comes from knowledge and the question is: does your culture support a constant and consistent flow of knowledge to and from the remote worker?

Let’s find out:

• Have you created or implemented specific communication media for the team? Wikis? IRC? Are they used? Do different teams need different media? Are there too many and, if so, how are you going to anoint the one true medium?
• Other than the job, how are you encouraging other random interactions between local and remote folks?
• How often are you seeing these remote folks face-to-face? My vote is at least monthly.

Friction Detection

Remote friction is going to crop up. Just like interpersonal tensions randomly appear in the building, so does friction around remote employees. What are you doing not only to detect these, but also fix them? An example.

I hate meetings, but the brilliant thing about a meeting is that it’s full of people, and in a room full of people you never quite know what the hell is going to happen. The knee jerk reaction to bridging this meeting gap when there are remote workers is always, “We need good video conferencing software.”

After 10 years of hearing this argument, I’m calling fail. Video conferencing works when you need to talk to your kids during that trip to Chicago. It fills that visual gap, but all of the video conferencing solutions I’ve been a part of relative to a meeting create friction rather than remove it.

Yes, I can see Anne on the screen, but she’s flat. She’s also got this 1/10th of a second lag on the conversation, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re in the middle of that strategic rant about design and Anne chimes in, mid-sentence, with a bright thought that completely disturbs the creative cadence of your rant. That 1/10th of a second. Her inability to inject her essential thought at precisely the right moment. These micro-disturbances of the Force are a constant reminder that Anne’s not there. She’s being projected on the conference room wall like a well-intentioned screen saver. This isn’t just hurting the tempo of the meeting, it’s eroding her credibility.

In this case, surprisingly, less technology, rather than more, is better. Skype’s proximity to my computer and the usual lack of lag is far superior to video conferencing for 1:1s, and spending a little money on a quality Polycom is a fine solution for the staff meeting, but technology is a tool and never the answer.

Friction detection is paying attention to all the ways a remote employee interacts with the group and constantly asking, “Is this working?”

Another Pond

You, as the manager of people, are responsible for making the remote call regarding a person, putting them in the right job, and making sure the culture supports remote people. But the responsibility of delivering while remote is squarely on the remote employee. Yes, a remote employee answers to himself. At four in the afternoon when they run into an impossible problem, it’s almost entirely up to them to develop their plan of attack.

Working remotely isn’t a privilege; it’s work. And it’s the same work we’re all doing back at the mothership… fully clothed… in the Pond.

The Makers of Things

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

Stunning.

In a good bridge, I see the defiant end result of how some of my favorite engineering stories begin:

• “I’m sure you can arrange an impressive line of people who say it’s impossible. I take personal joy in ignoring those who say no.”
• “Yes, halfway through this project we’ll discover the impossible, but we know how to build through the impossible. Impossible is when we do our best work.”
• “Trust me when I say that I can close my eyes and see the end result, and when you can see it, too, you will be amazed.”

Ignore the No. When Brooklyn and New York’s population was booming at the end of the 19th century, the best way to get to and from Brooklyn was via ferries. As solutions were considered, I’m sure there were those who simply thought, “More boats!” These ardent defenders of the status quo were not engineers — they were the business. Their goal was not to build something great, but to make a profit.

It was an engineer named John Roebling who proposed a suspension bridge. We take bridges for granted now, but back in the 1800s, bridges were in beta. They fell. One out of every four bridges… fell. He convinced them by designing a bridge half again as big as any before it that was six times stronger than he estimated it need to be. Roebling designed the complete specification for the bridge in a mere three months and then died of tetanus from an injury he received surveying the bridge site.

Discover the impossible. Both of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are in the water of the East River. Ever wonder how you dig a big hole in the bottom of a river bed? In the late 1800s? It’s called a caisson, which is a huge, watertight wooden box half the size of a city block. This monstrosity was constructed on the river, sealed with pine tar, and carefully floated to a specific location on the river. It was then slowly sunk to the riverbed by placing stone on top that would eventually become the foundation.

Done, right?

Wrong. With the caisson on the riverbed, it’s time to push it another 45 feet into the riverbed in search of bedrock. Workers did this through the continued application of stone to the top while workers in the caisson dug out the riverbed with shovels, buckets, and, when necessary, dynamite. There was nothing resembling an electrical grid, so there was nothing resembling modern lighting in this watertight pine-tarred box, which was slowly descending through the floor of the East River. There were no jack hammers, so when they hit rock, they used small amounts of dynamite to crack these rocks. In a pine-tarred box, at the bottom of a river, mostly in a very wet dark.

And when the caisson finally hit bedrock 45 feet underground, they had to do it all over again for the New York tower. 30 feet deeper.

You will be amazed. With his father killed via an accident early in the surveying process, it was Washington Roebling, John’s son, who was chief engineer. He did the balance of this work bedridden in Brooklyn Heights, suffering from caisson disease, which he acquired working in the caisson as it descended into the New York-side of the East River. It’s not technically a disease; it’s decompression sickness or the bends, and it forced him to monitor all of the work from a window in his bedroom. He relayed detailed instructions via his wife, Emily, who effectively managed a cadre of politicians, competing engineers, and anyone else working on the bridge for over a decade.

As the New York caisson descended further than its Brooklyn counterpart, the incidents of the bends increased, killing two men. With no bedrock in sight, Roebling used his knowledge of geology and mineralogy to make an amazing decision: stop digging. It wasn’t bedrock, but it was compacted sand.

The New York tower. 78 feet deep into the riverbed. Resting on sand. It hasn’t moved.

We Are Defined By What We Build

The Brooklyn Bridge was built from 1870 until 1883. A quick history refresher: five years after we finished shooting each other in the American Civil War, we started building this:

Three years after that, work started on another:

And before the Williamsburg Bridge was even done, work started on the Manhattan Bridge:

These are the words and the stories I hear in the Brooklyn Bridge: enthusiasm, audacity, impossibility, and amazement. More importantly, I see a work of bare utility with a palpable sense of confidence, an equilibrium with nature, and a beauty that only grows with time.

We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act. I’m happy to report our new President agrees when he says,

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”

Someone, sometime soon is going to start describing the climb out of this impressive hole we’ve dug for ourselves, and they’re going to call it “America 2.0”. Clever, yes. We need a new version of ourselves and that’s going to involve bright, unexpected ideas from those we least expect them from, and they’re going to strike you as impossible. All you need to do to understand these terrifyingly ambitious ideas is to look back at what we’ve already done to understand what we can do.

The Art of the Tweet

In writing an article, I know I’m done when I delete. The process leading to done is chaotic; it’s days, weeks, or months of aggregating writing where I collect and organize paragraphs and sentences. Over time, content creation becomes content shaping as I organize the thoughts into a pleasing coherence.

And then, in a moment, it’s done. It looks nothing like the final product, I still have hours of writing and editing to do, but I know that I’m done because I can see the arc and the shape of the piece. I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but, most importantly, I have the new ability to remove. I can delete. A line here, a paragraph there — I can let go of things of former importance.

It’s one of the biggest writing lessons I’ve learned in the past few years — the art of less — and the appearance of Twitter has only reinforced this lesson’s importance.

Two Tweets, Three Guidelines

There are two kinds of tweets:

Original material. This is you talking to everyone.

Retweets, quotes, and links. This is you forwarding a thing that you find interesting to everyone. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call these retweets.

There’s another type of tweet that I want to talk about briefly and that’s the conversational tweet. What does this tweet tell you?

@commanda No clue

Not a thing. As you’ll see with the three following guidelines, my Twitter expectation is that each time I glance at my Twitterstream that I can something of value in any tweet. While conversational tweets are interesting for you and the recipient, they leave the rest of us in the dark.

Say More with Less

Tweet material just shows up. I’m sitting there in someone’s office when they say something which is, well, twitterable. This identification process has become annoyingly front-of-mind over the past year to the point that I interrupt important meetings with the simple declaration, “That’s twitterable”.

With solid twitterable material on my hands, I ask, “Does it need an edit?” The editing of tweets started out as a practicality for me. I needed to know whether or not my rough tweets were more than 140 characters, so I’d fire up WriteRoom, which conveniently counts characters, words, and paragraphs. Yes, I know Twitteriffic counts characters and so does the Twitter web application, but writing happens in big, open places. I don’t like typing in boxes; I want a canvas.

With the rough tweet dumped into WriteRoom, I start cutting. First to get it under the 140-character limit, but, more importantly, to reduce the idea to the basics. The Elements of Style has advice here. They suggest: “Avoid fancy words”. Why utilize when you can use? My advice is similarly confusing: “Drop words to give them room to think”.

In my head, I’m cutting words from my tweet to give you room to mentally add your own:

BEFORE: If it’s 4am, I know how stressed I am.
AFTER: Stress is how well I know 4am.

Nine to seven words. Slight reorganization, but which says more to you?

The act of editing a tweet seems contradictory to the impulsive nature of tweets, which means this is a good time to remind you that I’m a repeatedly stated firm believer that Twitter is what you make of it. I want my tweets with a bit of art. I want each word considered. You want to share the intimate details of your Battlestar Galactica watching habits. Whatever works for you, but how about…

Don’t Say What You’re Doing, Say Why You’re Doing It

The question Twitter asks is, “What are you doing?” I can’t think of the last time that I followed that direction. Fact is 95% of my day would bore the shit out of you. Really. There’s a chance you might derive some meager inspiration from the fact that, right now, I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing — talking to no one — but what is more interesting is why I’m here. Why I choose to do what I do. The tweet is, “Avoiding a meeting I hate”.

It’s just a mental step further from “What are you doing?” It’s a moment of introspection to transform the boring details of your day into delicious group therapy. This is why I think you should…

Add a Bit of Yourself

Twitter is you. I’m a big fan of the retweet, but I have the same fundamental problem with it that I have with literal answers to “What are you doing?” My question about the zero-add retweet is, “So what?”

Yes, the point of the tweet is the link and, yes, I follow some people because they are experts at finding compelling content on the Web that I probably care about. I don’t want just the content; I want to know what you think about it. Retweeting an article? Great, what’s the one line you love? Think that lolcat is funny? Me too, but why?

BEFORE: NYTimes Graphic: Home Prices in Selected Cities: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi)
AFTER: Ouch. Phoenix: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi)

I’ve already got a bevy of sites that are scrubbing and prioritizing the web for me. I check them four times a day and they serve their purpose well. But these sites lack authenticity. I don’t need another list of interesting links.

In Twitter, you follow people, not content.

140

My brief research into the English language revealed the average character count of a word is eight. Throw together a bunch of a smaller and bigger words, some single spaces and punctuation and you roughly end up with the average 140-character tweet being somewhere between 14 and 20 words. Let’s call it 15.

15 words.

In my opinion, the art of a good tweet is not just how much you can convey using extreme brevity, it’s also how you can take an idea, shape it with a bit of yourself, and give it to someone else who, if you’ve given them reason, will do the same.

A Twitter Decision

In starting a significant project, an engineer knows the first three big design decisions you make are vastly more important than the second three.

The nature of these decisions varies from project to project. They may be choices about look and feel, rules about architecture, or trade offs regarding feature set. Whatever these decisions are, they set a tone that defines the success of the project.

When I look at Twitter, I see three early essential decisions about how Twitter allows you to craft a community. I believe much of Twitter’s continued success is due to definition and execution of these decisions.

Interestingly, some obvious candidates for the Top 3, like “Scales like crazy”, “Will generate money”, and “Needs to be searchable” weren’t initially there.

The decisions were:

• Decision #1: A user chooses whom they follow.
• Decision #2: A user chooses whom they no longer follow.
• Decision #3: A user should be judged only by what they say.

These are simple decisions of empowerment. As Twitter’s popularity grows exponentially, both veteran users and recent arrivals need to remember that these basic decisions mean Twitter is yours to build with however you choose.

Yeah, Britney’s here now. Barack was here for a bit. I hear Shaq is figuring out Twitter as well. Yeah, these folks have an inordinate number of followers and are saying nothing particularly interesting, but they do not embody what makes Twitter great. Twitter is great because of choices made to allow you build whatever you want.

Decision #1: A user chooses whom they follow.

This might have been your first Twitter crisis: why am I here?

“Well, I hear so’n’so was on Twitter and I like them, so I followed them so I could figure out what the hell this Twitter thing was all about.”

You added folks. You looked at whom others you respected were following and you added more. Then, someone pissed you off. Someone said something that was not aligned with the vibe of your Twitterstream and you got cranky.

Every couple of weeks, a meme stressing about “an increase in Twitter spam” wanders the Internet. Each time I see this meme appear, I turn away from my keyboard and bang my head against my desk three times.

Twitter spam. Really? Are you even paying attention? I’ll say it again, you choose who you follow. If you’re following a newsbot, you’re going to get news spam. If you follow a good friend who can’t stop RTing, you’re going to to get retweet spam, but complaining about it is like standing the middle of a freeway asking, “Why do these cars keep hitting me?”

“But Rands, I need to follow this person, but they won’t shut up.”

There’s a legitimate complaint here. I’m certain there’s a sensible feature request based on this complaint, like “Please don’t show me tweets contain RT or @” or maybe a feature to put someone you follow on Twitter time-out during that weekend drinking binge where they won’t shut up about their ex-girlfriend. Yes, these features could be added to the base platform, but why complicate a feature you already have? You unfollow. It’s brutally simple and it solves the problem.

Decision #2: A user chooses whom they will no longer follow.

My theory regarding folks who complain about Twitter spam is that they, like me, have been traumatized by decades of email spam. You believe that Twitter spam is inevitable because, well, we lost the war against email spam, so we’re going to loser the Twitter spam war, as well.

You can win this war.

Think if you had the following power over your email inbox. When a piece of spam showed up, you could press a single button and guarantee that you would never receive that type of mail again. Poof. We just eliminated the billion-dollar spam detection and prevention industry with this dream. That’s exactly what Twitter made possible with Decision #2 and they did it with class.

If you choose, you receive a notification when someone starts following you, but have you noticed there is no similar notification when they leave? I find this omission telling. While I can’t confirm the feature omission was deliberate, I hope it was. The simple choice to not broadcast a departing follower strikes me as saying, “We are choosing to focus Twitter’s community conversations on what’s being built, not what’s being taken apart.”

A service like Qwitter quickly appeared to fill the gap, but unless you’re getting paid by your number of followers, getting lost in figuring out why someone is no longer following you is a waste of time. Their departure has nothing to do with you; it has to do with them and the experience they want out of Twitter.

Decision #3: A user should be judged only by what they say.

Take a look at the decisions Twitter made regarding your profile. It’s a spartan, 160-character bio, your location, and a URL. None of which you actually need to fill out. This is decidedly not Facebook. There is no feature in Twitter which tells who in your graduating class has a Twitter account. If you don’t know the person whose account you’re checking out, you’re forced to think. You make a choice to follow not based on where they live, where they went to school, what they do, or whom they know. What matters is what they say.

Yes, this rule says should because there’s no way my hippie utopian vision of a world where bright ideas connect bright people is going to last. Barack hasn’t said much since the election, but still garners thousands of followers a week. Mr. Tweet robotically scrubs your follower list and offers automated helpful advice regarding followers of followers that you might be interested in, and I’ve found some “Well, duh, I should be following them” folks.

Twitter is mainstream and lots of time and energy is being spent analyzing and judging Twitter habits. “He’s got 17,123 followers and only follows THREE PEOPLE. Jerk.” Who cares? Yes, some folks have huge numbers of followers, whereas others have 12. This gives these massively followed people a larger stage for their 140 characters, but because someone has a pile of followers doesn’t mean I ever want my search altered by someone else’s subjective calculation regarding “authority”. I define my own authority. I prioritize.

This is My House

Think of your Twitter account as your house. This is my house. Your house is different. You’re trying to figure out how to use Twitter to monetize eyeballs. Good luck with all that. For me, Twitter remains a place for casual information. For me, a tweet is still a note I tie to a balloon, which I let go and think, “Who is going to read that one?” Sometimes I look and see where it ended up, sometimes I don’t.

In my house, I want to create an illusion of a two-way conversation, which means I continue to prune followers so that content flows at a consumable rate. If I get the sense that I’ve lost control over my Twitterspace, I’ll stop going — the same way my fancy new mail rule files once important messages straight into the well-intentioned To Forget folder.

This is my house and I’m still deciding how I want it built and, thankfully, Twitter decided to be spartan and to stay out of the way. I think they knew the construction of your community is your deal. Bitching about it means you haven’t figured it out for yourself.

Rands in Review 2008

I live in the mountains and in the mountains you need a chainsaw.

Strangely, the time of year it’s the least fun to be outside is when I use the chainsaw the most. This is a result of holiday vacation, trees conveniently falling during winter storms, and short windows of time the county of Santa Cruz allows you to burn in your yard.

The job of the chainsaw is rarely one of actual building. It’s destructive, constructive work where you’re removing dead or live trees in order to make room for others to grow. After an afternoon in the forest, I’m covered in sawdust and sap. I’m bruised, I’m exhausted, and I can barely walk. It’s great.

I’ve been doing the same type of work with the weblog. In preparation for a new design, I’ve been slowly tidying and pruning the site. I’ve also been reflecting on the past year’s writing. Let’s look back at some of my favorite articles from 2008:

Appropriately, 2008 was led off with a Twitter article. Twitter was a recurring theme for the year and it showed up again in May as I talked about what, in my opinion, made a good follower in We Travel in Tribes. The first tweet inspired article was The Quirkbook, which listed a plethora of quirks I gathered via Twitter after admitting a few of my own.

Out Loud was the second half of my reposings on presentations. This article tackled the art of giving a presentation versus writing one. Articles like this appear because of immediate practicality. I was in presentation hell last spring and needed to articulate through my fingers how to prepare for a presentation.

Pixel Rigs documented another visual fascination of mine, namely desktop arrangements. I’m happy to report the Flickr group I created continues to receive a trickle of new desktop set-ups. I’ve recently updated mine, as well.

The FriendDA was an idea that had been kicking around my head that I finally got around to writing and posting. I deliberately disassociated the FriendDA from Rands to see what it could do on its own. Checks of the Twitterstream demonstrate folks seem to find value.

The Coffee Mug Affair was my third obsessive analysis of tools I can’t live without. The “This is seriously fucking black coffee” sits in front of me and is happily serving its purpose as I browse the archives and write this article. The cup also made an appearance on the first piece of Rands schwag, the t-shirt.

The year finished up with this Rands shirt with 100% of the profits go to First Book literacy charity. I’m done printing shirts, but I’ll be leaving what has been printed up in the Buy Olympia store until we’ve sold out.

That’s 23 articles on the year — five less than the year before. Other than some small tweaks, I’m moving into year #4 of the current design — which is unacceptable and currently being rectified.

The fact real work kicks in this week is tempered by the presence of MacWorld, which brings some of my favorite people to San Francisco. This collection of bright minds shows up at a perfect time of year. With the holidays behind us, with the celebration and the cleansing complete, it’s time to ask, “What are we going to build next?”

A Signature Cadence

Early on in the movie Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe constructs one of my favorite getting-to-know-you and let’s-fall-in-love scenes. The lead, William Miller, and the love interest, Penny Lane, stare at each other while lying to each other about their ages:

Penny: “How old are you?”

William: “18.”

Penny: “Me, too. How old are we really?”

William: “17.”

Penny: “Me, too.”

William: “Actually, I’m 16.”

Penny: “Me, too. Isn’t it funny? The truth just sounds different.”

What does a lie sound like? How do we decide to trust? There’s a reason why you can figure out in an instant whether a mail is spam or not. It’s not a single, measurable thing, but a whole set of small, invisible variables with which you can instantly make a judgment — I do not trust this mail.

You have a complex set of analytical mental muscles that help you make critical snap emotional judgments. Whether it’s a mail, a website, or a person, your brain can instantly look at 12 imperceptible aspects of a thing to determine how you should feel.

Truth, love, or lies, human has a signature cadence.

I love Flickr

Really, I love it. My favorite part of designing a presentation is the three hours I get lost slice and dicing the deck and cruising Flickr looking for the perfect image. I always find a photo that changes the way I see my deck.

Flickr pulled my SLR out of my closet and onto my desk. Flickr gives me regular visual insights into friends that I’d never find in Twitter, instant messaging, or even over lunch. I feel as I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what Flickr can offer and you know what? Until recently, I thought Flickr loved me back. Up until a few months ago, this was the Flickr logo:

As far as I could tell, just about every single Flickr page contained this highlighted message, and what I saw in this simple message was that I wasn’t on a web site; I wasn’t using software. I was somewhere else.

Flickr is not a web site. Flickr is a tremendously large group of people constantly throwing their photos at each other and when Flickr said it loved you, it was reminding you that you weren’t at a website, you were part of a community.

You’re Not a Clock

Some time shortly after Web 1.0 was over, an engineer was programming and making a choice regarding wording. He needed to tell the user how long it had been since something had happened — elapsed time. There are well-formatted, structured ways to display this information, but most assume you’re a clock:

3 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes, 3 seconds.

There are a bunch of problems with this format. First, you waste a lot of space saying very little, but the larger issue is that it doesn’t effectively describe the passage of time. You don’t measure time — you feel it. This engineer understood that you’re a human being. He decided that communicating elapsed time should sound like telling you the time over coffee, “When did Michael update his status?”

It’s small. You probably didn’t even see it. It’s not precise, but tells you exactly what you need to know. Moreover, it sounds like someone rather than something is saying it.

It sounds authentic.

Stop for a second and reread any paragraph in this article, but this time, I want you to listen to the voice you’ve constructed in your head. It sounds like you. This is why, when we meet, you’re going to be confused because I don’t sound like you. You do.

You trust this voice and the more a website or an application is designed to imitate that voice, the sooner a user will engage because they’ll make an emotional connection faster.

It’s a Little Thing

Do this. Take a moment to look on one of your favorite websites or weblogs and look for where they choose to sound like a friend you bumped into at the coffee shop. Once you start looking for it, it stands out. My favorite place to look is at the bottom of the page around the copyright:

It’s a little thing. In the huge pile of work building a website, the words chosen to deliver small messages might seem important, but these small words define a personality and both personality and reputation are built on decisions that feel too small to matter.

Here are three ways JetBlue starts the conversation at their kiosks:

Here’s how Twitter used to tell you they saved your information:

And this is how Khoi reminds you to have a conversation, not a flame war:

This conversational tone has a purpose. By sounding like a human, these small wording decisions push the technology out of the way to reveal what we really care about: the people.

Yeah, they’re faking us out. Yeah, it’s a script that is randomly saying “Hi” in every language possible, but look at the design intent. You are being benignly deceived into believe that you aren’t interacting with a computer, you’re staring through a window at other people.

And that’s where your head should be. Not worrying about how it might work, but who you might find on the other side.

I Think Flickr Still Loves Me

I see a lot of guilt inside the term “Web 2.0”. It’s an overused catchall term used to describe a bevy of new technologies and trends, but what I hear is guilt. When someone uses the term, I hear, “Yeah, so we’re not going to fuck-up and flame-out like those Web 1.0 dweebs. We’re Web 2.0.”

My negative reaction is unfortunate because inside of this guilty morass are some brilliant developments. I enjoy watching the ever-blurring line between a web page and an application. I like seeing the web becoming a cloudy platform.

Mostly, I like the authentic tone that came with Web 2.0.

Who knows who removed the authenticity from the Flickr logo. It’s sad, but it served its purpose. Flickr’s old logo was a quiet efficient invitation to join a community and sound like yourself.

A Pleasant Elsewhere

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume is certainly not the first book I read, but when the question of the first book comes up, it’s the first answer because in my fuzzy thirty-something brain, Tales was the first book I was proud of reading.

I picked it out, I lay on the top bunk of the bed, and I read the book for myself. There was no school assignment motivating my endeavor, just the simple joy of enjoying a book I had discovered by myself.

Summers in the Rands house were full of reading. The Mom signed the sister and I up for a reading program at the local library. The game was “Read as much as you possibly can”. 20 books and you got a patch. 100 and there was some type of pizza parlor incentive. At the start of the summer, I’d walk out of the library with my four new books and think 100 books. That’s impossible.

I’d get home, read the four books before lunch, and start to bug the Mom, “Can we go back to the library? When are we going to the library? I need more books.”

“We were just there.”

“Yeah, but I want more to read.”

It’s these intense summer reading periods that I blame for the four unread books sitting on my desk right now. It’s also the reason for the two packed shelves in my closet of to-be-read books, as well as the stack of seven books next to the bed. My belief is: there can never be enough books.

When I have headache, I read and the headache goes away. When I’m pissed at the world, I find a book and a dark cave and chill in a pleasant elsewhere. Forget about the knowledge and ideas passed along via the written word, reading a book brings a calm to my crazy NADD-driven world.

I see the world in terms of words because whenever I have a quiet moment, I fill it with reading.

My Disaster

Roughly a third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and while there are piles of research that indicates literacy leads to a better quality of life, I simply want to promote a pleasant elsewhere. Certainly, there are more urgent disasters in progress than literacy, but this is my disaster and you can support it.

I offer the first Rands in Repose t-shirt.

This shirt is available in limited quantities until the end of the year.

The simple, yet elegant logo for the shirt was designed by the terribly talented Kevin Cornell. The shirt itself is a product of the Continental Clothing Company and is constructed of 70% bamboo, which sounds freaky until you put it on. Bamboo has a high quality, unique, silky feeling, but is durable and machine washable.

Both men’s and women’s sizes are available in a complex brown color named “bitter chocolate”.

100% of the proceeds for each shirt goes to First Book, a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.

I’d like to thank the folks at buyolympia.com for make the process of finding, printing, and selling shirts easy.

I’d also like to thank the folks who take the time to read and comment on my reposing. It’s my honor to play a small part in your pleasant elsewhere.

Happy Holidays.

Dumbing Down the Cloud

Cloud computing is yet another name for services that have existed for a really long time. Here’s the 2008 IEEE Internet Computing quote regarding Cloud Computing:

“Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, and wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors.”

Information stored on servers? Temporary caching? Holy fuck. You mean like those email servers and clients I’ve been running for 15 YEARS?

The innovation in cloud computing happened years ago. It happened when some bright engineer was trying, for the 185th time, to draw the Internet on a slide, and thought, It’s this big, huge, amorphous thing that lacks definition. It’s a… cloud.

That’s when the magic happened. That’s when the name mattered. When it was first used to eloquently and visually describe an idea that lacked mental definition.

Everything that has been happening since then is marketing and wishful thinking. It’s those marketing nerds getting paid too much money to rename ideas we’ve already had. Innovation doesn’t come when we give our ideas new names; it comes when the fundamental idea quietly evolves. Innovation often happens silently — not by what you say, but what you do.

Anywhere. Transparently.

My use case for the cloud hasn’t changed in years. I want a single folder sitting somewhere in the cloud that I can transparently access from any computer… anywhere. I’m not greedy; I’ll make it even simpler: I’ll only put documents in that folder. No applications, no preferences, just my well-defined documents.

I’ve been trying creatively-named solutions to this use case for a decade. This is how my technology investigations play out:

• Discover
• Install
• Configure the bits
• Give the solution a whirl three times
• Never use it again.

Fact is, getting me to change my information workflow is pretty hard. I’m a creature of habit and efficiency. While I will compulsively give any new idea or tool a try, an application or service needs to fulfill strict requirements.

Just to grab me, you have to:

1. Make it look and feel like magic.
2. Work flawlessly in the first 10 minutes. If you can’t survive 10 minutes of critical analysis, I’m gone.
3. Provide additional, unexpected awesomeness.

Like I said, it’s tough, and chances are that even if an application meets all of these requirements, I’m going to throw it out because I don’t trust it.

I trust Dropbox. Here’s why.

Dumb versus Smart

There are two approaches to cloud storage: dumb and smart.

A dumb cloud does just what you’d expect. You attach an external drive or you mount a network directory. It’s there. It does nothing unless you remember to manually copy stuff yourself.

A smart cloud combines the external storage with a scheme to do your copying or back-up for you. The idea is that as you change files locally, these changes are detected and sent off to the cloud. Sounds simple enough, right? Brace yourself.

Remember my use case: a single folder sitting somewhere in the cloud that I can transparently access from any computer… anywhere. The key word in that sentence is transparent, and a tool’s inability to be transparent is why applications in this space have been a study in failure. I’ll explain.

The fail begins with you and your two computers: a portable and a desktop machine. You edit one file on your desktop machine. Fine, the bits get sent to the cloud. Then, you make a different change on the SAME file on your portable, which is NOT on the network. Two hours later, you bring that portable onto the network and what happens? You’ve got two different versions of that file which both contain original work. Whatever cloud sync tool you are using will likely ask you: “Hey, both of these files have changed. This one was edited this morning and this one was edited two hours later. Which one do you want to keep?”

It’s a fair question. Sync is trying to be useful, sync is trying to be helpful, but sync is giving you a choice, and while you are generally good at choices, you will screw up. And when you do you will never, ever blame yourself, you will blame sync.

You will twitter: SYNC FUCKING OVERWROTE MY CHANGES, when all sync was doing was what it was told. See, sync will happily screw you if instructed to do so. By you.

Even though it’s my fault, data loss is a colossal disaster in my universe and that means once I figure out data was overwritten, I will not cease my irrational swearing until whatever tool responsible is completely eradicated from my system.

Yet, it is my fault. I chose a solution that was too smart. What I need is for my smart clouds to be dumb.

Dumbing it down with Dropbox

There is nothing new about the idea behind Dropbox. Even the name shows little in terms of innovation. Before I explain how Dropbox gained my trust by solving the sync problem, let’s talk about how it grabbed me.

Is it magic? After a simple install and easy account sign-up on the Mac, you end up with a new menu extra. Choosing ‘Open your Dropbox’ reveals the directory structure of your Dropbox and you’re off. Doing what? I don’t know — whatever it is you do. Folders and files thrown into the Dropbox folder are silently synced with the cloud. On the Mac, unless you look closely, it’s not even clear what’s going on. I had to fire up my portable and set up Dropbox on a second machine to confirm that it was actually doing anything.

The magic of Dropbox is that it doesn’t ask you to think about what you do. You care about one thing: do I have access to the most recent version of my files? And with Dropbox, yes, you do. Wherever you are, so are your files.

A flawless 10 minutes. Once I convinced myself that Dropbox was actually doing something, I pushed it. I dumped a large Keynote into Dropbox on one machine and then jumped to another machine and deleted a different file. How long until everything was reconciled? It wasn’t instant, the Keynote copy was limited by bandwidth, but it worked flawlessly. And besides, you don’t need instant access to your files because you can’t be in two places at once. What you want is to never be bothered by the fact that your files are in the cloud. Dropbox is designed to never get in your way… even when you do something stupid. More on this is in a second.

Unexpected awesomeness. While it wasn’t in my first 10 minutes, the unexpected awesomeness came when a friend asked for a presentation that wasn’t mail server-friendly. He emailed me a link to a shared Dropbox folder, and when I clicked on it, the folder was immediately integrated with my existing Dropbox hierarchy. That’s right, I can construct a complex shared hierarchy in the cloud and you know what that complex collaborative beast looked like? My familiar directory structure.

It’s these types of design decisions where trust begins.

Trust begins when I can see the design intention of an application. What in NetNewsWire, for example, is the end result of endless fretting over every design angle regarding reading feeds. What I expect is that when I’m stumped, its author, Brent Simmons, has not only thought about why I’m stumped, he’s already provided the right feature configured in precisely the right manner to circumvent my stumpedness.

When I use Microsoft Word, I see corporate intent. I see how different warring internal groups tugged the UI to and fro for a decade. I see the intern who did that one feature four years ago. I see a land of misfit toys in the features that haven’t been touched in years.

When I’m using Word, I keeping seeing Word, and I don’t see what I should be seeing, which is what I am writing. When I’m using Dropbox, I don’t even know that I’m using it because it is designed be transparent.

The Screw-Me Scenario

How does Dropbox solve the screw-me sync scenario? To date, Dropbox hasn’t said a thing to me. It hasn’t given me a single decision to screw up. Dropbox is very smart because it never asks you a thing about sync or any file operation. This is the brilliance: Dropbox knows that any question is a chance to make a wrong decision. And a chance to make a wrong decision is a chance to erode trust.

Yes, you can create the conflict scenario. When it occurs, Dropbox quietly creates a conflict file in your folder and lets you figure out what to do. See, Dropbox isn’t going to ask because that’s not the model. That’s not the design. The Dropbox flow is: “We’re not going to bother you with sync because we’re just keeping track of you changing stuff and your stuff is only changing when you change it and there is only one of you. If there’s a problem, you’ll figure it out when you’re good and ready”. It’s not elegant; I still have to eventually go and clean up the mess, but the more you trust a tool, the less you care about the edge cases.

Dropbox is not dumb. In fact, Dropbox is quite smart because it lets me be dumb.

And I’m dumb. Two weeks ago, I sat down to put the final touches on a presentation. I fired up the portable, looked in the usual Dropbox location and it was empty. Ok, well, I saved it to my desktop, right? Ok, no. Maybe another location inside Dropbox? Ok, no. I can taste it’s-deleted-forever adrenalin in the back my mouth now.

Spotlight reveals nothing and I’m starting to blame Dropbox now, so I fire up their web interface, where I discover they keep track of each discrete file operation, and it looks like last night I deleted the presentation in a fit of psychotic folder cleanliness. But here in the Dropbox web interface is every single version of the file that I saved, as well as the ability to restore them.

Click. Restore. And I’m saved.

And that’s smart.

Build Anything

As an engineer, if you want to piss off someone who is asking you whether you can or can’t build a thing, just say, “Given enough time, I can build anything”.

They’ll believe you’re dodging the question, and they’ll think you’re arrogant.

As a means of negotiating a schedule or a feature, this answer is not helpful. You need to take the time to explain your thinking to this person. You need to walk them through your development process. It’s an opportunity to educate and not come off like a jerk.

However.

Given enough time, an engineer can build anything.

I’m optimistic.

And I hire optimists.

Like any profession, software development is chock full of radically different personalities, but I want the optimists. I’m not looking for Yes-folk; I’m looking for those folks who, when backed into a corner with a gun to their heads, respond with, “Fuck it, we’re going to figure it out”.

This base optimism can be hidden in all types of personalities, but when the shit hits the fan it shows up and often creates the impossible.

In my two decades of working in Silicon Valley, I am happy to confirm that this valley is full of these insane optimists. These are people who:

• Work hard
• Over-commit and still deliver
• Rampantly go out of their way to help each other
• Have a track record of stunning success

This is not a population limited to the valley, it’s a population spread across the country and across the globe, but today I’m thinking about my country.

We’re nowhere near the bottom of this disaster we’ve voted onto ourselves. I don’t think the majority of Americans fully understand the severity of our financial crisis. We’re all fervently staring at Christmas, confusing the holiday spirit for hope.

Yet, I remain optimistic.

Regardless of who wins the election, the question remains, “Do we have it in us to re-invent ourselves? Can we rebuild our country into a place we respect?”

Yes, we can.

I live on the west coast of the United States, which is a region pioneers traveled to so they could choose how to define their home, but this whole country is built on that idea — we choose who we will be.

Where I sit, with the cranky engineers —the insane optimists — I hope we all share this optimism because, given enough time, we can build anything.

FriendDA

The lesson of the Holy Shit is that when you stumble upon a truly revolutionary idea, you have the ability to recognize it. There are lots of people who, when they first saw a web page, thought, “I can order pizza on the phone with a live person. Why would I do it on the computer via, what’d you call it? A browser? Also, why is that text blinking?”

You didn’t see pizza. You didn’t even see the blinking text. In fact, you saw nothing in particular; you just had a gut feeling. There was no logic or strategy behind the gut feeling, it was a sense of deep potential. Your amorphous thought was, “I can’t think of anything I won’t be able to do on the web.”

A Holy Shit is the instant of instinctually recognizing massive potential.

As epiphanies go, Holy Shits are few and far between. My gut says you’re lucky if you stumble upon one a year. However, smaller versions happen all the time.

A by-product of obsessively, constantly surfing the net to discover the bright and the shiny is a steady flow of promising new ideas. Mostly slight variations on existing great ideas that tickle your fancy. For example, after staring at Twitter for nearly two years, I’m guessing I’ve had a dozen bright ideas about Twitter-inspired products. These ideas tend to show up in the morning during the drive, after appropriate caffeination, and more often than not they fade the moment I walk into the office.

But some stick.

My rule is: if I’m still thinking about a bright idea when I’m driving home, it’s worth writing down. By passing the idea through my fingers I make it slightly more real… I give it definition.

And then I sleep on it.

The following morning, if I’m still chewing on the bright idea, I start to worry because the logical next step is to pitch a friend. The rule here is: all ideas improve as a function of the number of eyeballs that see them. The troubling converse rule is: as soon as your idea gets out in the wild, it’s no longer yours.

In the corporate world, there’s a legal instrument to protect bright ideas generated inside of the business and it’s called a Non-Disclosure Agreement or an “NDA”. When you sign an NDA for a company, you’re legally saying, “I’ve agreed to take on the responsibility of protecting and not revealing the company’s intellectual property even if that intellectual property consists of ideas that came out of my head in the first place.”

There are lots of interesting variations of the NDA, but the two significant ones are: the Two-Way and the One-Way.

The Two-Way NDA says, “Anything either of us says is private”. The more scary One-Way states, “We can use anything you say, but you can’t use anything we say”.

Neither of these legal instruments is useful to me when I merely want to pitch a friend about my idea. The concept of getting Phil to sign an NDA over a beer while we shoot the shit about my random drive-to-work idea makes no sense. Phil’s a friend.

But I want Phil to know that what I want to chat about is more than our average conversation. I want slightly more than a smidge of ceremony before I spill the beans about my bright idea and I call this ceremony the FriendDA.

The FriendDA is a non-binding, warm blanket agreement that offers absolutely no legal protection. I’d suggest if the idea of legal protection is even crossing your mind that the FriendDA is totally inappropriate for your current needs.

Take a look.

Ideally, the understanding you want to get to with the FriendDA requires only a simple question. The moment you’re about to pitch Phil on the idea you ask, “FriendDA?”

Phil takes a sip of beer and nods.

And you’re off.

The Culture Chart

They played bridge every Wednesday at Netscape. In the middle of the cafeteria. Like clockwork.

The players were a collection of ex-SGI guys and they worked for a variety of different groups at the company, but as I learned a few months later, this core group of men quietly defined the engineering culture of the company… with a bridge game.

Ninety Days

If you follow the rules in Ninety Days, you’re going to have a solid feel for the construction of your immediate team. Who is who. Who does what. What they know. Who the freak is. Who the free electron is. In a start-up when there are only 12 of you, you’re done. You know the people landscape because, from where you sit, you can see them all and you interact with all of them regularly. In a larger company, however, ninety days is only going to give you a brief glimpse of what you need to know about your co-workers, the company, and its culture.

Fortunately, in a large company, tools and documents have been created to help you traverse the culture and process and figure out where people fit. For example, what do you do when you get a random urgent mail from a co-worker stranger? Even if the stranger takes the time to explain who they are and what they do, you still fire up the corporate directory with the simple question: “Who does this bozo work for?”

The corporate directory is the digital representation of a formerly very important document: the organization chart.

A quick glance at the org chart answers a lot of ego-based questions like:

• Which org does he work in? A cool one?
• How many direct reports does he have? More power?
• How close is he to the CEO? More influence?

As sources of information go, the org chart is essential, but it is an incomplete picture of your company, which brings us back to bridge at Netscape.

Bridge

If you looked up the four core bridge players on the org chart, you’d learn a bit. One engineering manager, another guy from some oddly named platform team, another guy who had a manager title, but no direct reports, and the last guy who looked like a program manager.

My org chart assessment: Meh.

What I learned months later was that the folks sitting at that regular bridge game not only defined much of what became the Netscape browser, they also continued to define the engineering culture or what I think of as a culture chart.

Unlike the org chart, you’re not going to find the culture chart written down anywhere. It doesn’t exist. The culture chart is an unwritten representation of the culture of your company and understanding it answers big questions that you must know:

• What does this organization value?
• Who created this value system?
• Given this value system, who contributes high value?
• Who is most aware of how value is being created?

This is fuzzy philosophical mumbo jumbo, so let’s bring it home. In your current job, right now, tell me what it’s going take to get you a promotion.

“I need to work really hard.”

Ok, so you knew you need to work hard to get a promotion before you set foot in your current gig. My question is, what specific thing do you need to do in order to be promoted? I’d argue that for any engineer who is actively managing their career, it’s essential to figure out the answer to this question as quickly as possible, and to do so you need to understand the culture.

Detecting Culture

If you are going to be promoted, you are going to succeed in a group of people when you provide that group things that it think it needs. Now, your gut instinct is that this group of people is the management team, and that’s a good org chart-centric answer. The problem is it’s your job to stay ahead of your manager. You’re not going to get promoted giving your manager what he wants; a promotion comes when you give him what he wants as well as what he does not expect, but desperately needs.

It’s unfair. This guy is tasked with your career development and I am saying it’s your job to tell him what he wants. You don’t have to do this; you can take the reactive cues from your boss, but I derive intense professional satisfaction when I deliver the unexpectedly needed and I discover the unexpected by first finding the culture.

To deduce the culture of a company, all you have to do is listen. Culture is an undercurrent of ideas that ties a group of people together. In order for it to exist, it must move from one individual to the next. This is done via the retelling of stories.

“Max was this nobody performance nerd and three weeks before we were supposed to ship, he walked into the CEO’s office with a single piece of paper with a single graph. He dropped the graph on the table, sat down, and said, ‘No way we ship in three weeks. Six months. Maybe.’ The CEO ignored the paper, ‘We lose three million dollars if we don’t.’ Max stood up, pointed at the chart, and said, ‘We lose ten if we do. We must not ship crap.”

Whether this story is true or not is irrelevant. The story about how Max saved the company ten million dollars by telling the CEO “No” is retold daily. In hallways. At the bar over beers. The story continually reinforces an important part of this company’s culture.

We must not ship crap.

There isn’t a corporate values statement on the planet that so brutally and beautifully defines the culture of a company.

There are other stories that you’re going to hear over and over again, and inside each of these stories are the real corporate values. Each one, while designed to be entertaining, teaches a lesson about what this particular company values, and these are the lessons that are going to get you promoted.

There’s a chance you’re not going to find these stories. My hope is that you’re in a company where engineering is valued and, as such, has an influence on the culture of your company. If it’s been six months, you’ve been actively looking, and no one has told you a great story about how engineering shaped the fortunes of your company, there’s a chance that in your company engineering doesn’t have a seat at the culture table. My question is then, “How are you going to succeed, how are you going to be promoted, where engineering isn’t an influential part of the culture?”

Culture Definers

After you have a healthy collection of stories, you’re going to have a good idea about some of the culture, but you’re still missing essential data for your culture chart. See, the folks who tell the stories about culture usually aren’t the folks who created them.

Stories are told, but first they are born.

The people who are responsible for defining the culture are not deliberately doing so. They do not wake up in the morning and decide, “Today is the day I will steer the culture of the company to value quality design”.

They just do it. The individuals who have the biggest impact on the culture and company aren’t doing it for any other reason than they believe it is right thing to do, and if you want to grow in this particular company it’s a good idea to at least know who they are and where they sit. You need to pay attention to this core group of engineers because as they do, so will the company.

Game Over

Your company is networked in more ways than you can possibly imagine. Just because you’ve reverse engineered the development culture in your organization doesn’t mean you’ve got a complete map of the overall culture. There are endless connections tugging any decent sized group of people in multiple directions at once. There’s the been-here-forever network, the I-survived-the-layoff people, and the untouchable-did-something-great-once crew.

Culture assessment is an information game and it’s never over. Your job is to continually situate yourself in such as a way that, as quickly as possible, you can assess subtle changes in the culture of your company.

I wasn’t concerned when Netscape started losing market share to Microsoft. I didn’t sweat it when the stock price stalled. The reason I started thinking about my next gig was, months before either of these two events occurred, one of the lunchtime bridge team left.

The game stopped. The small group of four no longer spent a long lunch quietly, unknowingly defining the culture of the company and everyone who was watching noticed.

They noticed when one of those who had humbly done the work that defined the company no longer believed enough to stay.

Horrible

I can turn a phrase.

High school journalism is where I discovered this. Mrs. Wickett kept bringing stories to me in my junior year “Needs a clever headline.” I’d read the story and throw out a terse, clever headline.

No clue where this ability come from. If I actually think about how I pick the words and construct the idea, the ability vanishes. The less I know about it, the better.

I’ve been riding this talent for years. Turns out the ability to summarize isn’t only handy for writing headlines; it’s useful in meetings, too. “He just said that, you think this, let’s move on and stop saying the same thing over and over again.”

It was this appreciation of summarization that I took into my first executive product presentation at the last gig. 10th floor of corporate headquarters. Four VPs and their minions surrounding the table. My thought: Wow them with crisp, clean, and clever thoughts. Alliteration. Witty. Headlines.

So I did.

“This is the product. Here are the 20 clever phrases to describe it. Thank you very much!”

Silence. 30 seconds of awkward silence followed by the VP of Marketing breaking the tension, “What exactly are we reviewing here?” The next five minutes were less pleasant as the room realized I was done and all I’d accomplished was filling the air with clever alliterative phrases. There was no obvious strategy behind the headlines.

The Russian Lit Major was standing outside my door as I limped back from the beat down “How’d that feel?”

“Disaster.”

“Yeah, details bore the shit out of you and you suck at talking to executives.”

“… I what?”

I See Bell Curves

You are horrible at something.

You are a bell curve. A standard distribution. At one end of the curve, you have your talents. You’re naturally and uniquely good at them, but you’re not quite sure why. At the other end of the curve, you have your natural deficiencies and, while I am an optimist and I do believe you can learn your way through just about anything, you’re genetically predisposed to be pretty bad at these things.

Now, chances are you are a horrible at a whole bunch of things, but I want to focus on one thing. It’s the thing that will have the most impact on your career. By being bad at this thing, you limit your career growth.

I’m going to make a leap and assume that you’ve already identified your horrible. At some point in the past, you realized you were bad at this thing. “I am unable to read people.” “I love to program, but I am a lousy architect.” “I dress like a goofball.” Whatever your realization was, you become aware that you were deficient relative to the rest of the world, and you took one of two paths.

The first path: you structured your days and your life so that you wouldn’t stumble over this deficiency. Bad programmer, but deeply technical? Ok, you stuck with QA. Unable to read people? Ok, stick with code, don’t manage. Horrible fashion sense? Right so, you’re not first in line for customer visits. As path of least resistance strategies go, this can work. You can sit there and hide from the horrible, but my thought is, if you’re reading this weblog, you chose the other path and you attacked the horrible.

Your thought, “I refuse to suck at this,” so you took the other path and forced yourself to learn through the horrible.

Educating yourself in your deficiencies. Learning. Researching. Practicing. I’m a fan. There is nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment when you know that Darwin is rooting against you. I would go so far as to say that success at overcoming the horrible is far sweeter than success when you know what the hell you’re doing.

And yet… you still might suck at your horrible.

I Want More of You

Back to the Russian Lit Major lurking outside my executive disaster,

“Yeah, details bore the shit out of you and you suck at talking to executives.”

“… I what?”

“You have a product there, but your problem is that you believe that since you can see, everyone else can. They can’t. You need to stitch together the details of how you discovered the product and you need to say it in the language of executives. I’ll show you.”

That night, she took my presentation home and ripped it to shreds. The following morning she sat me down with a completely revised presentation and she walked me through it, slide by slide, pointing out that while I was making fine points, I was skipping over essential details the executives needed to hear. My thoughts were big, but they lacked meat and executive-friendly messaging.

It sucked. It’s one thing to know you’re horrible at the something, but discovery of this horribleness by the rest of the team is a whole other order of magnitude of embarrassment.

Except the slides were better. My messages were still there, but the deck made sense to someone other than me. Two weeks later when we presented again, the questions were enthusiastic, not problematic. I was saying the same thing, but the additions of the Russian Lit Major’s natural ability made my message clear.

Big Trust

There’s a defining moment in your career when you choose to trust someone beside yourself. I’m not talking about trusting them with the small stuff: “Hey, can you fix this bug for me?” I’m talking about big trust “Hey, your design sense is 10x mine, what the hell is wrong with this dialog? Be brutal.”

It’s tricky to leave that swell little island of you. It’s hard to suck up your pride and acknowledge there are those who excel where you suck. But whether you’re an individual or a manager, your job is to learn to scale at what makes you great. Yes, you want to fill your professional experience gaps, but if you work where I work, you’re in a hurry. Getting anything done requires a balance of your natural talent and your ability to find and leverage the talents of those around you.

By putting big trust in someone else, you’re solving three problems: you’re increasing the chance you’ll get your project done, you’re building a strong team, and, oh yeah, you get to watch and learn as someone deftly works in a place where you’re horrible.

By watching someone be great, you’ll learn just like I learned. I don’t need the Russian Lit Major for every presentation, but I know whenever I want to be great, I’ll go and find her.

Impossible

Right now, there’s a CEO standing in front of his 85-person start-up at an all-hands meeting and he’s saying, “In the next 90 days, we need to do the impossible”.

The particular version of impossible doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone in the room is shocked when he says it. You can tell by the intensity of the silence.

“We’re going to what in the what?”

What gives this guy the right to ask the impossible? Sure, he’s the CEO, but does that mean he gets to stand in front of the room and ask the team to build a levitation machine?

Yeah, it does.

However, this does not mean the CEO isn’t screwing up.

Asking for the impossible is an advanced management technique and it’s one that is particularly abhorrent to engineers. They are very clear on what is and isn’t possible because they’re responsible for building and measuring all the possible. When you ask an engineer to do the impossible, they often laugh in your face not only because they think it’s an absurd, irrational request, they also have the data to prove it.

Yet, given this irrefutable data, I still want you to consider this request. There is an upside to pulling off the impossible. Not only is it a great morale booster, it can also be incredibly profitable, because all your competition thinks the impossible is, well, impossible. Better yet, WHO DOESN’T WANT A FLUX CAPACITOR?

There are three measurements to take with regard to your CEO and his request when the team has been asked to do the impossible. These measurements aren’t going to help you pull off the miracle, but they will help you size the impossibleness.

A Hint of an Insane Plan

First, let’s figure out if your CEO is insane. Listen carefully to the actual request. If your CEO is standing in front of the engineering team asking you to transform lead into gold, you should grin, nod, and start mentally editing your resume, but don’t bolt from the room just yet. Now, if he’s asking you to reduce your release cycle from 90 days to 10, you can let yourself be shocked, but be relieved by the fact that you’re not being asked to perform matter transmutation.

There’s a subtle difference between insane and impossible.

You should respect your gut when that internal “he’s insane” flag starts waving, but that doesn’t mean you should stop listening. There’s more data to gather and there are times where an insane approach might be the right thing.

Our next assessment has to do with legwork. Has your CEO done any preliminary work to actually figure out whether the impossible idea is achievable? What is his strategic intuition about this crazy idea? Is he able to articulate, however vaguely, why this idea is a good idea for the company, and how you might pull this off? You’re not looking for a definite plan, more the strategic broad strokes, a point from which the managers can begin sketching in the details.

A word of warning: there are managers and executives out there who can pitch the impossible on confidence alone. They need no intuition or evidence regarding feasibility to get their teams’ buy-in, and while these chutzpah-laden individuals sure are inspiring, you should trust that nagging feeling that shows up later when you’re driving home, the high fades, and you’re left with a strategic emptiness. That emptiness is the practical result of the CEO’s request lacking everything but confidence. The absence of some thread of an idea about how you’re going to do the impossible, and you might be screwed.

The lack of a glimpse of a plan beyond the charisma translates to a lack of hope.

Skin in the Game

Next, you want to figure out how much skin your CEO has in the game. How much of the company is he betting on this request? If this is a bet the company decision, I’m comforted by the fact that he’s backing this impossible request up with his job. He knows that failure means everyone is looking for a new gig. That’s motivation.

If the request is smaller, if this is a bet the department request, well, the risk is more localized. The cost of failure will likely be born by the senior guys and gals running the show. I’m not suggesting the CEO thinks any less of the importance of this impossible request, but, trust me, he knows that it’s not necessarily his job on the line if the team blows it.

What you’re assessing here are two things: size of the request and level of executive commitment. Having a gut feel for these two things is often a moot point. Depending on your seat on the org chart, you might not even have a chance to choose whether you’re saddled with the impossible. However, developing this swag out of the gate means when the impossible hits the fan you can be one of the first to act.

The Importance of Respect

The glimpse of a plan and confidence. These two fuzzy mental assessments are in play when deciding to ask the impossible, but there is one more that needs to be considered.

Remember, this is an impossible request. This isn’t, “Hey, can you fix these 10 bugs by Friday?” It’s “Hey, can you rewrite this major component in half the time it took you to write it the first time?” Forget whether it’s remotely feasible. Forget whether the confidence is oozing out of every pore of your CEO. You’re not going to be convinced, and more importantly, you’re not going to engage if you don’t respect the person who is asking you to do something

Financial rewards, promotions, IPOs, promises of future interesting projects. All of these incentives matter and can be used to light a fire under a team, but an individual’s decision to engage in the impossible starts with the question, “Do I respect this person enough to tackle the impossible?”

There’s a book to be written about how to build respect in an organization. My brief advice is, when you are asked the impossible, carefully consider every hard request already made of you. Does he ask the impossible every month? Every Monday? Does he follow up on his impossible requests or does he expect you to run with them? Have we ever successfully completed an impossible request? Is he there at 3am on Sunday morning with everyone else, looking like he hasn’t shaved in a week?

I don’t know how many impossible requests you get, but I do know that frequent impossible requests result in an erosion of respect and a decaying of credibility. And that means when the CEO is standing up in front of the troops asking them to perform magic all they’re thinking is, “This crap again?”

What He Really Wants

Nothing I’ve described is concrete. Nothing I’ve described is going to placate your initial intense, negative engineer reaction when your CEO asks you to do something utterly absurd and irrational.

It gets worse… I mean better.

There are times when your leadership should be unencumbered by your version of reality. There are times when it’s important that your CEO isn’t intimately familiar with a product space or lifecycle. Day to day, doing business requires reasonable expectations and an adherence to plans, but those things actually prevent the extraordinary from occurring. The extraordinary requires a catalyst like an impossible request.

What’s important when the CEO asks for the impossible is that he’s pushing the definition of possibility for what the team can accomplish. Maybe your CEO only has an idea, and can only feel the possibility in what he’s asking, but it’s not his job to make it all happen. That’s where you come in. You’re the person responsible for transforming the feel, the intuition, the glimpse of a plan, and the confidence into knowing and doing.

You’re the one who is actually responsible for delivering the impossible, and all I’m asking is that you consider the request, because agreeing to engage in the impossible shatters normality and ignores fears and I love that.

The Quirkbook

It all started with a tweet:

“Making a list of superstitions / foolish consistencies / lightweight OCD behaviors e.g. I always put my RIGHT shoe on first. You?”

This right shoe behavior started during ice hockey. The team was bad… like 0-10 bad. Last game of the season against the best team in the league who slaughtered us in a previous match-up. As I sat in the locker room considering a perfect beat-down of a season, I decided to become zen about situation… deliberate. Rather than stressing about the size of the beating, I considered the small parts of manageable reality sitting immediately in front of me.

“In what order shall I put my gear on? What is practical? What feels right? You know, I like putting my right skate on first. I can’t tell you why, but the order feels important. Right skate, then left.”

We killed them. 9-3. Sure, they started by playing half their game because they were already in the playoffs, but after I scored that hat trick in the first period, they woke up. We slapped them around for another two periods. It was glorious.

I credit the skates. No, I credit the skate application process.

It’s that story that goes through my head each morning as I stare down. I remember deciding to care about how I put things on my feet. It’s a silly superstitious quirk transformed into an unavoidable daily routine and that’s why I twittered it. I wanted to know who else was saddled with these foolish consistencies.

Steven Frank took the time to write me a lengthy mail on my tweet. He mentioned, “For a while I used to semi-believe that if I could tap out a certain rhythm on my desk while the modem was dialing, I’d get through to the BBS instead of a busy signal. Never actually worked in reality.”

I did that, too.

Steven continued, “Anxiety, OCD behaviors, and depression almost always come as a package deal. I’m sure that anyone who reports one has the others. And for some reason, they always seem to affect a lot of folks in tech. I’m not sure which way ‘round the causality is, though.”

There’s a risk with giving a clever name to neuro-behaviorial developmental disorders. I wrote the original NADD (“Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder”) article expecting the inevitable comment, “You, sir, are making fun of people with legitimate disabilities. Jerk.”

Mostly those comments never arrived. Readers understood the meaning of NADD was not to belittle those with a disability, but rather to see the clever ways we’ve adapted our perceived deficiencies into distinct abilities.

It is with this thought that I present the following responses to my original tweet. I find them informative, sometimes hilarious, but mostly comforting.

• aquarium I hate to be on the left side when going somewhere
• bobthecow i check my zipper every time i walk out of a bathroom. even if i only went in to wash my hands.
• bonsai 1 cup of coffee in the morning. Always. Even when camping in the middle of nowhere.
• borkware I like light switches to be up when on, and down when off.
• brentsimmons I always sit on the right side of the plane, where it’s safe.
• ckolderup volume levels on TV/stereo/etc must be even or divisible by 5
• decafbad Toilet paper rolls go on with paper rolling OVER the roll, not under. Geez, people. ;)
• dreid I make code fit in 80 columns, I delete trailing whitespace, spaces never tabs.
• dstringf Weird quirk - I drop the last word off sentences a lot, especially if I am nervous.
• elaptics putting my hand in my pocket to check that my keys are still there - even if I have just put them in there
• epochblue M&Ms must be eaten in even numbers. You wouldn’t want one side of your mouth to get jealous while the other eats an M&M, would you?
• ergelo always click my pen open twice before writing, it certainly won’t write as well if i don’t
• gooddoug Also, whenever I get a paper coffee cup sleeve, I _HAVE_ to line up the fold with the join in the paper cup. Always.
• hmfullen I can’t resist stacking things, basically any time I’m waiting for anything.
• isaacschlueter I avoid white cars.
• janl Use the right spoon size for the food (complex); when in doubt, a fork. Shoes off or laces lose when coding or sitting comfortably.
• jaredg I always sort the jelly and jam by flavor when eating at restaurants that put the carrier on the table.
• jexner same here - right shoe first. I also try not to step onto broken parts of pavement.
• jtradke must use phone on right ear. even if right hand is needed elsewhere.
• kissane My closet door must be closed at night so nothing can eat my shoes. (We keep neither dogs nor raccoons.)
• kmcg selected eating utensil must be right weight/heft for the moment. (utensils obviously not a matched set.)
• KuraFire car stereo volume in increments of 5; aligning cutlery in restaurants; aligning stacks of things; OH GOD THE LIST GOES ON.
• lfmoliveira must untangle tire air hoses at gas stations (and phone cords anywhere).
• luomat Realized one of my oddities tonight - I will *often* NOT click on the first result in Google until I’ve checked out some of the others
• maczter I always put my pants on both legs at the same time.
• mdhughes All gadgets/tools must go in pockets in the exact right order before leaving home, come out onto desk when I get to work/back home.
• meeju I can’t sleep if not having a mouthful of water before lay down
• melle Browser tabs and task bars have to have their items in specific order, or else they’ve gotta be closed up and re-started.
• nathansmonk When parking my car, I have to have a corner spot.
• naturallygeeky Always push the walk button at crosswalks 10x. That way it knows I’m in a hurry.
• nebulous If one of my feet stumbles/stutters on the ground while walking, I try to replicate it with my other foot.
• nevenmrgan every device light - MacBook, USB hub, TV, clock - must be covered at night. Ambient light is ok, small lights are NOT
• OcelotPotPie I always set my alarm clock in odd numbers. For example, waking up at 8:00AM is an alarm set to 8:01AM. Or 8:59.
• pburleson I don’t get up unless the clock is on a multiple of 5 ( i.e. 5, 10, 15, 20 )
• popthestack I constantly clear my clipboard by copying a single space. I accidentally pasted sensitive things in IM chats one too many times…
• robertpalmer I always wet the toothbrush before putting toothpaste on it. (We started a book of these where I used to work: “The Quirkbook”)
• ryanmears firefox and textmate windows must always be in the same upper left hand corner of my screen, and be the exact same dimensions.
• rynosoft I never realized it until a friend pointed it out, but I tend to sort my fries when eating fast food.
• sandrift Even after I *know* I’ve put my keys into my bag, I must double-check that they’re there before closing car door or trunk. Total OCD.
• simplepixels Checking my pockets repeatedly to make sure nothing fell out. I once had my pocketknife fall out in a pediatrician’s office…
• spotthehall It’s that 1-2-1, 2-4-2, 1-2-1 algorithm - applied to gaps between the pavement slabs…
• ssanchez I knock on subway / Tube doors to ask them to let me on / off, but only if they are the automatic, not push button to open ones
• studlycaps Whenever I see an open cupboard or drawer, I have to close it. I can’t bring myself to leave the room with it open
• tjeremy I have to chew the same number of things on the left side of my mouth as I do on the right side. Even down to color and #, eg: M&M
• zanshin Stairs have to be counted in groups of four.
• ZooFood The join in the paper coffee cup must align with the drinking hole on the lid. Must turn lights off when leave room, close cupboards.

The Coffee Mug Affair

At my favorite local coffee shop, Lorraine gives me shit when I purchase coffee in a paper cup, “You… are not saving the world.”

She’s right. I’m not, and it’s actually worse. Each time I reach for a sip and this sad little corpse of tree flesh greets me with its pathetic weight and palpable sense of Al Gore guilt, I’m lonely.

I’m missing a key member of my creative posse.

A Box Full of Fail

The next chapter in documenting the accessorizing of my obsessions was an investigative report on paper. I’ve got 27 links regarding the history of paper queued up and ready to be read, but I don’t honestly care a lot about paper. I can’t separate the notebook from the paper.

In fact, I’m pissed at paper. Forget about the environmental guilt, cups made of paper are a sure fire way to ruin any cup of coffee because they change the taste. Coffee mugs are the only way to go and I’ve spent a lot more time fretting about mugs than paper. That’s the other thing Lorraine doesn’t know: I’ve got a box full of failed coffee mugs.

Unlike prior excursions, with coffee mugs, we can brief. There is no need for comparison tables. There are just two use cases that define a great coffee mug: Driving and Writing.

Driving

The Driving case is tactical. How do I move from point A to point B without spilling scalding liquid over me and the car? Technology has provided a bevy of James Bondian metal travel mugs guaranteed to safely transport a hot beverage, but this technology comes with a cost. After three uses, like paper, your coffee tastes like whatever material your mug is made of.

This means I’m paying two bucks for the privilege of not being scalded by a cup of coffee that tastes like old aluminum.

No.

Plastic, while less hip, suffers from the same taste degradation over time. Glass-lined or not, three uses and the taste of old coffee and angry plastic permeates every sip. This conveniently leads us to the first key construction point for the perfect mug:

It must be made of ceramic. After years of foul tasting cups of coffee, I’ve discovered a ceramic travel mug, while a hazard if dropped, is the only material that doesn’t affect the taste of the coffee. Combine this with the cleverly designed removable plastic top and you have the Pottery Barn travel mug:

Will it last? I don’t know. Can it survive a drop? Probably not. Will I lose the top? Probably. Does it deliver my coffee as intended? Yes. I have six.

Writing

The Writing use case is strategic because it’s an essential part of my writing process. Right this second, I’m editing this article and, as you might expect, there is a process. First, I sit up. Writing is serious business for which your spine must be straight. I also lean my head slightly downward, looking up at my words as I write. Occasionally I mumble what I’m typing… no clue why.

And then I stop and I take a sip of something from a ginormous coffee cup… which is when I really start writing. The sip of coffee is a pause with weight. As I described in I Don’t Multitask, these moments of silence are invaluable. They are when I step out of what I’m doing to consider what I’m going to do, and for this brief journey I need a companion, and that’s my coffee mug.

To understand this relationship, you have to consider the sip. It’s a conversation and that conversation has two elements:

It must begin with character. The appearance of the coffee cup needs to speak.

It must continue with weight. A full coffee cup is a two-handed affair. The coffee must be blistering hot and a threat sitting three inches to the left of my keyboard. Reaching for my mug is a commitment. It is a reminder that, “Hey, we’re focusing elsewhere for moment. Don’t screw this up. I’m hot.” My coffee mugs are ginormous. My sips — carefully orchestrated.

It’s a brief conversation and it has only one goal: a creative elsewhere.

The Posse

I’m only addressing half of this situation. There’s a coffee bean article to be written, but it’s time to get back to management and design, so I’ll cut to the chase: whole bean + grind at home + French press = FTW.

A great cup of coffee is not just a gorgeous caffeine administration vehicle; it’s part of your creative posse. On my desk, all within a 12 inches my hands, I have the iPhone, the Zebra Sarasa gel pen, a sweetly decaying Field Notes, and the Life is Short coffee mug. None of these items are required for me to write — they are conveniences — but they are essential to accessorizing a moment of creative, companionable silence.

Sweet Decay

I sidestepped the evaluation notebook issue in The Gel Dilemma, but this omission has bugged me because I’ve cared about what I’ve written on for a lot longer than I’ve cared what I’ve written with.

The Mom is to blame here. When I was 10 she gave me a journal entitled “Moments Worth Remembering”. There was a rainbow on front. I asked the Mom:

“What’s this?”

“It’s a journal.”

“For?”

“Writing down what you think.”

“About rainbows?”

The idea had never occurred to me… writing for myself rather than for Ms. Ockerman, the 3rd grade teacher.

Every five years, I go back and reread portions of that journal, looking for the same transition. I start the journal and it’s clear that I’m still writing for school; assuming that someone is going to read and grade my journal. Then, halfway through those pages of horrible cursive, I stopped expecting to be graded and started writing for myself. It was a treatise on the coolness of the Rubik’s Cube and it was just for me.

Since the Rubik’s epiphany, I’ve been writing constantly in journals. During college, I spent two years drunkenly plunking down my thoughts on the computer, but I gradually moved back to the handwritten word since, well, notebook computers weren’t there yet and I wanted to write wherever I damn well pleased.

The Goal

The primary goal of a notebook is to get out of the way… to disappear. It does this by perfectly fitting into your writing situation. How accessible does it need to be? What notebook tangibles do you need? How will it withstand a beating? By fitting into how you write, a notebook becomes invisible. It wastes none of your time because any moment you spend noticing the notebook is a moment you could be noticing something else, and writing about it.

But that’s not what makes a notebook truly sexy.

I have years of experience with some notebooks, weeks with others. As you can see, I’ve explored a wide variety of notebooks. The photo above is ordered chronologically, with my oldest journal on the bottom and my newest discovery, the Field Notes brand, the notebook in which I’m writing the first draft of this article, on the top. Like The Gel Dilemma, I’ve evaluated notebooks according to specific buckets of criteria.

My collection represents a wide variety of the notebooks out there, but they are merely the ones I’ve stumbled upon or had recommended. It is by no means a complete or representative collection. But know this: when I see a store with notebooks for sale, I always stop. I examine. I flip the pages and figure out if there is anything new. I do this regardless of current company, country, or convenience. I am a social introvert, but will stop a complete stranger on the street if they’re sporting an unknown notebook.

Purpose

The Purpose section represents the hard facts regarding this selection of notebooks. As a means of simplification, I’m going to use the word notebook to describe the bevy of different writing receptacles I’m going to evaluate. I could have just as easily used the word notepad, journal, workbook, or sketchbook.

As you can see above from the variety of notebooks I’ve used, there are widely differing intended uses. Anything pocket-sized works better than anything else when you’re sitting on a 16-hour flight to New Zealand. Given that intended use significantly affects value, there is no clear winner regarding Purpose, but there is judgment.

Brand	Size	Binding	Cover	Paper Weight	Pages
Cachet Sketchbook	10.5 x 13.5	Stitched	Hard	Heavy (70#)	~150
Watson-Guptill Sketchbook	8.5 x 11	Stitched	Hard	Heavy (70#)	~200
Moleskin Cahier Notebook	7.5 x 9.75	Stitched	Soft	Medium (20#)	60
Moleskine Reporter Notebook	8 x 5	Stitched	Hard	Medium (20#)	192
Paperchase Notebook	5.75 x 4	Glue	Pleather	Thin (20#)	~250
Moleskine Japanese Notebook	3.75 x 5.5	Stitched	Hard	Medium (20#)	60
Moleskine Notebook	3.75 x 5.5	Stitched	Hard	Medium (20#)	60
Field Notes Notebook	3.5 x 5.5	Saddle-Stitch	Soft	Heavy-Medium (50#)	48
Moleskine Cahier Notebook	3.5 x 5.5	Stitched	Soft	Medium (20#)	64

• Binding is one of those attributes you’ll never notice until it fails. In my experience, sewn binding never fails. I’ve had both glue-based and stapled bindings blow out on me, usually as a result of purchasing an overall poor quality notebook. A blown-out binding means a dead notebook, and that means everything inside of that notebook will be forgotten.
• The Japanese Moleskine has zigzag folded pages with heavier paper. This was novel for about a week and then was totally annoying because I kept forgetting where in the zigging and zagging I was currently writing.
• I love ginormous notebooks with sketch paper. We’re talking MacBook 17” ginormous here. In all-day off-sites with strict no laptop policies, the massive notebook is a security blanket. This is not an everyday notebook, but grab the biggest damned notebook you can find the next time you’re in an art store. It’s a great conversation piece, while also being a handy place to mentally wander when a meeting goes boring.
• Paper weight, the thickness of the paper, is the Achilles heel of many of the Moleskines. While I appreciate the off-white’n’yellow coloring of the paper, the paper itself is thin. I’m guessing 20 pound-ish. This bugs me less than the fact that I can see through the paper to the next page if I’ve already written on it. This is a noisy visual distraction that detracts from Moleskine’s general high quality.

Intangibles and Accessories

Getting into the more esoteric aspects of individual notebooks. These features tend to be where folks start to foam at the mouth with regards to their favorite notebook.

Brand	Lines	Detachable	Color (Cover/Paper)	Availability	Pocket	Band
Cachet Sketchbook	None	No	Shiny Black / White	Art store	No	No
Watson-Guptill Sketchbook	None	No	Matte Black / White	Art store	No	No
Moleskin Cahier Notebook	None	Partial	Brown / Off-White	Everywhere	Yes	No
Moleskine Reporter Notebook	None	No	Shiny Black / White	Everywhere	Yes	Yes
Paperchase Notebook	Grid	No	Shiny Black / White	Borders	No	No
Moleskine Japanese Notebook	None	No	Shiny Black / White	Everywhere	Yes	Yes
Moleskine Notebook	None	No	Shiny Black / White	Everywhere	Yes	Yes
Field Notes Notebook	Grid	No	Brown / White	Mail Order	No	No
Moleskine Cahier Notebook	None	Partial	Brown / Off-White	Everywhere	Yes	No

• I’m fervently anti-line on the page, but for the sake of science, I’ve tried a couple of lined notebooks. The result: yeah, you eventually stop seeing the lines, but read that again, you stop seeing what? I don’t need lines on a notebook. I needed lines in 3rd grade when I was learning how to write. I’m good now, thanks.
• Several Moleskine versions offer detachable paper for a portion of the notebook and this apparently floats some boats, but I never rip pages out of a notebook. I keep the notebooks which survive forever, which means a notebook with ripped-out pages is a violated notebook.
• Notebooks are always black. Sorry brown.
• Inner pockets are like mail rules. By using them, I forget whatever I put into them.
• The elastic band differentiates many of the Moleskines, but it also encourages a curiously annoying habit — you save stuff. The band gives the comforting illusion that your notebook is an enclosure, so you start shoving receipts, postcards, and business cards into the notebook. If packratting information is your schtick, the band helps, but I find once I start packratting, my notebook becomes less a writing tool and more like luggage. This is a mixed blessing as we’ll see in moment.
• There are huge families of notebooks that I haven’t included in my evaluation and the reason is they have too many moving parts. Ring bindings, refillable, tabbed, multicolored, combinable, and linkable notebooks — there’s something for everyone. All I see in many of these features is an opportunity for my notebook to explode.

Sweet Decay

This section was originally titled “durability” because any notebook evaluation must analyze how a notebook is going to survive. We need to understand how a notebook can take a beating because what’s sexy about a notebook is how it survives.

Scars are stories. What I want out of my notebook is that it looks better after three months of beatings. A great notebook decays gracefully. A great notebook weathers its use and becomes more than what it began as. As a notebook is beaten up, its character improves. Therefore, the ratings in this table are different. They explain how, after heavy usage, the various aspects of the notebook survived.

There is additional measure on this table, Character. Character is a purely personal opinion of how the entire notebook looked after three months. As I’m not going to anoint an overall winner, consider Character to be the best gauge of my overall opinion of Purpose, Intangibles, and Decay.

Brand	Binding	Cover	Paper	Character
Cachet Sketchbook	Poor	Good	Excellent	Unremarkable
Watson-Guptill Sketchbook	Good	Good	Excellent	Unremarkable
Moleskin Cahier Notebook	Excellent	Good	Good	Wanna-be
Moleskine Reporter Notebook	Excellent	Excellent	Good	Hip
Paperchase Notebook	Poor	Good	Poor	Embarrassing
Moleskine Japanese Notebook	Excellent	Excellent	Good	Hip
Moleskine Notebook	Excellentt	Excellent	Good	Hip
Field Notes Notebook	Good	Excellent	Excellent	Hip
Moleskine Cahier Notebook	Excellent	Excellent	Excellent	Hip

• There is only one disaster among the nine books, and that’s the Paperchase notebook. No surprise here, it was a Borders impulse buy. It has a thin pleather cover, grid lines, and I was a third of the way through it before the pages just started falling out.
• Moleskine is over-represented in my sample, but that’s because they survived. I’m certain my sample of notebooks would be larger, except that I discarded many notebooks when they decayed quickly and poorly.
• Yeah, there’s an entire article to be written about how the ink lands on the paper.
• The Moleskine catalog is obnoxiously large, but in their quest to be anything to anyone, they’ve found some sweet spots. In particular, I think the small Cahier notebook is a tough combination of cover, binding, and stitching. Yeah, it’s brown, but convenient size and durability makes it my go-to traveling notebook.
• While the decay of the elastic band isn’t listed here, it’s worth calling out that represents a decay paradox. First off, who doesn’t want to be the dude from The English Patient where he’s capturing everything he’s seeing, feeling, and touching in his notebook? I do. The band helps here except when it blows out and becomes a limp black string hanging from my thoughts.

The Whole Story

There’s no obvious winner here because there are far too many uses for a good notebook. For me, notebooks are the home for the primal drafts of my articles. Right now, I’m finishing a draft of this piece on a flight to New York. There are two notebooks sitting in my lap that I’m using for source material because both are my New York notebooks.

How do you want to remember something you’ve done or thought? Your memory, while vast, is apt to alter itself according to your mood, your opinion, the time of day. And it fades and loses things over time. This is why we take pictures. Memory, while often comprehensive in terms of storage, is lousy at reconstruction.

Any context you can capture aids in reconstruction, which is why I write it all down. But better yet, my notebook, through its design, captures context as well. This is why New York looks like this:

There’s a story within a story here. It’s not just what I wrote down, it’s how what I wrote in captured what I didn’t consciously see.

We Travel in Tribes

The rumor that Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails comes as no surprise to those familiar with Twitter’s shaky uptime record and its tendency to lose its mind in increasingly impressive and creative ways.

So, new platform. Fine. Saw that coming. What continues to surprise me is this: why aren’t we more pissed when Twitter goes mute for three hours? How about when those tweets you sent just vanished? How come delete only works 50% of the time? Why aren’t the Twitterati bolting to Pownce?

The answer comes down to value. In the time that I’ve been using Twitter, it’s transformed from a curiosity to an essential service. What were seemingly random status updates have now become organized into organic conversational threads that bring a steady flow of relevant content across my desktop.

“Rands, you mean, just like an RSS reader?”

Yeah yeah yeah, that’s not the key value. The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know.

Don’t Give Me What I Asked For, Give Me What I Want

When I ask a question, I’m looking for an answer in one of three ways:

1. Specifics. Just answer the question directly and cleanly. I am the king of finding specifics. Average rainfall in Honokaa, HI? Yeah, that took three seconds to find.
2. Like or Related. Rather than answer the specific question, how about a related answer? I’m in a Sigur Ros mood — what should I listen to? Ratatat. Google can help with related answers, but useful discovery rates begin to drop here because relation is subjective. It’s influenced by personal preference — a judgment call. It helps if you know me before you suggest that this is like that and you think I’ll like it.
3. Rock My World. Fuck my question. Rands, here’s a random thing I know you need to know. There is no technological solution to knowing when or how to rock my world. Well, there is, but the technology is far less interesting than the people who use the technology, which brings us back to Twitter.

Affinity is the opposite of Infinity

Twitter is a social network, yes, but it’s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I’m thankful, because I’ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to what end? I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss.

I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me.

I’ve already described how I maintain a healthy Twitter equilibrium. This lightweight following protocol keeps the average amount of content I receive at any given time to a readable volume and shields me from the increasing and poorly named problem of Twitter spam. As an aside, I don’t understand folks who are complaining about Twitter spam when it’s a fundamental tenet of Twitter: “You choose who you follow”.

There are two immediate networks that I care equally about. First, there are the folks I follow. I actually know or have met a majority of the people on my followed list, but there is also an increasing healthy dose of strangers.

The second list is the folks who are following me. Now, there are functional differences in how these two groups are treated by Twitter and its supporting cadre of third party applications, but, to me, there is no difference between those I choose to follow and those who choose to follow me. Both groups have amazingly high information value because of a simple choice: “By choosing to follow this person, I am acknowledging we may have something in common / an interesting intersection.”

The act of one human being choosing to follow another is a big deal. As long as nefarious intent is not in play, the connection creates what the social science nerds like to call an affinity map; by drawing a line between you and me, we can infer that we’re somehow connected. How are we connected? Who knows? Maybe you like nerd culture? How about gel pens? We’re not really going to know until we test that link by asking a question.

Via the LazyWeb convention, I expect reasonable, informed, and quick answers to most any question. Where I used to use Google, I now use Twitter for questions, because not only do I get the answer, I also get the opinion. And sometimes I get my world rocked with random, psychic, off-the-cuff, tangential information that Google will never give me because Google doesn’t know who I am.

We Travel in Tribes

I’m eagerly watching Twitter evolve and organize itself. I’m dazzled as third parties are giving Twitter memory and context. But what I care about, and what has value to me, is the tribe of people in my ecosystem. Twitter is the best social network out there; it’s a great social search engine; and it’s a short strategic hop from being a terrific next generation address book.

My tribe is not your tribe because you’re not using Twitter how I do. You wrote an Academy Award-winning screenplay, only follow a few people, but have thousands following you. You sell shoes and follow each of the thousands of people who follow you. You are a major airline, but sound surprisingly human.

Twitter’s value has nothing to do with the technology.

Measuring uptime is an interesting nerd exercise, but Twitter’s value lies in how it stays out of the way and allows people to easily connect so they can share their thoughts and, more importantly, explore their differences.

Saving Seconds

I’ve been ripping on the mouse for years.

The argument is one of precision. The mouse, while incredibly useful as a casual means of interacting with a computer, is not a productivity tool, because when you use a mouse you sometimes miss and missing isn’t productive.

WAIT WHOA RANDS. PHOTOSHOP MAN. PHOTOSHOP LOVES THE MOUSE.

Calm down, yes, when it comes to art, to replicating the natural brushstroke, there is nothing better than the mouse (except a Wacom tablet), but do this for me. Go find the Photoshop guru on your floor and watch him or her work. Yes, the mouse is in play, but did you have any idea how much manipulation he did via the keyboard? Want to know why? Because anyone who has a deep, meaningful relationship with a computer is constantly looking for a way to save a few seconds.

The Learning Contradiction

Most of the time when you’re sitting at your computer, you’re doing exactly the same things. Your brain protects you from this mundane observation because your brain is really good at repetition. This is both a blessing and a curse. I’ll explain via an example.

Application switching inside of an operating system is the foundation of NADD. The ability to quickly context switch between apps is so common a task that they’ve developed a keyboard command just for us. In Windows, it’s Alt-Tab, and in Mac OS X, it’s Cmd-Tab. Problem was, when I made the move from Windows to Mac OS X, there was no Cmd-Tab equivalent, so my first moment inside of Mac OS X felt like this…

• “Pretty.”
• “WTF with maximizing windows?”
• “Shit, how do I switch apps?” CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK

The pathway I’d learned to do a simple, essential task was blocked. A task I’d taken for granted was now a mental hangnail, which threw off all my timing.

A quick search of the Internet revealed a fine shareware replacement for application switching. After the install of the new system preference, the hangnail vanished. I didn’t think about app switching again. Was my new solution faster? I don’t know. All I know is I’d unblocked the path to do what I needed to do so that I could forget it was there.

The blessing of learning a thing is also a curse. By learning to do a thing, you also forget it’s there, which means as new, improved means of doing things show up, you remain blissfully ignorant. I’m a fan of this ignorance because I’ve got other crap I need to do, and I don’t want to sweat the details, but here’s the rub: the details might be wasting a huge amount of your time.

Saving Seconds

Let’s try a test. From this article, I want you to count the number of discrete steps it takes you to compose a new mail message. Each key or key combination you click is 1 point. A mouse drag is one point. A mouse click is another point.

Ready? Go.

There are two types of people. The ones who waited for me to say Go to compose a new mail and the ones who read “compose a new mail message” and pressed the three keys that are necessary, from anywhere in the OS, to fire up a new compose window.

Anything more than three points to compose a new mail is a massive waste of your time.

“Rands, you are a nerd. I am not. I enjoy the slow gracefulness by which the mouse glides over to my dock and I select the mail application, after which I select the File menu, followed by New Message. Aaaaaaaah.”

All I’m reading is 5 points. All I’m thinking about is the 37 mails you send each day multiplied by 5 points = 185. Let’s multiply that by 30 days in a month, which is 5550 points. Finally, let’s multiply that by the number of other micro-tasks you’re doing where you’re doubling the amount of necessary effort. Ok, I can’t even do the math; I’ve got the productivity shakes here.

Ok, deep breath. Whooooooooooo.

You’re likely not in as a big a hurry as I, that’s fine. You may have an extremely casual, informal relationship with your computer and that’s cool, too. Perhaps this article is not for you, but my question is this: do you want to spend your time heading towards doing stuff, or doing stuff?

This article is for the folks who, when they discover a simpler way to get something done, a shortcut, they get a rush because they know simplicity is elegant and efficiency is a turn-on. The target audience for this article is people who, when presented with some else’s desktop, can’t help but stare and size it up. Their question is, “What is this person doing that will make my world move faster?”

Welcome.

Triage

How many fingers are sitting on the keyboard right now? Go type something. Looks like I’ve got all ten in play, but as I watch myself type, I’m really only using six or so. Yes, my form is crap, but I’m still hitting 90 words a minute on most typing tests.

Would you rather have ten smart fingers or one big, dumb thumb? Ten fingers, of course. Then why in the world are you holding onto that mouse right now?

The first thing we need to do is get you to understand the degree of your mouse addiction, so I’m going to ask you to unplug your mouse. It’s important to leave the mouse in the same familiar spot on your desk, but it must be unplugged.

Ok, now go work for 10 minutes. No cheating.

At some point during these 10 minutes, you’re going to forget the mouse isn’t connected to your computer and you’re going to grab it and the pointer is not going to move. You’re going to think, “Huh?”

Good. Jot yourself a note about what you were doing:

• Switching to Mail
• Selecting Format Menu
• Selecting a paragraph of text

Each of these represents a second or two you can save. Each task that you jotted is a task where some maniacal productivity nerd has already stared at and figured out a way to make it faster. This leads to the second part of your exercise.

For each note on your list, I want you to discover a non-mouse-based equivalent. Start with the local help system. Better yet, let someone else do the work for you and search Google for “Must have keyboard shortcuts for YOUR FAVORITE APP”.

You might not find a shortcut for every task, and even if you do there’s no telling whether that particular shortcut is going to stick in your head, but my guess is… one will stick. It will stick because its value to you will become instantly apparent. I made fun of the Windows Start key for months until the key showed up on my keyboard and I realized it was the simple starting point for EVERYTHING I DID ON MY PC. I’m on a Mac now, but I can still close my eyes and imagine firing up Word: START-RUN-“Word”-Return. Four points… meh. I can do better.

The point of this exercise is awareness. Once you’ve found one or two shortcuts that shave a micro-second here and there, you’ll become more aware of other places where you’re repeating yourself. You’ll start looking for time-saving shortcuts elsewhere because there is bliss in saving time.

Practice Productivity Minimalism

Like your desktop, you’re going to construct your own version of productivity nerdery. Still, here are some of my favorite moves and observations.

As much as possible, I keep my system of shortcuts as simple as possible. My ideal is that I should be able to sit down at any vanilla Mac OS X system and fly. The primary reason has to do with my personality. I’m a nerd and I know that without constraints I’d tweak my productivity system endlessly. I’ll explain.

I recently pinged the Twittersphere regarding how many folks actively maintain their Address Books. As expected, the graph of the responses formed a pleasant bell curve with most folks responding with a healthy “I maintain it as I need it”.

Then there’s the guy who sent me the 700-word email describing, in detail, the precise process he uses to maintain his Address Book. This mail included AppleScripts and shell scripts. I read the whole mail. I ran the scripts, too, because I can appreciate the obsessive nerd personality.

I’m that guy.

I’m the guy who will spend the entire goddamned weekend reorganizing my tagging system because I didn’t like the tone or the tense of my previous tagging system.

Paying attention to productivity is a slippery slope. The system efficiency addiction associated with saving time can become so compelling that your process begins to control more of your time than your product.

Only Essential Additional Tools

Given my minimalist approach, I keep my list of required productivity apps short. In additional to the feverish use of Cmd-Tab for application switching, I also use LaunchBar.

This is the cornerstone of my interaction with the operating system. This is a utility that allows access to just about anything in your hardware and on the Internet via a simple Cmd-Space-application/URL/whatever. Your question is, “Does LaunchBar do my_favorite_task?” And the answer is, “Yes, it does. And if it doesn’t do it out of the box, it’s probably a five-minute configuration exercise to make it happen.” In the past ten minutes, I’ve used LaunchBar to: make a TinyURL for Twitter, search for the LaunchBar website, look up John Adams on Wikipedia, and fire up a half-dozen applications. My favorite game to play with LaunchBar is: “I wonder if…?” where I just start typing “I wonder if…it looks up maps”.

Yeah, it does.

Many folks prefer Quicksilver to LaunchBar and want to argue endlessly about the pros and cons of each. Realize this debate has nothing to do with the strengths of the respective tools, but is merely a manifestation of the zealotry of the nerd personality when it comes to defining, defending, and fretting about the inessential details of their favorite tools.

There are a bevy of other tools you can obsess over. TextExpander is popular with heavy email users in my crowd. There’s also a healthy sprinkling of AppleScript on most of my friends’ desktops. Everyone has his or her own system for productivity, which leads me to my last thought.

We’re All Wasting Seconds

This is the presentation I want to see at the next conference: in a room full of people, anyone is welcome to walk up to the mic and plug their laptop in to the projector. They’ll be asked to complete three simple tasks:

1. Send a mail to a friend
2. Find something on the Internet
3. Save a bookmark or an image.

I would be fixated.

After the presenter was done with the tasks, we’d be able to pepper them with questions: “You did that too fast, what were you doing?” or “What haxie are you using on your dock?” or “I smell AppleScript… what the hell was that AppleScript?”

If each speaker had five minutes, in an hour we’d have 12 different speakers doing the same tasks completely differently, and I promise you’d find a small fix that you’d forget immediately that would forever have added a few seconds to your life.

The Business

You’ve had a small number of career defining moments. These are the select few moments in time when the trajectory of your career changed instantly and drastically. I have two buckets of these: ones I expected and ones that completely blindsided me. While the surprise and subsequent scrambling involved in being blindsided are chock full of delicious adrenaline, I highly recommend the moments you can predict.

One such predictable moment is the first glimpse of the offer letter for your new gig. This is the culmination of hours of resume tweakage, a series of phone screen gymnastics, and two grueling days of in-person interviews. This is the moment where you can answer the question, “How much do they think I’m worth?”

Fact is, you should already know. You’re the business.

Pre-Game

The offer letter negotiation process starts earlier than you think. Think back to your first phone screen. The recruiter was asking you warm-up feeler questions like, “Why do you want to leave your current gig?” and “What’s your ideal job?”, when they slide in a casual, “So, what are you making now?”

You stop. You sense that this seemingly off-the-cuff question is important. Your inner dialog goes something like, “I’m making 64k, buUUut, I’m going to round up to 70k because, well, I’m worth it.”

Yes, you are, but it’s a lie and it’s not a very good lie. You also broke the number one rule in negotiation: be informed. You don’t make 70k; you don’t make 64k, either. You make closer to 90k. HOLY RAISE RANDS.

I’ll explain where this magical raise comes from as well as the other rules in a bit, but first let’s understand how to answer the question “What are you making now?” Your answer: “I’m full-time and I’m making 64k. I’m getting a review in October, and my last raise was 4% plus a 2k bonus. I’d be walking away from 500 unvested options with a strike price currently 12 bucks under market, and all of which are going to be totally vested in 12 months.”

Expect an uncomfortable pause on the other end of the phone. That’s the sound of the recruiter furiously scribbling “Candidate knows their compensation shit” on the top of your resume. What you’re saying with this lengthy informed answer is complex, yet simple. You’re saying, “There are many ways to be compensated. I’m aware of all of them and, when the time is right, I’m ready to negotiate.”

How I’m Doing?

Whether you’re expecting an offer letter imminently or simply wondering how I’m going to make the offer negotiation process entertaining, I have an exercise for you. Let’s figure out what you actually make.

Like frequent resume updates, this career maintenance exercise is designed as a professional checkpoint, which answers the simple question, “How am I doing?”

First, I’ll explain how I calculated your hypothetical yearly compensation above:

• Base salary: 64k
• Benefits: 25% of 64k = 16k
• Bonus: 2k
• Stock: 6k
• Total: 88k

There are two fuzzy areas in this calculation. First, if you haven’t worked for yourself, you probably haven’t considered benefits as part of your compensation before. That 25% is an educated swag that most companies use to account for health and life insurance and 401k. You spend a lot of time ignoring this 25% because it involves things like retirement and health benefits and — duh — you’re immortal. There will, however, be a time, probably sooner than you’d like, that you’ll fully appreciate this portion of your compensation.

The other fuzzy area is stock. This example assumes you got 2000 options when you were hired and these options vest at 25% each year. I’m making an optimistic wild-ass leap and saying that you’re grossing 6k a year using the idea that you are making 12 dollars per option per year. Congrats.

Now, grab a piece of paper and figure out what you make. Don’t sweat perfection. You just need to be close.

The Swag

Fast forward. You’ve just finished the second round of interviews. Traditionally in high-tech, the recruiter is the last interview of the day and their job is to get inside your head and see what you think about the gig. They might throw in some compensation questions regarding your current gig as well. My advice is simple: the more they know you want the gig, the less they need to offer you.

And they haven’t offered you a thing yet.

There’s a time and place for negotiation, and it’s not at the end of six hours of interviews on a Friday when you don’t even know if you’re getting an offer letter.

So you wait. You send off a set of references, sit in bed replaying interviews in your head, and send thank you e-mails to the interview team. All professional karma-aligning activities, but what you really need to do is build your own offer letter. Let’s swag it:

Salary

The business model everyone loves is a business built on recurring revenue streams. This is why you can get a good cell phone for absolutely nothing. You’re going to pay for that phone many times over with your monthly subscription of $39.95. You’re still happy paying $40 a month because that feels like a deal, but carriers don’t see $40; they see the $1500 you’re going to spend over that three-year contract.

Your base salary is your recurring revenue stream. It’s your financial life blood and we’re going to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get it as high as possible because a 1% increase doesn’t affect just this year, it affects every year after it. For the swag, you need to figure out what you want to be paid in the new gig, and my first question is, “For someone doing exactly the same job as you, how much are they being paid?”

For a question that everyone wants to know the answer to, the Internet is surprisingly useless here. In preparation for this article I spent a solid day researching various salary information sites and couldn’t find a single site that contained a job description that remotely described my current gig.

Go ahead and check out those salary info sites and confuse yourself a bit, but I’ve got two pieces of advice for your swag. First, talk to friends with similar jobs. Remember that salaries for similar jobs vary greatly depending on the industry, geographic location, and specific company. Second, take your current salary and add 10% — that’s your salary swag.

Title

Titles, like salaries, vary from company to company, but what you’re looking for in a new job is a sign that you are growing. Associate software engineer now? Ok, drop that associate title from your business cards. Stuck as a software engineer for three years? I’d be looking for that senior prefix when I jumped ship.

Think of your new title like this: what title needs to be added to your resume for this new job to demonstrate that you’re actively growing in your career?

Sign-on Bonus

It’s difficult to swag a sign-on bonus because this type of incentive is often used to augment weak parts of an offer, and you don’t have an offer letter yet. If a recruiter knows you’re keen on stock and that you’ll be disappointed with a low-ball stock offer, they might dazzle you with a large sign-on bonus. Sign-on bonuses are one-time cash windfalls that may never show up again. For now, all you need to know is that they’re often a band-aid, and the question will be: what are they hiding?

Stock

While representing the largest potential for unexpected financial gain, stock and stock options are also the hardest to swag. Rather than focusing on a hard number here, the question you should first ask is, “How much do I believe in this company?” If your answer is, “I like the company, but I don’t see a lot of growth” then focus your negotiation energy on base salary. If your answer is, “I love this start-up; it’s the next Google” then stock grants are clearly going to play a major role in your negotiation.

In terms of valuing the stock, whether we’re talking about a start-up or an established public company, you’re speculating. For a publicly traded company, take a look at the past 5 years. What’s the average stock price? For the start-up, well, my rule of thumb for stock is no different than a venture capitalist’s success rate. A VC’s expectation is that one out of every ten of their companies is going to hit it big and that will cover the investment for the other nine. My expectation is that one out of every ten jobs will result in a stock windfall. This should depress you.

Any value you place on stock or options is a wild-ass guess, but it’s still an important piece of data. The value you put on stock is a measure of your belief in the company.

The Offer

“… and the team is really excited to have you onboard and we have an offer letter for you.”

And then it lands.

Before we digest what the recruiter is saying, I want to reset your head. Yes, you’ve made it this far. Yes, you want the job. Yes, you love the company. But here’s the reality: You are the business. If you take this gig, I think you should pour your heart into it, but I want you to remember that you’re going to have another five to ten other jobs in your lifetime just like this one. This means that for each moment you spend being pumped about the new gig, you’ll have an equal and opposite moment at the end of the gig where you can’t wait to get the hell out.

Amongst these five to ten jobs that you’ll have there is one constant: you. You’re the one who has to pay rent, ride the subway, buy a condo, get married, have some kids, and build your dream house. Your welfare is not your employer’s first priority. It takes one layoff to figure that out.

You are the business and the one consistent metric business is measured by is growth. A new gig represents a rare opportunity where you can drastically change the trajectory of that growth.

The Counter-Offer

As a hiring manager who has been involved in many offer negotiations, the safest way to get me to ignore any counter-offer is to make it without data.

Recruiter: “The candidate wants a higher base.”

Me: “Really? Why?”

Recruiter: “He just does.”

Me: “Grrrrrrr.”

Negotiation is a discussion of facts. Any counter-offer needs to be constructed with the impression that it’s based on data. “I want a 10% raise because, based on my research, that represents the average salary for this gig elsewhere in the industry.”

Sure, it’s still a swag, but your swag demonstrates effort/research/desire and in an interrupt-driven industry full of bright people racing around doing nothing in particular, I’m a fan of research. It demonstrates that you care about your career and that’s someone I want to work with.

The real problem is…

This Offer Blows

There’s some portion of the offer that is disappointing to you, and everyone involved, including your future employer, would prefer that you didn’t walk in the door disappointed. Let’s fix that.

As I don’t know what your problem is with your particular offer, I can’t advise what you need to say, but here are some common frustrations and a plan of attack.

Lower Base Salary: If you’re staying in your industry and you’re staying at an established company, I can’t see how a pay decrease is ever a positive sign. Yes, if you’re moving to a start-up, you’re going to trade salary for stock. You need to figure out if you’re cool with that.

You wanted a 10% increase and they came back with 5%? Why? Sure, your 10% was a pie in the sky swag, but how is the recruiter justifying this base salary? They’re probably saying something about comparable salaries across the company and how you’d be making more than 90% of the people in your grade. That’s a warm fuzzy, but I call bullshit: you’re in the wrong grade.

But It’s Ok, Here’s a Bonus: If the recruiter is pitching this bonus as a fix for your low base, I call bullshit again. A sign-on bonus, like a bonus plan, is a finicky thing that has a habit of vanishing when the sky falls. You can’t count on them. There’s nothing like an instant pile of money to distract you from the fact that, over the long term, you’re bringing less money home.

Even Better, Here’s a Pile of Stock: How do you value this stock? Sure, for the public company, you have a stock price, but you’re not going to see a penny of that stock for a year. And what about that start-up? Well, did you know they have a stock price, too? They have to in order to give it some sort of value. This is how a start-up values itself when it goes to a VC. They say, “We’ve issued x amount of shares and we believe they’re worth y per share. How much would you like?”

You can ask about this internal stock price. You can ask about how big their pool of outstanding fully diluted shares is and that will give you some data about how much of the pie you’re getting. But here’s the rub: I assume start-up options have zero financial value, but this doesn’t mean they have zero absolute value. Again, your measure of the stock is merely the measure of your faith.

And This is Our Final Offer: If some part of the offer blows and there’s absolutely no way to fix it, you have two options: walk away or find another way to ease the blow. If you can’t walk away, have you thought about:

• Asking for additional vacation hours right out of the gate?
• Getting a start date a month later than they’re asking? There’s nothing like 30 days of work-free bliss to adjust your perspective.
• What their work-at-home policy is? Perhaps Fridays working at home will remove that “I’m not getting a raise” taste in your mouth.
• Perhaps my favorite “This offer blows” move is to negotiate a six-month performance review. You know you rock, but they don’t… yet.

Meh

My single worst gig was one where I got everything I wanted out of the offer letter, but in my exuberance for being highly valued, I totally forgot that my first read on the gig was “meh”. 90 days later, I couldn’t care less that I got a 15% raise and a sign-on bonus. I couldn’t stand the mundanity of the daily work and I happily resigned a few months later, taking both a pay cut and returning my sign-on bonus for the opportunity to work at Netscape.

All of this discussion of compensation ignores a simple question you need to be able to answer: “How much might I love this gig?”

For any new job, you should be able to quickly explain to anyone why the new job is bigger than the last and why you might love it. Whether they believe you or not is irrelevant. You’ve got to believe it because you’re the business.

Nerdfotainment

I was introduced to Ask A Ninja via this podcast. In the podcast, the Ninja complains extensively about the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. The gist: “Every single character has their own damned plot line and it’s incredibly hard to figure out what the hell is going on”.

The third movie, At World’s End, only compounded the complexity problem. More characters, more plot lines, and more confusion. I just watched the third movie for the third time and discovered another subtle moment of “Oh, that’s why Calypso said that random thing in the second movie. I get it now.”

Back to the Ninja. His final pitch was: “Movies shouldn’t be this much work”. He’s wrong. Movies can be this hard, especially when they’re designed for nerds.

Nerd Generation Theory

According to my math, there is a huge pile of nerds who are traipsing around their 30s. This is the Apple ][ generation and they’re making some bucks. Financial types call this decade of life “the accumulation years” because, traditionally, this is the time of life when you start gathering piles of cash for use during the rest of your life. You’ve found your ideal gig and you’re hitting your stride.

Advertisers love these 30-somethings because they have large disposable incomes. Consequently, content creators love them as well, which means that for content creators to generate their own piles of cash, they need to develop entertainment targeted at the nerd demographic.

What do we know about nerds? Well, we know a lot. They need a project, are systematic thinkers, and they love puzzles and games. This brings me to a whole pile of entertainment that has shown up over the past ten years. All of which, I believe, is specifically designed for the nerd demographic, since all of the content shares a common characteristic: it’s terribly complex and nerds enjoy making it more so.

J.J. Abrams is a Big Nerd.

One of the more prominent recent examples of nerd entertainment is J.J. Abrams’ Lost. If you don’t follow the show, here’s the pitch: “A plane leaving Sydney, Australia, headed for Los Angeles, crashes in the middle of the Pacific. The survivors end up on a mysterious island where an endless stream of bizarre, unexplained shit goes down.”

I’ve just told you the basic premise of Lost, but I’ve actually told you absolutely nothing about the show. This is because Abrams has constructed a seemingly infinite set of intersecting plot lines involving all the major characters, both on the island and before they got to the island. Combine these elements with the usual science fiction elements such as immortality, time travel, and a creepy black smoke monster and you’ll quickly realize that one of the biggest criticisms of the show is “I have no fucking clue what is going on”.

That’s right. That’s the point. That’s why nerds created the Lost Wiki. That’s why we replay all the trailers in slow motion. We’re looking for that tattoo on the shark in the third episode of the second season because AH HAH! That explains something. I’m just not sure what… yet.

Nerds are systematic thinkers, which means, for entertainment, we want to exercise our systemic comprehension muscles. We want to stare at a thing and figure out what rules define it. In the case of Lost, Abrams get this. He sprinkles hints of systems within the system of the show. He tinkers with time and with personalities to paint brief glimpses of clues. And then he changes everything because he knows that if we ever feel we’ve figured it out, we’ll bail.

Captain Kirk doesn’t know he’s a Big Nerd.

Our search for entertaining complexity is not new; it’s just gone mainstream. In fact, if systemic complexity doesn’t exist in a nerd-appropriate show, we’ll go ahead and create it. Think about the original Star Trek series, which, in my opinion, was one of the first pieces of serious nerd entertainment.

Like Lost, the amount of content and discussion regarding the original series, which hasn’t seen production in FORTY YEARS is mind-boggling. Yes, we’re still arguing about whether Captain Kirk could actually build a cannon to kill that lizard-guy . “In a battle between the Enterprise and a Star Destroyer, who would win?” (cough: Enterprise, duh, Star Destroyers can’t fucking steer.)

I’ve no idea how much backstory Gene Roddenberry constructed behind his characters and his stories. But I know that nerds, with their love of this show, have forced systemic complexity on it. Because if there is no project, no problem to solve, it’s not engaging.

Feluf, also a Big Nerd.

Feluf is my Level 70 Night Elf in World of Warcraft. I was running Karazhan with my guild the other night and I landed two sweet Epics: Ferocious Swift Kicker boots and the Steelhawk Crossbow.

Many of you have no clue what I just said. Some nerd crap about World of Warcraft. If you have no clue whether World of Warcraft would float your boat or not, my question is: what’d you do when you read the previous paragraph? Did you Google Karazhan? How about Epics? If you did, you learned that Karazhan is a dungeon and Epics are apparently really good gear.

Unlike popular TV and movies, World of Warcraft is clearly targeted at the nerd mind set, which means it’s designed with brutal system complexity in mind. Sure, they’ve designed the beginning of the game to be simple and approachable, but that’s how any good drug dealer builds his business: the first hit is free.

Significant engagement in World of Warcraft reveals a world chock full of complexity. You want to stop running all over the place? Well, you need a mount, and those guys show up at Level 40. To get there, you’re going to have to figure out what gear is good for your class. You’re going to have to learn how to make money to buy your mount, either via your profession or via building and selling goods at your local auction house. And once you get your mount at Level 40, you’re already going to know there are faster Epic mounts out there. Shit.

There’s a point where all this complex game drudgery sounds like life, and yeah, there is a lot of social interaction between players and guilds. But it’s intersections within the system to support the system. Warcraft is built to be impossibly complex, but every player is always secretly thinking, “I can totally figure this out”. Which is why Blizzard changes the system every few months.

Kaiser Soze. Unpronounceable Big Nerd.

The Usual Suspects, Memento, and Donnie Darko. These movies represent some of the best of nerd entertainment, and two of these movies didn’t do great at the box office. Yet all of them eventually made a pile of money because of the unique system puzzles they presented. Most folks walked out of those movies thinking, “I’m, uh, not sure quite sure what just happened to my brain”. Whereas we nerds rushed home to the Internet to begin the quest of figuring out the system. IT’S A TIME TRAVEL MOVIE, RIGHT?

We followed that line of questioning up with the immediate purchase of the DVD. In the case of Donnie Darko, this not only made the movie profitable, but also resulted in eventual release of the Director’s Cut of the movie, which only created more mysteries regarding that bunny who is still freaking me out.

Mr. Darcy is a Big Nerd. No, really.

Nerds have no monopoly over mind-bendingly complex plots. Anyone with a girlfriend has already endured multiple adaptations of the Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, I’ve been there. Yeah, I know the A&E version is the only adaption worth anything and I further know it’s because of that annoyingly charming Colin Firth portraying Mr. Darcy.

Yes, Mr. Darcy. Like the plots of J.J. Abrams, the arrogant intensity of Captain Kirk, and the devious hidden intentions of Kaiser Soze, Mr. Darcy is great nerd entertainment. I mean it.

Once you get past all the “doths” and “thous”, and realize there’s a lot more going on than social climbing and gold-digging, in Mr. Darcy you find a complex and nerd-worthy character. Why’s he being such an arrogant prick? SHE’S NEVER GOING TO LOVE THAT… WAIT… WHAT?

Argument about the natures and motivations of the characters in Pride and Prejudice might seem different than those in Lost or The Usual Suspects, but ultimately, we’re yelling about them because they are beautifully crafted unsolvable puzzles.

And that’s nerdfotainment.

I Don't Multitask

I’m at the end of a conference week and I’ve just moved hotels. This is normally a hassle, but the broadband in the prior hotel blew, which means I’m a week behind on everything. Once I’ve checked into the room, the first thing I do is fire up Safari and watch the first page load. Nearly instant.

Sweet, sweet broadband.

As we know, high-speed access to the Internet is the key to information bliss in The Cave, but we’re not in our Cave, are we? We’re in New Zealand on the 9th floor of a strange hotel where they tell me the water flushes down the toilet in the opposite direction. I haven’t checked; I’m busy building my Cave away from home.

There are two goals with the process: creating a sense of comfortable familiarity while also managing the interestingness of the surroundings. I start by positioning the desk so I have line of sight to the TV, and then I remove all non-essential, distracting crap from the surface. I turn on the desk lamp and the bathroom light and turn off the rest of the room lights, creating a comfortable blanket of darkness around the desk.

The window stays open unless it’s a significant source of glare. I used to always pull the drapes because I used to see windows as very high-resolution screen savers, which are apt to grab my attention. But, as we’ll see, the interestingness of this natural screen saver outweighs the risk.

Lastly, I need mental background noise to tap into when I’m not focusing on whatever task it is I’m working on. Back at home, my favorite source of white noise is the coffee shop. It’s chock full of people, stories, and familiar, random sounds that fuel my creative forward momentum.

No coffee shop here, so I need to create it. A movie will work, and I get lucky and find Casino Royale, which I’ve already seen.

I spend the next hour and a half doing tasks that don’t require significant attention. I’m scrubbing email, scribbling random thoughts, triaging bugs, tidying articles in progress, and generally doing tasks on the B list. What’s more interesting are my mental breaks. I jump into another tab in Safari and take a glance at del.icio.us, Digg, Google Reader, or other meta-content. I watch the movie for a few moments or glance out the window to see what the world is up to.

These mental breaks share a common trait: they provide rich content, but not rich enough content that I’ll stop working on my B-list tasks.

When Casino Royale is over, the next movie comes on, which is The Majestic, with Jim Carrey. This presents a potential problem. I haven’t seen this movie, and I don’t want to risk it being good and grabbing my attention.

No problem. Wikipedia to the rescue. I spend five minutes reading the plot of The Majestic and I’m done. The summary describes all the plot twists and aspects of the movie that might grab my attention. Reading the Wikipedia summary lobotomizes the interestingness so that the movie becomes structured white noise. I can glance at it for 5 seconds, take my mental content break, and not get lost in wondering where the movie is going because I already know how it’s going to end.

The World is Not a Screen Saver

In Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, he describes how researchers for Sesame Street determined what parts and how much of the show were actually registering with five-year-old kids. What they discovered was that, when presented with toys and quality segments, these children were able to play with toys and remember content from the show just as well as kids who just watched the show.

This research from the late 1960s contradicts a lot of the bitch-slapping directed at multitasking, especially in the recent Autumn of the Multitaskers article. The article summarizes, “we concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on”. This article goes on to say that multitasking-related stress prematurely ages us, hampers our ability to focus and analyze, and, in the long term, causes our brains to atrophy.

Compelling stuff. I especially like the reference to one of the studies where “… researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds.”

Knowing how important having a properly constructed Cave is to me, both at home and remotely, the phrase “listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds” stands out. Think about how the task of listening for specific tones amongst noise would fit into my Cave environment. The answer is: it wouldn’t. In fact, it would drive me batshit crazy and I’d chase the researcher out of my hotel room with a broom or whatever the hell they call a broom in New Zealand. Of course the students listening for tones in random noise learned less; the researchers were bugging the shit out of them.

The Autumn of the Multitaskers actually leads with a story about how the author crashed his car trying to use his cell phone while driving. He implies, but does not explore, the idea that multitasking is a skill and not a generational curse. The hidden contradiction in the article is that you could just be really bad at multitasking. And my guess is that being really bad at anything you need to do often is potentially a recipe for stress and early aging.

It also reminded me of another thing: I don’t multitask.

Multitasking is a convenient descriptive term for what I do. In fact, to the outside observer, multitasking is a perfect description, but because it’s based on outside observation, it’s misleading.

I don’t multitask. Think about it, you can’t concentrate on two things at once. Yes, to the outsider, I am doing many tasks at once, but in my head I can only do one thing at a time. Where the art is, where the skill is, and what the term should describe is what I do between the tasks. What I do well is a combination of timely, adept context switches combined with content-rich breaks. It looks like this:

And it feels like this.

I deeply consider the thing I’m working on. I sit up straight, furrow my brow, talk to myself, and dig into what I’m doing. My environment is meticulously designed to support this, whether it’s the precise, familiar location of my computer, the blanket of darkness surrounding me, or the white noise I select to provide a mental break focal point.

At some point while working, I will reach a mental block. I quickly assess the magnitude of this block (minor cramp or total fucking blockage?) against the priority of the task (need to finish this now or whenever?) Based on that lightning fast assessment, I either stop or grind it out.

This stop may be a context switch to another task, but it’s often a break to soak in the white noise, and it’s in these pauses that I’m brutally creative. When I stare out the window of the hotel, I see a small harbor full of sailboats, and, somehow, the haphazard arrangement of the colorful sails reminds me of a summer in Minnesota where my jerk of a cousin taught me to play Bloody Knuckles after everyone went to bed. Bloody knuckles, now that was a game, and games remind me of the bizarrely different ways human beings have figured out how to communicate, which is the EXACT topic I’m currently writing about, so I jump back to my MacBook and continue writing.

Or perhaps I don’t find my sailboat segue. Perhaps the harbor takes me in a different direction and I’m inspired to switch tasks. Fine, back to that email where I’ve been writing a response to a flame mail from a well-intentioned engineer who has suddenly realized that he’s been ignoring the web for five years. And it turns out the web has changed a bit and his five-year-old mastery of web technologies is now obsolete. His recent discovery of his irrelevance (cough: Fez) has turned into this flame mail, which requires a careful response. And, you know, email is just another bizarre construction by which we communicate AND HEY that’s the topic I was just writing about, so I switch back to my original writing task.

The actual elapsed time that occurred during the previous three paragraphs is about 10 seconds, including my five-second inspirational pace in front of window. And if you were watching me, you’d think, “restless, unfocused, multitasker”. What you can see now, with internal context, is that I’m really only working on one thing: the article about communication.

Yes, I almost made a switch to another task, extinguishing the flame mail, but even if I did, I’d still have the echo of what I was just doing. Tasks get messed up in my head, yes, but mixing shit up is how you build new shit.

Distributed Attention

Back to Gladwell’s research. What they learned was that the five-year-olds were “Attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they were looking at what for them were the most informative parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.”

Multitasking is the art of distributing your attention and, guess what, you’ve instinctively known how to do it since you were five. What have you done since then? You’ve worried about information overload, you’ve devised a new way to get things done, and you’ve thought “That’s me!” when someone has taken the time to describe something you already knew.

Me, I’m watching how I context switch. I’m learning when I need to switch to a new task or just relate what I want to do with what I’m currently doing. I’m figuring out the right environment to seed my tasks and my non-tasks that push my ideas towards a coherent structure. At the same time, I’m acknowledging that documented excessive structure might sell books and provide misleading comfort, but it doesn’t provide much space for inspiration.

My Cave, wherever I build it, is a deceptively creative structure. I surround myself with creativity-driving, chaotic-seeming natural order, which is built with the understanding that I can only do one thing at a time, but when I stop, I create.

It’s Windy in Wellington

The presentation season kicked off for me with a week in New Zealand at the Webstock conference. I arrived early, which, as it turns out, wasn’t the best use of my time, as I spent two solid days of what should have been vacation stressing about slides.

Among the many highlights was the speaker dinner held the night before the conference where I met far too many bright people to list here. As I walked back to my hotel room along the waterfront with my head buzzing from the after effects of rapid content acquisition, I heard someone whistling.

No, not someone. Something.

Wellington is at the south end of the North Island, which somehow makes it incredibly windy. The wind varies from a gentle breeze to a hat-removing, lean-into-it, category 4 wind storm. My guess is that residents don’t notice the wind, but I wonder if they notice the whistling lampposts.

I’ve no idea whether this was intentional design or not, but when the wind hits them just right, I swear the cylindrical holes in the lampposts whistle. In unison. I walked by multiple times during my week in Wellington just to see how the lamp posts were singing that particular day because I wasn’t sure if it was a fluke. It wasn’t.

Whether someone intentionally designed these lampposts or it’s a happy coincidence is irrelevant. It’s a great example of one of the unspoken goals of going to any conference: you travel to discover the truly unexpected.

SXSW is Big

It’s big and becoming notorious for the fact that while everyone goes, many skip the panels because the panel structure provides less content and more rambling conversation where there is no guarantee that a rock star set of panelists are going to say anything useful.

Guess what? I can get the same thing with the same rock star panelists and a higher hit rate of usefulness in the unstructured environment of that random bar on 6th street at two in the morning.

My contribution to fixing the SXSW problem is the following. First, John Gruber and I are following the lead of Jim Coudal and Brenden Dawes, by spending an hour delivering content, not conversation. The topic is Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts and, oddly, I think I’ll lead off with a compelling design story about Mentos. We’ll see how that works out.

Second, I also have the pleasure of moderating a panel titled Designing for Freedom and, as with each year, I have been honored with a rock star set of panelists, which includes:

• Gina Bianchini (CEO of Ning)
• Anil Dash (VP Evangelism at Six Apart)
• Braden Kowitz (User Experience Design Lead at Google)
• Brent Simmons (Creator of NetNewsWire)

As an aside, the panel is up against the keynote with Mark Zuckerberg, but my thought is this: “Think of how much time you’ve already wasted on Facebook, why waste more?”

Yes, it’s a panel and I just ripped panels, but my commitment is this: we’ll stay on topic, say something bright, and we’ll be available for yelling at a local bar shortly after the panel.

Whistling Lampposts?

I knew Webstock was a hit when it was 2am and I was standing outside a bar yelling at some bright someone about some bright thing and having a ball.

Webstock is small. 500 or so, but I’ve never been to a conference where the audience had such a sense of community. Sure, it’s a function of the size of the design population of New Zealand, but that doesn’t explain why Webstock had such personality. I can firmly point my finger at the passion, expertise, and professionalism of the organizers, but I think I should also point at their humility and simple goal of “Let’s build the new, which encourages fertile chaos”.

For me, a conference finishes with a list. It’s a combination of names from business cards and names I simply remember. These aren’t necessarily folks that need an immediate follow-up; it’s the “remember this person” list and how I discover these people and why I need to remember them is a function of the creativity entropy of the event.

I don’t know if this entropy is definable, controllable thing. My guess is SXSW has it and will continue to have it as long as the population believes those bars remain an intellectually target rich environment. As for Webstock, it’s on the other side of the world, but they’ve defined an event you must experience simply because you want to find your own whistling lamppost.

Out Loud

It’s the calm before the presentation storm. Over the next three months, I’ve got four different presentations at Webstock and SXSW. I’m also the best man at a wedding in Washington, all of which means I’m spending most of my down-time thinking up things I’m going to say in the future.

If you’re looking for advice on giving a presentation, the Internet is chock full of endless advice. I’ve been here, too. If you’re looking for tips on writing the presentation, the Internet goes dark — for a fairly simply reason. To think about how to write a presentation, you need to think about how you speak, and that’s not what you’re doing when you read or write. I’ll demonstrate. Say the following out loud right now:

I am reading this out loud to no one in particular.

Were you surprised to hear your voice? I was. Did you actually read it out loud? No? Why not? Sitting in a coffee shop? Worried that the guy next to you will think you’re a freak? This basic discomfort is the reason it’s tricky to explain how to present in an article. The skills involved in writing a clever paragraph are completely different from those used for developing and delivering that clever paragraph to a room full of strangers.

You still haven’t read it out loud, have you?

Presentation or Speech?

Developing a compelling presentation involves a series of decisions and exercises to align your head with the fact that you’re delivering your content directly to people. No internet. No weblog. Just you.

Your first decision: speech or presentation? Wondering about the difference? Take a quick look at these two entirely different appearances by Steve Jobs. The first is his Three Stories speech at Stanford and the second is part of his MacWorld 2007 keynote.

You only need to watch a few minutes of both to get a feel for the difference between a presentation and a speech. My guess is you only viewed the Stanford video because everyone has seen Steve Jobs at MacWorld and the Stanford video is a shocker. Clearly, it’s Steve Jobs. It’s his voice, he’s got his trademark bottle of water, but the delivery is completely anti-Jobs because he’s reading his compelling stories from a piece of a paper.

It freaks me out.

In his autobiography, regarding his stand-up comedy years, Steve Martin writes, “If you don’t dim the lights… the audience won’t laugh.” This subtle, paradoxical observation is the core difference between speeches and presentations. In a presentation, half of the art is figuring out how to create an environment where your audience can actively participate without knowing they are participating. In a speech, the audience may laugh or cry, but they are not required nor encouraged to participate, because, during a speech, the spotlight never leaves the speechmaker.

For a presentation or a speech, you need your audience, otherwise it’s just you in an empty room talking to no one in particular, and we already have a word for that… it’s called writing.

The Unforgivable Mistake

There is one unforgivable mistake when giving a presentation. You’ve heard it before: “Don’t read from your slides.” As you’ll see, my approach for presentation development is designed around avoiding this cardinal mistake, and it starts with picking the right tool.

For all of my presentations during the past three years, I’ve done all my content creation inside of my presentation software, which, thankfully, is Keynote. In the back of my mind, I’ve wondered if this is the right tool to iterate a presentation. Shouldn’t I follow the same process as writing and drop all my thoughts into TextEdit where I can easily slice and dice complex thoughts? No.

Start with and stick with Keynote or whatever presentation software floats your boat. First, presentation software is effectively designed to be outline software and that’s a great tool for organizing and editing your thoughts while not allowing them to become a book. By keeping your presentation in slide format, you’re forcing your content to remain a presentation, not an article. Where each slide is a thought. Where moments of undiscovered brilliance are sitting between bullet points. We’ll talk about how to find this brilliance in a bit, but for now, iterate in the slides.

Your job is to get as much of the meat as possible into outline form so that you can begin to transform it into a presentation. Don’t worry about how you’re going to say something or whether folks are going to get it. If you’re worried that the outline doesn’t allow you to capture the essential detail that you could with a blank piece of paper, start taking notes. I like the stickies in Keynote for random small thoughts. I like the speaker notes for bigger ones.

What’s going to happen as you edit and re-edit is that an initial structure will emerge from your outline. Better yet, since you’ve stuck with presentation software, I’m guessing you’re already starting to hear your voice in your head on certain slides…

• “This is a key point. I need to say this one reeeeeeeeallly slowly because it needs to stick.”
• “Good data that needs to be conveyed, but… dull. Needs hip.”

Once you’ve got what looks like a rough outline of your presentation, it’s time to invoke The Disaster.

The Disaster

This is the second time I’m going to ask you to do something and the second time I just want you to do it. No questions asked. I want you to go to the first slide of your presentation, stand up, and give your presentation.

Wait what whoa Rands this is rough and it’s missing thoughts and uh…

Quiet. Give it a shot. Beginning to end, each slide, I want to hear your presentation.

Done? How’d it go? There’s a reason I call it The Disaster, you know. There are three reasons you should tough out your rough presentation with zero prep:

1. Get a feel for how it fits all together.
2. Hear yourself speaking. This is more reinforcement that you aren’t writing a book, you’re writing a presentation.
3. Build confidence. You now know the absolute worst case scenario regarding this presentation. There is no way it could be worse than what you just went through.

Did you notice as you stood in your office talking to no one in particular how thoughts in your head sounded different than on the slides? Did you discover flaws in logic? Mysterious new gaps in content on the slides you’ve been staring at all morning? That’s progress.

During the Disaster run-through, I take a ton of notes. I do this on a piece of paper next to the computer because, as much as possible, I want to stick with the idea that I’m giving my presentation. If I stop to edit my slides, I lose track of tempo and momentum, or worse, I end up re-writing my presentation rather than giving it. These handwritten notes look like this:

• No clue what slide #2 is trying to say.
• Segue between #4 and #5 is non-existent
• #10: Repeating myself

Your first job after your Disaster is to integrate your notes as quickly as possible. For me, the post-Disaster edit is also the single biggest change I’ll make to the presentation. In addition to major structural changes, I also find new content that needs to be added.

Reduction

This is a good time to remind yourself how to not throw up. This is the topic of an article from last year I wrote on the topic of preparing to give — not develop — your presentation, and there are huge useful intersections between these articles. For those NADD afflictees out there, I present this article in three slightly revised bullet points:

• Practice endlessly (so that you can)
• Improvise (but never stop)
• Fret (ting)

In terms of developing your presentation, I’m going to further modify bullet #1 for this article. It’s now, “Practice and edit endlessly”. This is the largest piece of work where I have the least advice because you need to stare at your slides at 2am for three nights in a row. You need to soak in your presentation. So, mix it up. Invoke another disaster. Pitch a friend. Print your slides and pitch a tree in the woods.

My best piece of advice is a threat: an audience can smell an immature presentation on the very first slide. It has nothing to do with the quality of the content; it’s you standing lamely in front of your slide and silently conveying the “Ok, what I am going to talk about here?” vibe, and it’s presentation death.

During this endless editing and practice, you’re looking for a reduction and consolidation of slides to occur. It’s not that you’re saying less, it’s that you’re beginning to internalize the content so you no longer need all those words to remember your point. It can be disconcerting to delete your fine ideas, so use the speaker notes or stickies if you feel you’re going to forget something important. You aren’t going to need them, but if it makes it emotionally easier to prune, terrific.

This consolidation is one of the reasons I don’t usually send my slides to folks who ask after the presentation. My slides, standing on their own, rarely make sense without me standing in front of the room furiously waving my arms.

Second, as part of your consolidation, you’ll want to start thinking about where you want to use images rather than words. Remember, a presentation is a visual and auditory medium, and a slide covered with words is, well, a cop-out. If you’re only going to use words to describe your fine idea, why don’t you just send everyone an email instead of wasting an hour of their time reading the same thought plastered on the wall behind you.

This presentation is only partially about you and what you think. Yes, you are the guiding force, but the goal is to present an idea with space around it. In this space, your audience is going to pour their own experience and their opinions; they’re going to make your idea their own. Pictures, charts, and graphs create structured, memorable space. I use them in two ways: either to replace an entire thought wholesale or to augment a word slide that needs more space.

A Design Aside: The visual design of your slides is an important topic that is outside the scope of this article, but know this: I’ve seen people lose their minds tweaking animations and transitions on slides. They try every single animation in the hope that just the right transition will add that certain something to their presentation, but what they don’t know is that an animation fixation is usually a sign that your content blows. The same rule for typefaces applies for transitions and animations. The less your audience sees your design decisions, the more impact they’ll have.

Third, you’re looking for an underlying structure to your presentation that you’re going to want to share with your audience. During all of this endless practice, you’re going to develop a feel for how your presentation fits together, but this structure may not be initially obvious to your audience. For any reasonable-sized presentation, you need to design a visual system that allows audience members to instantly know where they are.

Fourth, and lastly, you’re looking for audience participation opportunities in the flow and tempo of your presentation. Where are you going to turn the lights up a little bit and remind the audience that they’re sitting there, soaking in your thoughts? Let’s talk a bit more about this.

Presentation Punctuation

Participation is presentation punctuation. You’re going to use participation to accentuate parts of your presentation. You’re going to use it to break up complex thoughts into digestible, comfortable ideas. But you only have partial control of when folks will actually participate.

The most common participation technique is the show of hands opener. It’s usually done at the beginning of the presentation as a warm-up:

• “Show of hands — how many of you own a Mac?”
• “Quickly, how many of you think you’re paying too much for term life insurance?”

As a warm-up technique, I’m a fan of the opener. It’s an up-front reminder that this is not a speech, it’s just an opening salvo and you’ve got another hour to fill. As you’re endlessly practicing your slides, look for sections that are idea-heavy and give your audience a shot in the arm with a question. You don’t even have to ask for a show of hands, just direct the spotlight at them for a moment.

Tell me exactly what you do with your fingers when you read at your computer.

You’re only going to be able to plan so much of your audience’s participation, and therein lies the beauty of actually giving a presentation: you don’t know when your audience is going to show up. Dull, wordy slides I considered deleting often got the biggest laugh. Visual slides that I’ve poured my heart into are often complete duds. You won’t know until you’re there.

Something for their Pocket

What do you want your audience to remember? I should’ve asked this at the beginning, but I’m asking it now because you’re almost done with your presentation and I want to know what your giving your audience that fits in their pocket. I want to know what part of your presentation is actually going to leave with them.

There’s a really easy and cheap way to do this and it’s the Lessons Learned slide. It’s the bulleted list of important points slide that, when displayed, invariably results in a slew of cameras and iPhones appearing in the audience because they know this slide fits in their pockets.

Regardless of whether or not you use it, the Lessons Learned slide is a handy one to have at the end of your deck during the entire presentation development. It defines the basic structure of your presentation and represents a goal. Could you give your entire presentation from a single slide. 50 minutes, a room full of people, and you with your single slide with six bullet points?

That’s your goal, and you can have a wildly successful presentation without achieving it, but a one-slide presentation represents the ultimate commitment to your audience. It says, “This isn’t about slides. This about me telling you a great story… out loud.”

Pixel Rigs

I have an unnatural fixation with pixels.

For two years I was a stalwart supporter of the 17-inch PowerBook/MacBook Pro. My argument was simple and ignorant: “You need as many pixels as possible because you need to be able to see as much as possible.”

This pixel fundamentalism blinded me to the simple fact that the 17-inch was just too big and heavy. Yes, 17 inches is bigger than 15 inches, but the primary use case for a portable computer is mobility, and lugging around a 6.8 pound gorgeous piece of aluminum is a total mobility buzz kill. A creative tool should never be an anchor.

Yes, when I finally switched to a 15-inch, I was instantly happier. The weight and size elegantly integrated better with my travel habits and I didn’t miss the lack of roughly half a million pixels for a moment.

Besides, NOW WE’VE GOT SPACES AND UNLIMITED PIXELS WOOOOOOOOO! Ok, no, Spaces isn’t the right pixel solution, but that’s a different article.

Now, my desktop computing solutions don’t have the mobility requirement, which means, as frequent readers know, I continue to lose my pixel mind when it comes to screen real estate. What started as a treatise to justify the necessity of 30-inch flat panels has slowly twisted and turned into a seemingly insatiable need for more pixels.

Seriously. One of my current background drive-to-work soak projects is a justification for a second 23” flat panel turned on its side… and you can help.

I’ve created a Flickr group called Pixel Rigs where I’m dying to see your pixel rig. Go grab your favorite camera, take a shot of your desktop, and post it to Flickr. Unlike prior excursions, stage your desktop a bit. Let us see how you’re managing pixels. Go crazy with Flickr’s notes features… like this:

Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever… explain to everyone how you’ve tamed your personal pixel fixation.

Year in Twitter

I’m a sucker for charts’n’graphs.

The only thing better than data is data about data. Data about data is information that, in quantity, becomes knowledge, which is just a short hop away from wisdom. And when wisdom shows up, you know you’re this close to figuring it all out.

As a nerd who erroneously believes that the world is a knowable system, charts’n’graphs further the illusion that I’m one epiphany away from this complete knowledge.

Twitter’s deliberately spartan feature set has no charts’n’graphs. In fact, most of the information you can learn about your personal Twittersphere is summed up on the front page: following, followers, favorites, direct messages, and updates. That’s it.

Twitter has become a daily social touch point for me. In fact, I’ve started to see the @reply_to_someone convention outside of Twitter particularly in email:

“Did anyone take notes at the design meeting? I saw @markjz and @wenderz scribbling something.”

Given the amount of social energy I’m pouring into Twitter, I’ve been wondering how I’ve been using it. Fortunately, @dacort has written a fine Perl script to suck down all your twits, chew on them a bit, and spit them out into delicious charts’n’graphs in Numbers.

Staring at this year in review for Twitter has given me the following information:

• The @replies aren’t really a surprise, as these are folks I work with or who are avid Twitter buddies. I suspect the interesting data here is in the long tail. How many folks have at least one @reply?
• I’ve been stewing over the lunchtime Twitterspike for a couple of days. In an early version of the stats, there was a spike around 2pm and that spike is still there around Noon in the latest stats. Before seeing either of these graphs, my guess would’ve been that I was chattier in the morning. Looks like I’m apt to fire off a Twitter right after lunch to set the tone for the afternoon.
• The Twitters per month really tell the story of my year: “Getting to know Twitter during the first half of the year, and then August arrives and I’m totally fucking buried with work, which is followed by a couple of months of not wanting to see a computer ever again. December shows up and I’ve got time off, so WHAM… Twitters galore.”

Sadly, the most interesting information isn’t included in these charts’n’graphs and that’s influence. How many people am I following and how many do they follow? How many folks have been following me? Who do I know that they know? It’s the intersections of my Twitter network that I really care about because that is how I can figure out how efficiently collecting and distributing the really juicy information.

Happy New Year.

A Brief Glimpse

Just back from Scotland for recruiting. Same universities as last time, St. Andrews and Edinburgh. Last year, this is the trip that inspired the A Glimpse and a Hook article, so it’s appropriate that this year’s trip forces a revision.

I bagged on the objective section of the resume in the Glimpse piece, using the argument that I found objectives pointless, but after a solid week of scrubbing, thinking, and talking about resumes, I’m prepared to get proactive. Sure, many objectives are crap. The question is, why are they crap?

A crappy objective section in a resume suffers from the same issues as the rest of the resume: standardization. Your first resume started with a question: “How do I write it?” A kind person whipped out a resume, showed it you, and it resonated with you so you copied the structure. Problem was, you didn’t stop there. You also copied the style of the writing. You borrowed the boring, vanilla language where you described your hopes and dreams in the language of business. “I am a motivated team player looking for a high growth opportunity at a company which does not blow.”

Yuck. The only interesting word in that objective is blow.

I’m a fan of grabbing the bright ideas of other people, but I’m a bigger fan of you tweaking their ideas and making them your own. Your resume, like your objective, should give me a sense of you and where you’re going. I want to see a little ego and I want to see your character because I’m not hiring a flat piece of paper, I’m hiring a person. But when I start, all I have is the paper.

Professionally Pointed

I update my resume every six months whether I’m looking for a new gig or not.

A resume refresh gives me perspective. I don’t get a report card much anymore, just a yearly focal review which pretty much tells me what I already know: grew a little here, fucked up there… a bit more money.

A resume revision doesn’t remind me of how I’m doing, it forces me to think about where I’m going. Your objective, like your resume, is a snapshot of your professional life. In a few brief sentences, you need to clearly describe your professional goals in your own voice. You need to explain where you are professionally pointed.

Here’s my current objective:

I need to work with bright people who don’t take no for an answer and are crazy about well-designed software. If these people aren’t there when I show up, I work hard to find them.

Is this everything I’ve ever wanted to achieve? No. Will the reader understand all of my skills, all of my capabilities? No. Will they get the idea that I value design, people, and might be a little crazy? Yup.

When you’re thinking of your objective, I want to think of yourself sitting at bar. You’re two drinks in and you’re pitching a friend about what you want to do with your life. While this casual, egotistical, mildly trashed tone may best suit high tech gigs, seriously, what do you have to lose being yourself?

Resume Stress

You’re stressing as you work on your resume because usually when you’re updating your resume, you’re in need of a job. In this stress, you fall back on convention — on standardization — because getting the resume done feels less important than the job hunting and being original takes a lot of work.

Problem. There are a bazillion people out there who are looking for the same gigs you want. The barrier to entry is not that someone can hunt down a job opening; the barrier to entry is getting noticed amongst a sea of mediocre resumes.

Here is an audacious goal for your resume: to get you to a point in your career where you no longer need a resume. It’s the point that in your chosen industry people know who you are and what you are capable of. And they want you doing it at their companies.

It’s a tricky lifetime goal, one that I’m still working on, but that’s the goal I want you to think about when you’re stressing about your professional objective. It’s not your next job you need to stress about; it’s your career.

The Nerd Handbook

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should.

At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. You were showered with the fire hose of attention because you were the bright and shiny new development in your nerd’s life. There is also a chance that you’re lucky and you are currently your nerd’s project. Congrats. Don’t get too comfortable because he’ll move on, and, when that happens, you’ll be wondering what happened to all the attention. This handbook might help.

Regarding gender: for this piece, my prototypical nerd is a he as a convenience. There are plenty of she nerds out there for which these observations equally apply.

Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. It’s clichéd, but a nerd is defined by his computer, and you need to understand why.

First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.

The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day. When the illusion is broken, you are going to discover that…

Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.

These control issues mean your nerd is sensitive to drastic changes in his environment. Think travel. Think job changes. These types of system-redefining events force your nerd to recognize that the world is not always or entirely a knowable place, and until he reconstructs this illusion, he’s going to be frustrated and he’s going to act erratically. I develop an incredibly short fuse during system-redefining events and I’m much more likely to lose it over something trivial and stupid. This is one of the reasons that…

Your nerd has built himself a cave. I’ve written about The Cave elsewhere, but here are the basics. The Cave is designed to allow your nerd to do his favorite thing, which is working on the project. If you want to understand your nerd, stare long and hard at his Cave. How does he have it arranged? When does he tend to go there? How long does he stay?

Each object in the Cave has a particular place and purpose. Even the clutter is well designed. Don’t believe me? Grab that seemingly discarded Mac Mini which has been sitting on the floor for two months and hide it. You’ll have 10 minutes before he’ll come stomping out of the Cave — “Where’s the Mac?”

The Cave is also frustrating you because your impression is that it’s your nerd’s way of checking out, and you are, unfortunately, completely correct. A correctly designed Cave removes your nerd from the physical world and plants him firmly in a virtual one complete with all the toys he needs. Because…

Your nerd loves toys and puzzles. The joy your nerd finds in his project is one of problem solving and discovery. As each part of the project is completed, your nerd receives an adrenaline rush that we’re going to call The High. Every profession has this — the moment when you’ve moved significantly closer to done. In many jobs, it’s easy to discern when progress is being made: “Look, now we have a door”. But in nerds’ bit-based work, progress is measured mentally and invisibly in code, algorithms, efficiency, and small mental victories that don’t exist in a world of atoms.

There are other ways your nerd can create The High and he does it all the time. It’s another juicy cliché to say that nerds love video games, but that’s not what they love. A video game is just one more system where your nerd’s job is to figure out the rules that define it, which will enable him to beat it. Yeah, we love to stare at games with a bazillion polygons, but we get the same high out of playing Bejeweled, getting our Night Elf to Level 70, or endlessly tinkering with a Rubik’s Cube. This fits nicely with the fact that…

Nerds are fucking funny. Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast because of his strange affinity with the computer. This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor. Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor is another game.

Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.

This quick wit is only augmented by the fact that…

Your nerd has an amazing appetite for information. Many years ago, I dubbed this behavior NADD, and you should read the article to learn more and to understand what mental muscles your nerd has developed.

How does a nerd watch TV? Probably one of two ways. First, there’s watching TV with you where the two of you sit and watch one show. Then there’s how he watches by himself when he watches three shows at once. It looks insane. You walk into the room and you’re watching your nerd jump between channels every five minutes.

“How can you keep track of anything?”

He keeps track of everything. See, he’s already seen all three of these movies… multiple times. He knows the compelling parts of the arcs and is mentally editing his own versions while watching all three. The basic mental move here is the context switch, and your nerd is the king of the context switch.

The ability to instantly context switch also comes from a life on the computer. Your nerd’s mental information model for the world is one contained within well-bounded tidy windows where the most important tool is one that allows your nerd to move swiftly from one window to the next. It’s irrelevant that there may be no relationship between these windows. Your nerd is used to making huge contextual leaps where he’s talking to a friend in one window, worrying about his 401k in another, and reading about World War II in yet another.

You might suspect that given a world where context is constantly shifting, your nerd can’t focus, and you’d be partially correct. All that multi-tasking isn’t efficient. Your nerd knows very little about a lot. For many topics, his knowledge is an inch deep and four miles wide. He’s comfortable with this fact because he knows that deep knowledge about any topic is a clever keystroke away. See…

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior — it’s simply rude — but seriously, I’m trying to help here. Your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

Information that your nerd is exposed to when the irrelevance flag is waving is forgotten almost immediately. I mean it. Next time you hear “Cool”, I want you to ask, “What’d I just say?” That awkward grin on your nerd’s face is the first step in getting him to acknowledge that he’s the problem in this particular conversation. This behavior is one of the reasons that…

Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When your nerd is staring at a stranger, all he’s thinking is, “I have no system for understanding this messy person in front of me”. This is where the shy comes from. This is why nerds hate presenting to crowds.

The skills to interact with other people are there. They just lack a well-defined system.

Advanced Nerd Tweakage

If you’re still reading, then I’m thinking that your nerd is worth keeping. Even though he’s apt to vanish for hours, has a strange sense of humor, doesn’t like you touching his stuff, and often doesn’t listen when you’re talking directly at him, he’s a keeper. Go figure.

My advice:

Map the things he’s bad at to the things he loves. You love to travel, but your nerd would prefer to hide in his cave for hours on end chasing The High. You need to convince him of two things. First, you need to convince him that you’re going to do your best to recreate his cave in his new surrounding. You’re going to create a quiet, dark place here he can orient himself and figure out which way the water flushes down the toilet. Traveling internationally? Carve out three days somewhere quiet at the beginning of the trip. Traveling across the US? How about letting him chill on the bed for a half-day before you drag him out to see the Golden Gate Bridge?

Second, and more importantly, you need to remind him about his insatiable appetite for information. You need to appeal to his deep love of discovering new content and help him understand that there may be no greater content fire hose than waking up in a hotel overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice where you don’t speak a word of Italian.

Make it a project. You might’ve noticed your nerd’s strange relation to food. Does he eat fast? Like really fast? You should know what’s going on here. Food is thrown into the irrelevant bucket because it’s getting in the way of the content. Exercise, too. Thing is, you want your nerd to eat healthily so that he’s here in another thirty years, so how do you change this behavior? You make diet and exercise the project.

For me, exercise became the project ten years ago after a horrible break-up. When the project was no longer the Ex, I dove into exercise every single day of the week. There were charts tracking my workouts, there were graphs tracking my weight, and there was the exercise. Every single day for two years until the day I passed out in a McDonald’s post-workout after not eating for a day. Ok, so time for a new project. Yeah, nerds also have moderation issues. That’s another essay.

Significant nerd behavioral change is only going to happen if your nerd engages in the project heart and soul, otherwise it’s just another thought for the irrelevant bucket.

People are the most interesting content out there. If you’ve got a seriously shy nerd on your hands, try this: ask him how many folks are in his buddy list? How many friends does he have in Facebook? How many folks are following him on Twitter? LiveJournal? My guess is that, collectively, your nerd interacts with ten times more people than you think he does. He can do this because the interaction is via a system he understands — the computer.

Your nerd knows that people are interesting. Just because he can’t look your best friend straight in the eye doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to know what makes her tick, but you need to be the social buffer — the translation layer. You need to find one common thread of interest between your nerd and your friend and then he’ll engage because he will have found relevance.

The Next High

As you discovered when you were the project, your nerd’s focus can be deliciously overwhelming, but it will stop. Once a nerd believe he fully knows how a system works, the challenge to understand ceases to exist and he moves on in search of The Next High.

While I don’t know who you are or why in the world you chose a nerd for your companion, I do know that you are not a knowable system. I know that you are messy, just like your nerd. Being your own quirky self will be more than enough to present new and interesting challenges to your nerd.

Besides, it’s just as much a nerd’s job to figure you out and maybe someone somewhere is writing an article about your particular quirks. Good news, he’s probably reading it right now.

The Gel Dilemma

Two years ago, I figured out my favorite pen was no longer being produced in its current form. A quick scan of my local office supply stores revealed nothing. This fact, along with the total lack of auctions on eBay featuring my now discontinued pen showed me that a) I was screwed, and b) I’d become fond of an unremarkable pen.

I avoided a total pen breakdown for a few months simply by looking for this pen in my home and work environments, as I was sure I’d find remnants of the six boxes of pens that had mysteriously liberated themselves from my office over the past four years. In a week, I’d built a small stockpile of reclaimed, partially used pens, but it is a fundamental law of office supplies that a pen wants to be free. Despite my best efforts, my stockpile was slowly depleted.

The crisis arrived in the last month when a rush purchase at Office Depot resulted in a jar full of pens that demonstrated some of the worst writing utensil characteristics: cheap feel and erratic ink flow. Each time I picked this pen up I felt, “Everything I’m about to write is going to look like crap.”

It’s time for an educated change.

The Joy Vectors

Each time I pick up and use a pen, I want to feel a bit of joy. These joy vectors are:

• The way the pen sits in my hand. I should feel I have a firm grip.
• The way the pen applies ink to the paper. I like a thick, consistently black line on the paper. This is both a function of the ink and the construction of the tip.
• The fact that I know the pen is readily available. I want to be able to find the pen in a nearby office supply store. I don’t want to end up high, dry, and penless any time in the near future. Yes, I think about this each time I pick up a pen.

I also have existing baggage regarding pens.

First, my assumption is that the more moving parts in a pen, the less precision I have when the pen tip touches the paper. I have not deconstructed a retractable pen, but my gut tells me I lose energy among the pen casing, the retracting mechanism, and the tip. This is one reason that I am biased against pens that click. The other reason is… they click. Over the past few weeks of my pen evaluations, I’ve noticed that when most people pick up a retractable pen, they click it, roughly five times. Not joking.

Second, and related to the moving parts issue, I’m not a fan of the cushioned grip pens. The cushioned grip reminds me of third grade when Ms. Ockerman handed out these humongous, triangular, watermelon-scented grips for our pencils. They made me feel clumsy then and they make my pens feel squishy now. People. I have finger strength. Really.

Lastly, and most important, I only use gel-based pens. I don’t know when I made the transition, but I can tell you when I’m not using one because I immediately throw it away — I despise how non-gel-based ink plays on the paper. But I don’t know why. Turns out it’s the gel. Go figure. According to Wikipedia, “What distinguishes a gel pen from a ballpoint pen is the gel ink which consists of pigment suspended in a water-based gel.” They go on to describe, “… how gel inks resist common laboratory analysis.” I’ll translate both facts: if you’re using gel-based pens, you’re going to get deep, rich lines which can not be traced by covert agencies. Bonus!

Interface Points

Using the joy vectors as a structure, I returned to Office Depot and purchased six pens all in roughly the same price range. With each of these pens, I conducted three tests:

• The Glamour Test. How does it look? How does the pen feel in my hand, and, more importantly, can I spin it around my thumb?
• The Line Test. How does the ink flow? The basic straight line.
• The Writing Test. This test brings it all together. How does my writing look? Is the pen helping or hurting?

The Glamour Test

You can scroll to the bottom if you’d like to see the names of the six pens I ended up selecting, but you’ll have more fun waiting. The results of the Glamor Test were:

#	Type	Size	Tip	Casing and Grip	Weight	Spin
1	Retractable	.7	Plastic	Comfortable — not too big — boring cushioned grip	Very light	Hard to spin
2	Retractable	.7	Metal	Cheap plastic casing — large and clumsy	Heavy	Very spinnable
3	Capped	.8	Metal	Cheap casing and grip	Weight is right	Spins well
4	Retractable	.37	Metal	Solid feel — shortest of the six which leads to odd balance	Weight is right	Shockingly, very spinnable
5	Capped	.5	Metal	Perfect feel even with the leathery grip	Weight is perfect	Serious spinnage
6	Capped	.5	Plastic	Wide feel, slick casing. Meh.	No issues here	I can spin this pen

The Line Test

For our next test, I drew a straight line using a ruler. This brings up the sensitive issue of what paper to use. I’m going to avoid this entire debate and just use a Moleskine simply because if you’re going to have an argument about pens with anyone, chances are there’s a Moleskine nearby.

Photos of this size really don’t tell you much, so, for the next two tests, I recommend looking at the larger size. My methodology in this shot was simple: plant the pen on one end of the paper, grab the ruler, and then draw a straight line across the paper. You’ll notice an unexpected piece of data in that during the time I fumbled with ruler placement, you can see how the paper soaked in the ink. You’d think this was a function of the nib, or tip, size, but you can clearly see that #2 with a .7mm nib soaked in much quicker than the larger #3. Wonder what is going on there.

The line test shot doesn’t tell much unless you’re doing the lines yourself, but:

• The small nib size of .4mm (called “micro”) was intensely annoying. Even though this pen had the firmest feel of the retractables, gel ink being used for fine lines feels like heresy. This pen is eliminated.
• As much as possible, I tried to use the same amount of pressure drawing each line, but, as you can see, pens with the same nib size can draw with varying line thickness.

The Writing Test

All of this pen fretting leads to the final test: how does it write? How does it perform when the last thing you want to do is think about the pen rather than what you’re writing? Here’s how they look:

As with the line test, examining a much larger shot may prove more interesting. My observations and eliminations:

• Following the elimination of #4 for thin lines, I’m eliminating #3 for fat lines, which are also a function of the huge casing.
• While the quality of lines among #1, #2, #5, and #6 is comparable, I’m eliminating #2 and #6 because of the girth of the pen. The casing is huge and feels awkward in my hand, which results in strange penmanship.
• Comparing the last two pens, #1 and # 5, it’s clear that #5 is the winner, but here’s the catch, #5 is my loser pen – my previous favorite that’s not available in its current form. This makes #1 the winner by default.

The Wrap Up

The pens in this competition were:

#	Name	Type	Size	Result
1	Pilot G-2	Retractable	.7	Winner!
2	PenTel Energel	Retractable	.7	Eliminated — Unwieldy size and cheap casing
3	Pentel Hybrid Gel Roller	Capped	.8	Eliminated — my current replacement and it’s crap
4	Uni-ball Signo	Retractable	.37	Eliminated — lines are too thin
5	Pentel Hybrid Gel Grip	Capped	.5	Eliminated — no longer readily available. I love this pen
6	Pilot V-Ball Grip	Capped	.5	Eliminated — Casing is too big

Unfortunately, I’m not sold on the winner. After my contest was over, I began to use the G-2 as my go-to pen. While the flow is fine and the feel is good, I’m still not over my precision-loss-to-the-retractable-mechanism paranoia. Fortunately, actively worrying about pens for a few weeks will introduce you to an entire pen sub-culture. After asking friends about their favorite pens, I was sent off to a local Japanese paper store where there was an entire wall of gel pens sporting strange names and being sold in individual plastic wrappers. Visions of a secondary competition starting bouncing around my head.

For now, I’m editing this article in front of the fireplace using a capped G-3. It’s a little wider than I’m used to, but I swear the lack of moving parts is keeping my already messy penmanship in check. Tomorrow, I’m going to give a different Uni-ball Signo a whirl. This badass capped pen is almost an exact replica of my beloved PenTel, including the total absence of a plastic grip.

All of these exotic new pens are a violation of my readily available joy vector, but, you know, I’m prepared to be fond of a remarkable pen.

The Twitter Equilibrium

I’m back from a few days in Vegas. Before I left, I decided it was time to talk a bit more about Vegas, and I decided I’d Twitter tips for what I consider to be a successful Vegas trip. Thing is, from the moment I set foot in the airport, I realized I had a million tips to send, but I also knew that I had to sensibly and carefully dole them out. I needed to maintain a Twitter equilibrium.

Yeah, that’s a mouthful. I’ll explain this in a moment.

Before the definition, you need understanding how I’m using Twitter. For me, Twitter is a desktop application like Twitterific. It’s not a bookmark and it’s not a webpage; it’s an integral part of my real-time desktop alongside Mail, iCal, iChat, Stickies, and Safari. I use the Twitter website, but I use it as an administration tool to manage my account. I rarely use it to actually read Twitters.

Second, you need to understand my mental model of Twitter. In my head, it’s a chat room. When I sit down at my computer, I expect there to be a reasonable amount of new content from bright people. In my head, I have no idea that these people can’t actually hear each other’s Twitters. You’d think that’d present a conversation consistency problem, but it doesn’t because I don’t let the chatter get out of control —- I maintain a Twitter equilibrium.

This equilibrium is the state when Twitter is providing you with precisely the right frequency and quality of content that you expect. It’s totally arbitrary and completely personal while also being essential to preventing Twitter from becoming another useless, annoying social networking tool that you maintain out of a weak sense of loyalty to people you don’t actually know.

For me, I’ve achieved a Twitter equilibrium following roughly 100 people. For whatever reason, at around 100 folks, I’m finding a pleasant flow of new, interesting content whenever I glance over at Twitterrific. I’ve been refining this number since I started using Twitter and, during that time, I’ve found a couple of essential information management rules:

Rule #1: Remove noisy people. Even if you love them. Probably the easiest way to get turned off Twitter is following someone who is filling Twitter with useless noise. This is especially common with newcomers who are still figuring out that Twitter is the king of casual information, so I cut new people some slack. If the problem persists, they’re out. Good friends who I talk with daily get noisy and get removed, too, but, yeah, I eventually end up following them again.

Rule #2: Follow Rands’ First Law of Information Management. Which reads: “For each new piece of information you track, there is an equally old and useless piece of information you must throw away.” If you continue to follow new people, eventually they’re going to overwhelm you with their casual information flood, so you must get in the habit of removing a person for each new person that you follow. Incidentally, the first law tastes great with RSS feeds as well.

Those of us afflicted with NADD have a problem with this law, since folks with NADD believe that, at any point, something interesting might happen anywhere. The first law is a compromise — yes, you might throw something away that you could use — but think of it like this: by throwing away crap, you have more time to find new gems.

Rule #3: Find ways to stumble about. While Twitter is a fine way to follow folks you know, there are more people that you don’t know and there’s a good chance they might have something to say. The folks at Twitter recently introduced the Twitter Blocks feature to allow you to do just this, but there’s an easier way to explore your Twitter-hood. Once or twice a week, I glance at the replies page to see messages from folks who are following me, but I might not be following. The choice to engage in a conversation, to me, seems like the single best way to see if we have mutual interests.

100 people doesn’t seem like a lot. I’d like to follow more, but to do that, Twitter needs to step up. Allow me to easily find and prune people who haven’t updated in forever. Let me group or tag people I follow, so I can filter conversations to co-workers, new people, and folks on Twitter probation. I know, I said keep it Spartan, but Twitter’s success will be defined by it’s growth and that means they need to figure how I can spend less time following more people.

Apple Los Gatos x 2

Coffee approach pattern Delta was in play today. This unlisted approach pattern is a stop in Los Gatos to hit one of two decent coffee shops, The Great Bear or the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting company. Neither shop can compete with Peet, but Los Gatos has other attractions. Namely, the soon-to-be-completed Apple Store:

Store errata:

• That big white Apple is a sticker and it’s either in high demand or easy to remove as the store has been through several since the logo appeared in early May.
• Note the rectangular hole in the center of the build which is the future home of the glowing Apple logo.
• Also note the construction has now moved over the sidewalk.
• Local press has been covering the build out of the store which noted that 30’ high glass and stainless steel façade might not fit in the designated historic district. They also suggest a September opening.

[9/1/07 Update]: That was quick…

Coffee and Design

Mornings are a delicate proposition, but there are two events which, if they occur, guarantee a positive experience.  The first event is coffee acquisition. Currently, there are three different coffee approaches, each has its own consequences. They are:

1. Crappy mountain swill.  This is coffee from the local store. They try, but it’s a serious B. Even the cup is limp.
2. Corporate swill. Coffee from work. Again, they try, but they lose quality to volume.
3. Peet’s Coffee. This is the shit. You can’t beat Peet’s. There’s nothing like driving to work with a thin sheen of caffeine induced sweat all over your body.

In terms of setting the mood for the morning, acquisition policy A and B are sufficient, but lack complexity and inspiration. Yes, I get my coffee high, but I’m cheating because it’s a path of least resistance approach: mountain and corporate swill are on the way or at work whereas Peet’s involves a ten minute detour. Committing to this detour leads to a stellar cup of coffee. 

(Note: There is another coffee acquisition tact and that is “Brew your own”. It’s always an A+, but is a time consuming process reserved for weekend mornings.)

The other morning defining event is email. When I first sit down at the computer and load the morning email, I’m, again, looking for complexity and inspiration. Who on the planet took time to send me a great email? Something I can dig my teeth into and leverage my complex coffee high for an equally inspirational response? This morning the mail read, “What are the pros and cons of having design report into engineering vs. product management?”

Wow. Now that’s a question. That’s an “I should write an article about that” question. The extremely short answer is “Geography matters”. Having design and engineering in the same part of the organizational chart means they teach each other all sorts of stuff, make better decisions, and move faster. There are many cons, but I believe the pros vastly outweigh these cons primarily because of the organizational velocity they create.

On Design

I’m going to be talking a lot more about design of the coming months. This starts next month at the Webmaster Jam in Dallas where I’ll be speak on Managing Web Design which is a presentation in dire need of a new title, but you get the idea. Early next year, I’m headed to New Zealand to speak at the soon-to-be-launched Webstock conference. Ideas for this event are still swirling in my head, but design will be on the menu.

Next up is the South by Southwest Interactive festival for 2008.  I’ve moderated panels at the event the past two years and it remains my favorite conference simply because it attracts of set of people you will see no where else. As I mentioned in my post-game report for SXSW2007, there was much discussion that the panels were adrift this year. There are lots of theories as to why this was the case, but that’s water under the bridge and simply a problem to solve.  

I’ve got a one-two punch solution to SXSW panels this year. The first punch is a two-person presentation which I’m proposing to do alongside John Gruber. Titled Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts, we’ll be tackling the idea that you’re never going to design something great without pissing someone off, yelling at people you respect, and losing sleep thinking that you’re doing the wrong thing. Piqued your interest? Great, mosey down to the much improved panel picker and say so.

The second punch is more traditional panel I’ve cooked up with co-conspirator, Gina Bianchini.  The panel is entitled Designing for Freedom and will explore the idea of how products can be designed so that people can create and make something their own. The quality of a panel is defined by the panelists and I’d love to tell you who we’ve picked for this, but first you need to head back to the panel picker and weigh in.

Speaking and Design

The intent with both of the SXSW2008 panels as well as the other speaking engagements is the beginning of a intentional theme I’m setting for the next year. I want to talk with as many bright people as possible about the intersection of design and engineering. Like management, engineers are not necessarily trained in this discipline, yet they are often asked to make important decisions that affect design. In my ongoing quest to make sure engineers wear as many hats as possible, the next year is going to be chock full of design ramblings, meaty morning emails, and stellar cups of coffee.

Yard Sale

In the past two weeks, I’ve seen a second flood of friend requests on Twitter. Included in this second wave were several Twitter haters who apparently believe that they’ve made their point and now it’s ok to join Twitter.

Welcome.

I wasn’t the first person to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. In fact, my original plan back in February was to give it a two-week trial to see what was what, and it’s now July and I think I’ve finally figured out the what.

Casual Information

I’ve identified two specific and unique uses for Twitter, and this why an application like Twitterific has now become a part of a very short list of must-have applications that I fire up whenever I sit down at a computer.

First, a definition. Twitter and the many Twitter clones are the kings of casual information. This is information that is non-essential, meaning that if this information was never discovered by anyone — no big deal. More on this in a moment.

The reason Twitter owns casual information is based entirely on the spartan feature set they’ve chosen to provide to their users. You can add friends, but the total lack of presence information about the people in your network means you’ve no clue whether or not they’re actually going to read a thing that you type, so you filter yourself. You can’t depend on the information getting to anyone, so you don’t send essential information.

Twitter detractors see this as the biggest nuisance with the service. They claim the casual information relayed via Twitter is non-essential, egotistical, and dull. Oddly, they claim this on their very own weblogs which I find… interesting. What I find more interesting is that you never know when casual information might become essential.

Twitter is an informational yard sale. You simply never know when that off-the-cuff comment you toss will alter a person’s day. I’ll explain via my two favorite use cases:

Use case number one for Twitter is when lots of Twitterees are congregating in the same place. My most recent example of this was at WWDC where my average twits per hour went through the roof. Anyone at the conference with a Twitter account was doing the same thing and it was a brilliant way to sniff around the social undercurrents of the conference. It was also handy for ad-hoc event coordination. The best example of this was a message I sent the last day of conference which read, “Drinks @ the W — 4pm. I’m buying”.

Three hours, thirteen attendees, and several hundred dollars later, I knew two things. First, who doesn’t like free booze. Second, the definition of casual information varies wildly by who reads it. I would’ve happily drunk my margarita on the rocks solo at the W, which is why I threw my invite into Twitter, but it turns out twelve folks took my casual request and made it essential.

My second Twitter use case involves keeping track of distant friends. A few years ago, I interviewed Brent Simmons, who is the creator of, among other things, NetNewsWire. I like Brent. (Hi Brent!) My gut instinct tells me that if Brent and I worked at the same company, we’d do lunch… a lot. Still, Brent is in Washington and I’m in Los Gatos and that means the extent of our relationship is that each WWDC we end up at some bar for 15 frenetic minutes doing a year of catch up.

When Brent showed up on Twitter, I immediately started following him because I care what Brent thinks. Yeah, he’s had a weblog forever, but the casual information relayed via Twitter is far more real. The act of creating casual information is a real-time slice of your life of the moment. I read messages in Twitter and think that people are giving themselves a headline or a title of a chapter of their lives. Here are the last three on my screen right now:

• Absorbing Jared’s Hometown
• A Bit Early for the Cure
• The Wife’s Margarita Recipe

Twitter gives me a glimpse into the lives of an interesting collection of people across the planet. It’s casual information, but it’s also a bit of poetry and it’s all better than radio silence. I’d prefer to be drinking with y’all, but I’ll take what I can get.

Social without the Network

In the vast sea of social networking tools, Twitter stands apart because of what it chooses not to do. I like Facebook. It’s friendly, it’s authentic, and it gives me interesting slices of data about the lives of the people in my network. I like Ning, too. I like their focus on easy network building, I like how they actively care, and I think they could’ve gotten more than $44 million.

Still, both Ning and Facebook throw a tremendous amount of crap between myself and my network. Ok, so it’s not crap. It’s a pile of choices, and whether it’s an ad or a video or whatever content the network wants to throw at me, a choice is a decision and I have very little time for more decisions in my day. All I want is to know what these bright people in my network are up to. That’s it.

Twitter is all the social with very little network.

Keynote Kung-fu

It’s WWDC season and that means Keynote. Lots of it. Today is Sunday and I’ve clocked 6 hours of Keynote and I’m ok with that. Keynote doesn’t get in my way and Keynote doesn’t piss me off, so I’m taking a break from endless slides to give Keynote some credit and to give you some Keynote tips.

If you’re a power Keynote user, you can skip this piece. This is basic Keynote blocking and tackling.

Prepare Your Workspace

If you settling into a long Keynote session, I will now save you 10 minutes. Turn on the following palettes: Inspector, colors, and fonts. 90% of the tweaking you’re going to need to do is in these palettes and rather than switching them on and off, I want you to find a comfortable place on your desktop. Me, I put the inspector and colors next to each other with fonts below. It’s tidy.

After you’ve got your palettes set-up, let’s head over to preferences and save you some time there. I run with standard preferences except for the rulers. Go ahead and click there now.

There are three things I change here before I begin. First, I change the alignment guides to a different color. The default yellow is distraction and often conflicts with objects on the page. I use a sky blue.

Second, I turn on both “Show guides at object center” and “Show guides at object edges”. Enabled these last two preferences create all sorts of alignment guides when you move an object around the page. These guides are one of my favorite features because I have grid issues. It’s hard for me to leave a page without things aligning just-so and the plethora of alignment guides makes my alignment job easy.

Explore the Inspector

The use of color and font palettes is obvious, but you probably don’t know everything which is going down in the inspector. Take a few minutes to explore each of the panels and understand their function. This is where the cool goes down. Some random cool:

• Hate your slide size? You can change it on the document panel.
• Love transitions? Remember that there are two major animation panels: one for the slide transitions and another for per-object build transitions.
• The build panel is the heart of transitions in Keynote. This is where you set per-object transitions, but most folks don’t know that you can get really crazy by opening up the ‘More options’ drawer. The drawer allows you to see all the transition on the current page, lets you reorder them, and let’s you chain transition events together. More on this in a second.
• I know I told you to put the color palette up and you’re going to want to click on it, but you often need to specify the object you want to change in the inspector before you can change the color. Remember, if the color isn’t changing, you need to select in the inspector first. You’ll get used to it.

My last piece of advice regarding the inspector is to play because that is how you’ll get creative. If you’re wondering if you can change the opacity of that photo, go ahead and try it out. You probably can.

Organize Your Iteration

My slides always start as an outline and the fact that I can easily indent and group slides via the navigator means I can easily iterate through thoughts as they cross my mind. Like any good outliner, simply hitting tab indents a slide or a slide group — shift-tab does the opposite.

As my slide set evolves I’m constantly moving slides around as well as adding and deleting content. Often I have a slide which has a thought I want to keep around, but I don’t want to include as part of the presentation. Right clicking on the slides gives you the option to skip a slide. This removes the slides from the presentation, but not from the slide set. Handy.

If you’re working on a text heavy presentation, you can always switch to outline view in the navigator. This displays text only in the navigator and is useful in early versions of slides where all your scrubbing is ideas and not visuals.

Lastly, as random thoughts which don’t have a home show up, I’m torn between sticking them into stickies or dropping them in the presenter notes. The sticky approach has the advantage of being in your face whereas presenter notes scale. Presenter notes also show up in the presenter view which might be the single best reason to use them.

Pull It All Together with The Fade

A sure sign of a Keynote rookie is transition insanity. This is when every single slide and object has it’s own transition and it’s a visual mess. Defining a design aesthetic for Keynote is beyond the scope of this brief mental break of a piece, but I will say, “The best transitions are the ones you don’t see”.

One of my favorite combined transitions is the fade. This is when you choose to emphasize or de-emphasize an element on the page by changing the opacity. This is easy now that you’ve discovered the ‘More options’ drawer in the Build palette. Let’s try it:

• First, duplicate the object you want to de-emphasize. Set the opacity on the duplicate to whatever you want it to eventually be.
• Second, select the original object and set the Build Out transition to Dissolve. Now, move the duplicate object directly on top of the original.
• Run the presentation and see what you’ve got. A nice fade on your original object, but let’s also emphasize another object.
• Add another object to page and put a Build In transition of Dissolve.
• Now go into the Builds drawer and note you have two transitions there. Select the second transition and select the Start Build drop down and choose the “Automatically with build 1” option.
• Finally, select the first transition and select “On Click” from the Start Build drop down.

Run the presentation and see what happens. You’ve combined two transitions into one into a pleasing fade. AAAaaaaah. Simple, clean, and easy.

Ok, back to work.

How To Not Throw Up

As soon as you decide to become a professional nerd, either via a university degree or simply because you sit up all night writing Python to scratch your particular technical itch, you think you absolve yourself of having to stand up in front of a group of people make a presentation.

And you might be right.

Then there’s a chance you’re going to build or think something brilliant, and no mailing list, weblog, or wiki is going to be able to contain this brilliance. Those who want to hear about your brilliance are going to insist that you stand in front of them and explain this bright thing that you did or thought.

Conflict. Yes, you want to explain your brightness, but, um, the last time you stood in front of people and told a story was Ms. Randall’s 11th grade English class, and you stumbled through an incoherent ramble about Henry David Thoreau and some pond.

Unlike that pond, you are immensely qualified to talk about your topic, but you’re totally unqualified to present in front of a group of people. It’s not just that you haven’t had the practice, but that lack of practice has given you the erroneous impression that there’s a good chance you might throw up if you have to stand up and tell a story in front of 500 people.

Not Throwing Up is a Two-Phase Process

This article is about presentations, not content. Both are equally important, but I’m not here to help you write your content, I’m here to transform that content into a presentation that doesn’t suck.

Let’s say you’ve written your 30 slides. A rookie presentation move is to: a) have too many slides, and b) stuff your slides with clutter, like wordy bullet points. Filling each slide with as much content as possible. This is your feeble attempt to get out of actually presenting. Your thought is, “Fill the slides with information and read the slides”. This makes sense to you, since I know you’re nervous, but my question is, “Why are you nervous?”

“I’ve never presented in front of 500 people.”

“So, you’re not confident you can do it?”

“Right.”

“Ok, so let’s focus on the confidence rather than creating more horrible slides.”

Phase 1: Practice endlessly. Confidence is going to come not when you memorize your slides, but when you move the content from one side of your brain to the other. Right now, your slides are sitting in the linear left side of your brain, the practical side. This is a fine place for the slides to be while you’re creating them, but before you get up on stage, you need to move them to the right side of your brain, the creative side. You need to be able to feel your slides.

Your presentation is storytelling. It’s a performance. It’s you on stage telling me and 499 of my friends a story about why you’re brilliant. That’s not a comforting thought since I know you’re already nervous about standing in front of 500 people and bumbling through your slides. And now you’re saying it’s a performance? My presentation regarding huge performance wins in garbage collection is NOT a performance.

Of course it is. Why else would there be 500 people sitting here wanting to hear about it? I promise there’s some art, some performance, in your presentation, and the best way to find it is to practice endlessly. The best way to do that is to stand up, walk around your office, and give your presentation to no one. Over and over again.

It takes some getting used to — pacing around your office or hotel room listening to your own voice — but that’s exactly what your audience is going to hear. You need to figure out how to listen to yourself tell a story while also critically listening to the story. You’re the presenter and the audience. Yeah, it takes practice.

Start with those three slides there about that one specific topic: Talk through it and listen to how it sounds. Does it make sense? Does it flow? Are you reading the slide or are you telling a story? How does it transition into the next point? After you’ve heard yourself verbally walk through a topic a few times, you start to hear what you’re trying to say, and you make discoveries like, “Uh, I’m making no sense” and “This is supposed to be funny, but it’s lame”, or “This topic doesn’t have any relation to anything near it.”

We’re talking hours of practice here, but you’ll slowly start to notice that you’re not just memorizing the content, you’re also memorizing the flow. You’ll start to notice where you’re repeating yourself, you’ll find key points in the strangest places, and you’ll stop to reorder and rewrite slides… a lot. Good. Keep practicing.

When you can sit at your desk with your eyes closed and talk through any one of your slides, you’re going to stop worrying about what you need to say and focus more on how you’re going to say it. This intimate knowledge of your content is going to give you confidence.

But you still might throw up.

Phase Two Throw-up Avoidance

A few years back, I gave a recruiting presentation at two different universities on the same day. Same presentation, same general age group of students, morning versus evening.

The morning presentation was in front of a packed room. Just after 10am. I was three cups of coffee into the day and so was everyone else. Three slides in and I knew this was going to be an easy presentation. Heads were nodding, laughs were coming from the least expected slides, and folks were actually taking me up on my offer: “Stop me if you have a question”. Captivated. 40 minutes of slides. 20 minutes of intense, engaged questions and answers. Mission accomplished.

5 hours later. I’m in another conference room 50 miles away in another university and everyone’s coffee has worn off. The room is half full and I’m a little tired, but I’ve done this presentation 30 times in my head, so when I start on slide #1, it’s on. I know this presentation, so why is everyone falling asleep on slide #3? There’s no laughing and, by slide #10, someone gets up and walks out. Ouch.

Hopefully, this is normally when you considering throwing up. I say hopefully because there are a great many presenters who don’t have a clue when the presentation is going badly. This is certainly a rookie mistake, but I’ve sat through a fair share of presentations by seasoned managers where they just flopped and didn’t have a clue.

You need to stop and listen to what your audience needs. If your presentation isn’t going swimmingly, stop five minutes in and look around the room. Is the audience looking at you? Or are they staring at their laptops? Has there been nodding? I know it’s been 10 seconds now and you’re still looking at the audience saying nothing — it’s ok, they’re just sitting there wondering if you’re about to throw up. You’re building tension.

More importantly, you’re figuring out the most important part of your presentation: which audience showed up? Here’s the rub: you can write brilliant, compelling slides, you can practice your slides 40 times, but you can never predict who is going to show up, and your presentation must be tailored to those who show up.

Ok, now throw up.

Phase 2: Improvise. This is hard and this is where our senior managers, with hundreds of presentations under their belts, screw up. First, they’ve stopped fretting, which means their presentations lack any sort of energy. Consequently, they don’t listen to the audience, so when the audience asks for something, they don’t give it. This is why they sound like bad used car salesmen; they’re just reciting the sales pitch and they don’t care what you think.

How do you need to improve? What is your audience going to ask for? They want one thing: they want to participate. No, they don’t want to get on stage and present your slides; they want to be included in this presentation — in this performance. I’m not talking about waves of applause, I’m talking about taking looking at a sea of people and knowing these people are listening to your every word. It’s a constructive silence directed squarely at you, and when you learn how to read it, it’s a high.

So, what are you going to do? How are you going to adapt? Maybe this crowd wants you to wake them up? How about accentuating your points loudly? How about a bit more walking around the stage waving your hands furiously? Perhaps you’re too amped and they want you to slow and pause between your words. Give them time for your words to soak in.

When someone walked out of my university presentation, I immediately stopped. I began reminiscing about my college years and the complex protocol I’d worked out for when it was ok to walk out of a lecture. This 5-minute irrelevant segue did two things: first, it reminded my semi-lucid audience that I was one of them, and second, since my segue was timely (person walking out) and humorous (maybe), we reconnected. They woke up and I dove back into my slides with my new college buds who were now clear that I cared about what they thought.

Fret

No lying. The ability to improvise takes experience and you’re going to have to live through and recover from a couple of horrific presentations in order to build up your improv repertoire. For these early disasters, I have three pieces of advice:

• When you’re presenting, talk like you’re talking to one person who happens to have a thousand eyeballs. Don’t get lost in the sea of faces, pick a person and tell them the story. Not for the entire hour, just a few seconds. Then move on.
• Use silence as punctuation. My favorite trick in the book especially since I’m a fast talker. When you hear yourself gaining verbal momentum, stop. Count backwards from 5. Walk across the stage. Resume. These breaks are going to give both you and your audience a chance to mentally regroup.
• They want you to succeed. This piece of advice is in every presentation guide out there — because it’s true. Your audience is expecting you to rock their socks. They’re expecting an A+. That’s where you’re starting in their heads and walking on stage knowing this helps.

I don’t want you to throw up.

I want you to fret about this presentation, and if you’re not losing a little sleep, you don’t care. You’re not going to be motivated. You’re going to end up perpetuating the idea that nerds can’t tell a story. If you’ve been handed the responsibility of a presentation and aren’t the least bit concerned, give it to someone who is going to sweat this thing and then be prepared for that person to end up as your boss.

The Rules of Toys

Ok, stop reading right now and count the toys you can see from your desk. Don’t ask me for a definition, just count.

Ordered by proximity, I’ve got:

The amethyst ball the Mom gave me.




A hockey stick given to me by a prior team. Near this hockey stick is a hockey puck.



A cup-sized brass bell along with a small bell-ringing device.

What’s your count? Zero? Really? Loosen up your definition and try again. Thirty? Wow, do you ever get any work done?

For me, toys are yet another means of a mental punctuation. As I slowly page through my day, I engage these toys for a mental break. The amethyst ball is my tactile fidget “not sure what to do next” device; the hockey stick is my “break the cycle of sitting at the desk and score one for the New York Rangers” break; and the bell, well, you’ve got to hear the bell to understand that it’s the perfect musical mental reset.

I’ve had various toys in my office since I started in high tech, but it’s only in the last six months that I’ve discovered how we can use the rules of toys in both interface and application design.

The Rules of Toys

A well-designed toy:

• Makes a request. It asks you to “Play with me”. This is why you are compelled to touch it.
• Is fantastically straightforward. The design suggests, “When you pick me up, it’s going to be clear what’s going on.” This is why great toys never have manuals.
• Has hidden potential. A toy is going to hook you with some clever visual, but the real value is something you can not see, but must find.
• All of this leads to the fact that a well-designed toy is instantaneously fun and who doesn’t want to have fun?

Now there are very different kinds of fun that a toy imparts. The monkey fun we get out of throwing a frisbee feels different than the Einstein fun of figuring out the Rubik’s Cube, but regardless of where you park the fun in your brain, you’re still playing with a toy.

While it’d be entertaining to design all products and user interfaces with these rules in mind, we’d never actually get anything productive done. It’d be really hard to listen to your music if the interface was a Rubik’s Cube. Or maybe not… wait, someone write that down. The point is that you need to be selective where you apply the toy rules and the best way to explain this is to show you how it’s done.

Any Idea What This Is?

Pandora. Once you’ve selected a song or an artist, Pandora starts merrily playing your related music via their music player. Invariably, Pandora will play something you hate and you’ll want to get rid of it, so you’ll check out the interface where your mouse will hover over the cover art and you’ll see this:

This is a toy interface. It’s straightforward, it’s simple, it’s not exactly clear what’s going to happen when you start clicking on those thumbs, but you’re being invited to do something.

Yes, you have cultural touchstones as to what “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” means and this gives you some idea what clicking one or the other will accomplish, but, more importantly, these thumbs empower you to make a difference, make a judgment even if you might not understand exactly why. There’s a silent contract that by clicking on these little playful glyphs that you’re going to somehow improve your Pandora musical experience.

Let’s keep moving…

Any idea what this is?

“No, Rands, but I just want to reach out and touch it.” Me, too.

This is iPulse. It’s a system monitoring utility from Iconfactory, which is arguably the king of toy application development.

Now, a screenshot isn’t a fair means of analysis of iPulse because its interface isn’t static, and the application is an interactive experience. As you run your mouse over the interface, you see all sorts of statistics regarding your system. But at a glance, the design of iPulse is a toy. It’s encouraging you to explore. There are system monitoring tools out there that spam you with all sorts of statistics regarding your memory, hard drive space, and network activity, but the iPulse approach is the opposite. They start with a question, “What if understanding how your computer worked was an exploration?”

No, this design isn’t for everyone. Hardcore performance nerds are going to be quite happy running top in a terminal window, whereas iPulse uses a playful design to hide the nerdery behind a toy and give you a chance to learn. In the middle of the day, when iPulse is pulsing and blinking in the corner of your screen, you’re going to start to tinker with it and you’re going to discover, “Hey, Mail.app has totally lost its mind and is eating my CPU. Now what?”

The hidden consequence of playing is that you learn, and how would you prefer to learn, from a textbook or a toy?

The examples so far demonstrate the toy rules for portions of an application or for a simple utility, but the real question is: can you build an entire application using the toy rules? Sure you can.

Twitter is a Big (Important) Toy

Let’s see if Twitter obeys the rules:

Does it make a request?

Is it fantastically straightforward?

Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Does it not present obvious value (but it’s there)?

The blogosphere can’t shut up about whether there is value in Twitter or not. Like weblogs, the opinions range from “It’s a fad” to “IT’S GOING TO CHANGE MEDIA AS WE KNOW IT”, but neither is the lesson.

The first lesson is that the fact that folks can’t shut up about Twitter means there is obvious value, even if no one can articulate what that value is. The second lesson is simply that people like to play, and Twitter is a communication medium designed as a toy, which leads us to the last rule…

Is it fun? Yeah, it is fun. Forget about the organic social network that springs up around you, forget about Twitter’s current spotty performance, and realize it’s fun to summarize your mental state every hour or day. Think of it like this: if you had to give your state of mind a chapter title, what would it be?

Twitter is also a reminder that there’s another toy rule that I haven’t mentioned. In its hidden potential, a well designed toy allows each person to build their own unique experience.

Choosing When To Play

Designing with the toy rules is not a solution for all design problems. You might want to employ the toy rules when it’s important that your users not only focus on part of your interface, but it’s also important that they remember it. Giving your users a toy, an interface that is going to invite them to play, is also going to invite them to explore, and when they’re exploring, they’re learning.

Toy interfaces are also great at turning a terribly complex idea into a simple interface. Yeah, you might lose information fidelity by tucking your complexity inside a toy, but would you rather your users stop at confused, or would you prefer to give them a chance at discovery? Again, the value of any toy is not obvious, it must be discovered. No, it must be a joy to discover.

More Messy Thinking

Let’s start with the visual…

This new monitor configuration keeps popping up the engineering team and after walking into enough offices thinking, “Useful or flashy?”, I decided to give it a whirl.

The basic usage pattern is unchanged. The left screen is for the active workspace whereas the right screen is the palette screen — utility windows like calendar, Twitter, instant messaging, and stickies which require a glance now and then, but aren’t playing in the primary workspace.

After getting over the initial shock of the verticalness of the right monitor, I have the following thoughts:

• The windows you see on that monitor are unchanged in terms of shape from the original configuration. They tend to be tall, narrow windows which means they fit perfectly on the rotated monitor and they have new room to grow.
• While this screen shot doesn’t show it, the vertical monitor is a great space for scads of semi-translucent terminal windows. MmmmmmmMMm Terminal Windows.
• That’s the stand of the monitor jutting off the right hand side of the picture. I haven’t looked at how it’s attached to the monitor to see if it’s non-trivial to remove, but the resulting angle of the monitor leaning back against the bookshelf is, well, pleasant. It’s leaning back more than the primary workspace and it gives the monitor a relaxed attitude.
• It’s likely a result of the new shape, but I’m suddenly feel I’ve discovered the bottom of the right monitor.

You can see the evolution of my desktop as well as my fascination with baseball caps here and here, but it’s more important to understand why you need all these pixels by reading the original Messy Thinking article.

The Sanity Check

As we discovered in A Glimpse and a Hook, it’s almost a miracle when the phone rings and a recruiter wants to set up a phone screen. The fact is, someone, somewhere in the organization has successfully mapped you to an open position. This is a really big deal because, in my experience, the chance that you’ll get this job has improved logarithmically. It’s not 50/50, but it’s vastly better than when you were a random resume sitting on a desk.

There’s a sense of relief when that phone call arrives and as soon as you hang up the phone with the recruiter, you’re going to call your best friend, “Hey, I got a interview with The Company!”

No, you didn’t. You got a phone screen and a phone screen has little to do with an interview. While your situation isn’t as tenuous as the 30 seconds you have to make an impression with your resume, you’re still not in the building and nothing real is happening until you’re in the building.

Like Glimpse, I’m going to walk you through my precise mental process that I use as I walk through the phone screen, but first you’ve got homework:

Stalk Your Future Job

Before you even talk to me, you’re on a fact-finding mission. You’ve got a job description, and after the phone screen has been set up, you’ve got my name. You might also have an idea of the product or technology associated with this gig or you might not, but even without a product name, you’ve got plenty of information to start with.

Do your research. Google me. Find out anything you can about what I do and I what care about. This isn’t stalking, this is your career, and if I happen to be an engineering manager who writes a weblog, well, you can start to learn how I think. Maybe I don’t have a weblog, but I post to mailing lists. That’s data, too.

How is this going to help you during the phone screen? Well, I don’t know what you’re going to find, but anything you can gather is going to start to build context around this job that you know nothing about. This helps with phone screen nerves as well. See, I have your resume and you have nothing. Aren’t you going to feel better about talking with a total stranger when you figure out from staring at my Flickr pages that I absolutely love Weimaraners? Isn’t it going to be reassuring to know I swear in my Twitters? A bit of research into who you are talking to is going to level the information playing field.

Similarly, if you have a product name or technology, repeat the same process. What is the product? Is it selling well? What do other people think about it? I’m not talking about a weekend of research here. I’m talking an hour or so of background research so that you can do one thing when the phone screen shows up: you need to ask great questions.

That’s right. In your research, you want to find a couple of compelling questions, because at some point during the phone screen I’m going to ask you, “Do you have any questions for me?” and this is the most important question I’m going to ask.

Initial Tuning

Before I ask you the most important question, I need to figure out a couple of things early in our chat. What I need to learn is:

Can we communicate? I’m going to lead off with something simple and disarming. It’s either going to be the weather or something I picked up from your extracurricular activities. “Do you really surf? So do I! Where do you surf?” These pleasantries appear trivial, but they’re a big deal to me because I want to see if we can communicate. It’s nowhere near a deal killer if the pacing of our conversation is awkward, I’ll adjust, but how off is it? Are we five minutes in and we still haven’t said anything? Ok, maybe we have a problem.

One more softball. My follow-up questions will now start to focus on whatever question your resume left me with. I’ve no idea what I’m going to ask because it varies with every single resume, so my thought is that you should have your resume sitting in front of you because it’s sitting in front of me as well. It’s my only source material.

Whatever these follow-up questions are, I’m still figuring out how we communicate. This means you need to focus on answering the questions. It sounds stupid, but if it’s not absolutely clear to you what I’m asking, it’s better to get early clarification rather than letting me jump in five minutes into your answer to say, “Uh, that’s not what I was asking.”

See, you and I are still tuning to each other. It’s been ten minutes now, and if we’re still not adjusted to each other’s different communication styles, I’m going to start mentally waving my internal yellow flag. It doesn’t need to be eloquent communication, but we should be making progress.

No more softballs. We’re past the softball phase of the interview and now I’m going to ask a hard question. This isn’t a brainteaser or a technical question; this is a question that is designed to give you the chance to tell me a story. I want to see how you explain a complex idea over the phone to someone you don’t know and can’t see.

Again, who knows what the actual question will be, but you need to be prepared for when I ask the question that is clearly, painfully, open-ended. I’m not looking for the quick, clean answer; I’m looking for a story that shows me more about how you communicate and how you think. Being an amazing communicator is not a part of most engineering jobs, I know this. I’m not expecting Shakespeare, but I am expecting that you can confidently talk about this question because I found this question in your resume and that is the only piece of data we currently have in common. If we can’t have an intelligent discussion about that, I’m going to start wondering about the other ways we aren’t going to be able to communicate.

Your Turn. We’re twenty minutes into the phone screen and now I’m going to turn it over to you when I ask “Do you have any questions for me?”

When I tell friends that this is my favorite question, the usual response is, “So, you’re lazy, right? You can’t think of anything else to ask, so you go for the path of least resistance.” It’s true. It an easy question for me to ask, but it is essential because I don’t hire people who aren’t engaged in what they’re doing. And if you don’t have a list of questions lined up for me, all I hear is: YOU DON’T WANT THIS JOB.

A well thought out question shows me that you’ve been thinking about this job. It shows me you’re already working for it by thinking about the job outside of this 30-minute conversation. Yeah, you can probably wing it and ask something interesting based on the last 20 minutes, but the impression you’re going to make with me by asking a question based on research outside of this phone screen will make up for a bevy of yellow flags. It shows initiative and it shows interest.

The Close

And we’re done. It went by pretty quick, but the question is, “How’d it go?” Here’s a mental checklist to see how you did:

Long, awkward pauses. Were we struggling to keep things moving? Were there long silences? Well, we didn’t tune appropriately. Again, not a deal killer, but definitely a negative.

Adversarial interactions. What happened when we had different opinions? Did we talk through it or did we start butting heads? This happens more than I expect on phone screens, and it’s not always a bad thing. I’m not interested in you telling me what I want to hear, but if we are on opposite sides of the fence, how do we handle it? If a candidate is willing to pick a fight in a 30-minute phone screen, I’m wondering how often they’re going to fight once they’re in the building.

How’d it feel? This is the hardest to quantify, but also the most important. Did we click? Did the conversation flow? Did we both learn something? Ideally, I’m a decent representation of the culture of the team I’m hiring for, so if the 30 minutes passed painfully, I’m wondering what kind of pain hiring you might inflict on the team.

Specific next steps. How did I leave it? Did I give you a song and dance about how “we’re still interviewing candidates and we’ll be in touch within the next week”? Well, that’s ok, but what you’re really looking for is a specific next step like “I’m going to bring you in” or “Let’s have you talk with more of the team”. An immediate and actionable next step is the best sign of success with a phone screen. If I don’t give you this as part of the close, ask for it. If I stall, there’s a problem.

A phone screen is not a interview, it’s a sanity check. I already know you meet the requirements for the job by looking at your resume. The phone screen is going to tell me whether you meet the requirements of the culture of my team.

Unlike your resume where you send your hope to an anonymous recruiting address, the phone screen gives you leverage. The phone screen is the first time you get to represent yourself as a person. It’s still a glimpse, but it’s the first time you can actively participate in your next job.

A Glimpse and a Hook

The terrifying reality regarding your resume is that for all the many hours you put into fine-tuning, you’ve got 30 seconds to make an impression on me. Maybe less.

It’s unfair, it’s imprecise, and there’s a good chance that I make horrible mistakes, but there’s a lot more of you than me, and while hiring phenomenal teams is the most important thing I do, I’m balancing that task with the fact that I need to build product and manage the endless stream of people walking into my office.

But here’s a glimpse. I’m going to walk through the exact mental process I use when I look at a resume. I don’t know if this is right or efficient, but after fifteen years and staring at thousands of resumes, this is the process.

The First Pass

Your Name. It’s simple. Do I know you? Whether I do or not, I’m going to immediately Google you to see if I should. Oh, you a have a weblog. Excellent.

Company Names. Do I recognize any companies that you worked at? If I do, I don’t look at what you actually do, I assume that if I recognize the company, I’m in the ballpark. If I don’t know the company, I scan for keywords in the description to get a rough idea. Hmmmmm… networking words. Ok, you’re a networking guy.

Job Description and History. Here I’m looking for history and trajectory. How many jobs have you had and for how long? How long have you been in your current role? Where’d you come from? QA? Or have you always been an engineer? This is when I start looking for inconsistencies and warning flags.

Other Interests and Extracurriculars. Yeah, this is part of the first pass. I’m eagerly looking to find something that makes you different from the last fifty resumes I looked at. More on this in a moment.

So, we’re done. It’s been ten to twenty seconds and I’ve already formed an opinion. There’s a good chance that I’ve already made a call whether to move forward on you. If there are other folks checking the resume out, I can certainly be convinced to take a second look, but a basic opinion has been formed.

Before we move to the second pass, let’s talk about the parts of your resume I didn’t look at and never will.

Professional objective. This is likely your lead paragraph and I skipped it. Career center counselors across the planet are slamming their fists on their desks as they read this because they’ve been telling students, “You need to write a crisp career objective. It defines your resume.”

Yes, it does, but I still don’t read it and it’s not because there isn’t good content there, it’s the time issue. See, if your resume is sitting in my inbox it means someone has already mapped you to an open job in my group. Reading your objective is going to tell me something I already know. Besides, my job title and description scrub will tell me whether we’re in the ballpark or not. If I’ve got a Jr. Engineering position open and you’ve got 10 years experience, I’ll figure out that mismatch when I look at your history.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include this objective in your resume. As you’ll see below, there’s more to the process than just me reading your resume, and different folks are looking for different content.

Skills. I skip the skills section not only because this is information I’ll derive from job history, but also because this section is full of misinformation. I’m not going to say that people lie in the skills section, but I know that if a candidate has heard the word Linux in the workplace, there’s a good chance they’re going to put Familiarity with Linux as a skill on their resume.

Besides, again, I know you’ve goofed around with Linux because you said so in the description of your last job, right?

Summary of Qualifications. Similar to Skills, this is another skip section for me. Here’s a good example from an imaginary resume: “Proven success in leading technical problem solving situations”. This line tells me nothing. Yes, I know you’re trying to tell me that you’re strategic, but there is no way you’re going to convince me that you’re strategic in a resume. I’m going to learn that from a phone screen and from an interview.

Unlike Skills, which I find to be a total waste of time, I will go back to Summary of Qualifications if we end up talking. When you write “Established track record for delivering measurable results under tight schedules”, I am going to ask you what the hell you mean on the phone and if your answer isn’t instant and insightful, I’ll know your qualifications are designed to be buzzword compliant and don’t actually define your qualifications.

The Second Pass

If I can’t decide whether to schedule a phone screen after the first pass, I go for another. The goal now is, “Ok, I saw something I liked in the first pass, is it real?” This is when I do the following:

In-depth Job History. I’m going to actually read the job history for the past couple of jobs. Not all of them, just the last two or three. What I’m doing is fleshing out my mental picture of you. I’m looking for more warning flags. Do your responsibilities match your title? How long were you at your most recent job? If it was a long time, can I get a sense of how you grew? If it was short, can I figure out why you left? Do your last two jobs build on each other? Can I get a sense of where you’re headed or are you all over the place?

Your job history, — your professional experience — is the heart of your resume. This is where I spent my time vetting you and this is where you should spend your time making sure I’m going to get the most complete picture of who you are and what you’re going to bring to my team.

School. Yeah, this is the first time I’ll notice whether you went to college or not. I purposely do this because I’ve found over years of hiring that a name brand university biases my opinion too early. There’s a lot to be said for a candidate who gets accepted to and graduates from Stanford or MIT, but I’ve made just as many bad hires from these colleges as great ones.

Seeing a non-Computer Science degree is not a warning flag. In fact, I’m a huge fan of hiring physics majors as engineers. For whatever reason, the curriculum for physics has a good intersection with computer science. Any technical major for me is perfectly acceptable, and even non-technical majors with a technical job history make for a resume worth thinking about.

Ok, so that second pass took another 15 to 30 seconds and we’re done. You’ve just given me the opportunity to change your life by potentially bringing you in for an interview and that chance is over. Next!

What’s unfair about what just happened is this. You spent hours working on your resume. You sent it to close friends for review and you edited it. You agonized over the different sections and you stressed about the tone, and here I am, the hiring manager, and I read 1/10th of your work in 30 seconds.

Don’t despair. There are some easy things you can do to improve your chances.

Differentiate, Don’t Annoy

Design your resume to downgrade. Your resume needs to withstand some formatting abuse. Go get your resume right now and convert it to plain text. Can you still see the different sections? Is your job history still cleanly formatted? Can you still see the different jobs as well as the start and stop dates? Screw around with the margins, too. Where are your line breaks? They’d better not be after every line because that means visual chaos if a well-intentioned recruiter starts messing with fonts.

Never include a cover letter. I don’t read them. Recruiters don’t pass them on. Make sure the key points of your cover letter are living in your career objective and your job history.

Embrace honest buzzword compliance. Remember, I’m not the only who is going to read your resume. I’m likely the most qualified to make a call whether you’re a fit for my job, but before your resume gets to me, its going to be passed through a couple of different recruiters and these folks are just as busy as I am.

The lifeblood of the recruiter is the keyword. Java, C++, Objective-C. The more specific relevant keywords and buzzwords you can shove into your resume, there more likely you’re going to make it past the initial cut.

As I said above, I skip the Skills section because most folks already know that recruiters are just searching for specific words when they’re sourcing candidates, so they shove every possible buzzword into their resume. Know this, if you claim to Strong Java Background in your resume, I’m going to be compelled to figure out how strong your skills actually are. Don’t include any keyword or buzzword that you aren’t comfortable talking about at length.

Differentiate, don’t annoy. You’re likely going to start developing your resume from a template. Maybe you’ll use a friend’s resume that you like as a starting point. Excellent. How are you going to make it yours?

Remember, I’ve looked at thousands of resumes, which means I’ve seen all the standard templates. I know when you’re using Microsoft Word and I know when you’ve developed a format of your own. Right this second, I’m flipping through a dozen college resumes and the ones I’m spending time on are the ones that grab me visually, where there is something different. On this one, the fellow put a subtle gray box around each of his section headings. On this other one, the candidate used a nice combination of serif and sans serif fonts to grab me.

A couple of subtle visual differences to your resume goes a long way toward keeping me engaged in reading it, but remember, we’re engineers here and efficiency matters. Differentiating your resume to the point that I can’t quickly parse it is going to frustrate me. You’re not applying to be a visual designer; you’re an engineer. Keep to the standard sections and don’t make me work to figure out who you are.

Sound like a human. Here’s a doozy, this intern says he “planned, designed, and coordinated engineers efforts for the development of a mission critical system”. ZzzzzzzzzzZzz. What did this guy actually do? I honestly don’t know. Let’s call this type of writing style resume mumbo jumbo and let’s agree that usage of this style is tantamount to saying nothing at all.

What was the mission critical system? Why was it critical? How in the world did an intern plan, design, and coordinate the engineering efforts? I’m a fan of giving interns real world work, but it’d take a world-class intern to plan, design, and manage engineers on whatever this mission critical system is.

Take time to write your resume for a human. You need to hit all the right buzzwords and keywords to get yourself past the layers of recruiters, but I’m the guy who is really going to take apart your resume, and if you’re saying nothing with resume mumbo jumbo, I’m learning nothing. Give me specifics and give them to me in a familiar tone. I’m not an automaton; I honestly want to know what you do. Tell me a story.

Include seemingly irrelevant experience. This applies mostly to college types who lack experience in high technology. You’re going to stress that your job history doesn’t include any engineering and you’re thinking your summer working at Borders bookstore is irrelevant. It’s not. Any job teaches you something. Even though you weren’t coding in C++, I want to know what you learned by being a bookseller. Was it your first job? What did you learn about managers? How did you grow from the beginning to the end of the summer? Explain to me how hard work is hard no matter what the job is.

A Glimpse and a Hook

A resume will never define who you are. It’s not the job of your resume to give me a complete picture, and if you’re struggling to include every last detail about who you are, you’re wasting your time. Your resume should be designed to give me a glimpse and a hook.

The glimpse is a view into the most recent years of your professional career. It should convey your three most important accomplishments and it should give me a good idea where your technical skills lie.

The hook is more important. The hook will leave me with a question. Maybe it’s something from your other interests section? How about an objective so outlandish that I can’t help but set up a phone screen. I’m not suggesting that you make anything up, I’m asking you to market yourself in a way that I’m going to remember. A resume is not a statement of facts. It’s a declaration of intent.

Technicality

There’s a very short list of new manager “must do’s” in the Rands Management Rule Book. The brevity of this list comes from the fact that a must is an absolute and, when it comes to people, there are very few absolutes. A clever way to manage one person is a disaster when applied to another. This makes the first item on the Management Must Do List:

Stay flexible.

The only constant in management is that believing you’ve seen it all is a bad idea. Staying flexible is the only stance to adopt when constant change is the only constant.

Paradoxically, the second item on the list is surprisingly inflexible and it’s still a personal favorite of mine because I believe it helps set the stage for management growth. It reads:

Stop coding.

The theory is this: if you want to be a manager, you must learn to trust those who work for you to take care of the job of coding. This advice can be hard to digest, especially for new managers. It’s likely that one of the reasons they became managers is due to their productive developers, and their first reaction when things go to crap is to revert to the skills that built up their confidence. That’s writing code.

When I see a new manager fall back to coding, I tell the manager, “I know you can code. The question is, can you manage? You’re no longer responsible for yourself, you’re responsible for the team, and I want to see you figure out how to get the team to solve this problem without you coding. Your job is to figure out how to get yourself to scale. I want lots of you, not just one.”

Good advice, huh? Scale, management, and responsibility. Very buzzword compliant. Too bad I’m wrong.

Wrong?

Yup. Wrong. Not totally, but enough that I might need to make some calls to past co-workers and apologize. “That not coding pitch of mine? Wrong. Yeah. Start programming again. Start with Python or Ruby. Yeah. I mean it. Your career depends on it.”

When I began my career as a developer at Borland, I was part of the Paradox for Windows team and this was a big one. Just on the application development team we had 13 developers. If you included the heads from the various other teams who provided essential technology like the core database engine, graphing engine, and core application services, you’re talking 50 engineers directly contributing to the product.

No team that I’ve been on since then has even been close in terms of size. In fact, with each passing year, the size of the engineering teams contributing to my products has steadily shrunk. What’s going on? Are we getting collectively smarter as developers? Nope, we’re just distributing the load.

What have we, as developers, been doing for the past 20 years? Well, we’ve been writing a crap load of code. Piles of it. So much of it that we decided that maybe it was a good idea to make it easy to share by open sourcing it. Thankfully the Internet showed up which made this sharing trivial. If you’re a developer, try this right now. Go search Google Code for your name and find some code you forgot about that everyone can see. Scary, huh? Didn’t think your code lived forever. It does.

Code lives forever. Good code not only lives, it grows as those who value it make sure that it doesn’t become stale. It’s this pile of high-value, well-maintained code that is helping shrink the average size of the engineering team because it’s allowing us to focus less on writing new code and more on integrating existing code to get the job done with fewer people and in less time.

There’s a depressing line of reasoning here, the idea that we’re all just a bunch of integration automatons using duct tape to connect different pre-existing moving parts to create slightly different versions of the same thing. It’s this train of thought that has a lot of senior management teams excited about outsourcing. “Anyone who can use Google and has some duct tape can do this, so why are we paying big bucks for our local automatons?”

We’re paying these management types some pretty big bucks to think this crap up. Still, it brings up my final point that there are eager, bright developers all over the planet and they’re eager and bright even though they haven’t spent a moment in an accredited university. Oh yeah, and there lots more of them coming.

I’m not suggesting that you should be worried about your job because some bright fellow overseas is gunning for you, I’m suggesting that you should be worried about your job because the evolution of how software development occurs might be moving faster than you. You’ve been working for ten years in your job, five years as a manager, and you’re thinking, “I know how to develop software”. And you do. Right now.

Stop Coding?

If you follow my advice and remove yourself from the code, then you are removing yourself from the act of creation. This act is why I don’t really sweat outsourcing. Automatons don’t build, they process. While good process can save a lot of money, it’s not going to bring anything new to the world.

With smaller teams doing more for less, removing yourself from the code strikes me as a bad career move. Even in a monstrous company laden with policy, process, and politics, you can’t forgot how to develop software. And how to develop software is changing. Now. Right under your feet, this very second.

You have issues. I understand. Let’s hear them.

“Rands, I’m on the Director track and if I keep coding no one is going to think I can scale.”

My first question to you is this: from where you are sitting in your soon-to-be-Director chair, do you see software development changing within your company? If the answer is yes, my next question is: how is it changing, and what are you going to do about it? If your answer is no, then you need to move your chair because, I swear to you, software development is changing right this second. How in the world are you going to scale if you’re slowly forgetting how software is made?

My advice is not that you start assigning yourself tons of features in the next release. My advice is that you take action so that you stay in touch with how your team builds stuff. You can do this as a Director or a VP. More on this in a moment.

“Uh, Rands, someone has to referee. Someone has to have the vision. If I code, I’m going to lose perspective on my job.”

You still need to referee, you still need to massage decisions, and you still need to spend 30 minutes every Monday morning walking around the block four times with that engineer who needs to walk through his weekly “We’re Doomed” rant, but you also need to lose perspective about your job and you do not need to be a full time coder to do this.

My advice for losing perspective:

1) Use the development environment to build the product. This means you must be familiar with your teams tools including the build system, version control, and programming language. This task is going to keep you in touch with the language your team uses to talk about how they get stuff done. And it will also allow you to continue to use your favorite text editor… which rocks.

2) Be able to draw a detailed architectural diagram describing your product on any white board at any time. I’m not talking about the three boxes and two arrows versions. You need to know the detailed one, the hard one that isn’t pretty and is tricky to explain. This is your map for understanding just about everything about your product. It changes over time and you should be able to understand why those changes are occurring.

3) Own a feature. I’m literally cringing as I write this because it is fraught with danger, but I don’t think you can really do #1 or #2 without a feature that is yours. Owning a feature not only forces you to actively participate in the development process, it also switches your context from “Manager responsible for everything” to “Person who owns a thing”. This is a humble, unassuming perspective which will remind you about the importance of small decisions.

I’m still cringing. Someone is already yelling at me, “MANAGERS OWNING FEATURES??!?!” (And I agree.) You are still a manager, so make it a small feature, ok? You’ve still got a lot to do. If you can’t imagine owning a feature, my back-up advice is to fix some bugs. You won’t get the joy of ownership, but you’ll gain an understanding of the construction of the product that you’ll never get walking the hallway.

4) Write a test script. I still do this late in the product cycle when folks are losing their minds. This is a simple script that you run with each build. Think of it as a your checklist for understanding what your product does. Show it to co-workers. Do it often.

“Rands, if I code, I’m going to confuse my team. They’re not going to know if I’m a manager or a developer.”

Good.

I mean it. I’m happy you’re about to confuse your team by swimming in the developer pool. The simple fact is that well-defined roles in software development are fading. User interface guys are doing what can only be called development in Javascript and CSS. Developers are learning more about interaction design. Everybody is talking to everybody else and they’re learning from each other’s mistakes, stealing each other’s code, and there is no reason that a manager shouldn’t be participating in this massive global cross-pollination information cluster-fuck.

Besides, you want to be a part of a team of interchangeable parts. Not only does this make your team more nimble, it presents each person with the opportunity to see the product and the company from a vastly different perspective. How much more are you going to respect quiet Frank the Build Guy when you see the simple elegance of his build scripts?

I’m not wishing confusion and chaos on your team. I’m actually wishing better communication on it. My belief is that if you are building the product and touching the features that you’ll be closer to your team. But, more importantly you’ll be closer to how software development is constantly changing in your organization.

One Absolute

A co-worker at Borland once verbally assaulted me for calling her a coder.

“Rands, a coder is mindless machine. A monkey. A coder does nothing relevant except lay down boring lines of useless code. I am a software developer.”

She was right and she would’ve hated my advice for new managers to stop coding. Not because I was suggesting that they were coders, but more that I was proactively telling them to start ignoring one of the most important parts of their jobs: software development.

So, I’ve revised my advice. You can stop coding, but…

Stay flexible and don’t stop developing.

Interview: Allan Odgaard

I’m coming up on five years of steady Mac OS X usage and anniversaries are a time of reflection, so I went back to read my first significant article about Mac OS X.

There’s something missing from this first analysis. See, there was one killer app that I’d been dying to try out on the Mac platform and the lack of any mention in this first piece is strange to me.

It was BBEdit, people. I’d been longing to seriously develop against this editor since a brief QA stint at Symantec in the early 90s and when the time finally arrived where I had a professional reason to do so, the editor just didn’t stick.

Yes. I’m doing less coding and more managing in my current incarnation, but I use some type of editor on a daily basis, so why the constant stream of semi-criticism of an application that so many people love?

The answer is TextMate. As I wrote about in Bright, Patient Design, this editor has filled the editor vacancy on my Mac OS X desktop and I was happy to interview its creator, Allan Odgaard, to learn more about the development of my new favorite tool.

RANDS: Tell us the story of the moment you decided to develop a new editor for Mac OS X.

ALLAN: It wasn’t a singular moment. It was having worked with the Mac for maybe half a year that lead me to the conclusion, that if I wanted to make shareware for the Mac, a text editor was something where there was no native offerings, so definitely a niche to fill.

It might seem I little harsh to say no native offerings, but everything based on NSTextView is generally not much more than NSTextView which, while one of the best text editors that comes with a GUI kit, is not a feature packed editor for the power user.

As for dismissing the Carbon editors which did exist: at that time Carbon did not support sheets and drawers, did not use the standard key bindings infrastructure, often used the older Classic spacing guidelines, etc. So for me (a “switcher”) they often felt a bit out of place.

According to Wikipedia, you did 5 months of development to get a 1.0 release out the door. How’d you pick the feature set for this first release?

It was actually more like four months though I had experimented with various editor related stuff prior to that, but did start basically with a clean slate.

At that time, the primary goal was to get something released, so the features were mostly determined from a “do we really need this for 1.0?” As motivation (for writing yet another editor) I did however need 1.0 to have foldings, snippets, and recordable macros.

How has BBEdit (or other editors) influenced the design and feature set of TextMate?

A few of the things which definitely did influence me when I wrote TextMate were:

• CygnusEd: this is a very simple Amiga editor which I used a lot. It taught me the usefulness of recordable macros and how a few simple basic tools is generally better than specialized ones. As of such, you could say that initially I wanted to recreate CygnusEd for the Mac, but add features such as syntax highlight, foldings, snippets, and similar.
• VisualAssist: this is a plug-in for MSVC++ and it adds things like auto-pairing of brackets, re-indented pasting, and a lot of other neat stuff. Before I tried this plug-in, I probably would not have touched such smart features, because I would think they got in the way. But VisualAssist blew my mind, and it still does!

• NEdit: I used this at the university for everything text related, and while I was not a power user, I once took a look at how it did language grammars, which it did pretty free form, and that has stuck and was my outset for TextMate’s language grammar system. Also, the ability to execute the current line as a shell command and move around a column selection, I loved that about NEdit as well and added that to TextMate.

A big non-editor inspiration was CSS selectors which is what I recreated as scope selectors. The first time I read the CSS specification I was pretty excited to try out the concept. Unfortunately I did not have access to any browser which implemented it, so I started writing my own implementation, though I never got very far with it. Still, a seed had been planted and on an unconscious level I have probably tried to find a place where I could implement them, ever since.

There’s something very satisfying that TextMate has built-in software update. Was there any special reasoning behind this feature?

Yes, this comes from me wanting to push frequent updates, but not inconvenience the user too much. If there’s too much manual work, the user might not appreciate frequent updates and might either choose to receive less of them or just feel annoyed.

That said, it was actually Nicholas Jitkoff (of Quicksilver fame) who was bugging me about having to do the manual work each time. But I wouldn’t have spent as much time on it had it not been for what I mentioned above.

Do you have a favorite pet feature?

What I really like myself about TextMate is the infrastructure, but there are two things which comes to mind, probably because they both act as enablers:

1. The ability to switch a normal selection to a column selection by tapping the option key once. For me that upgrades column selection from something I occasionally use to something I use dozens of times each day, even with columns that span only two rows.

2. The ability to have a command receive “current scope” as input. For me this exemplifies the abstraction I am pursuing with TextMate: you want a command to uppercase a string? Make the command (tr ‘[a-z]’ ‘[A-Z]’) and set the scope selector to ‘string’, input to ‘current scope’ and output to ‘replace’. While this action is contrived, it illustrates how everything unrelated to the task of ‘uppercasing the current string’ is irrelevant to the command. In all other editors (that I know of) you would have to write code yourself to find the string delimiters, and then you have the problem that these can be defined differently for different languages.

From your profile on the Wiki, you state you have a skepticism regarding the HCI field. Where does your skepticism lie?

Let me start by saying that I think understanding human cognition is very important for good software design. My skepticism about the HCI field comes from the fact that it is often hard to quantify the quality of results because a lot is subjective and subject for interpretation.

At one point I was semi-employed by a Ph.D. student (of HCI) which wanted me to log all sorts of data so that he could look for patterns afterwards. This is fine in some situations, I have just seen too much of it, and too little aggregated theory, instead there is a lot of common sense and a few authors making a fortune writing about it.

Do you plan to release TextMate as open source? If not, what’s your exit strategy, if any?

I am extremely torn on this issue. I have a lot of things I want to see happen with TextMate and there really is too much for me to do this all alone.

So one option is to hire programmers and basically build a company. Is this something I want to do? Maybe, but running a company requires a steady cash flow. Hiring good programmers can be difficult, and hiring a bad programmer can turn out to be worse than not hire anyone at all, but you will rarely know in advance.

It also requires me to spend time communicating my ideas and do a bit of micromanagement as I probably can’t just hire five programmers and say “make TextMate better” and expect them to know what that means.

On the other hand, the current model (where I do all the work) is not really working as in, it does not scale, and already I have people to help me out, not just for bundles but e.g. while I am on vacation I have other people handle support etc.

So the company slowly becomes a necessity. But you asked about open source, open source I have considered for a few reasons:

1) TextMate already has open source components and it occasionally bugs me that I can’t just point users at the source.

2) I said above that I don’t want to micromanage. When I delegate a job, I expect something specific and if I do not get that I might sometimes be a little disappointed. With open source I am not asking for anything, meaning I will get things I did not ask for, thus I will probably be positively surprised, and the things I may get, will sometimes be things which never occurred to me, thus even with infinite resources, I would not have asked for it (look at Microsoft, they have the closest you get to that, and they do not know what to ask for, so they do not get it, and thus have software which is bad and/or imitations of other products).

So what is stopping me from open sourcing TextMate? Basically two things:

1) if TextMate is open source, can I make any money?

2) if TextMate is open source, will people actually contribute?

Going the company route does not present these problems and I would be able to ensure that TextMate becomes what I have in mind.

Presently I am thinking of both things as possible scenarios, and I am consciously moving toward a modularized architecture that will allow me to test these things in a smaller scale. For example, making some modules open source while hiring people to work on other modules.

Do you have a feature roadmap and, if so, what are your big ticket features of the next six months?

As I mentioned above, the stuff which I get the most excited about myself is the infrastructure.

Things in TextMate are generally triggered when the user does some form of interaction. For example, pressing a key, dragging a file to the edit area, or typing a keyword followed by tab and then based on the structural context (e.g. are we inside a string in a source file?) which TextMate knows about from having parsed the document, some action will fire, like running a command or inserting a snippet.

This simple system has allowed a plethora of cleverness in the form of bundle items, and TextMate 2.0 (though the ETA is not within the next six months) will make the parser able to work with more complex document types, have scope selectors select more than just the structural context, have commands fire for more than just file dropping, key equivalents, and tab triggers.

These improvements to the existing infrastructure will allow for a lot of cool new things. I am deliberately being a little vague on what exactly they are since people have started to copy my ideas, which I have nothing against, I just want to be the first with the implementation.

The design of TextMate is one where you discover what you need rather than features being shoved down your throat. Isn’t there a risk here that a good feature might never be found?

Certainly. One of the reasons I do the screencasts is to educate users of features which might not be easily discovered.

But I don’t think it is a problem that users do not find specific (cool) features unless the feature they do not find is fundamental, like opening files, or something they miss and have spent more than 20 seconds looking for.

I do consider how features can be made more visible, but if you enumerate the features in TextMate there is probably around a thousand, depending on what you count, and most users would be hit by information overflow if all features had an equally prominent visibility.

Ninety Days

When you accept a new job, you don’t know who you are going to work with, what you are going to be doing, and how much (or little) you’re going to like it. Call everyone you want. Ask their opinions. Trust the fact that a good friend referred you for the gig. Revel in the idea that the company has a good pedigree, but don’t delude yourself that in a smattering of interview hours that you’re going to have anything more than a vague hint of your new life.

Try this. Tell me about your best friend. Give me a bulleted list of five noteworthy things you think I should know about your best friend. Got it? Read it out loud. Does this do justice to your best friend? I hear you when you say, “He’d do anything for me”, but why is that? Why is he protective of you? What’s the story behind the bullet? That’s what I want to know.

Each person in your new team has a story they want to tell you and it’s never a bulleted list. Some are going to freely give this story whereas others will carefully protect the fact they even have a story, but until each person you need to work with has shared this story with you (and vice versa), the interview isn’t over. The jury is out and you won’t know if this new job that you’ve begun is actually your job.

Deliberation

Your first job is to relax. Like the first day of school, you’re going to overcompensate in your first day, your first week. Most people do not lay their clothes out the night before they go to work. You’re doing this to calm yourself. Those clothes neatly laid out at the end of your bed are a visual reminder that you have control over this thing that you can’t control.

Relax. There’s an industry standard regarding the amount of time it takes to make a hire and it’s ninety days. New managers hate when I tell them this because they’re so giddy they’ve got a new requisition and BOY WATCH HOW FAST I CAN HIRE. Yes, yes. I appreciate your velocity, but I’m not going to worry about your hire for ninety days.

This chunk of time applies to your new job as well. You’ve got ninety days — three months — to finish your job interview. Draw an a X on a calendar ninety days from now. Make it a physical act that reminds you to relax and to listen rather than fret about what you don’t know. The new team isn’t going to trust you until you stop laying out your clothes, until you stop being deliberate.

I know you’ve done this before: you’ve had five other jobs and you have well refined people assessment instincts. Except, well, they’re biased. These instincts are based on where you’ve been and you have never been here before. My suggestion is that the less you trust your instincts, the more you’ll learn about your new job and that’s why I wrote you a ninety days list:

#1) Stay late. Show up early. You need a map of the people you work with and I find the best way to start scribbling this map is to understand people and their relation to the day. When do they get there? How long until they engage in what they do? Coffee run? Wait, no. Late arriver. Doesn’t leave until he gets something done. Makes his coffee run at 4:30pm. Doesn’t drink coffee? Really? Why? These long days of watching give you insight and they give you tools for understanding what each of your team members want.

#2) Accept every lunch invitation you get. People are stretching themselves for you the first few weeks you show up. They’re going to go out of their way to include you and no matter who they are, you’ve got to take the time to reciprocate. The lunch invite from that guy in the group you pretty sure you’ll never interact with will result in stories and you have a stunning lack of stories right now.

#3) Always ask about acronyms. It’s great that we’re all speaking English, but why is it that you’re sitting in your first staff meeting and not understanding a word? It’s because every team develops acronyms, metaphors, and clever ways to describing their uniqueness which you must understand. Cracking the language nut is absolutely essential to assessing the hand you’ve been dealt and you’re going to need to ask a couple of times.

#4) Say something really stupid. Good news, you’re going to do this whether it’s on this list or not. I’m saying it’s ok. This stupid thing that you’re going to say is going to demonstrate your nascent engagement in your job and when they stop giggling, the team is going to know you’re desperately trying to figure it all out.

#5) Have a drink. Similar to the lunch task, but more valuable. No barrier is crossed when someone invites you to lunch, but when you get the drink invite, someone is saying, “C’mon. Let’s go try a different version of honesty.” Stories are revealed over drinks, not lunch.

Warning: the next three on the list are at the bottom for a reason. These are advanced moves that you don’t want to attempt until you’ve built some confidence that if they go horribly wrong, you have some confidence that you won’t permanently damage your still developing reputation. Read on.

#6) Tell someone what to do. Everything above this list is about listening and this task involves you saying something. More importantly, it involves you telling someone what to do. I don’t know who you are telling or what you’re saying, but the goal is to exert your influence, to test your influence. More importantly, to test your knowledge of the organization and see if this thing you have to say is true. Telling is the sound of your instincts aligning to this particular organization and this thing you are saying is your first bit of inspiration. Trust it. Tell the right person and realize that everyone was waiting for you to say it.

#7) Have an argument. This is the riskiest item on the list, but potentially the most revealing. There’s a good chance when you pull a #6 that this is going to happen anyway. Again, what you are willing to argue about and who is going to be on the other side of the argument is a function of your situation. What you want to understand is how does the organization value conflict? Is it ok that you’re digging your heels in? Do others engage in the argument? Who swoops in to save the day? Can these people argue without losing their shit? Does this team argue out in the open or do they use devious passive aggressive subtlety?

You’re going to learn two valuable things during this professional battle. First, how does this group of people make a decision? Second, you’re going to have a better taste of their passion and their velocity.

#8) Find your inner circle. In your arguments, lunches, drinks, and late nights, you’re going to find kindred spirits. This is the short list of people who share your instincts. These are the ones who complete your sentences and they know your stories. These are the ones who welcome the argument because they know great decisions are made by many. Your inner circle is not exclusive because you’ll go nowhere drawing relationship boundaries among the team. This is the list of people with whom you share your raw inspiration and your stories because you know they’ll gleefully help refine them.

The discovery of your inner circle won’t happen until time has passed. You’ll instinctively be attracted to people who feel comfortable, who feel right, but they can’t be in the inner circle until they’ve passed the test of time. They’ve got to pass through the ninety day list a few times before you’ve heard enough stories to let them in.

Finishing the Interview

It’s not just that you forgot to ask key questions during your initial interview process; it’s that the person that you were walking into that interview isn’t who you are. You’re a resume, you’re a referral, and you’re a reputation.

Your job interview isn’t over until you’ve asked all the questions and heard all of the stories.

Your job interview isn’t over until you understand the unique structure that has formed around this particular group of people. It’s not just the organizational chart, it’s the intricate personalities which have settled into a comfortable, complex, communication structure.

Your job interview isn’t over until you have a framework for how you are going interact with these people and that means understanding not only their goals, but also their invaluable personal quirks. What they tell you the first week has more to do with the fact that you’re new than what they actually feel. What they tell you after ninety days is the truth.

Your job interview isn’t over until you’ve changed to become part of a new team.

Happy New Year.

Bright, Patient Design

The creation of a Rands article goes like this. First, the idea strikes me at some random part of the day… usually in the car to or from work. I spend anywhere from a day to a month fine-tuning this idea in my head until it’s something I want to start writing about. It’s entirely possible that some great work never makes it past this stage because I don’t write it down, but my thought is, “If the idea can’t escape my head, it’s not ready yet.”

When I’m ready to start typing, I fire up TextEdit for a first draft. Yes, TextEdit. I don’t need much out of an editor for that part of the writing process. Actually, all I need is a pleasant font and bold. Code editors don’t work because they don’t have rich text formatting and I use this formatting to visually mark sections and cordon off ideas. Word doesn’t work here because it’s a cluttery mess of functionality I don’t need.

Once I’ve got something 75% of the way there, I start sending it out for content review and copy editing. (If you want to help with Rands stuff, drop me a line. Let’s talk.) This is another advantage of TextEdit — it’s Mail friendly — it pastes exactly what I typed in formatted into the message as opposed to Word which has a penchant to make fonts huge and retarded.

With feedback in hand from the various Rands support folks, I clumsily merge this feedback into TextEdit and then print out the piece and shove it under my pillow for a day. This is bake time. I gotta forget about the piece for 24 hours so I can read it again with fresh eyes before the last edit. There’s a moderately large pile of work which never makes it pass this stage, either; the thought is the same as above, “Not done”.

With a fully baked piece in hand, I begin the mechanical process of prepping the article for posting. Now I need an editor that is markup-friendly. I’ve been using BBEdit since my move to Mac OS X and my thoughts from 2004 still apply: “It’s a fine editor, but what’s the fuss about? Where’s my holy shit?”

I’m not a power user, but I know what I expect out of a good editor and, well, BBEdit is a good editor, but whenever I fire it up I feel like I forgot to read some imaginary manual called, “BBEdit Rocks. Really.” I suspect the fact that I didn’t grow up with BBEdit is part of the issue. The fact that I’m a pure Mac OS X guy with zero pre-Mac OS X experience probably contributes to feeling like I’m missing part of the BBEdit joke. Yeah, Zap Gremlins. Ha ha. I get it. Clever, but great design?

My BBEdit ambivalence allows me to check out new editors as they stream across my consciousness and, to BBEdit’s credit, it’s lasted four years. I’ve test driven several editors during that time and BBEdit remained my technical tool of choice, but it was only a matter of time until someone else knocked my socks off.

The buzz around TextMate started many months ago, but it’s when folks started to ask me to order it that I started to pay attention. There is no copy protection known to man that any bright engineer can’t circumvent, so when an engineer asks you to purchase the software they’re saying, “This is the shit. We should pay these guys for this fine piece of work.”

You bet I downloaded it.

After two steady months of TextMate, I’m happy to declare it my editor of choice because it demonstrates a design philosophy I love. Bright, Patient Design. I’ll explain.

A well-designed application gently lets you know it’s smarter than you. It goes like this:

TextMate: “Hi Rands, I’m TextMate.”

Rands: “Quiet, you, I’ve got stuff to do and no time to do it. I don’t have time to learn a whole crap load of keyboard commands. I’m just trying to format some HTML. Please stay out of my way.”

TextMate: “You bet. Just holler if you need anything.” [insert silence]

TextMate’s interface is a big huge empty space. No toolbar, a clean menu structure. You just start doing whatever it is you do and then, eventually, you need something.

Rands: “TextMate, I need to create a link and IF YOU’RE GOING TO PUT ME THROUGH HOOPS WE’RE THROUGH. I MEAN IT.”

TextMate: “Sure, see that status bar at the bottom, all the HTML commands are there.”

Rands: “Great, now shut up.”

TextMate: “You bet.”

Exploring the status bar at the bottom of each TextMate window is your first glimpse into Bright Patient Design. In a single status bar, TextMate’s potential explodes. First, there’s a exhaustive list of all the different language types supported by TextMate along with a set of formatting and template commands for each and every language. But wait a tick…

Rands: “Hey, TextMate.”

TextMate: “Yo.”

Rands: “I need to add a link.”

TextMate: “Did you check out that status bar?”

Rands: “Yeah, it’s CTRL-SHIFT-L, but I need to associate it with this URL I just put on clipboard. How do…”

TextMate: “Rands, did you use the command?”

Rands: “No, but do I need to paste the HTML and then paste…”

TextMate: “Use the damned command.”

So I do. Ctrl-Shift-L and TextMate does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It adds the HREF and it automagically pastes the URL on my clipboard into the HREF. In my book, TextMate has just taken two separate tasks and made them one. Folks, that’s a 50% savings and 50% savings is engineering nirvana. Careers are made on 50% savings.

Now, I bet BBEdit does this, but fact of the matter is, I don’t know that it does. I’ve spent four years stumbling around that program and my impression is not Bright, Patient Design, it’s Historical Cruft. BBEdit’s biggest flaw is one of its greatest assets: its history. BBEdit’s design is an amalgam of every design decision the Bare Bones Software team has made since its release for System Software 6 in the early 90s and it shows. Go click on the anchor button in the HTML toolbar and tell me what happens. That’s right, you get a dialog with every possible anchor attribute you’d ever need. That’s not bright, that’s lazy.

Bright, Patient Design is knowing that you are going to need to tell people what they want, but having the patience to know they need to discover they need it. It is choosing to stay out of their way while they make this discovery and then, when they’re ready to learn, showing them you can make their life better.

Bright Patient Design acknowledges you are going to make big decisions for your users. You are not going to present every possible bell and whistle. You are going to give them the one bell they need and you’re going to ring it sweetly and they’re going to realize that you’re a better bell ringer than they are.

After my link moment with TextMate, I realized that higher powers were present and I dug into the program. Of course every single damned command, macro, template, and snippet is a customizable script. Of course, it’s trivial to start using these scripts, but TextMate doesn’t throw this seemingly limitless customization in my face, they focus on staying out of the way while I learn at my own pace.

It’s harder than it sounds. Each time Microsoft Excel barks at me asking, “Hey Rands, it looks like you’re managing a list. BOY CAN I HELP YOU!” I want punch my flat panel monitor flat. Excel, you’re not being helpful, you’re being an arrogant prick and shoving your design down my throat. I’ve had the same reaction to just about every Wizard I’ve ever met. Wizards are a grimly unsatisfying experience where potential functionality is dangled in front of me, but I rarely end up with what I need.

Yes, I want you to decide for me, but you better make the right decision based on my need or we’re going have an even bigger problem. Again, this is really hard. Developers have to enumerate every possible user need for their application and then prioritize which of those needs are most important and how to meet them. My guess is TextMate’s developers are a collection of hardcore developers who have been using editors for a bazillion years. In those bazillion years, they got all the market research they needed. They also probably stared at BBEdit a good long time and said, “We can trim 50% of this functional crap and still have a better product.”

Yes, there is a well-defined need for applications where every single option is presented to the user. Photoshop comes to mind. Any professional application, really. You don’t need to be Bright or Patient here in your design because your users are incented to figure out how to be experts. Me, I’m in a hurry and the more your design stays out of my way and let’s me get stuff done, the happier I am and the more likely I’m going to become an expert.

Desktop Accessories

On the list of things I do a lot, typing is up there close to breathing. It started with the Apple II forever ago and now it’s now and I’m still typing every single day and each day I wait for the sharp pains to start racing up my forearms My only guess that I haven’t been afflicted with carpel tunnel or some other repetitive stress injury is that I’m either genetically predisposed not get it or I’m not repetitively injuring myself.

My guess is the latter. I don’t think whatever genes prevent repetitive stress injury have had the necessary time to bake. You’ll have check-out my great-great-great-great grandson who will either sport these evolved RSI-friendly genes or a plug in the back of his head. Depends who wins.

A repetitive injury-free lifestyle involves adjustments to habits and environment. The single best habit you can have is a short attention span. Nothing is repetitive when you can’t focus. You think I’m joking and I kind’a am, but my understanding is that much of the RSI issue is that you stay in the same position for long periods of time where the muscles keeping you in said position get angry. This paragraph is five sentences long and I’ve changed position twice.

If you don’t have NADD, well, then you can change your environment and your environment is your desk. Here’s are my favorite desk accessories:

First, the Big Three. Monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Let’s straighten one thing out first. Any tool which is physically betweteen you and your content is worth investing in. Stop worrying about your processor speed or your front-side bus. Focus on nailing the big three, starting with:

Monitor. I’ve been here. A couple of times. Your monitors are your eyes to your content and if you aren’t spending dollars here to get two flat panel monitors then you’re spending your time organizing your content, not surfing it.

Keyboard. I used to be fussy about my keyboard. I’d swear by the Microsoft Natural keyboard, but I’ve been on Apple’s standard keyboard for many years and I don’t have any complaints. Keyboard characteristics that I care about are feel and sound which, oddly, intersect quite a bit. A semi-padded “click” is what I want to feel and hear when I hit the letter R. Too clicky, too hard, or too deep a push and I’m no longer thinking about what I’m writing, I’m thinking how annoying my keyboard has become.

Mouse. Two essentials here. Wireless and shape. I’m using a Microsoft Wireless mouse, which is a mouthful, but it feels natural in my hand. I can’t live without a right click and a scroll wheel and the mouse has both… and a bunch more buttons that I never use.

Regarding Wireless. A good measure of any tool is the average number of times a week you pick it up and throw it across the room. My average for wired mice was once a month. See, your wired mouse doesn’t stay in one region on your desk. It wanders depending on how your sitting in your chair, your posture, and how much coffee you’ve had. Each time I was sitting in odd position on a caffeine induced writing episode, my wired mouse would find that region on the desk that was inaccessible via a wired mouse. I wouldn’t notice that subtle tug the first three times I tried to drag the mouse to the unreachable… or would I? The fourth time I’d yank the thing out of it’s USB and sling it across the room. It’s one thing to have your significant other interrupt The Zone, it’s a other thing to have poorly designed non-sentient piece of crap get in the way.

Speakers or Headphones? I’ve got both and I use them depending on what I’m doing. Right now, I’m cranking Local H and sitting at my desk with my wireless headphones and a terrific glass of Pinot from Nicholson Ranch. If you walked in my office, my headphones are a handy visual clue, “Don’t bother me”. If I’m doing the same thing with speakers, I’m not in the Zone, I’m just filling time. Wireless is also essential for headphones. I’m using Sennheiser’s right now and I’m going to give them a solid B mostly because I’m so happy about not having to replace the busted headphones I kept tossing across the room. With wireless, I still need to fuss with various controls from time to time, but they work perfectly 90% of the time and they never get wrapped around my chair.

Huge Stack of Paper. Do this right now. Go walk to the closest laser printer and grab a healthy stack of paper and plop on a non-intrusive corner of your desk. Why? Because you sometimes need to write things down on paper. I know you’ve got to-do tracking application or maybe you’re using your mail application to get things done. In both cases, you still need paper. The act of writing down a something on a piece of paper gives that something more reality and if you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, well, all the more reason to pilfer some paper. Don’t worry, we’ll make more.

Wander Spots. My desks at work and home have visually interesting places to take mental breaks. A stack of books, a photo… any sort of nerd knick knack that feeds your brain. This is where you stop to reflect on the last thirty seconds of your life. How am I doing? Is this feeling right? Maybe I should take another sip of wine. Ok. Back to work. These frequent mental breaks may sound like a lot of work, but these micro-breaks may very well be the reason I’m not wearing braces on my wrists. I stop. I wander. And I return to what I was doing. Sometimes.

Direction. I’ve been flip-flopping on this for years. Do you face the people who walk in your office or do you show them your back? The argument for the back is that anyone who wants to invade your space not only needs to come into your office, they also need to ask for your attention. My theory is that some small percentage of folks will spend the eighth of a second between when they walk in my office and when they ask for my attention asking themselves, “Do I really need his attention? He looks busy.” If the answer is “No”, we both save time. Whether this is true or not, I recently returned to facing my door because folks were scaring the shit out of me walking in my door, sitting down, and then asking for my attention. WHO IN THE. WELL HI.

Since my return to facing the door, I’ve realized that, as a manager, you’ve gotta face the door. That eighth of a second between when you see someone walk in the door and they say something is invaluable. Are they pissed? Is this important? Are they confused? What hat do I need to wear? All of this analysis goes down before anyone says a thing and that analysis prepares me for whatever has just walked into my space.

Trickle Theory

Buried.

Back at the start-up, we were shifting gears. After six months of talking about shipping a product, we needed to ship a product and nothing gets everyone’s attention like a deadline. The good news was that QA had been doing its job and there was a pile of work in our bug database. The bad news was that no one had looked at the database in months.

We had a Rent-a-VP at the time, and as temporary executives go, he was sharp. He quickly deduced our goal — “Ship a Quality Beta” — but he also quickly discerned that we had no idea about the quality of the product because of our pile of untriaged bugs.

He called a meeting with me, the QA manager, and the tech support manager. His advice: “Triage every single bug in this fashion and tell me how many bugs we’ve got to fix in order to ship this Beta.” And then he left.

Every single bug. 537 bugs. You gotta read the bug, possibly reproduce it, and then make an educated team decision. Let’s assume an average of five minutes per and you’re talking about… crap… 45 hours of bug triage. It’s an impossible task. I’ve got features to fix, people to manage, and I haven’t seen the sun on a Saturday in two weeks.

Let’s take a brief segue and talk about the huge value that exists in a bug database. In just about every company I’ve worked at, the only source of measurable truth regarding the product is the bug database. Marketing documents get stale. Test plans become decrepit. Test case databases slowly mutate into the unusable personal to do list of QA. The bug database is the only source of data regarding your product.

I know this. I know that once I’ve effectively scrubbed the bug database, I’ve got the single most informed opinion regarding the product.

But.

537 unscrubbed bugs? 40+ hours of bug drudgery?

Please. I’ve got a product to ship.

My normal approach when faced with an impossible task is analysis because analysis gives you data, which in turn allows you to make a confident decision. So, I do what I did above: carefully estimate how long it will take to complete… 5 minutes x 537 = impossible. This fair estimate freezes me with fear. How in the world am I going to get my other five jobs done whilst scrubbing 40 hours of bugs? Once I’m good and lost in that fear, the impossible task, I’m no longer thinking abut getting the task done, I’m thinking about the fear.

My advice is: START.

“But Rands… I’ve got three hundred tests to run and one day to…”

Stop. Go run one test. Now.

“Wait, wait, wait. Rands. Listen. They need this spec tomorrow @ 9am…”

Shush. Quiet. Go write. Just a paragraph. Now.

Welcome to Trickle Theory.

Our Villain

My traditional first move when managing impossible tasks is to put the task on a to-do list.

“There! It’s on the list. AaAaaaaaah… didn’t that feel good? It’s on the to-do list, which must mean it will be done at some point, right?” Wrong. Putting the task on the to-do list does one thing: it avoids The Critic.

Every story needs a villain and in this piece our villain is The Critic. This is your internal voice which does careful and critical analysis of your life and he’s gained a powerful place in your head because he’s saved your butt more than once.

He’s the one who told you that offer from the start-up smelled too good to be true. You remember that company, right? The one that simply vanished three months after you declined that stunning offer letter. It was The Critic who said, “How in the world can they afford to give anyone this type of offer when I don’t even understand their business model?”

The Critic was the one who calmed you inner nerd and convinced you to not buy HDTV three years ago and he told you not to trust that fast talking engineering manager who emphatically guaranteed his team would be done on schedule. The Critic said, “People who talk fast are moving quickly to cover up the gaps in their knowledge.”

The Critic was right. The Critic gained credibility, but for this piece, he’s still the villain.

I know it feels great to get that impossible task on the to-do list. I know it feels like you actually did something, but what you’ve done is avoid conflict. You know that if you start considering the impossible task, The Critic is going to chime in with his booming voice of practicality, “RANDS, what are you THINKING? NO ONE ADDS FEATURES TWO WEEKS BEFORE A SHIP DATE!”

“Ok, alright, you’re right, but the boss wants it and when the boss gets something in his head it takes a lot of work to blah blah blah…” Now, you’re justifying, you’re worrying, and you’re arguing with The Critic when what you should be doing is starting.

Nothing Happens Until You Start

Let’s first break down impossibleness. For the sake of this article, there are two types of impossible tasks. First, there are impossibly dull tasks. This is work which requires no mental effort, but is vast in size. Bug scrubbing is a great example of this. At the other end of the spectrum are impossibly hard tasks. These are tasks like, “Hey Rands, we need a new product by Christmas. Yes, I know it’s October. Ready. Go!”

Oddly, attacking both boring and hard tasks involve the same mental kung-fu where your first move is starting.

Such silly, trivial advice… start. Still, take a moment and examine your mental to-do list or just look at your written one. How many terribly important tasks have been there more than a month? More than a year? Embarrassing, huh? It’s not that they’re not important; it’s just that you didn’t begin and you didn’t begin because the moment you think about starting, The Critic weighs in, “How will even start? You’ll never finish! You don’ t even know where to start.”

Begin. Go read the first bug. Don’t think about how many are left. Go to the next one and watch what happens. In just a few minutes, you’ll have made something resembling progress. Two more bugs and it’ll start to feel like momentum. Progress + momentum = confidence. The moment you see yourself tackle the smallest part of the impossible task, the quieter The Critic becomes because you’re slowly proving him wrong.

Iterate

The second piece of advice is simpler than the first, which is hard to imagine. Iterate. Once you’ve kicked yourself out of stop, iterate becomes a little easier, but if you’re truly tackling an impossible task, The Critic simply isn’t going to shut up.

“Wow, you’ve closed five bugs… Only 532 more to go, sport!”

Iteration and repetition aren’t going to silence The Critic. Progress will. A beautiful thing happens when you point your brain at an impossible task. Once you’ve begun and start chewing on whatever the task is, you’ll start to see inefficiencies and begin to fine-tune your process. This is how an engineer who tells you, “It’s going to take two weeks to write that code” comes back after the weekend and says, “It’s done”. He honestly believed that it was a two week task, but as soon as he started chewing on the problem, he realized he’d written similar code a year ago, which, with a half a Saturday of tweaking, provided the same functionality.

The same applies to small, duller impossible tasks. Above where I estimated it’d take 5 minutes of triage for each bug, I didn’t take into consideration that after about 50 bugs, I was going to be really good at scrubbing bugs. I’d start to identify people who generally wrote good bugs versus those who didn’t have a clue. I’d learn the problematic areas of the product and learn where I could make snap judgments regarding bug viability. What was a five-minute triage window for the first 50 bugs was one minute for the next 50 and that turned into an average of 15 seconds per bug for the second hundred when I really got rolling.

This means that my original estimate of needing 45 hours for bug scrubbage turned out to be roughly 7 hours. What I thought would take a week is actually going to take one solid day.

Do not believe that this gives you the authority to slice every single estimate by 5. Turns out that impossible tasks, upon consideration, actually are terrifically hard. Believe this; an individual tends to be very bad at work estimates until they’ve begun the work.

Mix-it-Up

Crap. You’ve been saddled with an impossible task and after a weekend of no sleep you have confirmed, yes, the task is impossible. In fact, you’ve started, you’ve iterated, and you still have no clue how to actually complete the task. Story time.

This spring I had a crew come up to clear some brush on the property. Now, the property is a pleasant combination of oaks, bays, and redwoods, but much of it had become overgrown and inaccessible. My first thought when I moved in was, “Hell yes, I’ve got clearing mojo!” My thought after one weekend of clearing, when I was partially successful at clearing up 50 square feet of 5 ACRES OF FOREST was, “Impossibly boring”.

This attitude gave me a unique curiosity when the crew of three men showed up, chain-saws in hand, to clear the land. They had no issue starting and they clearly had the iteration thing down, but they also demonstrated the last and most component to Trickle Theory: mix-it-up.

It went like this: one guy would cut and drag brush into the fire, another would cut trees down, and the third would trim fallen trees. This went on for a while and then they’d all switch. Now, drag guy was cut guy, cut guy was hauling wood guy and trim guy was stack guy. During lunch, I sat down and asked, “When do you guys switch jobs?”

“When we’re bored.”

Beautiful, beautiful Trickle Theory. How cool is this? If you’re working on an impossibly hard or impossibly dull task and you find yourself mentally blocked by boredom or confusion, stop and do something else. The benefits of stopping are stunning.

First, stopping smacks The Critic squarely across the face. See, he’s also the voice in your head saying, “Uh, if we don’t work hard on this, we’re screwed”. And the longer you sit there grinding out the impossible task when you don’t want to, the louder he gets.

Second, stopping to do something else is fun for you and your brain. It breaks the cycle of whatever tasks you’re doing and points your grey matter at a whole new problem and your brain loves new, it consumes new with vim and vigor, and that puts spring in your proverbial mental step.

Third, and most important, even though you are stopping, your brain is bright enough to keep background processing the impossible task. This is why we find so much inspiration in the shower; you’re stopping and letting your brain wander, and your brain is smart. Your brain knows how important it is to rewrite that feature in two days and your brain is always working on that feature whether you know it or not.

“Wait, wait, wait. Rands, let me get this straight. Your suggestion when I’ve got a looming impossible deadline is to stop working on my deliverables?”

What I’m saying is, when you’re facing an uphill mental battle with yourself regarding the impossible task, it’s time to choose another battle… that isn’t a battle.

Entropy Always Wins

My life appears to be an endless series of tasks which are geared to slightly tidy up my world. Viewed as a whole these tasks represent a lot of work. Viewed against the actual amount of entropy in play in my small part of the world, these tasks represent a futile effort.

Fact is, your world is changing faster than you’ll ever be able to keep up with and you can view that fact from two different perspectives:

1) I believe I can control my world and through an aggressive campaign of task management, personal goals, and a CAN DO attitude, I will succeed in doing the impossible. Go me!

-or-

2) I know there is no controlling the world, but I will fluidly surf the entropy by constantly changing myself.

Surfing entropy takes confidence. This isn’t Tony Robbins confidence, this is a personal confidence you earn by constantly adapting yourself to the impossible.

Russian History

“Rands, I’ve got the idea. I’m serious. It’s going to be big and I’ve got my three MBA buddies lining up seed financing. Seriously big idea here, Rands. And I need a favor.”

Uh oh.

“I need a Free Electron.”

There is a list of the six confirmed Free Electrons that I know. Every six months I rewrite this list on a small yellow sticky to remind myself who these people are while also thinking if there are any new additions to the list. When I’m done, I fold the sticky into a small yellow square and swallow it.

There’s no way I’m coughing up my Free Electron list. I’m saving those six names for the day when The Great Idea finally shows up and I start dialing for Electrons.

Sorry.

I will make it up to you by describing two other essential oddly-named hires you need to make whether you’re at a start-up or a big company and we’ll start with:

The Russian Lit Major

This is a strange hire because one of the defining characteristics of the Russian Lit Major is that they simply aren’t that technical. They aren’t going to write code and when they first show up, your engineers aren’t going to trust them. Still, they are in engineering and they serve an essential function. They translate.

The Russian Lit Major should have been a computer science major, but they got off track. I don’t know how or why, but Russian Lit looked appealing to them as they were slogging it through college. They own a computer and they can do some wondrous things with that computer, but they can also speak Russian and read Tolstoy, which are two things you’re never, ever going to do.

When the Russian Lit Major got out college, they quickly discovered that the market for Russian Lit Major skills were, well, non-existent. They remembered, hey, I’ve got a computer and I’m not scared of it, so maybe there is a gig for me in high tech? I hear the money’s good.

Somehow, who knows how, they got hired in a big high tech company and they cut their teeth. Localization, technical publications, who knows… some Russian Lit Major-friendly portion of a large company where the Russian Lit Major remembers, “Shit, I should have been a computer science major” where it’s clear engineering is the place to be.

This first gig defines two things for your Russian Lit Major. They learn how a high tech company functions and they begin their professional struggle towards software development. It takes years and it probably never happens the same way, but the Russian Lit Major lands in an engineering group. Maybe it’s as program manager position or perhaps it’s a product manager, but they make it to engineering… where no one trusts them.

Trust them. See, in the struggle to get from wherever they started to their eventual engineering gig, the Russian Lit Major networked with a good portion of the company. They learned how different groups worked and they learned how to speak a variety of organizational dialects. Whether they eventually land in an engineering group inside their first company or at your start-up, an experienced Russian Lit Major has developed a complex communication toolkit to relate to the rest of an organization and that’s what your engineering team desperately needs.

If you’re in a start-up, you need them because, very soon you won’t be able to figure out everything by walking the hallway. There are too many people. If you’re in a big company, you need them for the same reason; there is simply not enough time in the day to regularly take the pulse of the company and that is what your Russian Lit Major is going to do. They’re going to make sure that whatever relevant shenanigans are going on outside of your team are going to cross your table. They’re going to eliminate surprises and they’re going to do this the best when they know that they are an essential part of the team.

Your team is not going to trust your Russian Lit Major because in their engineering world, if they don’t write code, they don’t create anything. Therefore, they are a waste of resources which could be better spent buying them a 30” flat panel. Your job, as the engineering manager, is to drill into their head there is exactly one currency in a company and that’s information. They won’t believe you. They think they fact they made file searching in the application 27% faster is a major corporate development and while I’m happy file searching is faster, I’m more interested in whether or not my Sr. VP is going to kill the whole project.

Cruise Director or perhaps Spy is a better name for the Russian Lit Major, but those terms are pejorative. They ignore one simple fact: it’s not that your Russian Lit Major speaks Russian or is even Russian Lit Major. The point is that in their quest to get into engineering, they’ve developed vision. They’ve seen aspects of the organization that you’ll never see and that gives them a uniquely valuable perspective on how to get stuff done.

The Historian

The other essential hire is easier to explain because they are an engineer, but they’re harder to hire because you’re not going to know they’re a Historian until a couple years after the hire. Story time.

We were in the scheduling phase of the third major release of the web application at the start-up and I was lying like a fiend. Now, I didn’t know I was lying because I was passionately waving my hands in front of everyone telling them that, yes, we could hit June. It was only four months away, but we only had two features and the team was 25% bigger, so this is GOING TO BE NO PROBLEM PEOPLE. CHAaaaaaaARRRGE!

Phil in the front row raised his hand and I deflated because I knew whatever Phil was going to say was going to totally derail my impassioned plea.

“Rands, we’ve never done a release in less than six months. Furthermore, with each new customer, the team is doing additional support work that we’ve never integrated into the schedule. Lastly, we’ve got an additional new product that no one is talking about that is going to dominate at least two engineers’ time.”

Phil is a total buzz kill.

No, Phil is a Historian. He never forgets a damned thing.

As a manager, when you’re standing in front of your co-workers, waving your hands, and possibly lying, there are two types of folks in the audience. Those who will let you lie and those who will raise their hands and explain how you are lying. More often that not, that’s your Historian.

That is the basic essential function of your Historian. They have deep organizational memory. When everyone is panicking because the boss says we’ve GOT TO SHIP in three weeks, the Historian looks at the bug database, counts the open bugs, estimates the incoming bug rate, scribbles on his white board and thinks, “We’ll be shipping in six because, historically, this is how many bugs we fix a week and that is how many are still going to be found. Hasn’t changed in four years. End of story.”

A good manager doesn’t actually lie, but often when we get our lips flapping about some important strategic direction, we forget about basic organizational physics. This is when a good Historian chimes in, not with the intent of being contrary; but because they are the conscience of the organization.

When you’re thinking Historian, I want you to think jwz of Netscape fame. He remains one of the defining Historians for me not only because he took the time to write down what was fucked up at Netscape, but he also clearly cared about the health and well being of the “idea” which, through his influence, became Mozilla. To me, that’s the definition of a great Historian. Someone who knows when it’s time to stop boring you with facts and starting reinventing the future.

Yes, Historians can be squeaky and aren’t always right. They’re going to annoy you with their inconvenient truths, but they’re simply trying to keep you honest.

Now Hiring

You don’t actually hire either of these folks. As I said above, Russian Lit Majors are likely to show up as a program management function and who knows whether they even let you interview those types. In any event, once you’ve correctly identified a Russian Lit Major, your job is to bring them as close to the organization as possible. You do this by explaining to all those engineers who say, “Uh, she doesn’t code… why should I listen to her?” that “You should listen to her because she knows more about this company than I do”.

You don’t hire Historians, either. You hire great engineers who, after a year of silence, raise their hand during that all-hands when you’re lost in the passion weeds and say, “Rands, you said this a year ago. What’s changed since then?”

“Uh. I did? Really? How’d it sound back then?”

Joe

Actual conversation.

DSL has been off for over 12 hours and that’s about my limit. There’s only so long I can do without a fresh set of bits, so I break down and do my third least favorite thing to do… call customer support.

Customer support frustrates me because of the well-designed ability to do nothing. This is intentional. The support process is designed to filter out the idiots which means if you want to actually find a living breathing human being, you must subject yourself to a series of idiot tests. This is why I reserve customer support excursions for dire situations. No DSL for half a day is dire. Let’s go.

My first ten minutes on the phone are spent in admiration for how far voice recognition has come. First off, it’s working 95% of the time, which is significant. I’ve been making fun of voice recognition for the better part of a decade, so seeing it applied in a real-time business situation is cool. Also, my DSL provider has done something smart with the recordings which guide me along. The recordings use common language… sometimes slang. For example:

VOICE ON PHONE: If you’re looking for information about new DSL service, say “New”. If you’re having problems with your existing DSL line, say “Problem”.

ME: Problem.

VOICE ON PHONE: Got it.

Got it? That’s slick. This use of relaxed language gives me the impression I’m dealing with less of a corporate monolith, but we’re just getting started.

My call proceeds via the automated customer support center and I figure out there’s an outage in Sacramento that “could” apply to me. Problem is, Sacramento is 100+ miles away from Randsville and that’s far enough for me to push a little harder, so I do it… I say, “Operator”.

Here’s the transcript:

REAL VOICE ON PHONE: “Hi, thank you for calling SBC. My name is [pause] Joe. How many I help you?”

Now, I’m always terribly nice to customer support folks. Even though I’ve just spent 30 minutes jumping through idiot hoops to get to them. They’re just doing their job and being kind sometimes helps.

ME: “Joe, hi. My DSL has been offline for 12 hours now and I’d like to get some information about when I might get my DSL back.”

JOE: Let me first start by apologizing on behalf of SBC for this inconvenience. Can I have your DSL account number please?

Joe’s laying it a bit thick, but ok. Whatever.

ME: Sure, it’s ###-#####.

JOE: Thank you. Sir, if may ask, what is your name?

ME: It’s Rands Pantalones.

JOE: Thank you. Sir, if I may ask, may I call you by my first name?

Ok, what the hell? Now, you should’ve guessed this is clearly outsourced customer support. No big news there. It’s also pretty clear that “Joe” is reading from a series of carefully scripted cue cards. Even if his delivery wasn’t so stilted, the content of the questions just scream FOCUS GROUP DERIVED FEEL GOOD CONVERSATION TECHNIQUES. Let’s move on.

We continue. He tells me what I already heard from the automated customer service. There’s an outage, but it’s over 100 miles away and I want to make sure I’m a part of that 100-mile radius, so I push Joe a bit.

ME: Joe, Sacramento is far away. Can you confirm that my outage and the Sacramento outage are the same thing?

JOE: [long pause] Rands, let me again apologize on behalf of SBC for this inconvenience. A moment please. [another long pause] Rands, do you like sports?

RIGHT OK NOW YOU’VE BLOWN IT JOE.

I realize the cue card says, “Choose from one of the following MAKE A CONNECTION WITH THE CUSTOMER questions”, but I’m becoming more comfortable with the thought of dealing with the voice recognition system rather than Joe. It’s not that I believe Joe isn’t a decent human being… he’s just on the other side of the planet and I don’t know shit about cricket and he knows less about ice hockey, so why are we doing this dance?

My discomfort with the Joe experience would be good segue into an incensed rant into the evils of outsourcing, but I don’t want to go there. I’m happy Joe has a job and I’m sorry about whoever lost their job back in the States, but I have one piece of advice for both of you.

Cogs get outsourced.

Key Exports

Last month, I spent an hour explaining to the dean of a local college what kind of curriculum he should be schlepping to the local Silicon Valley kids. His first question was, “What is your hardest technical question?”

Before I answer, a brief aside. Yes, I’ve lost some sleep worrying about the perception that high tech jobs are being shipping over seas. More importantly, I’ve fretted that declining enrollments in computer science programs are direct result of this outsourcing. A decrease in the programming population in the US of A would mean it’d be harder for me to hire a fresh out of college guy/gal to beat up for a few years, but I’ve got some really good news for you.

The next generation already knows more about computers than you do and they haven’t even made it to college yet.

The current generation never knew a home without a computer. They assume they have ready access to just about any piece of information… and they’re probably working on their own Linux distribution right now. As a means of shaping your brain for critical thinking, I’m going to give college two thumbs up. As a requirement for doing great work in the software development industry, I’m going to give a college degree a long “Hmmmmmmm” while I slowly stroke my goatee.

Back to the question, “What is the Rands’ hardest technical question?”

ME: “I don’t ask technical questions.”

Listen, if you’re sitting in my office for an interview, I am assuming you’ve got technical chops. We wouldn’t have let you in the door unless we could figure out from looking at your resume that you had the technical skills to do the job. Doesn’t matter if you’re a college hire or Mr. Lord of the Database. I’m not vetting you for technical ability, I’m vetting you for the breadth of your vision, I measuring your ambition, and I’m looking for a sign that you believe you can change the world. Really. If all you want to be is a cog in the machine, quietly hiding in the 27th floor of the Behemoth Corporation, Inc., well, that’s great, but here’s the deal: cogs get outsourced.

As I’ve already discussed, jobs that can be “well specified” are being shipped offshore. High tech moved manufacturing offshore a long time ago and now we’re in the midst of pushing technical and customer support there. These are jobs which can be described with a flowchart, a specification, a means by which the job can be performed in a reliable and measurable way.

Think about Joe’s job. He’s spending his day following a well-defined routine. These are the calls and this is the flowchart. Joe has a daily metric. Joe, you are successful if you resolve 27 calls per day. More is good. Less is bad. The definition of this metric is why SBC is ok with outsourcing their customer support overseas. They did the math. 27 calls a day in the US is $50.00 and 27 calls overseas is $30.00. Multiply that by 27 million calls they do a year and you’re talking serious bank.

Joe is happy he’s got a gig and so am I, but just because his country provides a better dollar per call ratio doesn’t mean he’s got a guaranteed gig. Watch, two years from now Fezlakistan will burst onto the outsourcing stage and guess how long it’ll take your corporate behemoths to do math and start shipping their cogs there. Sorry, Joe. Keep reading. I can help.

Interfacing with Humans Pays Big Bucks

Well-defined QA and engineering is right on the tail of manufacturing and that’s A-OK with me because nothing that I’ve done in just under two decades of software development has been well-defined.

Seriously. I’m coming up on almost 15 years straight of non-stop development, crunch cycles, and fire drills. I work hard on improving process and quality, but it’s hard to write a good spec when the VP of Engineering is telling you that if we don’t get Customer X that feature, well, 150 people lose their job. So, make the call, don’t sleep for two days to get the product out or write a spec that is going to make QA and Documentation’s job easier?

The process weenies out there are now standing at their desks viciously shaking their finger at the screen as they read this. They are saying, “Rands, you just got lucky. You’ve just been fortunate enough to land at successful companies where these fly by the seat of your pants design shenanigans can exist because the cash is pouring in elsewhere.”

Really? Fifteen years, four companies, and six promotions later… you think I’m winging it? No, I just looking like I’m winging it because I never stop moving.

Seriously, I do not specialize in hardened software that keeps submarines pointed in the right direction. I work on software where the primary user is you, the person who stares at the bleeding edge and thinks, “What’s next?” Predicting this future is a messy business. There is a distinct lack of flowcharts. Practically zero spreadsheets. People argue a lot, but they’re arguing because the best way to refine an idea is to throw it in a mosh pit of creative people, wait, and then see what emerges.

Jobs in this crazy design arena, so far, are safe simply because:

• You can’t outsource creativity.
• You can’t outsource thinking.
• You can’t outsource passion.

Our Peculiar Accent

The number of people needed to create a viable product is decreasing. We need fewer folks who make widgets and more folks who are staring at the entire widget landscape and wondering, “I wonder what happens when I put Widget X near Widget Y… Hmmmmm… I think I’ll call it Flickr.”

I’m not suggesting that it takes any less hard work or collection of bright college brains to get these ideas off the ground, but I do know that within the circles I travel, there is a distinct optimism regarding ideas. Folks believe they can do anything. I love to think this sense of entrepreneurial spirit is an American asset, but that’s absurd.

If we have to outsource something, let’s work on outsourcing that. Let’s show the rest of the planet the excitement Borland felt when it started to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft. Let’s demonstrate the enthusiasm a bunch of midwest college kids felt when they realized this browser thing they wrote was changing the world.

If we have anything to share with the rest of the planet, it’s our own peculiar entrepreneurial accent.

WWDC and SXSW

Two days later and the WWDC hangover is just about gone. I’d like to say the hangover was primarily booze-related, but it was a stress hangover. We had some big things to pitch this year and getting that pitch refined took some work. That is an understatement.

Thanks to everyone who dropped by to say “Howdy” and “We get it”. I appreciated that.

Next on the Rands public speaking schedule is, hopefully, a return to SXSW. The folks at SXSW are taking a different approach with developing content by asking former presenters and panelists to submit ideas and then have the community vote on those ideas.

I’ve got a proposed session under review called “The Design Aesthetic of the Indy Developer” and you should vote for it here:

http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/panel_picker/

The description: “This panel intends to explore the product lifecycle (or lack thereof) within very small software development shops. The goal is to explore the experiences of successful small developers and discuss the design process. Panelists will represent significantly different platforms and technologies to give a broad set of (hopefully) differing opinions.”

Like last year, I’ll be gathering a pile of notable panelists from differing backgrounds to have it out on stage for everyone else’s entertainment.

Lots of good potential panels on the SXSW2007 docket, check it out…

Still Back from Europe

The week before WWDC is a good time to remember that it won’t always be like this.

Take a deep breath and…

A Nerd in a Cave

The first few days of any significant overseas trip, I’m a jerk. It’s not just the jetlag that’s poisoning my attitude; it’s the lack of context. I get twitchy when I don’t know where my stuff is. Combine that with the fact that no one is speaking English, there are two toilets in the bathroom, and I have no idea what time it is and you can begin to understand why I’m in such a foul mood.

Three days in, I’m sleeping, I know it’s called a bidet, and I’m working hard on my Italian R and U sounds. I’m having fun, but I’m still thinking about my lack of context. I’m thinking about the familiar place I’ve built so that I can work.

The Cave

The picture on the About page is my Cave. It came as part of the new house. I didn’t paint the walls blood red, they came that way. Most folks who get the tour walk into The Cave and gasp at the walls. “They’re so dark how can think surrounded by this ominous redness?” I nod and grin slightly and shuffle them off to the next room. See, I love my Cave. The thick blood red walls wrap me in comfort and that is what a Cave does.

My Cave is my intellectual home. My kitchen is where I eat, my bed is where I sleep, and my Cave is where I think. Everyone has some sort of Cave; just follow them around their house. It might be a garage full of tools or a kitchen full of cookware, but there is a Cave stashed somewhere in the house.

The nerd Cave has some specific traits:

• A computer on a desk with ready access to the Internet. The fact that a computer without an Internet connection is essentially a very expensive DVD player is a recent development, but the fact is, when I sit down at my MacBook and there is no wireless I think, “Well, I could play Bejeweled, right?” In The Cave, the Internet is the life blood. It connects this dark place with the rest of the world.
• World-canceling features such as a door or noise-reducing headphones. These features are a nuisance to significant others interested in communication, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
• A random collection of comforting nerd knick knacks. This varies wildly from nerd to nerd, but there is always at least one object or talisman of nerd-dom sitting in the Cave. I have this white carved stone polar bear staring at me right now. I think I got it for Christmas. It’s been staring at me for ten years now and each time I sit down in the Cave, I worry that if the polar bear wasn’t there… I wouldn’t be able to write.
• Something to drink. This may be my thing, but I can’t really settle into The Cave without something liquid. Right now, it’s a cup of homebrew by Peet’s. In the afternoon, it’s a glass of water. In the evening, it might be wine or a beer. For me, the drink is a mental pause where I intensely scrutinize the last 30 seconds. What did I just write? What am I trying to say? [sip] Ok, back to work.
• A well-defined layout. This ties into my NADD, but I have deep knowledge of the layout of my Cave. Each month, the housecleaners come for a tidying of the house and each month I walk into my office when they are done and spend 30 minutes adjusting my monitors, relocating my pens, and re-piling my papers. I think it’s great that someone is coming to clean the house, but I wish they’d STOP TOUCHING MY STUFF.
• A view. Like the drink, the view is a mental break, an escape to somewhere else that provides a brief alteration to perspective. This is why everyone in the office wants a window. It’s not a status symbol, it’s an escape. I’ve seen nerds without a view go to great lengths to create one. My manager at UCSC built a working window frame in his subterranean office and put posters from around the world behind it. When I left UCSC, he had a poster of Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

It’s an ominous name: Cave. It alludes to a dark, damp place where you are likely to be eaten by a grue. The irony is that the purpose of a Cave is not to insulate, its purpose is to germinate. I’ll explain.

The Zone

Each weekend morning, my process is this: I wake up, walk up stairs, sit down at the computer, and figure out what is happening on the planet. Once I’m comfortable the sky is not falling, I walk to the kitchen, grind my coffee beans, and begin to boil water. While the water is heating up, I return to my computer and follow up on whatever tidbits tickled my fancy from my first pass. This morning, it was some World Cup research followed by looking into options around wireless headphones. Turns out, Sony sucks. Go figure. Water’s boiling! Back to the kitchen, where I pour hot water into my French press and dig up my favorite ceramic cup. The coffee needs to sit for three minutes, which means back to the computer! Ok, so why do Sony headphones suck? Poor sound quality? Bad design? Bit of both, really. Coffee’s ready, so one more trip to the kitchen where I pour the steaming brew into my favorite cup and travel, once more, to my Cave.

It looks like a lot of work, but I do it instinctively . It’s a routine designed to do one thing — get me into The Zone. Much has been written elsewhere about the mental state that is The Zone, but I will say this: it is a deeply creative space where inspiration is built. Anything which you perceive as beautiful, useful, or fun comes from someone stumbling through The Zone.

Once I’ve successfully traversed my morning routine and have entered The Zone, I am OFF LIMITS. I mean it. Intruding into The Cave and disrupting The Zone is no different than standing up in the middle of the first ever showing of The Empire Strikes Back, jumping up and down, and yelling, “DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER! DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER!” Not only are you ruining the mood, you’re killing a major creative work. Think about that the next time you enter The Cave with a useless question about what shoes you should wear.

No, I’m not going to answer the phone. In fact, it’s a sure sign of compromised Cave design if I can even hear the phone ring. And no, I don’t hear you when you walk in and ask if we should go to the park tomorrow. I don’t hear you the second time, either. I don’t mean I’m ignoring you because that’d involve using precious brain cycles I need for The Zone… I really CAN’T hear you. That’s how deep I am in The Zone.

No , I have no idea that it’s been four hours since I closed the door and began furiously typing. Really, the only things I know are: a) when my coffee cup is empty, and b) when I need to head to the bathroom.

Yes. When you successfully penetrate The Zone, there is a chance I’ll be an asshole. In fact, I might snap.

The Snap

This is where I apologize.

No one deserves to be on the receiving end of The Snap. All you were really doing was coming in to see when I was done because we agreed we’d go surfing this afternoon. Still, I got in The Zone and I’m writing this wicked article and WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU WANT? The Snap is a glare, a raised voice… something designed to indicate you are PISSING ME OFF with your presence.

It’s not fair, I realize that, but think of it like this. If you walk up to me and slap me across the face, I’m not going to think, “Why’d you do that?” I’m not going to take the time to dissect the situation. My instinct is going to be pure, primal, and immediate. I’m going to slap you back.

The reason for this irrational reaction is antiquated brain wiring. Four million years ago it was to my evolutionary advantage to respond to slaps as quickly as possible because they were often precursors to being eaten. Rather than piping my slap response through the “What is a Reasonable Response?” portion of my brain, it’s wired straight into my “React Immediately or Else” area. Somehow, The Snap response has the same wiring. Invasion of The Zone is akin to some primal activity that required the brain to wire itself for immediate, irrational response.

It’s not right, it’s not socially acceptable, and I regret my actions 30 seconds later, but in 20 years of nerdery, the quest hasn’t been to kill The Snap, but figure out how to manage it.

The Place

Try as I might, I don’t always make it to The Zone. I’ll go through all my odd little pre-Zone activities of drink and music selection. I’ll slightly adjust the five essential objects on my desk and I’ll begin… playing World of Warcraft.

This is not The Zone… this is The Place. It is very similar to The Zone in appearance, but, mentally, it’s a different muscle that I’m exercising. If The Zone is akin to playing power forward in a championship hockey game, The Place is the six hours spent in the weight room the day before. Yes, I’m using my mental muscles, but I’m not really building anything.

The rule is this: your significant other can interrupt The Place with impunity. That’s the rule. I might Snap, but if you let me linger in The Place like you should let me work in The Zone, you’ll never see me. If you walk into my office to ask me something and see a half-naked night elf dancing on my screen, you are hereby authorized to invade. Mistakes will happen and you’ll invade The Zone thinking it’s The Place, but after I’ve cooled down, it’s my responsibility to explain why what looks like The Place is actually The Zone.

Other Places

Nerds are rewarded for structure. We get big bucks for reliably generating useful technology that works. Sure, we’re artists, but it’s an art of patterns, repetition, structure, and efficiency (I swear, it’s sexy). This makes it not surprising that the places we create in our homes and in our minds are designed in the same fashion.

The risk with these places is the same risk with all comfortable places. In the comfort, we forget that some of the most interesting stuff happens elsewhere.

The Forums

Some of my earliest memories of hanging with the Dad were visits to the local hardware story, Orchard Supply Hardware. I remember two things. First, the distinctive smell, which I learned, years later, is the stench of fertilizer. Second, the huge amount of time it actually took to get to the register, which was near my primary target, the candy.

The Dad was smart. He knew I’d come because he’d always buy me a treat, but at came with a cost. The Dad was physically incapable of spending less than an hour in Orchard Supply and WE WERE THERE FOR A BOX OF NAILS. He had to soak in the place, wander each aisle, muttering to himself… it drove me nuts. By the time I was a teenager, I was a tremendous jerk, hated my parents, and swore to never go to a hardware store again. THERE’S CANDY ELSEWHERE, POP.

During the carefree apartment rental years, I avoided hardware stores by purchasing the inevitable hammer at the local grocery store. My hardware policy changed the moment I bought a house, when WHAM I needed a wheelbarrow, and it turns out they don’t sell wheelbarrows at Safeway. It was time to return to Orchard Supply.

The place smelled the same. All fertilizery. Same folks wandering around in their forest green vests trying to look helpful. Same horrible fluorescent lighting. I wondered if they candy selection has improved in the past decade? Hey, what’s this? A tool chest. I need a tool chest. Wait, this vice grip rocks. I could totally fix my kitchen with this thing. And that reminds me… I’ve got that loose tile… Where is the tile glue? I NEED A HELPFUL GREEN VEST STAT!

The cliche about hardware stores and people over thirty is this: it’s a toy store. We go there to buy crap that looks cool, but that we don’t really need. Wrong. My Dad was not wandering Orchard Supply looking for crap; my Dad was looking for ideas. That’s what a great tool does: it inspires you to build.

Rands in Repose Forums

I’ve been noodling the idea of Forums for Rands in Repose for over a year. Some of the most interesting articles on the site have little to with my reposings and everything to do with people taking the time to comment on my original thought. Forums seem like a natural way to encourage the growing Rands in Repose community to interact, but the problem has always been — the tools suck.

Over the past few years, I’ve installed and toyed with both PunBB and vBulletin on my server. Each time I thought, “You know, all I need to do is announce this to the public and we can start this experiment.” Folks will show up and, if past comments are any indication, they’ll have something to say. Problem is, forum or discussion board software just looks boxy and rigid and I’m messy. I live my life in my inbox and my inbox is an insatiable growing beast. Sure, I like to give myself the impression that I’ve tamed the beast with mail rules and filters, but the fact is, I’ve got 5000+ unread message in my inbox that I’m never going to read.

Still, that is how I think about conversations. Not in structured discussion groups, but in a firehose of a queue that I can slice, dice, tag, filter, sort, and whatever other verb makes my info_surfing easier.

Enter Lussumo’s Vanilla forum software. I found this software July of last year, and, like any great tool, I instantly thought, “Yeah, I can build something with this”. It’s not the prettiest software out there; it doesn’t have the most features, but what it does have is instant software sex appeal. When you first look at it, you don’t think, “Golly, which discussion group should I search?”, you see everything that folks are talking about right this second. What Lussumo gets that others do not is that I’m not interested in building a discussion forum, I’m building a community. The success of piece of social software is an easy measure — how long does it take one person to find people they should talk with?

Jump Starting the Forums

The forums are an experiment and by experiment I do mean, “I’m going to keep tweaking it, throwing stuff at it, and then we’ll either call the experiment a success or a failure”.

- You can browse the public forums without an account, but to post, as well as access all the forums… including access to the slush pile of articles that didn’t quite make it to the front page… you’ve got to create an account. I realize this hoop will decrease the number of folks who sign up and I’m “OK” with that fact.
- I’m new to the whole forum thing, so I’d definitely appreciate constructive criticism, feature requests, and whatever other members think would improve the experience.

Let’s begin…

Developer 2.0

Right this second, there are five books sitting on my desk. I’m not talking about the invisible books stacked up next to my monitor, I’m talking about the books I want you to see the second you walk in my office. They change over time, but right now they are:

• The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture
• Post Secret
• Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works
• Antoni Gaudi
• Universal Principles of Design

My degree is in Computer and Information Science. I spent four years grinding on the basics of developing software, yet, strangely, there are no programming books on my desk I do have these books, stuffed on nearby bookshelves, but these are not the books I pick up when I have five random minutes. I pick up the architecture book and read the blurb about the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London. It describes a subway station design with a high degree of visual transparency between floors which means there is very little need for supplementary signage.

I spend the rest of the day staring at signs and absorbing the irony that while signs are trying to make my life easier; they exist because of basic deficiencies in design.

Yes, I’m a wannabe designer. It started four years ago when I opened my first iPod and read the following:

“Designed by Apple in California.”

This is not marketing; this is advice.

Designers Need Developers to Make Their Products

I listed the top three themes from SXSW a couple months back, but the entry did not capture the holy shit I took from Austin. SXSW is a gathering of music, movie, and interactive enthusiasts. On the plane to Texas, the game of figuring out which person belonged to the different aspects of the conference began… Yeah, the music folks look like music folks… edgy… arty. The movie folks dripped with glamour and intense LA energy. What about the interactive folks?

Wait, what does interactive actually mean? I still don’t know.

My impression is the interactive portion of SXSW is a mutated version of what used to be the multimedia portion of the conference. You remember this fad, right? When everyone got crazy about pouring all sorts of content onto CDs and Macromedia Director was king? Developers were scratching their collective heads during these times because no one was inviting them to multimedia conferences. Their thought, “They’re building software, right?”

Wrong. The multimedia types were thinking, “It’s bigger than software, MAN… We’re building complex interactive multimedia experiences. It’s not ones and zeros, MAN… it’s SOOOOOOUUUUUUL.”

Right. So, it’s software. Simply because creatives could hide from software engineers behind their authoring tools didn’t mean they weren’t developing software. It just meant they had a comfortable space to live in where they could design, not program.

Over the past few years, someone started inviting developers to SXSW. Designers discovered that whiz bang Web 2.0 technology heavily intersected with their domain, but they also found the tools were primal. There is no Director for developing web applications because everyone is still trying to figure this shit out.

Designers have two choices. Either dip their feet into the programming pool and learn this frontier technology, or figure out how to speak developer. This leads to part of the beauty of this year’s SXSW. Tables full of passionate designers and developers. Both parties buying each other drinks and silently staring across the table thinking, “Shit, I really need this guy, but I totally don’t speak his language.”

Which leads us to…

Developers Need Designers to Make Their Products Work

The third hire at the start-up was an interaction designer, Barney. When I arrived several months later, I thought, “Swell, someone to make pretty pictures of my product. That’ll sure make presentations easier because I suck at drawing.”

In our first design meeting, I was shocked when Barney was running the meeting and there wasn’t a pretty picture to be seen. He had these low-fidelity wireframe designs of the product that weren’t at all fun to to look at. After twenty minutes of staring at them, I realized they described how our product fit together.

Me: “Wait wait, wait, Barney, page two… Are you sure that’s how it’s supposed to work? That makes no sense to me.”

Barney: “Rands, you aren’t the customer. I’ll explain why.”

In the months before I arrived at the start-up, Barney had gotten into the the head of our target customers. He’d spent weeks onsite withpotential clients and he grilled them and he captured every nugget of truth about what they cared about. Three years later, Barney was long gone, and we were still flipping through his specifications… searching for inspiration.

Barney’s lesson was simple. Design for the customer. It doesn’t matter if it’s HTML, C, Python, or Ruby on Rails. Your job as a developer of software is to build software which works for human beings and there are conferences full of bright people who are well versed in cognitive psychology, usability, visual design principles, and art. The problem is you aren’t going to these conferences and soaking in their experience. It turns out that is a career limiting move for both of us.

You Can’t Offshore Art

There is a person sitting somewhere on the planet Earth who is capable of doing your job for a lot less money. I know what I said, jobs which lend themselves to a well defined process will be the first to go, but that will change. Each year that passes, more technology and infrastructure spreads across the globe and anyone with a computer and connection to the Internet has a chance to build the skills to develop software.

If someone figures out a useful way to integrate remote workers as a team, the Silicon Valley software developer has a problem. How do you compete with an equally skilled developer who is willing to do your job for half the cost? Do you know what the biggest expense is for a software development company? That’s right, it’s your salary. If I could figure out how to effectively engage a remote team, I could build a virtual team of developers that could be twice the size of my local team, but I won’t do that because I’m not hiring developers for my next start-up. I’m hiring designers.

When I’m building up the next development team, each of my hires will need to demonstrate they can talk maniacally about a slice of design. Maybe they’ll care deeply about color theory? Architecture? Interaction design? I don’t care, but they must be passionate about something other than writing fast, bug-free code because software is art. We don’t need another Microsoft Word, we need the next word processor and that’s going to come from a small group of people with a delicious interdisciplinary mix of design and development skills.

So, take a small leap. If you haven’t already, go buy this book. It’s full of bite-sized design ideas. Soak in it and prepare for your next job.

The Wet

All you needed to do this winter to figure out that we screwed up the planet is stare out the living room window. This here is day number four of snow that stuck up here at fourteen hundred feet in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

We get a smattering snow ever so often, but it was close to thirty years ago that we had anything which resembled close to a week of snow worthy weather.

When you follow the snow with close to forty days of rain, you can imagine the feeling when the back yard starts to look like this.

Happy Spring.

1.0

Max was a mess. We were on our third mojito at The Basin in Saratoga when it just came pouring out of him. The last 72 hours involved:

• Two days in Los Angeles babysitting a customer’s data center
• Four hours of sleep
• Two huge arguments with his wife on the cell phone
• A marathon conference call with his boss, which resulted in a new trip to Chicago in two days

The mojitos might’ve been talking, but it sounded like Max was sure that his wife was going to leave him; his company was about to crumble; and he was 12 hours and one plane flight from a nervous breakdown.

He said, “Shipping a 1.0 product isn’t going to kill you, but it will try”.

Understanding 1.0

In your career as a software developer, you’re going to be screwed at some point. I’ve got you covered there. Start here, keep thinking, don’t yell, treat those you work with decently, and you’ll be fine. It’s valuable experience, but it’s nothing compared to 1.0.

1.0 is developing the first version of a new product. It’s what all those start-ups are busily doing right now. They’re working on some 1.0 idea that’s good enough that a handful of bright people will forgo their lives in support of the chance of being right… SEE, we had a great idea… We’re bazillionaires and we were right.

Most of those start-ups fail.

Before Fucked Company, failing was a quiet, somber thing. The dot-com explosion made colossal flame-outs front page news and everyone discovered what most of us already knew.

Really. Most start-ups fail.

Why?

To understand the difficulty of 1.0, I need to give you a model for understanding how a 1.0 software product actually shows up. I’ve designed just such a model by heavily borrowing for a theory known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is worth talking about all by its lonesome.

Maslow’s theory contends that as humans meet their basic needs, they seek to satisfy successively higher needs that occupy a set hierarchy that looks like this:

At the bottom of the pyramid is the biggest area of need: physiological needs. These are the basics: food, drink, air, sleep, etc. The idea is that you won’t be able to focus on anything else in the hierarchy if these needs aren’t met. Think of it like this: who cares about falling in love if you can’t breathe?

Moving up the hierarchy, you have safety needs, love/belonging, esteem, and, finally, the oddly named self-actualization tip of the pyramid, which is our instinctual need to make the most of our unique abilities. Translation: writers write, singers sing.

There’s a fine entry in Wikipedia regarding Maslow’s Hierarchy if I’ve piqued your interest. Personally, as a manager of humans, I stare at the hierarchy when dealing with folks on the edge. The Hierarchy gives me insight into where exactly a person is stressing out. Are they in need of career advice? (Easy) Or do they need marriage advice? (Harder)

Rands 1.0 Hierarchy

In thinking about the difficulties of 1.0, I realized that Maslow’s model fundamentally applied to shipping the first version of a product. There’s a hierarchy that defines what you need to build in order to ship 1.0 and it sort’f looks like this.

Sidebar regarding Charts’n’Graphs: Phillippe Kahn, the founder of Borland, told a great story about statistics that I think equally applies to Charts’n’Graphs. The story is, “Did you know it’s a statistical fact that people with larger feet tend to be better spellers? [insert awe] It’s because people with bigger feet are older.”

Charts’n’Graphs paint the world in a clean, linear fashion that serves one purpose: support the message of the author. Do not trust Charts’n’Graphs, but don’t let that lack of trust blind you to the intent of the story.

Pitch

At the top of the hierarchy, there’s Your Great Idea. I’m calling it pitch because I’ve got this alliteration thing going on. You can’t get anywhere in building a product or a company without a phenomenal pitch. It doesn’t matter if you’re Mr. Charisma; you’ve got to have the idea because it defines the structure and constraints of everything below it. If you don’t have the idea, you don’t know who to hire, which is the second layer — people.

Before we talk about this second layer, let me first congratulate you. I’m tripping over myself happy that you’ve discovered the Next Big Thing, but there are some basic facts to pay attention to. The first is:

Fact #1: You’re in a hurry

You’re a fool if you think you have exclusive rights to your pitch. There are too many bright people staring at exactly the same infinite pile of evolving information to assume your innovation is original. The only thing that gives you this right is delivering 1.0 and first, you’re going to need some people.

People

With your pitch in hand, you’re going to find the people to build your idea. These are your founders. These are the folks who will not only build your 1.0, but, more importantly, your engineering culture. Their arrival presents a challenge and a twist to the pyramid.

Your first few hires walk into a blank slate. Sure, they’ve got you, the keeper of the Great Idea, with your pitch and endless enthusiasm, but they don’t know where to find the bathroom. More importantly, they’ve got to digest the pitch and start to build your 1.0.

The moment one of your founding engineers starts writing code he/she is making a decision about the eventual product. It the first of innumerable decisions which will be made and as the Keeper of the pitch, you’re probably going to try to stay involved, but simply can’t be there for every decision. What you should be focusing on is the pitch. Your job is to listen to people and continually refine the idea so much that it can guide when you’re not there to clarify. This leads us to our twist. The Rands 1.0 Hierarchy is much scarier than Maslow’s because it looks like this:

There’s a good reason why folks don’t build their pyramids like this — they fall over. The only way to keep them from falling over is to constantly push one side or the other. This is your start-up. This impractical concept with your pitch sitting at the bottom… defining everything above it. What will kill you about 1.0 will be how much time you’re going to trying to keep this pyramid balanced, which brings us back to the topic at hand, people.

Fact #1: No one is indispensable

Now, I’m a people person. This entire weblog is devoted to figuring out how to make sure folks get along and get stuff done, but we’re not talking about an established company here, we’re talking about 1.0 and the rules are different because you are an unknown quantity and everyone is expecting you to fail.

Ever built a fire? What do you need? A match, some paper, and some kindling wood that catches fire easily. Your first three hires are your kindling. Their job is not to define the product roadmap, their job is to get things moving, and if things aren’t moving, you need to get some more wood.

At my start-up, I was brought in as the first engineering manager. The Founders had brought on two Free Electrons with totally different temperaments. One was burning the midnight oil on getting a working prototype done. He was fully aware we’d throw the whole thing away, but he knew that the ability to see the idea in code would change everyone’s opinion of what we were doing. It would make the pitch real.

The other Electron also loved the pitch, but he was working on infrastructure for future products. HE WAS WHAT? Yes, we had no product and one of our key hires was already investing in the future. When is investing in the future a bad idea? How about when the now is not defined? The Free Electron was working under the assumption that 1.0 would be successful and while I appreciated his enthusiasm, let’s remember Fact #0: Start-ups almost always fail.

I spent some time with the Free Electron and, as it often goes with very bright people on a mission, it was clear he wasn’t going to be swayed, so I let him go. That day. One quick meeting with our VP and it was done.

If you’ve read my article about Free Electrons, you’ll know that you don’t run into these types of stunning engineers very often. Firing a Free Electron is pretty stupid for most companies because they have so much potential, but here’s the deal: you aren’t a company until 1.0 is done. A great way to topple your fledging pyramid is to hire folks who are not getting the product done with a sense of urgency. Get 1.0 done and then worry what’s next.

Process

There is no word that irks engineers more than process. Try it right now. Get everyone in your office and say something like, “I’ve defined a new process to assist our bug triage”. Watch their faces sag. They hear “busy work”. They think “management is trying to justify itself”.

This is not the word that defines the third level of the Hierarchy.

Fact #2: Process defines communication

Process is the means by which your team communicates. Whether this is via a wiki, email, or the hallway, any team larger than one needs to define a means to share information. This is not an argument for specifications, documentation, or a whiteboard filled with do’s and don’ts. You just need to agree how you’re going to share information.

When your second engineer decides, “Yes, I’m going to capture my design decisions in a wiki”. That’s process. When your third engineer starts tracking bugs on that huge whiteboard in the meeting room, that’s process. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t even have to be universally agreed upon on, it just has to be stuck in a place where every can see it.

SourceSafe was the repository of choice when I landed at my first start-up. Stop laughing. It did a fine job of with a team of six engineers who had zero time to worry about source control. Sure, it was slow as a hell and lost a days work here and there because of various hiccups, but we were working on 1.0 and who had time to think about something more reliable?

Roland did.

Roland was a junior engineer and he was a Perforce fan. Roland did what any good employee of a start-up would do. Over the course of a weekend, he set up a Perforce server, rewrote all of our build tools, and scheduled a 10am meeting on the following Monday, promising Krispy Kreme donuts. His message: “This is the way it is. Everything works better. Thank you and have a donut.”

In a weekend, Roland fixed a major flaw in our process (crappy tools) and also demonstrated another fact of the hierarchy.

Fact #3: Each layer shapes and moves those near it

A sure sign of a healthy pyramid is that one layer invades another. Think of each change to people, process, and pitch as a shove in one direction. This movement requires compensation in the other layers otherwise the whole thing falls over. Roland’s decision to change the engineering process pissed off some folks. We lost some time to some source management edge cases that Roland hadn’t thought of, but, within a week, we’d adjusted. Even the most vocal opponent of the change ended up in Roland’s office arguing about how we could make it better.

If, in your organization, your pyramid is not constantly adjusting to keep itself upright. Something’s wrong. If the new folks aren’t testing the pitch, they either don’t buy it or they don’t get it. If your engineers aren’t arguing about the way they develop software ALL THE TIME, they’re becoming stagnant and that trickles down to your pitch and trickles up to your product.

A great stagnation warning sign during 1.0 is when someone decides to create an organization chart defining “This is who does what”. Now, investors and outside parties need this org chart to get a sense of whether you’re real or not, but your 1.0 team does not. The whiteboard in the corner of the room, which lists who is doing what, is your org chart. The definition and hierarchy an org chart portrays is the first step in creating a culture of secrecy in your org. That might work for Apple, but you’re not Apple, yet. You’re hope and hard work.

Product

At some point, you’re going to need to fake being done. You’re going to need to release something which barely looks like your pitch because you don’t have product until a neutral party stares at something.

Fact #4: You don’t have a company until you have a product

Product is not pitch. Pitch is the three sentence idea which gave you the credibility to hire the people. The people argued about the pitch, they created process to refine and develop the pitch, and that changed it. The pyramid wobbled hither and fro during all of this… maybe it fell completely over and you scrambled to stack those layers up again. Good job, there. You still don’t have product.

The neutral parties, your customers, need to see what you’ve been building because all your people are completely insane. All that healthy shifting of the pyramid has been taxing them. Each shove forced them to adjust their perspective of the pitch, their relation to it, and adapting to change is fucking exhausting. Folks who say, “I like change” are not currently working at a start-up. Folks at a start-up don’t say much because they’re busy adapting to the latest pyramid shift.

This state of constant change is the leading cause of start-up burnout and it’s also the reason you’ve got to get that product out. The perspective of the neutral party is essential validation because you’re nuts. Your pitch has been dissected and redefined so many times that it may no longer be something that is useful. A neutral party doesn’t care about the pitch, your people, or any of the pyramid shoving you’ve been up to; they just care whether the product is useful.

Using the Pyramid

At no point will you ever draw this hierarchy on a whiteboard during an organizational crisis and say, “FOLKS, PAY ATTENTION TO THE PYRAMID — SO SAYS THE RANDS”. The idea is to give you a tool that reminds you, “Hey, it’s all connected!” The pitch guides the people. The people refine the pitch. People and pitch create process and product, and, yeah, it’s all a big mess and that’s why start-ups fail.

The pyramid gives you a hazy map to think about the problems your company might face. People will yell in the hallway and it might sound like they’re arguing about product, but keep listening, maybe it’s process. Even worse (better?), maybe it’s pitch. Your one job as Keeper of the Pitch is to figuring out which layer of the pyramid is being tested and then figure out which way to shove the pyramid. This leads us to our last fact:

Fact #5: The lower the failure, the higher the cost

A year into my start-up, the Founders were at a crossroads. We were doing an enterprise web application that was built for onsite deployment. Problem was, everyone was going loopy about hosted services. The pitch there was: “Look how much time and energy I’ll save you by hosting this application in my data center, not yours”. This idea flew in the face of years of Oracle, PeopleSoft, and IBM domination of that huge pile of business software and hardware sitting in your data center, but it was the Internet… and the Internet was going to save the world.

The Founders changed their pitch. “We’ll just create copies of the software in our data center! We’ll save money keeping our bits close to home!” No huge difference there? Wrong. This adjustment to our pitch changed the engineering with the addition of a data center component and, more importantly, it fundamentally changed the architecture of the product. Rather than have hundreds of customized versions of our software sitting in various data centers, we had to have one copy of our software which was configurable to each of our customers needs and that wasn’t the product we designed.

It wasn’t an instant disaster. We had piles of money to throw at this transformation, but the transition cost became so great that we stopped working on anything except getting the hosted application working and, right about then, the bubble burst.

Let’s call failure a really bad decision. It’s when you choose to change something and that change percolates up through the pyramid. If you make a bad decision regarding version control, well, you can probably adjust to that. You can fire a Free Electron and probably find another bright person who can channel the pitch better, but you’re probably going to rattle more than you think. A failure of pitch is a structural failure that affects your entire company. Everything in your company depends on the vision that you’ve presented and screwing that up can be fatal.

Building Culture

If you’ve actually got a pitch ready to go, again, that’s terrific. This totally conceptual model I’ve thrown together doesn’t cover some major topics that you need to understand. How are you going to fund this thing? Where do you find VCs? Where do you find great people? Your life will become an endless list of questions and decisions and you’ll probably forget everything I just wrote in your frenetic sprint to keep your pitch alive, so I’ll simplify. The hierarchy I describe is not a model for how to build a great product; it’s a picture that describes the culture of your company. That’s what you’re really building in 1.0. A lasting, interesting culture which, if you’re lucky, continues to produces great products.

Think of your five favorite companies and think about what made them successful. Yes, they probably had a great 1.0. Think Apple ][. Think of the first time you saw Netscape. Those products are the end result of people killing themselves to get the damned thing out the door, but they weren’t just creating that product. Their work defined the culture of the company and that is what modeled their future success.

The Soak

My pitch at the SXSW panel was this. In creating a start-up, you’re going to be faced with a thousand seemingly inconsequential decisions. Tucked amongst those thousands of decisions are five decisions that actually matter. These decisions will change the face of your company. What I didn’t say was that I believe it’s next to impossible to figure out which decisions matter and which ones do not.

How depressing.

Here’s the deal, you can spend a lot of energy deciding what the big decisions might be, but that’s much less important than making the decision… educated guess or gut instinct. There’s a pile of thoughts on creating decision friendly environments in the Taking Time to Think piece, but that article focuses on the idea of thinking in a team scenario and I want to talk about when you choose to take your thinking solo.

Let’s start with the most infuriating email you’ve ever received. I’m not talking about that jerk in Tech Support who is simply stupid, I’m talking about the email from someone you trust… a peer… pissing you off in email. You’re going to want to react to this email in the same manner as if I came into your office and punched you in the face. It’s your animal brain at work and it served you well when you were living in a cave doing the hunter-gathering thing because reacting slowly meant you were eaten or punched again.

Now. You have time to soak.

The soak is when you plant the seed of a thought in your brain and let it bump around in a rich stew of ideas, facts, and whatever other random crap that seems to relate. The soak is a protected activity that will rarely occur during your busy day because you’re busy reacting to the familiar never-ending flood of things to do. The goal of the soak is simple: an original thought. Whatever the problem is your stewing on, you want to find an glimmer of inspiration which transforms your response from a predictable emotional flame-o-gram into a strategic considered thought.

Emotion and Ignorance

At a prior gig, I was finally hitting my stride. After a two year awkward getting-to-know the company phase, I was in the groove. I knew who was doing what, who was hungry, and who was coasting. I’d turned a small bright idea of a product into a successful money maker, so my boss decided to saddle me with something completely different. An entirely new product built on technology I’d never used. It was a strategic-shift product for the company which meant everyone would be watching. This visibility would amplify potential fuck-ups. This was the career defining product for me.

Holy shit.

Having no clue where to start on a new project and want to rip someone apart in email share one important characteristic. The best move in both cases is to start with a good long soak.

I break soaking activities into two buckets: Active Soaks and Passive Soaks. The Active Soaks are activities that you can direct and usually involve gathering content where as Passive Soaks are activities when you just point your brain in a random direction and pray. Passive Soaks are were the real work gets done. Let’s start with the first:

Active Soaking

Ask dumb questions. Your first job when faced with ignorance is information acquisition and, hopefully, there are folks out there who’ve already done some soaking. These folks have some facts, ideas, and opinions regarding whatever the problem might be and you need to hear them all. The first five of these conversations can be awkward for managers because it’ll be obvious after your first two questions (“What is it?”, “How does it work?”) that you have absolutely no clue what’s going on and a manager’s job is be clueful.

Suck it up, pal. Soaking starts out uncomfortable, but with each ignorant question you ask, you’re adding content to that managerial brain of yours. Ever sat in a meeting with your VP where they were presenting product strategy? Ever sat there, unblinking, shocked and thinking, “This guy, our leader, has absolutely no clue what doing”? That’s you in ten years when you’ve a modicum of success and decided that success is a result of your MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY policy.

Asking dumb questions is the best way to start figuring out what is actually going on. Furthermore, asking any question of your team is a handy way to indirectly say, “I care about what we’re doing enough to ask you what you think.”

Pitch a stranger. Once you’ve asked enough dumb questions, a picture will start to form in your mind about what exactly you’re doing. It’s a not a complete picture, it’s more a rough sketch coupled with the mild relief that accompanies the sudden absence of ignorance. Now you’ve got to test your understanding with a qualified someone who is willing to listen to you ramble. Pitch this person on your picture and see what happens. Lots of nodding? Great, it’s coming together. Blank stare? Ooops, time for more dumb questions starting with the person you just pitched.

What I find when I pitch a stranger is that the words coming out of my mouth have very little to do with the picture that’s in my head. The act of linearly mapping my thoughts into words and sentences exposes flaws or gaps in my thinking that I never find when the ideas are swirling around my head. This leads me to our next step.

Write it down, throw it away, write it down again. Once your stranger is no longer totally confused by your idea, it’s time to write it down. This is the same process as pitching the stranger in that you’re find another medium to capture your idea. Like the pitch, seeing the words on a piece of paper or flat panel monitor will, once again, expose gaps you can’t see in the picture in your mind. Those gaps prove you’ve got more dumb questions, so go ask them, write it down again, and then throw it away. That’s right, don’t just close the document window, you need to get rid of everything you just wrote down. Toss it, empty the trash, and step away from the computer.

I know you’re attached to some part of that document that you wrote. Some witty thought that elegantly captured an angle on your problem, but remember what we’re trying to solve here. This isn’t whether or not you should get a blueberry-orange muffin on the way to work, this a decision that matters and solving it elegantly means you want to visit and revisit your response as many times as possible. Consigning your first written draft to the ether might forever lose a piece of wit, but if that wit shows up in the second draft, I guarantee that it belongs there and you’ll never lose it again.

Passive Soaking

Once you’ve done all your active content acquisition, once you’ve pitched some strangers, once you’ve you’ve written it down a few times, you need to stop actively working on the problem. Remove that sticky from your screen, hide those second drafts on your desktop, and just stop working on it. Yes, you need to make a decision, you need to respond to whatever the problem is, and while I am saying you should remove all the physical artifacts of your active soak, you’re not going to stop. You can’t. Your brain won’t let you.

Back to the original flame mail from your friend. You’ve received these before and you know the absolute wrong thing to do is immediately respond. Of course, your animal brain is dying to do so because IT FEELS SO GOOD TO PUNCH BACK, but it’s never the right move because your animal brain is defending itself, it’s not resolving anything other than proving BOY CAN I PUNCH BACK OR WHAT? My advice regarding flame-o-grams and hard decisions is the same. Sleep on it.

A night’s rest is one best ways to calm and alter your perspective on a problem. Ever gone to bed at night when the sky is falling and awoken to a blissfully simple way to easily prop the sky up? How’d that happen? The answer is, your brain never stops working. Better yet, it has the unique ability to subconsciously construct elegant solutions to hard problems when you least expect it. Call it inspiration, call it intuition, but don’t stare at it too long because it’s a shy ability. It does it’s best work when no one knows it’s there.

Soaking Takes Time

Don’t tell anyone I work with, but I earn a majority of my pay during the forty minute drive to work in the morning. I get in the car with my cup of coffee, hit the road, and let my mind wander to whatever music is playing. Never do I think, “Ok, Phil flamed me pretty hard yesterday… how am I going to deal with this?” My mind stumbles, it strikes out in random directions, and I never know where it’ll end up. Still, if I’ve spent time actively soaking on the Phil problem the day before, my wandering often ends up somewhere Phil-like and, sometimes, the mental journey reveals a nugget of inspiration.

As practical advice goes, the soak is pretty thin. If your boss is waiting for you to weigh in on a critical decision I am not advising you to say, “I have no clue what to do, I’m going to go ask dumb questions, pitch a stranger, write it down and then throw it away, and then forget everything I did”. What I am saying is that any big decision, any big problem deserves time and consideration. If you’ve got years of experience under your belt, you can probably wing it pretty well, but you’re still going to be faced with situations where the right decision is to not decide, but think.

The soak is, hands down, the favorite part of my job. What I’m doing when I’m soaking on something is an act of creation. It’s design work. It’s strategy. It’s removing the emotion and ignorance from a problem and then constructing an original solution that shows those I work with that I’m actively caring about what I do.

Capturing Context

Each organization in a company has Their Favorite Application. It’s not truly their favorite application; it’s just the application they must use in their particular capacity in the organization. Stand up right now and walk into an unfamiliar part of your building and stalk your co-workers. If someone stops and asks you what you’re doing, tell them, “Rands sent me” and vigorously nod your head.That always works.

As you walk the hallways of this strange new part of your organization, look at their screens. What’s the consistent application sitting on their monitors? Is it Excel? Well, you’re probably in some area of Operations. Are you seeing a lot of Word? Maybe Legal possibly Tech Pubs. Is the cube empty? That’s Sales.

The most common application in Engineering is an editor. Whether it’s a terminal window or the world’s fanciest integrated development environment, Their Favorite Application is a code editor, but it’s not their secret weapon… that’s version control.

The concept behind version control is simple. It’s a central network repository for all the files of which a project is comprised. If I want to edit a file, I run a tool (which works alongside my editor) that makes a local read/write copy of that file on my system. I make my changes and then, using the same tool, I check in my file to the network. So, what’s the big deal?

Usually, there is no deal. You merrily check in and check out your files with no fuss. The deal occurs when you realize that software projects are often massive collections of files which are edited by teams of people. A version control system solves the problem that occurs when two engineers have checked out and have changed the same file at the same time. Whoever checks in their changed file first has no deal. When the second one checks in, that engineer receives a message that warns, “Hey, this file has changed while you had it checked out. Whaddayawannado?” The user then gets to figure out how to merge the two files into a consistent working whole.

That’s version control as a traffic cop and that’s cool because it prevents folks from bonking each other on the heads, but I haven’t gotten to the major cool and that’s the other thing I do when I check in. I don’t just check the file in; I also include information about what I changed:

“Rands added a new blingleforth function. It rocks.”

The version control server then copies my new version of the file up, tags the new version with my name and my comments, and increments the version number associated with the file.

Let’s ignore the useful fact that every single version of the file is stored in this system and focus on the comment I included with this change. This is the big deal. This is the secret weapon in Engineering. We not only save every version of our work, we also capture the context of the change. Version control stores the thoughts that made our ideas bright.

If you’re thinking, “My, what a quaint nerd custom”, if you’re not having a Holy Shit moment, think about two products: del.icio.us and Flickr. Both have built their feature sets around capturing context, and by context, I do mean tags. Each time someone adds a new link or photo to these services, they can add whatever tags they like. No rules. Just start typing words regarding what makes the link or photo relevant. That’s context.

When you start stumbling around Flickr and del.icio.us, you realize the value that is created when people choose to capture and share the context of their content. At SXSW, I was in awe of the folks who were taking the time not only to capture and upload their photos to Flickr, but also taking the time to carefully tag all their content. Thirty minutes after a presentation, there were dozens of tagged pictures sitting in Flickr for the presentation I just watched.

So what?

Think of the big project you’re working on right now. For me, it’s this article. I’m merrily typing away and hitting the Save button every twelve seconds because I’m a twitchy saver. Comes from years of flaky Windows applications that liked to crash. If you save a lot, you’re not screwed.

When should I capture context on this project? When should I stop and capture the thoughts about what I just wrote? Whenever I’ve created significance. I’ve been keeping track of these moments while I’ve been writing and so far, they are:

1. New intro down, borrowed from version control article I can never seem to finish.


2. Removed Wikipedia from example technology — Flick’n’del.icio.us are enough… don’t confuse them with wikis.


3. Keep moving disclosure paragraph around… haven’t found a home, yet. Might be wrongly in love with this paragraph.

Do these comments matter to you? No. Do they matter to me? Yes. Do I want my favorite editor to prompt me every time I hit the Save key for context? No. I want another verb, let’s call it Wow, and let’s have it mean, “I’ve done something significant to my project and I want to capture the context of that change”.

This is not an obvious activity for most people. In fact, huge passive aggressive battles have been fought within my engineering teams over these change comments. It’s a fight between those who are lazy and just want to check in their files and those who know that, while having the code safely in version control is good, understanding what is happening to the project on a day-to-day basis is even better. It’s called a status report.

That’s right; I finally found my technology angle on killing status reports. We need our tools to allow us to capture context at the moment we’re being bright not Friday at 4pm when we’re trying to get the hell out of work. How much easier would your status report process be if all you had to do on Friday afternoon was ask Your Favorite App, “Show me all the Wow for the last week”? That report alone is enough incentive for me try to remember to record my Wow amongst all my twitchy saving.

Nerd Disclosure

I’m serious a version control nerd. At Borland, I was the junior engineer, which means I was saddled with build duties. This means if the product did not build, someone yelled at me. This gave me a strong incentive to build an application that forced each engineer to make a comment, no matter how small, each time they checked into the project. IT’S NOT ME. IT’S HIM. At Netscape, I watched in awe as CVS was merged with bug tracking and build systems via primal web applications. I still drool over Tinderbox. At my start-up, I was the guy who took Microsoft SourceSafe out behind the building and kicked the shit out of it.

I live and breathe version control because I see the value. Each year, I learn more about more Favorite Applications. I learn how executives live and breathe presentation software. I learn about the magic that those folks in Operations can coax out of Microsoft Excel. Everyone is hard at work creating stuff, and, some minor tweaks to Our Favorite Apps, we can wrestle version control from the nerds and help everyone index their brightness.

One Lesson from a Night Elf

I have a thing for addiction.

Based off the number of hits, the articles on my weblog which have touched the most folks deal with forms of technology addiction. The consistent theme I read in articles which refer to NADD and RII is, “Whew, there are others out there like me.”

The articles themselves attempt to paint a semi-humorous picture about behaviors which, when exhibited by someone nearby, would give you cause for concern.

You: “What ARE you doing?”

Me: “Yeah, well, I’m just being myself in a world where keeping pace with technology involves the development of productive neurosises.”

You: “But you’re acting like a freak.”

My professional career is built on a foundation of me being a freak. This weblog is often defined by articles which explain, in great detail, how I manage to continue being a freak. This article will only make me more of a freak.

Level 60

Been playing Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. A lot. By the time I finish this article, I’m hoping to have taken a Night Elf Hunter to Level 60. My guess is this will involve approximately 17 days or 408 hours of online play time. That’s time where I’ve been doing nothing but staring at the screen and telling a pile of polygons what to do.

I think my Warcraft addiction has been mild compared to others. I’m guessing 17 days (spread over many months) to get to level 60 is nowhere near the record. I’ve pissed off my family at times due to lack of attention, but I don’t think I’ve every played past 2am. I don’t dream about Warcraft and after my first week of playing, I don’t have deep urges to get back to the game.

I did play a ton during the holidays. I do check-in before work to take a look-see at the Auction House. I am active in my guild and I have purchased an item for my Night Elf because, well, it looks good.

If you’ve never played Warcraft, the previous three paragraphs didn’t mean much to you, but I bet you’ve heard of it. I also bet you have an opinion regarding Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (“MMORPG”) games and I’m betting it’s a slightly negative opinion.

Let’s start with that.

Those Fucking Geeks

I didn’t touch online role-playing until Warcraft. If you’re not familiar with the space, all you need to know is they’ve been around in various popular forms since the late 90s. World of Warcraft is the 800 pound gorilla in the space with roughly 6 million subscribers. Think about that for a moment. WOW has more subscribers than there are residents in Los Angeles… with a San Jose thrown in for good measure.

My reasons for trying the game were two-fold. First, I’m a follower of buzz and Warcraft’s popularity had tripped the buzz switch. The presence of a well-supported Mac client helped. My second reason wasn’t as simple. See, as the popularity of MMORPG has risen, I’d found myself ridiculing those who were playing. “What’s the point, it’s not real” “Don’t you guys have lives?” “Nerds!”

I’d heard that ridicule before.

The Silicon Valley thinks fondly of the mid-to-late 80s because those were the golden years. The Mac was revolutionizing the perception of desktop computing. The PC, in it’s various formsm was making great strides at playing catch-up with it’s open architecture and impressive cadre of developers. The computing revolution was on, but my mid- 80s typing class was full of typewriters and folks silently chuckled when I started the class typing 95 words a minute.

“Nerd.”

Yeah, I was the guy who already had an Apple ][ and moved onto a PC. I was the guy who got called out of my World History class because the principal’s new Mac had a problem. I knew that Pascal was more elegant than BASIC, but I couldn’t tell you why.

“Don’t you have a life?”

At home, my desk was filled with dot matrix print outs of BBS numbers to call. My passwords were scribbled in pencil all over the place. When I wasn’t endlessly dialing busy numbers, my computer sat there running the PBBS software. Dragon Flight was the name of the place.

“What’s the point, it’s not real”

The first point of this article is not to convince you that playing World of Warcraft is tantamount to the strategic advantage a deep appreciation of computers gave me during the 1980s, my first point is simple.

Ridicule is spoken fear fueled by ignorance.

When I found myself internally judging others using the same mind set used on me twenty years ago, I ran out and bought a copy of Warcraft the same day. My seemingly innocent jests regarding those passionate Warcraft folks was based on the fact I had no clue what this MMORPG thing was about, so I fell back on the easiest defense to ignorance… ridicule.

Fuck that. Been a freak before. Willing to do it again.

The Lesson

When you first fire up World of Warcraft, you are presented with a set of choices. Alliance (good guys) or Horde (bad guys)? Boy or girl? Ok, what type of character? Night Elf? Druid? Human? Great. Now, what’s your profession? Hunter? Priest? Warrior? Ok, lastly, let’s define how you look. Long hair? Short or long hair? Fierce face or dopey?

The amount of control Blizzard has given players to construct their characters is phenomenal. And intentional.

My barber shocked the hell out of me last week when he told me was playing Horde Priest. Who the hell cares if Joi Ito and his buddies have replaced their non-existent golf game with long sessions in Molten Core? Those guys are nerds. MY FRACKING BARBER IS A HORDE PRIEST PEOPLE.

His comment: “Yeah, so… I playing a healer because, you know, I’m really a healer at heart. I like to take care of people.”

My unspoken thought: “Yeah, but, you’re undead.”

Warcraft is the first online game which can legitimately say they allow you create a compelling virtual self. I knew they’d done this when I spent my hard earned gold on a helmet that gave my character no real value other than it looked good. I knew they’d done this when my barber and I were discussing the pros and cons of soloing versus grouping.

The lesson is this. Ever so slowly, the value of a virtual self grows. We’re nowhere near the world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but neither are in the world were the concept of a virtual self is a niche nerd concept. Yeah, Warcraft is rebranded Dungeons and Dragons and folks will continue to play the ridicule card, but Blizzard has demonstrated you can build a complex, long lasting virtual world that world can be enjoyed by anyone.

Someone, I don’t know who, will take the lessons of World of Warcraft and they’ll build the Next Thing which will have even broader appeal. They’ll stay far away from the worst acronym ever, MMORPG, and they’ll help make the idea of virtual selves in virtual worlds as common as your email account. You get to choose where you stand regarding this inevitable development… with knowledge or with ignorance.

Fenging up the Shui

When my former boss took the VP of Engineering gig, he brought a pile of personal crap into his office. There was the model airplane, a few of pieces of artwork, and a pile of books. These items were moved into his office and proceeded to sit in the corner in boxes for over a year. He finally decided to hang the airplane from the ceiling one weekend, but up until the day he was laid off, I don’t think the books were unpacked or the artwork was hung.

Each time I’d walk into his office, I’d first think, “I’m working for a guy who can’t take the time to tidy up his office.” I’d then think, “I can’t think in a cluttered office”. I’d finally think, “I’m not sure about working for a cluttered boss.”

Yes, there are times when you’ll wake in my office and there will be clutter, but know this, I know the clutter is there and I’m grinding my teeth about the clutter RIGHT THIS SECOND.

My favorite clutter removal technique is frequent office rearrangements. We’re talking about every year or so. This year’s arrangement was entitled “Fenging up the Shui” and that roughly translates into “The removal of visual noise”.

The Winter 2006 adjustment is still in progress, but the process has already yield some gems.

First off, I’ve rotated my Messy Thinking set-up 45 degrees so my back is now facing my door while the view is, hey, of my view.

Two significant wins here:

• Calming view of a nature
• Reduction of random distractions as folks walk by

The moving of my main monitors forced my server set-up to move. Now, I never use the keyboard and mouse on my server box and the screen is generally powered off. As I move it to the new location, I thought, “How can I nuke this the keyboard/mouse clutter, but use the screen real estate on my server box?”

The solution: Synergy. This application allows you to share your local keyboard/mouse with any other Mac/PC/Unix box on your network. I’d used Synergy a few months ago, but quickly grew annoyed with it when I’d move off the right of my current screen and lose my cursor to the machine on the other side of my desk. Huh? Where’d the mouse go?

Synergy allows you to configure the virtual arrangement of your monitors however you like, so in my new Feng Shui set-up, I virtually place my server box BELOW my main monitor which is a place I never go as my Dock is on the left-hand part of the screen. It’s not an obvious set-up, but it’s also not annoying.

Lastly, I needed a use for the new screen. Since the machine would just be sitting there most of the time. I thought one of these RSS screen-savers would be handy except THEY MOVE and grab my attention. I needed something informative, yet not annoying. The answer is simple. I found a set of fab widgets, organized them in a pleasing fashion, and now, I have Dashboard running on this box 24/7.

The final results looks something like this:

Ok, back to work.

Three Links and a Thought

I’m in the midst of writing up a response to the complex pile of comments which landed on the Remotely article, but in the meantime, here’s some recent landings on my feed list. Starting with oldest first:

Tech.Memeorandum appears to comb all tech news and weblog sources and then does some “magic” to assess popularity. I haven’t done any research, but I’m guessing it heavily weights cross-linking as well as comment activity on other sites. That’s irrelevant… what’s cool is that it does capture hot pipin’ relevant bits. If you’re a nerd like me, you want as few stops as possible to capture buzz and Memeorandum does it.

Memorandum suffers from the wall-of-text problems that still make del.icio.us intimidating and a tricky browsing experience, but if you’re simply reaping data from an aggregator, who cares?

TechCrunch’s stated goal is “Tracking Web 2.0” which means I should starting foaming at the mouth regarding Web 2.0 (again). Problem is, Michael Arrington, the site’s writer, is doing a good job of sifting through the noise to find Web 2.0 bits that deserve a second click. I base this entirely on my completely unscientific method of noticing when I leave Bloglines to read a story at the actual site.

ValleyWag. There has been a well defined need for a good valley gossip rag since Infoworld nuked the original Cringely back forever ago. Still, the idea that I care about who the Google founders are nailing is absurd, so, clearly, they’ve got a hit on their hands.

My hope is that the Wag takes a stab on software gossip, as well, because I’ve got serious concerns about the quantity of juicy nerd_celebrity gossip that’s out there.

The thought is a simple one. A majority of the sites sitting in Bloglines represent the voice of a single person. I am wondering out loud why that is the case. Is there any way to articulate what is lost when a site aggregates multiple voices into one other than, “It doesn’t sound real”?

Bubble 2.0

The whispers in the valley and in the weblog-o-sphere is the hint that we’re in the early technology bubble similar to the Internet nuttiness of the late nineties. The ideas sound familiar:

- Those VCs sure are investing a lot of money in start-ups!
- It’s sure getting harder to hire!
- Everyone I know is heading to a start-up!
- You know, I kind’a want to go to a start-up!

When you combine these hallway observations with the techno-marketing term “Web 2.0”, you might start scratching your chin and thinking, “Hmmmmm… another bubble? Should I be making a move? Will be this time I hit the BIG BUCKS?”

First, yes, you should always be making a move. This is the Better, Faster, More industry and you should always be making a step towards growth, but the idea that we’re anywhere near a bubble is pretty silly.

Let’s look at some actual data. First, I picked five technology stocks from my longer stock list and compared their price right now to early 1998 which is a time I’m going to call early-to-mid Bubble. Go take a look at these right now…

• BEA
• Dell
• HP
• Symantec
• Borland

Some observations:

• The effect of the bubble is pretty obvious in all of these stocks. Sometime during 1998 and 1999, everyone went crazy and money poured into these stocks resulting in nutty valuations for all of the above companies except for Borland who still has little stars spinning around it’s head from it’s early-90s beat down from Microsoft.
• Of the five, only Symantec and Dell have really done well post-Bubble and Dell is a stretch — it’s been flat since late 2000.
• What you see in these stocks and a majority of other tech stocks is that many of them are still struggling with growth in a post-Bubble world. Better yet, go look at the recent history of the tech heavy NASDAQ. I look at this graph think, “Yeah, it’s pretty much 1999 right now.” THAT’S FIVE YEARS AGO PEOPLE.
• The final nail in the Bubble coffin is simple. Here are the big winners in IPOs for the last year. Go scan it and name every company that you know. I’m guessing the winners are Baidu and Under Armor. The grand total of successful buzzy IPOs this year includes a Google aftershock and the purveyor of shirts that looks great on super heroes.

Two lessons to be learned:

• Lesson #1: Money isn’t pouring into technology stocks unless it’s Google or Apple.
• Lesson #2: It’s still a technology IPO nuclear winter.

If you eschew risk, you can argue the best time to consider a change is when the technology sector is underperforming because, duh, there’s no where to go, but up, right? Maybe you could care less about dollars and you’re enthralled with the potential behind the Web 2.0 idea. I’ve have more bad Rands news.

I’m in the camp of folks who really wants to slap the term Web 2.0 across the face. My issue is that while Web 2.0 does describe a semi-nebelous set of fascinating ideas and technology, the term is being used more to describe the enthusiasm for these ideas and technologies rather than the practical realities. I’ve had the same intense negative knee-jerk reaction to other immense technology initiatives like OpenDoc, the .NET technology umbrella, and Network Computer fad. My thought, “Well, yeah, it’s a good idea, but you’re foaming at the mouth like it’s religion and that freaks me out.”

We really need these zealots because in their foaming they often stumble on brilliance, but in my world, I’ve got to ship product and shipping product is what will define Web 2.0 for me.

Web 2.0 is not going to be defined by the world slickest meme map, Web 2.0 will defined as the time when a technology company has a new idea which gives it’s employees the dollars and sense to go it alone. The technology companies which have the moxy to pull of an IPO pre-Bubble are now taking a different exit strategy. They’re allowing themselves to be snapped by the likes of Google, Yahoo, and EBay. That’s terrific. I’m happy for each and every entrepreneur who is being amply rewarded for their hard work.

I’m not suggesting that a definition of technological success is a successful IPO. We’re going to know that someone has hit it out the park long before their stock starts trading in public markets. What we don’t know is what flavor of Web 2.0 is going to give this company and how that flavor is going to create a sustainable business model. If you see it before me, I’d love to hear about it.

SXSW 2006

I have little data about where the South by Southwest festival actually started, but it began to intersect my consciousness two years ago. Year one thought, “What the hell does SXSW stand for?” Year two thought, “This appears to be the only significant gathering of the weblog community on the planet Earth.”

It’ll be four years since I began the current weblog when the SXSW 2006 festival kicks off in Austin, Texas. I decided shortly after SXSW 2005 to attend as well figure out if could throw together a presentation for the conference.

After months of chatting with SXSW folks as well as gathering together an all-star panel, I’m very happy to announce I’ll be presenting on March 12, 2006 @ 10am. The title of panel is “Sink or Swim: The Five Most Important Startup Decisions”.

A good title is nothing without good content and I’m pinching myself about the folks who have agreed to participate in my panel.

Cabel Sasser, Founder of Panic Software. Maker of shockingly good Mac software and home of the web’s best t-shirt store

Joel Spolsky, Founder of Fog Creek Software. Software development weblogger extraordinaire

Ev Williams, Founder of Pyra Labs and Odeo. Also a muser of software development

When I first cooked up up the idea for this panel on a drive to work, I thought, “You know, if I could get Joel, Ev, and one of the Panic guys in front of a crowd, that’d be some fun.” I’m shocked that each of these gentlemen volunteered their valuable time to talk about their start-up experiences.

If you know nothing about SXSW, head here. If you do know about about SXSW, go check out the panels page… it’s chock full of the bleeding edge. I haven’t a clue how I’ll decide what to attend.

Stay tuned for more Rands @ SXSW details including the invariable mass consumption of alcohol post-panel-panel event somewhere in downtown Austin.

Mark your calendars and I hope to see you there.

Ode to a Chain Saw

Everyone at work chuckles when I, once again, tell them I was out with the chain saw this weekend. They’re laughing because they’re trying to picture their nerd boss act like a mountain man. Fact of the matter is, I am a nerd. I do call Verizon every month or so to see when they’ll be lowering my DSL price and increasing the speed. I like futzing with my Tivo and I can program in C++. I also love my chain saw. Deal with it.

I have fond memories of the smell of a chain saw. My Dad has been using them for forty years, so I grew up with the stench of burning gas and fresh cut wood. Still, The Dad was bright enough to keep me away from the chain saw until I was ready. I’m the guy who killed an orchard with a Volvo when I was eighteen… we called it “vehicular orchardcide”. So, probably not a good idea to let me near lethal weapons until I turned twenty. He waited until I was thirty.

The previous home owner left me a chain saw, so I’ve been busy. Fire wood, you see. Oh yeah, kindling, too. What’s that? Need those bushes trimmed? Be right there. Waitwaitwait, let me clean-up that Christmas tree for you. I HAVE JUST THE THING.

Since this piece is really going no where, I leave you with this — it’s a list of how your many skills as a manager are like a chain saw.

• Both require constant attention
• You need to be standing flat on both feet before you get started
• Getting in the way of either when they’re doing their job well is a bad idea
• When used correctly, it’s always surprising how well they work
• The art involved is sometimes subtle
• A poor split second decision can have instant and, sometimes, lasting consequences
• Sometimes just starting the damned thing is a bitch
• Both appear intimidating at first, but are actually quite easy
• When you stop respecting it, you get burned
• If your blade is dull then you are wasting your time (Thanks Matt)

Saying No

Somewhere in your third year of being a manager, the Management Pixies will appear in your office in a puff of sweet smelling black smoke. There will be three of them and one will be carrying a gorgeous black top hat.

“Are you LeRoy McManager?”

“I am.”

The Pixies laugh. “Congratulations, you have passed successful through three years of management and we’re here to reward you, but first, one question: Have you seen Spiderman?”

“The first one or the sequel?”

“The first one.”

“I have.”

The Pixies laugh again. “What do you think the primary theme is in Spiderman, LeRoy McManager?”

“Um, hmmmm… life’s a bitch?”

Strangely, the Pixies don’t laugh. “No, try again. It’s important.”

“Ok, well. Hmmmm… Peter’s Uncle said something they kept yammering about… OH I KNOW… With great power comes great responsibility.”

The Pixies cheer and the one carrying the top hat flutters over to you and drops it in your lap. It’s soft and strangely warm. The hat-bearing Pixie looks up at you and grins, “You wear this hat when you want people to know who you are.”

“And who am I?” You look down at the hat and notice massive white block letters on the front, they read:

I’M THE BOSS.

A slow grin stretches across your face and you realize the hat has the vague smell of your Mom’s fresh baked bread. That smell has always given you a strange sense of confidence and you know that whenever you wear that hat, you’ll been infused with that sense of confidence.

All three Pixies leap into the air giggling, “Good luck LeRoy McManager, use your hat well!” More laughing. Another puff of black smoke and they’re gone.

You lift the hat slowly in front of your face, staring at the white block letters, soaking in the sense of power the hat gives you, and you put it on.

You stride out of your office never once wondering why the Pixies were giggling so much because, well, you’re the boss. The first person sees you walk by in your cloud of confidence and, once you walk around the corner, you don’t hear them snicker because, again, you’re the boss.

They’re laughing because while they know you’re the boss, they can see the other side of the hat and it reads.

… FOR NOW.

Managers can lose it.

I mean it. There are managers out there who are absolutely punch drunk with power and if you’re working for one of these folks, I’m really sorry. You’re a resident of Crazy Town and that means you never know what random crap is going to happen next and that sucks.

Manager’s don’t start crazy. It’s an acquired trait and this article explores what I consider the single best tact you can take to avoid a trip to Crazy Town. Let’s tackle it first with a story from an employee’s perspective.

You’re merrily typing way at your keyboard, hard at work at the next great feature when your boss walks in and says, “Hey, can you work on a Gizzy Flibbet?”

“Uh, isn’t the Flubjam the key feature? I’ve barely even started it. It’s going to take awhile”

“Oh yes yes, we’re still doing Flubjam, but I need you to prototype the Gizzy Flibbet and I need it in two days for a meeting with the Execs.”

“Oooooooook, you’re the boss.”

“That’s right, I am the boss.”

Two days pass and you pour your soul into the prototype feature. Like all investigations, you discover each step of discovery takes three times as long as expected. The final prototype coveys the idea, but the process to create that result has left you drained and pretty sure finishing the remaining work is going to take a really long time.

When your boss walks into your office, you summarize, “Here it is. It looks good, it’ll take awhile and I’m now very behind on my Flubjam work. Can I please get back to it?”

Squinting her eyes, she runs her fingertips along the front rim of her top hat. She nods and stares, “Ok, THIS IS GREAT. Let’s do this AND Flubjam AND let’s hit the same schedule! Go us!” She turns and leaves the room leaving your office with the faint smell of bread.

I’ll recap. Your boss has just picked the one scenario that involves the most work and has the least chance of succeeding. You’re screwed and while you might think your boss has lost it, you are a co-conspirator in this disaster because you didn’t do one simple thing, you didn’t Say No.

Losing It

Manager don’t lose it simply because the Pixies showed up with the top hat, they lose it because those they work with forget to look at the back of of the hat. Remember:

• Front: I’M THE BOSS
• Back: … FOR NOW

Management is myth… just like the top hat. We, as employees, believe it’s there, so we treat these management types different. Yes, they sign the checks and they write the reviews, but, in a perfect world, those events are a function of your performance and not theirs, so it’s your job to not screw that up. I realize that’s a big fat stretch, but stick with me.

What is the real source of a manager’s perceived power? It’s the idea that they can make decisions. When the the team is stuck on a problem, they gather up in the manager’s office, present their case, and the manager nods and says, “Go that way!” More often than not, everyone is so happy to be past the logjam, they don’t even question whether it’s the right decision or not. “He’s got the top hat, so he must be right!”

No no no no. Also. No.

Managers lose it when they are no longer questioned in their decisions. When the team stops questioning authority, the manager slowly starts to believe that their decisions are always good and while it feels great to be right all the time, it’s statistically impossible. The most experienced managers in the world make horribly bad decisions all the time, the good ones have learned how to recover from their decisions with dignity, but, more importantly, help from the team.

Let’s take a look at Saying No from the manager’s perspective without any Pixies.

Back at the start-up, we were considering the move to a hosted model for our web application. I, in my third year of management, was in charge of presenting the pros and cons of such a move to the Executive Staff. We were in the middle of three huge deployments, so I decided to not put the necessary work into the presentation. I wrote it the night before and didn’t vet it with anyone. The end result asked more questions than it answered. It was a mess.

The Executive Staff went pretty easy on me. It was clear from their questions that they weren’t happy with my half-baked ideas and I left the room thinking I’d blown it.

The first person I saw after the meeting was Doug, one of my managers. Doug, “Rands, way to go! You hit it out of the park, man! When do we get started?” In my state of depression, Doug’s enthusiasm for my crappy presentation was intoxicating. Maybe I was being too hard on myself? Maybe it was a good presentation and I’m just being too sensitive? Yeah, that’s the ticket.

The second person I found was Randy, my other manager. His comment, “Ouch. That stung. What’s our recovery plan?”

Sure, I wanted to punch Randy, but he was spot on. I’d blown it and any other conclusion was a load of crap. The irony in all of this is that Doug believed he was doing the right thing by supporting me, but he was only eroding his credibility with me by not telling it straight. Think of it like this, if I’d swallowed the Doug Happy Pill, I would’ve done nothing to recover from my failed presentation and I would have looked like an idiot to the Execs.

What I did do was swallow the Bitter Randy Pill and completely redo the presentation along with the help of my managers. We presented a week later and actually did hit it out of the park. That’s with the truth gets you… progress.

No Versus The Truth

Randy didn’t Say No, he told me the truth, but I’m leaving this article entitled “Saying No” because I think it’s harder to contradict your boss than to tell the truth. Saying No forces an idea to defend itself with facts. Sure, no one really wants to hear their idea is crap. It’s hard to Say No and it’s even harder to Hear No, but who do you want to work with? People who are going to help you refine your direction or ones who will merrily follow your downward spin to Crazy Town?

As with every job, your success as a manager is the end result of innumerable decisions. While the front of your top hat reminds everyone that you’re the one making the decisions, the back of the hat reminds everyone else that, more importantly, you’re the one responsible for those decisions.

Warcraft Woes

This is the obligatory, yes, I’ve been playing Warcraft and, yes, it’s eaten a ton of my time, and, yes, I’m saving for my mount and, dear lord, telling all of you sure isn’t helping my self confidence.

But I need some help.

The home machine, a Dual G4, was recently upgraded to a Dual G5 along with whatever video card came with the standard configuration… some ATI Radeon variant. Before I moved over to the new machine, I did a couple of frame rate checks meaning I walked around in Warcraft a bit and unscientifically observed the frame rate which averaged around 11 fps.

Now, I’m a quality junky. If there’s a slider in the video options of the game which allows me to control detail, I always max it out because I feel that’s how the game designers wanted me to see it… high quality, right? On my G4, it was painfully clear that Warcraft was going to be a visual pain if I maxed out the settings, so I surfed a bit and found out which options were the performance versus quality trade-offs. Turns out that terrain distance had the biggest effect, but whatever switches I flipped, I was happy and proceeded to play for several months before the G5 arrived.

With the arrival of the G5, I was hoping to see a frame rate improvement even though the video card was effective to the same, but I was shocked to discover that my average frame rate for the same walk in Warcraft was ACTUALLY SLOWER. What the.

So, I did whatever good nerd would do, I bought more hardware. A fancy ATI Radeon 9600 Pro card. It was back ordered, so I had to twiddle my thumbs, but it arrived last night and YOU BET I WAS ALL OVER IT. Card installed, drivers updated, and HERE COMES WARCRAFT BABY.

Aaaaaannd I still feel like I’m walking around in thick air. Yes, it’s actually a slower frame rate. Ok, so I upped the quality settings a bit, so it’s hard to do a fair comparison, but, folks, I’ve upgraded all of my hardware including the core graphical brain and my FPS blows.

So, two things:

• Am I missing something? Is there a switch that needs flipping? I know the drivers are in because there are substantial visually differences in the game, but why the slow FPS?
• If I’m cursed to this FPS, what settings do folks think have the best trade-offs relative to performance-versus-quality? Is it just terrain distance and resolution or are there other combos that folks love on the Mac?

Also, I play on Cenarius. If you want to go kill stuff with me, send me a google talk @ rands.feedback@gmail.com.

Repetitive Information Injury

Rachel and I were parked on the living room floor sorting through my old books. This is a tricky task because you’ve got to balance your interest in the books with getting the job done. Our current distraction was the Book of Questions. This was a late 80s fad book full of compelling questions you were supposed to answer honestly. In reality, the book landed during my college years so I think a lot of folks were using the book to figure out how to get laid.

The question Rachel and I were stuck on was some variant of, “Name a habit you have that you dislike.” While I pondered my response Rachel chimed in, “I hate how often I check my my email. I sit down, click the Get Email button, and see if anything shows up. If nothing does, I surf the web for a few minutes, and then check mail again… and again.”

I was shocked. Rachel is no nerd and the habit she was describing represents one the major downsides of all sufferers of NADD. I call it Repetitive Information Injury.

Sponge Variants

Your brain is a unique sponge. Regular old sponges have a pretty easy gig. They’ve got a puddle here or a spill there and they can usually handle it and, if they can’t, they just say, “Hey pal, I’m full. Squeeze me and let’s continue, ok?”

Your brain sponge has two unique qualities. First, there is no squeeze. Your consumption of stuff is only limited by waking hours and death. Second, your brain sponge isn’t dealing with puddles or spills of information. Your brain sponge is afloat in a ever growing sea of information. Add to that fact that every start-up I know of appears bent on figuring out ways to help shove more information into your brain sponge and you begin to understand where NADD comes from. It’s a set of habits designed as a self defense mechanism to deal the brain’s tendency to want to consume all information.

These habits don’t always work.

NADD sufferers walk a delicate tight rope between effectively consuming large amounts of information and losing themselves in a endless loop of useless, frustrating information acquisition motions that I’ll call Repetitive Information Injury (“RII”).

For me RII shows up late in the day. I’m between meetings and having nothing urgent on my to do list. I sit down at the computer and scan my unread email. Once done there, I click on a couple of tab groups in Safari and scan the news. Lastly, I switch to NetNewsWire and scan for changes on my 75+ feeds.

And then… I do it again.

And again.

It sounds silly, but I’m literally stuck in a loop of information acquisition. What I am looking for? Something interesting informational tidbit which grabs my attention and if I don’t find it, I’ll often loop four or five times before I realize that I’m in this useless, non-productive loop.

It’s not silly. In fact, it’s a warning. Pay attention to your NADD. My bouts of RII are limited to five to ten minutes late in the day when meetings become infrequent and my brain is just plain tired, but I’m assuming there are folks out there who are completely beholden to their RII. These are same folks who are contributing to the national average of a mind boggling 4.5 hours of TV watched each day… that’s over 9 years glued to the tube if you make it to 65.

Managing Your Sponge

NADD is a fact of life in this world of infinite information combined the increasingly ability to find personal relevance and share that relevance with those who care. RII is an unfortunately byproduct of NADD and I think it can be avoided with some simple adjustments to your information consumption habits.

Know the signs. As described above, RII is when you’re stuck in a consumption loop. Your brain is thinking it’s more important to continue to find something to soak in rather than moving on to your next project. It’s tricking you into continuing with thoughts like, “Hey, it just takes a second to press that Get Email button… or that Refresh Feeds button… go for it man! You never know when you’ll hit the information gold-mine!” Problem is, those seconds turn into minutes… and you’re suddenly staring at the same pages, listening to the same JUST DO IT advice, and suddenly 30 minutes have passed and you haven’t actually done anything.

The drug addict analogy works here on a non-life-threatening-level. You are, by definition, addicted to information if you consider yourself a sufferer of NADD and RII shows up when you’ve lost the ability to moderate that consumption. Knowing you’re in this state is step number one to unsticking yourself.

Trust your tools. Any NADD sufferer has their favorite set of information tools. Mine include Safari, Mail, NetNewsWire. The Safari tool is a combination of tabbed groups as well as information aggregators links such as Del.icio.us and Digg. For tools which poll for new information such as Mail and NetsNewsWire, I deliberately set the polling frequency to something longer than an every five minutes… every half hour or hour seems to work. These longer windows on polling inactivity give me more time to focus on other projects and if I’m focused on something else the appearance of 9 new emails in my inbox is less of a distraction.

Safari is more of a problem because it doesn’t poll. I’ve got to click on the tab group to see what’s up and once I start clicking, here comes the RII. Solution number one is to push as much of my tab groups into NetNewsWire and that sort’f works except brain likes to visually scan web pages… not just text headlines via RSS. My other solution is to mentally schedule my Safari excursions to twice during the work day. Once in the morning when the coffee is running through my veins and once at the end of the day when I want to assess the day. Success in doing is also varied.

Keep going forward. What your mind, your sponge, is really looking for during this NADD-induced RII bouts is significant change that it can transform into energy. Think of the first time you figured out what all the fuss was about AJAX. Remember drag and dropping in a web page without the help of Flash? You were probably trolling RSS feeds with a half full cup of coffee and WHAM you suddenly understood that web applications might be cool again. I remember that moment, wrote about it, too. Those information highs are what being an aggressive information consumer is all about. Even with the risk of RII, you’ve got to let yourself stumble around the Net and see what is what.

The difference between these free-form information excursions and RII has to do with direction. In RII, you’re stuck in a loop whereas information excursions move only forward. Like Safari, I try to keep these information consumption sessions away from work hours because they can turn into RII. Think weekends or pre-bedtime activities. Again, my success here has been limited.

Freaked out, yet?

Repetitive Information Injury intentionally smells a lot like it’s cousin Repetitive Stress Injury. Both are the result of bad habits. If you don’t figure out a structured means of managing your NADD, you’re not going to physically injured, but you are wasting a tremendous amount of time.

Personally, I rank my NADD as a key talent. My ability to consume and understand information is essential to working in a industry which likes to reinvent itself every five years. There’s lots of safe work in high tech that doesn’t require NADD, but I’ll risk it, RII and all, because my brain is unique sponge and when I stop using it, I might as well be dead.

The Insiders

The list of reasons folks want to become a manager is varied. I think it looks like this:

• I want to have more influence over product development.
• I wanted to try something new and I get along with people.
• I’m never going to be a great programmer, but I sure know what programmers are talking about so why not manage them?
• I have no idea what happened. I was suddenly a manager. WTF.

However it happened, you’re here now. You’re responsible for people rather than code and people ask questions. All the time with the questions and it’s now your job to answer those questions as best you can. Here’s the rub. In any organization of 50 or more people, there’s far too much happening for you, a single manager, to digest. Don’t try… or, better yet, go ahead and try and see how everything else on your plate gets ignored.

Your first line of defense against the onslaught of organizational information include the obvious ones. Your manager, your peers, and those who work for you. Being a decent human being to these folks will go a long way to keeping you informed, but even with those folks trusting you, there is still more to find out. You need to figure out how to build an information network which not only scales to your company, but it’s also got the filter out the crap that you don’t care about.

Good news: I’m going to tell you who these people are after I tell you this story.

Borland. 1990 something. I’m the new engineer in the group having recently been promoted from the QA group. This means I’ve got the worst office and I’m responsible for the product builds and application installer. It sounds like like a crap gig except for the fact that my QA cohorts are green with jealousy. Hah!

The crap office is directly next to the Administrative Assistant named Grace. I’m still being professionally hazed by the senior engineers so she’s really the only person who will freely talk to me, so I talk. A lot. Check-in every morning with a “Howyadoing?” Combined with the occasional coffee walk to the cafeteria, we turn out to be good friends. Even when the engineers start talking to me, Grace and I continue to hang.

One morning, I dart by her office with a brief “Howdy”. She follows me into my office, empty coffee mug in hand. “Hey Rands, Kevin (the big boss) ended up with a few extra Dells and said I should distribute to the team. Want one?”

Remember, I’m the rookie engineer which means I’ve got the crap office and crap hardware. Probably some 20Mhz Compaq beige atrocity covered with coffee stains. Grace is offering up a Dell 486 DX pizza box which, at the time, was a sweet piece of hardware hardly seen anywhere in my engineering group. How did I earn this piece of hardware? Was it brilliance? Experience? No, I was nice to the right person.

The benefits of hanging with Grace continued. Borland was staring at two years of repeated layoffs and my morning check-ins with Grace were chock full of information my manager didn’t have. She told me two weeks before my manager that layoffs were coming. The morning of the layoffs, she gave me a comforting nod that confirmed I wasn’t going to be a looking for a job. Whew.

Information wants to be free. It’s wandering your hallway right now and there are two questions: How much of it do you want? Who is going to help you find it?

DISCLAIMER: One way to read this article is that I’m describing which people are going to tell you secrets. Now there are very good reasons to keep a piece of information secret, varying from “We don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings” to “It’s against the law and you’ll go to jail”. Nothing in this article suggests that you should violate the intent of a secret — that’s a bad career move and a bad karma move. Don’t do it.

The Administrative Assistant

This is your Grace. This person is usually the right-hand person of your boss and privy all sorts of organizational shenanigans. In addition to having the inside track on the state of the organization, they’re also well qualified to penetrate bureaucracy. Wondering how to order that new chair to fix your back? The Admin is your friend because they know where the forms are, how to fill them out, and where they go.

Like any job, there are a lot of boneheads out there. If your Admin is changing every three months, it’s ok. Happens a lot. You probably don’t have a legitimate asset until they’ve survived six months in the trenches.

The Program Manager

Their role as owner of the Program forces them to muck around in other’s business. They’re responsible for talking to every person outside of the group that your team is dependent upon so, their perspective is nice and cross-pollinated.

I’ve had less information success with Program Managers because of the varying views of Program Managers in companies. If they’re just scheduled enforcers who don’t have a lot of skin in the game, they’re not tapped in… they’re just those annoying folks who ask, “Are you done yet? Are you done yet?” Program Managers who work at integrating teams with different schedules and agendas can’t help but be informed.

The gems you’re looking for in the Program Manager are varied. They have insight as to the various Players and Pawns in the organization. This can be handy when you need code or functionality from another group because your Program Manager can tell you what these other folks care about. Understanding a team’s motivation is job number one when you need something from them because you need to construct your request in a language that will grab their attention.

Like Admins, Program Managers surf bureaucracy which means their handy when the sky is falling. They’re a great source of information regarding how to convince the Execs there is no way in hell your shipping in two months. They’ve likely got slides sitting on their desktop right now which address that very problem.

Human Resources Representative

Let me first say that my prior start-up was populated with some of the best HR folks in the world. You’ve probably had a disappointing experience with HR in the past and it’s because your HR person was promoted out of some role which had nothing to do with HR. They were just a good “people person”. Ick. HR is a profession, not an escape route.

Unless they’re an idiot, your HR rep is the single most informed person in the company when it comes to the people and the people are the company. They know who’s hot and who’s not. They know what everyone is making and they’re the first people consulted when just about anything bad is going down.

Now, a good HR person is aware of their wealth of information as well their responsibility to distribute this information to only the appropriate folks. They don’t tend to be rumor mongers or loose lipped, but you should still keep this person nearby. Just because they can’t tell you the layoff is happening doesn’t mean they can’t put in a good word for you elsewhere in the company when it hits the fan.

If you don’t already have a regularly schedule 1:1 with your HR person, you should. If HR people are few and far between in the organization then you can make it quarterly. The last thing you want is to be introducing yourself to your HR person only because someone on your team is threatening to sue the company.

The Other VP

This is sketchy. The Other VP represents, well, your other boss. Doesn’t need to be a VP, just someone further up the food-chain. Think of it like this; if your group vanished today, who would you want to go work for? That’s the Other VP.

There’s a lot of reasons to have this person around. First, yes, your group might vanish at some point and it’s good to have an extended network of people if the sky falls. Second, everyone needs a mentor. Maybe your boss is your mentor. Great, well, you two mentors.

The Other VP is a person who takes the time to manage you in their spare time. They do this by having a cup of coffee with you every few months where they check-in. Maybe you talk about sports. Maybe you talk about strategic direction of the company. In any case, there’s a lightweight management relationship where information is exchanged. Why do they do this? Simple. They were you at some point.

Finding the Other VP is a slippery proposition. Try talking with all of your Insiders. Who do they like? Why do they like them? No consensus? Keep listening because a name will show up. When that name does land, it’s your move. This VP is never going to randomly set-up a coffee event. That’s your job. Remember, they were you and they remember that fact.

In Case of Layoff. Break this Glass.

Information wants to be free because people are constantly chewing on it. Right now, one of your employees is driving to work thinking about an off-the-cuff comment you made yesterday. It was an innocent comment about nothing in particular, but you made THE EXACT SAME COMMENT two years ago right before a layoff. Yes, you’ve leaked the layoff and you don’t even know it.

This is how rumors start and the more virulent the rumor, the faster is travels in your organization. Each step it takes, it’s vetted, mutated with a combination of new data and opinion, and then handed off to the next victim. The infection continues until it runs into cold hard facts. Yes, there is a layoff.

Rumors are fun because they are designed to provoke emotion. WHAT? WE’RE LAYING OFF PHIL? I LOVE PHIL.

Facts are more fun because they represent the truth and you can actually build stuff on the truth. Your network on Insiders exist to provide you as much truth as possible so you can get your job done.

Still a Tourist

… in my own house.

And a big version.

Management Cheat Sheet

There’s an article somewhere in my head which dissects the intense knee jerk reaction a lot folks have regarding managers. The question is, “Why do so many of us automatically assume that our managers are boobs?” The follow-on question is, “Even if we don’t think our managers are not boobs, why do we constantly ridicule them behind their backs?”

Clearly, the answer is rooted in our basic issue with authority. “Who does HE think HE is? More important than ME?” No, he’s just got a different job than you. Yeah, he’s probably got more to affect change now, but that he didn’t a few years back. He was you. So, what are YOU going to do about it?

The article needs to be written soon because my role continues to wander about the organizational chart and at each part of the chart, they serve a different kool-aid. This drink tastes great, but it slowly dulls my memory. It makes it harder to context switch to where I was versus where I am. Could be age, too.

To preserve these thoughts, I present you the Management Cheat Sheet. It leads off with a generic version of the Rands Communication Template and finishes with neatly organized lists of the various articles hiding on this site.

As you read the articles, you’ll notice I jump around a bit in terms of audience… sometimes I’m focused on the manager and sometimes on the employee. Here’s the point: There is no difference. Just because your boss can fire you doesn’t mean you can’t quit.

Rands Communication Template

People appreciate consistency… especially in business. They want to know what occurred today is likely to occur tomorrow.

“RANDS? HELLO? What about Messy Thinking? Signs of Art? Taking Time to Think? HOW DO I INNOVATE WITH CHAINS OF CONSISTENCY?!?!?”

Calm down.

Ever hung with a hardcore successful artist? Painter? Writer? I bet their workspace was a total disaster. I bet you wondered, “How is the world does this person produce their art in this mess?” They don’t produce, they create. There’s some studio or publisher out there who does the production and they need consistency because they’re responsible for the cash and the cash vanishes, the gig is up. Our artist can still create in this scenario, but can they eat?

The Rands Communication Template is document designed to allow you to consistently communicate with someone else. Maybe it’s your boss or maybe it’s your team. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that in your regular communication meetings, you are talking about the same stuff in the same way.

This template is a work in progress, but here’s the skinny:

• Using this template without modifying to your personal company/style is silly.
• This template is designed for someone managing multiple projects. Adjust to your load.
• Each of the mythical projects in the template are at a different mythical milestone. The content for each is adjusted accordingly.
• This document is intentionally one page — two columns. You should print it out and fold it in half when you use it. Two reasons: Sitting in front of a computer during a 1:1 is distracting and you should be focusing on communication with whoever is in the room. Also, keeping your notes short and to the point keeps you on message… less time consuming tangents. I can’t explain the folding thing, it just feels good.
• Almost every bucket on the template has an entry “Hot List Next Steps”. These are whatever festering problems you have in your program or project. These are items where a lack of a weekly forward progress is a career limiting move. It should be clear for each item what your plan is and when you’re going to execute on said plan.

My process with this document is simple. I update my template the morning of my meeting. To do this, I look at last week’s version for an interesting or hot issues I noted in the prior meeting. Ideally, I’ve already moved on these and have something to report.

During the meeting, I follow the order on the carefully folded sheet. People, Program, and Product. Success can be measured in two ways: healthy conversation during the meeting or awestruck silence. Your mileage may vary.

With feedback from y’all, I’ll be happy to continually update this document. I would absolutely love to hear from folks who have tried to use this document. I would absolutely love to see real world versions of this that folks have tried with the managers and employees.

Rands Communication Template v.02 (PDF)

Ok, useful articles:

Understanding the Team

These articles focus on figuring out who the hell your working with and for. I have a tendency to map personalities on a spectrum where they are either THIS or THAT. In reality, there are multiple spectrums and the following articles describe a bunch of them:

• Free Electron — the single best engineer you know
• Organics and Mechanics — fuzzy thinkers versus the machines
• Inwards, Outwards, and Holistics — managers are not evil
• Incrementalists & Completionists — better is the enemry of done
• Healthy Tension — r&d versus qa

Understanding the Company

Ever wondered why there are useless meetings? Confused by your new company’s lingo? Not clear why your boss is yelling at you? The following might help:

• Mandate Dissection — deliver and receive big news
• Agenda Detection — understanding the players and pawns in meetings
• Managementese — communication across the org chart
• Rands Management Glossary — evolving glossary of management mumbo jumbo

Improving the Team/Yourself

Constant improvement only comes from constant challenge. How you communicate and deal with that challenge will define you as an employee, a manager, or a soon-to-be-unemployeed loud mouth:

• Don’t Be a Prick — do unto others
• What To Do When Screwed — high velocity management
• How To Lose Your Job, Pt. 1 — understanding stagnation
• Avoiding the Fez — fixing stagnation

Creativity in Development

It’s relevant that the last section is the most fun. Figuring out how to build stunning products is job #1. I can help:

• Taking Time to Think — are you thinking or reacting?
• The Bear Story — art won’t die
• Messy Thinking — you need space to think
• Pitch — and a great pitch
• Signs of Art — because software is art

Google + Sun

Morning.

I wanted to go on the record and think out loud regarding the Google + Sun announcement which is is landing in about 41 minutes… so, I gotta keep this brief.

I see two scenarios here both of which don’t make much initial sense. I’m very much looking forward to being proven wrong.

Scenario #1. Google and Sun are developing a web-based office suite. There are two sub-scenarios here. They’ve built the mother of all AJAX applications OR they’re thinking they can get folks to run Java versions of these applications. I will not even discuss the Java option because to think that any Java application will come close to replicating native application user experience in terms of both performance and interaction is absurd.

So, AJAX, then? Well, it’s a fine idea, but I have seen no evidence that AJAX is ready for this sort of responsibility. I’ve been paying close attention to the folks @ 37Signals and I consider them to be on the bleeding edge of this stuff, but they’re still developing in the “app-let” space and have not crossed over to full blown applications. Their tagline: Simple software to get you organized.

Ok, maybe the WHOLE POINT OF WEB 2.0 is that my concept of traditional applications will need to change, but I’m a nerd and my Mom is not and you’re not going mainstream with any Office application if my Mom can’t use it. Last time I checked, we were still working on making it easy BOLD text inside a browser without using byzantine Wiki formatting.

Scenario #2: Sun is using Google’s distribution power to push some variant of StarOffice. (Hmmm: Yeah, I guess both Scenarios could be in play) Anyhow, the idea that because Google is everyone’s favorite search engine gives them ability to push software is as absurd as the Cool Java on the Desktop meme. Yeah, they’ve got scads of scalable cheap hardware all over the planet and I’m sure they can push bits really really fast, but what bits are they pushing? StarOffice? Quick, tell me what version they’re on. It’s version number 8. Please tell me one interesting thing that occurred between version 1 and 8…

Don’t worry. I’ll wait.

No, go ahead.

Nothing? Ok, do this. Name a single successful consumer facing application developed by Sun.

[sfx: crickets]

I do want to be inspired by whatever Google+Sun have cooked up, but as I move the puzzle pieces around in head, I do not see a scenario that makes a lot of sense. Once I’ve read whatever is going down in 28 minutes, I’ll update this entry.

[10/4/05 Update]: Here’s the updated Sun press release.

I’ll boil down this announcement to the bullet points:

- Sun will include the Google toolbar as part of Java download from their site. Quote, “There is a direct monetary value for us being a distribution mechanism for the toolbar.” Translation: Google is giving cash to Sun.

- Google will significantly increase its purchasing of Sun servers. Translation: Google is giving cash to Sun.

There’s a bunch of more blithering about the deal here, but I think I can sum this up pretty easily. Sun needs cash. Sun needs exposure. Google made an strategic investment in both today. Everything else regarding OpenOffice, Google’s involvement in driving Java, etc, etc, is interesting, but there is nothing at all revolutionary going on here. Both companies are planning to do “great things” , but that describes the mission statement of every company in the valley.

What a snooze. Why not use this event to announce you’ve done something amazing rather than trying to spin the world on that fact that you’re saving a company in distress?

Signs of Art

There’s a never ending battle going on in your software development team right now. It’s the battle between the Organic Engineers and the Mechanical Engineers and it sounds like this:

Organics: “Software is art!”
Mechanics: “Software is logic! It’s fact! And it’s a lot of work.”
Organics: “You’re right! It’s work but it’s artful work.”
Mechanics: “When you call it art, you trivialize our work. I design lightweight database libraries and it took my team of four engineers 18 months to roll out last version and it’s compliant with RFC 2354 and blah blah words acronym words blah blah.”

It’s at this point the Organic glazes over and starts dreaming about how they’ll design a stunning application on top of this whizbang database.

As I’ve said before, we need both Organics and Mechanics (as well as Incrementalists and Completionists) to get our bits out the door, but what I really want to say is…

Software is art.

The follow-up to this statement is “What is art?” Brighter folks than I have spent their careers working on this question and I’d like to apologize in advance to each one of them. I’m just some schmoe sitting on the floor of an airport waiting for my flight, but I’m going to take a stab at definition.

Art is “the documentation of a thousand interesting decisions”.

Let’s take that apart word by word:

“The documentation…” In order to qualify as art, you’ve got to be able to share it with others. This means capturing it on some canvas whether it’s paper, a DVD, a web page, a city, or your skin. If you can’t share your art, it’s not art. It’s a conversation with yourself and I’m sure you’re fascinating, but why not share it with the rest of us?

“… a thousand…” A thousand is a swag. It describes that there needs to be some perception of effort for a work to be art. I’m specially YELLING AT YOU MODERN ART because YOU OFTEN FAIL THIS TEST. A matchbox poorly glued to a large piece of purple construction paper is not art. Sorry.

I’m not suggesting that an outside observer needs to look at art and say, “Gee, that looks hard to do. I couldn’t do that.” The observer needs to experience something in the piece whether whether it’s the size, weight, or complexity of the work and can’t be created with a single trivial decision.

“…interesting decisions…” Now, here’s the heart. Art is is when someone captures a set of decisions worth remembering. Blue or red? Serif or sans serif? Ruby or Python? San Francisco or New York? Up or down? As I said above, one decision does not art make (STILL GLARING AT YOU MODERN ART), it’s the collection of all the decisions… captured… that create a conveys a unique idea to the observer. It’s not just whether they can see/hear/feel this idea, it’s whether they find inspiration in their aggregate perception of these decisions. It’s a personal thing. Some decisions will inspire, some will bore and the sum of all the decisions will affect each person differently.

Software is art.

It’s a thousand decisions captured in code and displayed as user interface, services, and any number of other useful and artful conveniences. I would further argue that a great piece of software has equal ability to change the world as any great piece of art and if you disagree, I direct you to exhibit A, B, and C.

Believe it or not, that’s just introduction to this piece. What I really want to talk about is my secret Software as Art checklist. This is my personal list of discrete events I watch for in a team which engaged in the practice of building artful software.

This list will annoy every program management lovin’ mechanic out there. I swear I tried to shake as many of them off with the whole fuzzy (yet relevant) art introduction. If they’re still here, I need to say that I’m not suggesting that the following is a means of gauging a project, it’s a means of taking the temperature of a process which is creating art. I will further frustrate everyone reading by merely giving you a means of measuring without suggesting how to improve your team environment. That’s another column or two.

Measuring Team Art

Teams which are building art display the following traits:

1) High tension at inflection points. Traditionally, folks start yelling whenever you move from one development phase to the next. Sometimes there are formal meetings around these transitions, sometimes not, but what I’m looking for in the yelling is a team that is choosing to challenge the process.

If you’re moving from design to development, folks should be asking questions like, “Do we have the right features?”, “Has anyone bothered to write specifications?”, or “I don’t understand the vision for this product.”

If you’re moving from developing to deployment, the questions are different, but similar in tone, “Have we fixed enough bugs?”, “Do these features work?”, “How’s our Beta going?”, or “Does anyone else but me think this is crap?”

The key to this tension is not that folks are tense, it’s demonstrating that they are engaged. They know these development inflection points are critical public decision points and if they’re taking the time to care then they’ve got skin the game. Art is never created by those who are following the process.

2) Ideas appearing out of no where. Love this. You’re wandering the hallways on a Saturday afternoon and two engineers are idly talking about Feature X. It’s a casual conversation, so you plant yourself against a wall and listen in and WHAM HOLY SHIT she just totally redefined Feature X with an off-the-cuff comment. SOMEONE WRITE THAT DOWN.

As I mentioned in the Taking Time To Think piece, great ideas only come when you’re soaking in a problem. Hallway brilliance only comes when the team is breathing the product.

3) Efficient Decisions. Another good sign that folks are busily creating art is they are making their own decisions. This might be hard for a manager to swallow because you’re getting paid to lead, but, trust me, you want the folks staring at the code to know two things:

• They can make strategic, big decisions all by themselves, but…
• The more folks they involve in the decision, the more art they create.

When you combine “efficient decisions” with “ideas out of no where”, you’re really cooking. A lot of folks freak out when they see a brand new feature in the product two weeks before the feature complete milestone. Yeah, it’s called feature creep and it’s hard to ship a moving target, but it’s worse to ship bits that are uninspired.

4) Evening and weekends. The traditional senior level productivity measurement is, “Is the team working weekends?” Senior execs believe a team really needs to “burn it at both ends” to ship a product. Furthermore, they believe that providing food for said weekend week is an incentive. Here’s your wake up call folks:

No one ever worked a weekend for free tacos.

When it comes to weekend and late night work, the question is not “Are they?” the question is “Will they?” Success here is a simple measure. Does the team go the extra mile without being asked? You see this behavior in start-ups all the time because the team knows who the team is. “It’s me and these three other guys and if we don’t do it, no one else will.” In larger companies, this perception is diluted because there is so many frickin’ people. It becomes, “Well, someone is going to fix this, right? Right?”

Measuring Despair

At every entrance to the Silicon Valley there’s this huge road sign. It reads:

You’ll notice that the sign says nothing about art. That’s right. You can do better, faster, and more and make scads of money without a smidge of art. Is that company you want to create? To work for? Really? Bummer. You can stop reading now.

If you’re still here, you know that the combination of a desire to build art and the BetterFasterMore mantra will invariably lead a development team to believe it’s screwed. No matter how inspired, creative, or innovative the group can be, they will arrive at an psychological impasse where all will appear lost. This is where you, the manager of people, will realize a couple of things. First, even though you’re no longer contributing code, the decisions you make regarding moving the team past despair is your essential contribution to the art that is your software. Second, you are responsible for the flavor of despair the team is experiencing.

One flavor of despair tastes like that last sip of coffee that’s been sitting in that paper cup all day. Cold, useless, and full of coffee grinds. It’s got a hint of promise, but it’s mostly an empty reminder of what was…. it’s depressing. The other flavor of despair is metallic in taste… it’s the flavor that floods your mouth when you’re being chased by a bear. It’s scary, but the adrenaline is kicking in and that means SHIT WE’LL JUST RUN FASTER.

There is a flood of management terms which change the taste of despair. Empowerment! Collaboration! Thinking outside the box! These words pasted on big fat pieces of paper and slapped all over the building do exactly one thing: they clutter up the joint. Changing the taste of despair and building a team that wants to create art is a full time gig and I’ll spend a lot of time writing here about how to do it. Sorry to leave you hanging, but I’ll leave you with a simple observation.

If you’ve got a team full of bright artful people, they’re going to have endless opinions about what is art and what is not. They will argue, they will yell, and there will be times when you hate the person you respect most because you are incapable of admitting they are right. This roller-coaster of pain and pleasure always ends at the same spot. It stops when all of the team’s hard-work is judged by one person — the customer. A finicky, opinionated person who will make the most important decision — is it art?

The Information Report

At the first whisper of school starting, Californians lose their fucking minds during the morning commute. What was a leisurely 20 minute commute to Cupertino turns into an hour of frustration. It’s not just that a large demographic of people are suddenly on the same schedule, it’s that they’re panicking because they’re late for work. This panics results in the inevitable “Hey, I know this secret route” approach which only fills alternate routes with uppity caffeinated yuppies with something to prove.

I am one of those uppity caffeinated yuppies, yet I have nothing to prove. I’m simply frustrated because I’m driving to work blind. I no longer have any no idea what the correct route to work is and I pride myself on either being informed or having the ability to become informed with ease. It’s that NADD thing again. Note to Yahoo: Bang up job on those traffic reports — THEY DON’T HELP ME IN MY CAR.

I feel better now.

Welcome to the Information Report for 2005.

As a NADD sufferer, I’m on a constant conquest to revise the tools I use to find and consume information. There are two general buckets of searching that I perform on a daily basis. The first is Active searching. You’re Active searching when you’re looking for a specific answer to a question. You’re on a mission and you’ll only be happy when the answer is found. Success in developing an Active search tool is measured in decreasing the time one of your users moves from “Huh?” to “Oh!”.

The second type of search is Passive. These are tools which push content your way. Passive searching is done without a mission in mind other than, “I want to learn new stuff.” Success here is measured in a tools ability to rapidly provide original content that is relevant to the user.

The Information Report is a snapshot of my current favorite Active and Passive information tools as well as a round up of tools which have recently fallen out of favor. I’m planning on publishing this report on a year basis, so I also venture an opinion about the tool or company’s prospects in the coming year. Come back next year and see how I did.

Let’s begin…

Google
Active Search
Rank: Tried’n’True

It’s hard to imagine that Google’s total active user based hasn’t stabilized or, at least, the user growth has become less meteoric. This would mean that Google would have to focus less on attracting new users and more on increasing the average visit to sites laden with ads. This is what they’ve done whether it’s Gmail, Maps, Homepage or any of the other number of Google properties designed to give you ONE MORE CHANCE to click on an advertisement.

Google remains the best tool for Active searching because it’s gets you from here (I trying to find out about X) to there (Hey, that’s exactly the X I was looking for) in as short a time as possible. It’s seemingly never down and it’s remains blazingly fast.

Still, don’t tell me that every idea that comes out of Google is great. The sputtering Brazilian infested Orkut remains a confusing wart on the Google suite of applications. The jaw dropping coolness of Gmail and Google Maps has yet to make it into the vanilla Homepage offering.

Next year: Yahoo makes all sots of noise about going toe to toe with Google, but does anyone actually use Yahoo! for search? Competition comes from eyeballs being pulled to Passive search tools such as the Del.icio.us and Diggs of world. These are sites chock full of eager folks who get paid nothing to prioritize and tag content. While smaller in scope than Google, these sites give their respective demographics easier access to the latest and greatest relevant information.

From the evolution-of-a-company perspective Google is also overdue for a kick in the shins in the form a significant founder resignation or PR scandal. I’d also expect the irrational anti-Google sentiment to continue to grow as it’s fanned by popular media outlets who appear to be giving Googlers the Microsoft treatment. Sigh.

Rands Advice: Keep sprinting. Look at inventing in Passive search tools. I’m thinking http://wander.google.com is a great idea.

Del.icio.us
Passive Search
Rank: Tried’n’True

I’m a fan. Del.icio.us represents low-tech user interface, but Joshua and crew makes up for it two ways. First, Del.icio.us appears to be scaling in the face of popularity. There is no quicker way to get a tool or service off my list than having it being down or having the service lie to me (See Below: Technorati). I’ve had the odd Del.icio.us hiccup during the past few months, but these events are sporadic and appear to be fixed quickly.

Del.icio.us also receives Rands kudos for sticking to their guns. I’ve been staring at the site for months trying to reverse engineer a business strategy and I think I’ve figured it out. Del.icio.us is not trying to be a social bookmarking site, it wants to be a social bookmarking platform. This explains the heavy focus on integration rather than dazzling user interface. I’m not suggesting Del.icio.us doesn’t care about user experience, but it’s clearly not job #1.

Next year: Answer me this: Who is paying the bills? I’d like to think Del.icio.us would cut a deal and provide social bookmarking services to various big names, but the competition is heating up in this space and if Del.icio.us is going to take it up a notch, they’re going to need a sugar daddy.

Rands Advice: Replace useless front page with the Popular page and achieve hits galore. Form editorial team to highlight great content. Consider move to Mountain View. Watch Digg.

Wikipedia
Active and Passive Search
Rank: Tried’n’True

Wikipedia is real competition for Google in both Passive and Active search. It’s replaced a lot of my proper noun searches as well as being a online replacement for my late night History channel excursions. Who cares if it’s written and edited by amateurs? It reads well and I leave feeling informed.

Next year: A buy-out of Wikipedia by anyone is a bad idea and they know it. Wikipedia needs to remain independent in order to maintain the appearance of objectivity and a lack of a corporate agenda. This means they’ve got to get creative about figuring out how to extract cash from me.

Rands Advice: Keep going at it alone and give me a reason to give you thirty bucks a year. Here’s a thought, publish a book.

Bloglines
Passive Search
Rank: Tried’n’True

It’s official. After various flirtations with native newsreader applications, I’m on Bloglines 24/7. The reason is simple. Look at ever single entry in this year’s list of NADD tools. Web based tools and NADD are the perfect combination. They allow me to feed my need from any computer on the network with zero fuss.

Bloglines ain’t pretty, but it’s web-based and it works just about all the time. NetNewsWire and NewsFire just rock from the UI perspective, but they slow me down. Yes, I’m in that BIG OF A HURRY.

Next year: Pretty much guarantee someone is going to grab my web-based feed reader dollars in the next year. FeedLounge looks swell. I’m guessing they’re are other bright folks wandering around here.

Rands Advice: Nice uptime record, but what about UI evolution? Where’s Bloglines 2.0 and why should I care?

Urban Dictionary
Passive Search
Rank: Tried’n’True

This my honorable mention entry because I don’t use Urban Dictionary on a daily basis. Still, when I need to figure out what pwnz0r means, it never fails.

Next year: Don’t change a thing.

Rands Advice: Stay hip.

Mint
Passive Search
Rank: Up and Coming

The only thing more interesting than writing content for the site is pouring over referral statistics. Mint showed up on my radar a few weeks ago and I couldn’t pay my thirty bucks fast enough. Why? It provides an essential service built with uncompromising visual design. WHO CARES IF I CAN’T GET TECH SUPPORT, it works so well out the box, I don’t need it. Mint is exactly the type of application I was thinking of while I wrote my Web Application Leap essay.

I’ve only had the service running on Rands for a short time, but I’ve already discovered some fascinating statistics. Guess what “Rands”, “Repose”, and “Holy Shit” have in common? They all return this site as the first hit in Google. How about this. The #1 browser used to view this site is Firefox. I’m receiving almost double the hits from Firefox flavors versus Internet Explorer. When did that happen?

Next year: I’m clearly unnaturally high on Mint right now and I’m sure I’ll have some bright suggestions in a few months, but I’m still a little dizzy with joy.

Rands Advice: Make lots of money and don’t pull a Refer.

Digg
Passive Search
Rank: Up and Coming

The Taking Time to Think article altered my perspective of Digg in a morning. I’d seen the site before, but had quickly dismissed the site as a Del.icio.us knock-off. Wrong. Sort’f. When the Think entry was published, I received a decent hit bloom on Del.icio.us by gathering forty or so bookmarks which is good for my entries. Several days later, I woke up to a Slashdot-like referral storm from Digg.

When did Digg become Slashdot? Wasn’t it Del.icio.us++? No. A evening of research revealed that Digg is a hybrid. A little bit of social bookmarking, a smidge of Friendster, and a healthy dose of Slashdot. Throw some Ajax on top and a slick interface and you’re talking Digg.

Digg has the feel of a something big. It provides much of the usefulness of Del.icio.us, but it goes a step further by providing the sense there is a community of people wandering around the links by introducing the concept of friends. It goes a step further than Slashdot by integrating a sense of time. Looking at Digg Spy — it gives a near real time view into what Digg-ers care about. Click on the “Digg this” link associated with every entry provides instant, non-intrusive feedback. “Yeah, you dug that. Keep digging.”

Next year: Digg has the potential to bump several folks out of Tried and True. They got the features, but they need to scale.

Rands Advice: Scale.

Technorati
Passive Search
Rank: Buh-Bye

Kottke stole my thunder on this topic, but I’m going a blow a fuse anyway. What the fuck. Technorati clearly had first mover advantage blog searching, but the blew it. Hard. The site was part of my default bookmark tab group, but my estimate is the site timed out 25% of time. They only recently added a time-out message which states, “We’re experience significant load…” Rubbish. If Microsoft Word only launched three out of four times, they’re be a revolt. If Technorati was an employee and performed like their site does, I’d fire it. So I did.

Refer
Passive Search
Rank: Buh-Bye

This is bittersweet. Refer was a Mint-like referral analyzer which I’d been faithfully using for several years. Despite it’s usefulness, the last revision to the code was November 27, 2003. Still, it worked and no one showed me anything better until Mint showed up. All I see in Refer is lost opportunity.

Taking Time to Think

Lunch at Don Giovanni’s with Phillip. He’s amped. We haven’t even seen our waiter and he’s already cleared the table and is scribbling furiously on the white paper table cloth.

“See, we needed to speed up our release cycle which is, of course, insane, but we figured out a way! We call it Train releases. We’ve got four releases going at the same time and a train leaves the station every month. If a feature is ready to go, it gets on the train and if it’s not, it waits for the next train. We’ve already released two trains in six weeks!”

I nod watching the scribbles become increasingly incoherent. I’d buy Phillip a nice glass of Chianti to take the edge off, but he’s a Mormon, so I try the truth.

“Phil, you’re screwed twice. First, you’re screwed because you’re going to need, at least, twice the staff to qualify these ever increasing releases and you’re a start-up. You’ve got one QA guy and if he hasn’t blown a fuse yet, just wait a month. Second, and most important, you’ve got no downtime. You’ve got no time to design because everyone is going to be panicked about which train they’re supposed to be riding.”

“Phil, in order to create, you’ve got to think.”

REACT versus THINK

Why can’t you think when you’re busy?

Dumb question, right? Answer: “I can’t think because I’m busy.”

Wrong. You can’t think because when your busy, you’re not thinking, you’re reacting.

Example. You walk into my office and start yelling, “Rands, it’s two days from shipping and we’ve just found a bad bug, a showstopper. What do we do? Are we screwed?”

I will respond and my response might look like thinking, but I’m not doing anything creative because I’ve dealt with the showstopper two days before ship scenario IN EVERY PRODUCT I’VE EVER BUILT. Survived it each time, too. Got some great stories. It’s that experience I’m using when you walk into my office and tell me the sky is falling. I’m not actually doing anything new, I’m just telling you the story of how I propped the sky up last time.

Yes, you can argue that one can be exquisitely creative when one’s hair is on fire. It’s the necessity is the mother of invention argument, but, seriously, if you’re hair’s on fire are you going to take the time seriously consider all hair dousing techniques or are you just going to stick your head in the nearest convenient bucket before it really hurts? Panic is the mother of the path of least resistance.

You won’t be a successful manager without well developed react instincts. A quiver full of experience gives you all sorts of arrows to shoot at problems and the timing and accuracy of some of those shots will be brilliant, but your quiver will slowly empty unless you take the time to think.

For the sake of this article, let’s partition your brain — one half is the creative brain. This is the part of your brain that is the source of inspiration. The other half of your brain is your reactive brain. This is the part of the brain that loves it when the sky is falling because it gets to move so gosh darned quick.

Your react brain doesn’t actually like to think because thinking is messy. Thinking involves slowing down and actually soaking in a problem and your react brain thrives in the familiar. Your creative brain loves the unknown. It’s a sponge and it’s only happy when it’s full of new ideas. This is part of the reason thinking is hard to pull off at work — it doesn’t fit nicely into daily course of business because it’s full of mind bending paradoxes and uncomfortable realities your mechanical manager is going to barf all over. Some examples:

• Thinking is not something you can constrain by time or a meeting. There is no beginning and there is no end — you never know when you’re done.
• Doing more thinking always pays off, but time is money and you’ve got 27 other meetings this week.
• The more people you include in the thinking process, the more genuine ideas you’ll find, but the process of finding those ideas will linearly slow down with each person who shows up.
• Everyone thinks differently.

The time to kick off your deep thinking is right after your last major release. It’s when every single lesson of the prior release is forefront in the team’s mind. They’ve just gone through the crunch where they had to stare at each poor design decisions illuminated by repeated painful deferral of bugs. They’re exhausted, but they have hope because they know they can fix it in the next release.

GETTING STARTED

The first step is defining a time when the team can think. In the past, I was a fan of kicking things off with an offsite. A good solid day of thinking somewhere other than corporate headquarters where folks can forget about their daily professional woes. The problem with this is that while everyone loves a field trip, the day is an illusion. Sure, the coffee tastes different and, yeah, everyone seems really excited about the next version, but tomorrow you’re going back to headquarters which is where you’re going to do 95% of your actual thinking. You’ve got to create a thinking conducive environment in your natural setting.

Start with two meetings a week. The first is a brainstorm meeting and the second is a prototype meeting. Both are, at least, an hour long.

Make sure there is time between the brainstorm and prototype meeting. Give everyone involved time to stew on the results of the brainstorm meeting. Conversely, you don’t want to wait too long to see a prototype because you’ll forget the context of the initial brainstorm. Once a week meetings are study in futility because folks forget everything during the course of a weekend and meetings up end up rehashing the same thoughts from the week before.

PLAYERS

When the meetings begin, you need a driver. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s not. There’s another paradox here. Structured thinking kills thinking, but unstructured thinking leads to useless chaos. Your meeting driver must be able to swerve the conversation back and forth between the two extremes, but generally keep it in the middle. Organics tend to be best at this. More on this in a bit when we figure out if your meeting is actually working.

Whom to invite? This is the hard one. If you invite every single person on the team, you’ll get nothing done… even with the world’s best driver. You’ve got to start small and let the momentum build. This is where you might initially piss people off because everyone wants to sit in this meeting because everyone has an opinion. If you have an idea of what the initial topics will be, invite those you know have an educated opinion. If you have no clue where to start with topics, roll the dice… pick at random. You never know what you’re going to find in the minds of engineers. The good news is that one of the best signs of a productive design process is that the players change. More on this in a moment.

One land mine you’ve got to be aware of in your attendee selection is obstructionists. These are folks who’ve fallen into a total react lifestyle. You can easily identify them by their tendency to map every new idea against previous experience and then declare the idea “unoriginal”. The reasons for this attitude varies. Maybe they were early designers of the product and can’t escape from the original design. Maybe it’s the fear of unknown. Whatever the cause, these folks are a creativity buzz kill.

CONTENT

The goal for the first brainstorm meeting is to start reliving the pain on the last release. What bug did you hate to defer? What feature didn’t get pulled off? Who hates this UI? Everyone? Yeah, I thought so. Hey, who is our customer anyway? You want to walk out of your first brainstorm meeting with 5 hot topics that folks want to address.

The second meeting is your prototype meeting. You want to see the results of the last brainstorm meeting in a prototype… paper… code… wireframe… bulleted list. It doesn’t matter as long as there is documented evidence of what occurred in the prior meeting. Maybe you just had a list of customer types? How about a list of the five things the team hates about the product? Your goal here is documented continuity between meetings. This documentation will eventually turn into mock-ups or actual working prototypes, but out of the gate, keep the documentation focused on remembering what the hell happened last time.

When you do get to mock-ups or prototypes keep them lightweight and devoid of detail. If it’s week three and the team is arguing about which icons fits where, you’re too deep. I’m a fan of wireframes when it comes to visually wiring an application together. They give all the geometry of a visual idea without suggesting a look or feel.

IS IT WORKING?

Ok, you’re two weeks into the Rands Creativity Plan and it’s going poorly. No one said anything during the first meeting because they’ve never been asked their opinion before. The meeting consisted of you in front of the white board and a lot of nodding. This lack of brainstorming content led to a very dull prototype meeting, so you stuck with more brainstorming. Week two rolled around and folks started talking except, well, they were yelling because there’s a fundamental disagreement about who the customer actually is. That’s painful progress except when you roll into your second prototype meeting and everyone’s silent again because who wants to be yelled at?

Good work. Really.

It’s a big deal to mentally stumble about and bump into shit during your initial brainstorm meetings. This seeming lack of mental coordination is what finding innovation is all about… but you still need to understand if you’re making progress. Some things you can look for as the weeks pass:

• Are decisions being made? Is the group working well enough to make a decision? Yes? Good.
• Are decisions being revisited? Is the group limber enough to go backwards to refine a previous decision? Even better.
• Are decisions constantly being revisited? Ok, problem here. Your team has spun into creative nirvana. A good time to step back and apply a little structure to the process. Reviewing decisions to date is a good way to find structure and move forward. Oh, you weren’t writing down the results of brainstorm meetings? Ooops. Start now.
• Are the players changing? If you’re four weeks in and the faces at the table haven’t changed, you might have a problem. If you’re working on a sizable project, there is no way you picked the right brainstorm team from the onset. The diversity of thought sitting outside of the room must be brought into the conversation. Time to start mixing it up.
• Are basic truths about your design showing up? These are the gems of brainstorm. These are decisions which are made that define the basic design of your problem. You’ll know these when they show up, stand up to scrutiny, and eventually starting virally wandering the hallways.
• Is it therapy or work? If you’ve just been through a brutal release, the team is going to spend the first brainstorming meetings venting. That’s ok, they need it. If it’s week three and you’re still on the vent, it’s time to make changes.
• Are holy shit moments occurring? Similar to the basic truth discovery, but louder and infrequent. “HOLY SHIT, we’re completely wrong.” Holy shits are disruptive, but are a good sign a limber creative process.
• Is the to do list growing or shrinking? If you’re early on in the design phase, it should be growing. If you’re getting close to the end of your design phase, it better be getting smaller. I know engineers want to solve every problem in the product in any given major release, but THAT NEVER EVER HAPPENS EVER. Better is the enemy of done and if it’s your project, you need to draw a line on what topics/ideas you intend to tackle and stick to it.

My rule of thumb is if you aren’t staring at one hard decision per meeting… you might be wasting your time. You’ve got the wrong people and/or the wrong driver and while it sure is fun to have an hour to chat… that’s all you’re doing. Chatting.

WHEN TO STOP

If your meetings are healthy, the meetings will naturally move from one topic to another. Decisions are built, ideas are vetted, yelling occurs, and prototypes are reviewed. I’ve found that these meetings will slowly die off as you move from hardcore design into serious development. If they don’t then you’re probably becoming addicted to thinking, and while that sounds appealing, you’re not working for a university, you’re working for your shareholders and they want to see new product yesterday. You can still design during the depths of development, but the trend you want to see in your meetings are that questions are being answered, not created.

FIGHT STAGNATION

Google knows you’ve got to take time to think. It is rumored they ask their employees to spend one day a week working on their own projects. Do that math. Google is investing 20% of the engineering budget on thinking. I’m sure that nothing comes from a majority of those projects, but Google gets two wins out of the program. First, some of the projects create value for the company. It’s probably one in five, but that’s not the real value. Google is creating a culture of thinking by allowing their employees to wander about and bump into shit.

I don’t know what you do and I don’t know what you build. I am certain that if you don’t demonstrate creative thinking in what you build, you’re screwed because you, your team, and your product will stagnate. Kicking off brainstorming meetings are a tricky proposition. They are poorly defined, hard to run, and harder to measure. What comes out of these meetings might be brilliance or stupidity… the difference between the two is magnificently slim. Good luck.

Let's Go Jabber

Back in my Netscape days, I was fuming that AOL had actually stumbled upon a bright idea in the guise of Instant Messaging. They only furthered my frustration by shoving their bright idea into my beloved Netscape Communicator. The question was, “How can a company whose target market are people who type with one finger be dictating the bits to an innovator such as Netscape?”

At the time, I had the bright idea to develop an open standard to AIM, but some brief pre-Google research revealed someone had beat me to it. Jabber was a fledging buzzword compliant protocol for instant messaging. Crap.

Jabber has evolved over the years, but, from my perspective, the buzz has been low key until Google slapped their name on it this morning.

While I won’t be using the Windows client, Google Talk (rather Jabber) supports iChat which means I can lump all of my buddy lists in one place. That’s handy. So, effective now, the new IM way to reach me is via Google Talk: rands.feedback@gmail.com.

For those new to Jabber, Google has provided a handy page for setting other Jabber clients to point at their servers.

[8/24/05 Update]: Right so, it’s called XMPP and not Jabber. YET JABBER JUST ROLLS OFF THE TONGUE. There appears to be no well-defined Mime type for XMPP. Bummer.

A New View

California housing prices blow, our Governor has been taking it on his industrial-sized chin, and there’s a good chance that we’ve fucked up the planet permanently.

Still, the early morning view from the new house does not suck…

20 minute commute to the Silicon Valley or 15 minutes to the beach. Can’t really beat California.

Still in boxes, but the view is still working for me.

The Portal Problem

Pet peeve — a name which do a poor job of describing an idea. A good name’s job is to elegantly wrap an idea in a single word because a name is going to travel. It’s going to leave one person’s mouth and go to another… and another… and another. Each time the name jumps a person, it’s runs the risk of being interpreted by an idiot. A good name can weather advanced stupidity whereas a bad name easily mutates into something it was not intended to be.

Enter Portals.

The term portal is up there as one of the most over-used terms of the late 90s. It’s right next to the term dot com except everyone knows what dot com means whereas if you ask your average technology observer exactly what a portal is… you’re never going to get the same answer.

Wikipedia defines a portal thusly “A web portal is a web site that provides a starting point, a gateway, or portal, to other resources on the Internet…”

Let’s throw up all over shall we? First, how in the world can you use a word to define itself? Second, how does this not describe EVERY SINGLE PAGE ON THE INTERNET. No wonder the term portal bugs me. It describes nothing.

Thankfully, the term portal has fallen out of vogue because of it’s lack of meaning and, hopefully, it’s association with the dot com implosion. Unfortunately, we might be in for another round of portalization and it appears no one paid attention the first time around.

Google fired the first shot a few months back with the first version of their Google Homepage. The event was noteworthy because of the utter lack of imagination Google put into the first version. Whereas Gmail and Google Maps had us chattering in the hallways, the Google Homepage was striking in it’s blandness and lack of obvious innovation. They’ve since rolled a new version which adds new content options as well as whizbang Ajaxables, but when you stare at your fully configured homepage, you think “This is exactly what I’d expect from a portal”.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has been tinkering in this space with the Start.com (Note: this page does not work in Safari). What is surprising is that the Start.com represents, in my opinion, a more refined interaction experience. Like Google’s latest version, there’s a handy configuration sidebar and you can drag and drop the different sections of your page. Start takes it a step further by allow users to change the CSS on the fly as well as alter the number of columns on the page… features which have been a part of My.Yahoo since, oh I don’t know, Netscape was still an independent company.

Why so stressed, Rands? Google is just filling out their product line to complete with Yahoo and Microsoft is desperately trying to show everyone that they can play in this space, as well. Heck, they even have their own Google Labs except it’s called Sandbox.

To understand my frustration, I’ve got to take a step back and talk about The Grid. If you’ve done any graphic design, you’ve heard of the grid. It’s the basic geometric specification of a page. Questions such as “Where is the headline?”, “How many columns on this page?”, “What’s the space between this columns?”, “Where should pictures go?” are answered by designing a grid specification. It’s one of those design terms that you don’t know, but are already implicitly doing by trying to aggressively use CSS on your new design.

Where innovative design comes from is when graphic designers take their respective grids and start to get a little crazy. They begin to violate the underlying design of the grid and this often creates unexpected visual interest while still hinting at a basic, orderly design. Want a great example? Go check out Dunstan’s (now defunct) weblog. He’s clearly working inside a existing framework, but what is interesting is where he push the constraints of that framework with work like his stunning top-of-page panorama.

Every portal I’ve seen does a mind-numbingly good job of following a grid. They do this for a simple reason, they need a means of representing chunks of information that can be arbitrarily moved by the end user. The boxing or chunking of these data into simple boxes makes the complexity problems associated arbitrary placement go away.

And it makes portals look like crap.

Both Google and Microsoft are doing their damnedest to use the latest and greatest web technologies to give flexibility to their respective portals, but they’re mimicking design from the late nineties. Yeah, I’ve been using My.Yahoo as my home page for five years now, but I honestly couldn’t tell you one piece of content on that page except for stock quotes… that’s the only thing I look at because the design blows. Nothing on the page draws my eye away from the column of stock quotes. Big things might be blowing up on the Planet Earth, but I wouldn’t know it from my homepage because all information is shoved into these boxes of vanilla lameness that reflect nothing about what information is being conveyed.

Please, I want a portal with just a hint of a soul.

I’m really glad that I can drag and drop my boxes hither and fro with the latest homepages, but how about giving headlines I care about with some meat? How about getting creative with the spacing on the page? Maybe allow me to increase the size of a box by draaaaaaging it across three columns and an option to say, “Hey, if there are images associated with this stories, I want them big and bold and centered.”

And, yeah, I want to be able to arbitrarily configure my content and, yeah, I know this makes the whole design a lot more complex, but how about this pitch. Why don’t you tell content providers like the New York Times or C|Net that you’re providing an option for premium exposure to the content by actually putting some design cycles into the layout of their content? Think they’ll want more eyeballs? You bet they will. Yes, this will cost them some dollars, but by landing some visual interest in their content, content providers will see more impressions and that means more dollars.

I’m getting closer to entering my third decade of technology immersion and I’m thankful that the rate of change in this industry keeps things interesting. It’s a pretty sure bet that whatever technology floats your boat this year will be dull as a sack of hammers in two years. This makes the introduction of these new portals from Google and Microsoft doubly frustrating. Even though these offerings provide the latest in interactive web technologies, their visual design reeks of five years ago and what was bad then is worse now.

No Bjork

When you ask a lot of people for musical suggestions, you’re going to get a huge steaming pile of music. This was the point of my original request and I’d like to than everyone who took the time to respond to my request.

I lost count at ~200 bands. It was at that time I realized there was no way I was going to listen to all of that music in a reasonable amount of time, so I began to randomly select songs out of the comments. Yes, this means your song may not have been perused and I apologize, but we’re talking about hours and hours of potential music listening. Add to that fact that I intended to pay for my music whenever possible and you’ll appreciate my selection criteria.

Anyhow, I ended up with 58 songs on the list. In order to give them each a fair shake, I listened them to a few times using the handy My Rating feature in iTunes to rank and re-rank songs. As of today, I had 11 songs which had 4 or 5 stars.

A couple of comments before I point you at what I consider to be decent music:

• I really don’t like Bjork or anything Bjork. I realize she’s edgey and revolutionary, but I simply find her annoying. Anything which sound Bjorky was instantly disqualified.
• I’m disappointed with my final 11 because, on the whole, they reflected my musical taste. One would expect this to occur, but I was hoping to end up with a list of music that sounded nothing like what I normally listened to. Sigh. Hard to break old habits.

Ok, so some good music you should purchase.

Best Band: The Postal Service. I ended with several of their songs in the final 11 because I appreciate their sound. After a couple of plays, I realized they reminded of light airy sound of The Dream Academy. Two songs to buy: This Place is a Prison and Nothing Better.

Best Australia Joni Mitchell (And/or Cat Stevens) Replacement. The Waifs. Bridal Train is a phenomenally catchy tune.

Best Song You’ve Already Heard. This song didn’t come from Boiling Point feedback, but I saw the video on MTV (ahem) and needed to own this song. Fall Out Boy’s Sugar, We’re Going Down Swinging fulfills all my adrenaline requirements and the video needs watching.

And three other songs I have to mention:

• Such Great Heights, Iron & Wine
• Warm Sound, Zero 7
• California One / Youth and Beauty, The Decemberists

Honorable Mention goes to Stereolab’s Lo Boob Oscillator simply because it’s something I liked that sounded like nothing I’ve heard. Also, great song name bonus points.

And the prestigious award of a “Song which Rands Happened to Like a Lot” goes to Electric Six’s Danger! High Voltage. In the vein of the prior selection, I picked this song because it was so different from much of my other music. Moath will the proud owner of a signed copy of the Joel’s Best of Software Writing I book as soon as he/she sends me a shipping address.

Thanks again to all who sent suggestions. I’ll continue to happily comb through the entries looking for further musical nuggets

Terminal Zen

Management by Hallway is the style of management when you get out of your office and walk around the office to see who you trip over. It’s by no means a reliable or scalable management style, but it does offer you the chance to strike up a random conversation about a random topic and you never know when all that randomness will lead to knowledge.

Part of my hallway management approach is to walk into someone’s office and, if it’s convienent, glance at their desktop. There’s a nervous eighth of a second when the co-worker sees that I’m looking and does one of two things: they hide their current window (hmmmm) or they sit back in their chair to begin our random discussion.

Really, I’m not spying. Engineers work too damned hard for manager’s to expect that ever single moment at work will be devoted to the code. I expect folks to pepper their work stints with news, music, and what_not as long as what_not doesn’t equal porn. What I’m looking for is a terminal window.

To me, the defining characteristics of my terminal windows are simple:

• A black background with just a smidge of transparency
• White, readable font (ProFont, 9 pt.)
• It has no agenda

That last bullet item throw you for a loop? I’ll explain.

Your average Mac OS X or Windows user will never see terminal or the console because they have no need. The whole purpose of the graphical user interface is to decrease complexity. There are buildings full of well intentioned people who are designing user interfaces bent on making decisions for you because each time you make a decision you might screw up. These designers are intimately aware of the unfair situation whereby a bad decision by you results in blame on them. The customer is always right even when they’re wrong. Ouch. Tough gig.

The end result of the all of their hard work are some exceptional applications and operating systems that have done away with anything resembling a terminal window. That’s good because when your average OS users sees a terminal window they think, “Oh shit, what did I break?”

Not me. Nope. I see Terminal Zen.

Terminal Zen is a feeling. It’s the sense of calm productivity I feel when that big empty black window covers my screen. It’s a sense that all the crap that is the graphical user interface is getting the hell out of the way and giving me primal access to my computer. It scrapes away all that magic the interface folks and exposes the nuts’n’bolts of the OS. You can have a similar experience by grabbing a flashlight and heading under your house. Look around a bit — in a few minutes, you’ll notice that, hey, all your drains go to one exactly one big black pipe that heads into the ground. How amazingly dull. And all that phone wire hanging all over the place? That’s your DSL line.

Not with me, yet? Let’s go back to just after I landed the new design for the site.

Once I published the new site, I promptly fired up three terminal windows. Two windows doing a “tail -f” on my web server’s access_log and error_log files and one utility window. What am I doing? For you non-Unix nerds out there, the tail command lists the last few lines of a file. The -f parameter leaves tail running and lists new lines which are added to the end of the file. By watching new additions to these files, I’m doing real time QA on the new site. I’m looking for bad links, I’m looking for missing files, and I’m watching the traffic as it happens. That’s right. I’m visually parsing the obscure common log format on the fly rather than using one of the many fine graphical tools out there that does that work for me. Why? Because those other programs have their own agenda.

Every well designed program attempts to make decisions for you in the name of usability. They do this by making decisions about what a user needs to see when. They take those decisions and build more and more user interface which, ultimately, simplifies the most common tasks, but totally buries and/or removes access to the uncommon ones. Great interface makes life easier for your target demographic, but great interface almost always makes life harder for power users by obscuring functionality. We’re ok with that. Here’s why:

Think of a great carpenter walking into a furniture store. They see a table they want to buy except it’s got cherry trim… and they hate cherry trim. Now, they can’t buy the table that’s 95% great because they know there is no magic to building a table, so they say, “Screw it, I’m not going to settle, I’m going to build it myself.”

There is no magic.

When it comes to nuts’n’bolts work on my computer, I’m irrationally willing to spend 10x the time to research and develop a tool that has a tenth of the features of an existing product. My willingness comes from the fact I know I’ll experience the joy of creation as well gather invaluable data from the various knowledge excursions I’ll make in support of my building efforts. All of this happens in a big black terminal window. Terminal is my hammer — it is the window within which I can build and see anything.

So, when I walk into your office and glance at your screen and see this big black window, I’m not looking to see what you’re doing, I’m looking to see how you’re doing it. When I see some form of a terminal window merrily chugging away, I think “Aaaaaaah… another terminal nerd. A fellow seeker of Terminal Zen.”

Messy Thinking, Pt. 3

Co-workers keep asking me why I bought the 30” flat panel and slapped it down next to the 23”. I’m not a coder anymore… in fact, with each passing year, I become less of a coder even with my painfully infrequent excursions into lands of Python and PHP.

What I am, as a manager, is an adept consumer of information and, while I’m still getting the hang of it, you can consume a lot of information with 6.4 million pixels.

AaaaAaaaaAaaaaaaaaah.

Read more about why you should own a 30” via the original Messy Thinking article.

The Boiling Point

I was yelling at the stereo in the car this morning.

It’s Peet’s Coffee, you see. My commute is just long enough for that large cup of black coffee to kick in which means as I near Cupertino, my mind is racing with a million caffeinated thoughts.

This morning’s thought, “I hate all the music on my iPod”.

It’s not my iPod’s fault. It’s the 80s. My iPod is full of 80s and early 90s crap and I’ve been so busy the past 20 years, I haven’t taken the time to explore anything else. This means when I look at my Top 25 Most Played songs in iTunes, it’s littered with Cure, Concrete Blonde, and movie sound tracks.

Pathetic.

This has been an emerging problem and I really shouldn’t be yelling at my stereo. I’ve already taken some steps to free myself from English Pop and Glam Rock. It started a few weeks when the brother-in-law took me to the Hot Buttered Rum string band in San Francisco. Yes, Bluegrass. That’s a step in the right direction.

This weekend it’s The Waifs and I don’t even what kind of music they play… but, hell, I’m going.

This is a start, but I need your help. Please tell me the name of your favorite band (or bands) that no one has ever heard of. If they’ve got a particular song you think rocks, I’d like to hear that, as well.

To encourage a very long list that will save my stereo from additional humiliation, I’ll be selecting one submission as “The Best”. This will be an impulse decision based off hearing one great song. The winner will received a signed copy of Joel’s Best of Software I which includes one of my essays.

if you want to be considered, please make sure to supply a valid email. I’ll be picking and publishing the winner a week from this Friday (7/22).

[7/22/05 Update]: Right so, I didn’t expect this much music. As of earlier this week, I’ve received recommendations for over 200 bands and I haven’t even had a chance to scrub the new stuff. Please bear with me while I listen to a lot of music. There is no way I’ll listen to everything, but I’m trying to give each person who submitted a suggestion a fair shake. The goal is to pick a winner a week from today (7/29).

You are welcome to continue suggesting new music, but you will greatly improve your chances of being heard by suggesting a single favorite song.

[7/31/05 Update]: Still listening to music… will select a winner this week, I swear.

Pitch

You’ve just finished your big release and the team has mostly returned from that four day weekend where they’re supposed to recharge from four straight months of work. Everyone is still pretty screwed up. Folks still instinctively check the bug database every 4 minutes to see if anything critical showed up even though there’s no chance of that… the customer doesn’t have the product yet and QA is still passed out in the lab.

No one is ready to start grinding again, but the senior management team is wondering what they’re getting for all that salary that’s rolling out the door. Quick! Someone think of something we can do that is low effort with high visibility! I know! How about a product planning offsite?

Administrators scurry to find a venue, engineering leads fire up their favorite presentation software, and in a few weeks you have your offsite. Invariably it starts with the state of the product presentation and that’s done by marketing.

The presentation leads with actual content. Market and sales numbers. Lessons learned from the past release. Good data based on facts derived from the past sales cycle. You want them to stop while they’re ahead because you know what’s coming next. They’re going to start defining features for the next release. They’re going to start using pitch.

Pitch is the pithy phrases used during that five minute window when marketing explains the feature set for your entire product. Based off this insanely brief content window, you will be expected to figure out what features and technology will be designed to make a sellable product over the course of the next year.

This lack of definition drives most engineers nuts, but when marketing pulls it off, I love pitch. Effective pitch represents something all writer’s respect: using the power of words to effectively express a complex idea and, potentially, change the world.

Not with me with yet? Let’s pitch some products right now. How about these three product ideas off the top of my head:

• Firefox on Steroids
• Outlook for the Rest of Us
• Windows without the Annoying

I haven’t defined new products. In fact, all I’ve given you is an impression… a feeling, but that’s all you need to do in the pitch… say a lot… with a little.

You completionists are already rolling your eyes at me right now. Your claim is, “You have said nothing, Rands. It’s people just like you who sign me up for futile efforts designing impossible products.”

My response, “For all the amazing amount of work you completionists do, you’d think you’d appreciate efficiency. When I tell you that I’m building Windows without the Annoying I’m trying to steer you towards the idea that I’m building a secure OS with a stunning, usable UI, a next generation file system, and a list another 20 features that would competitively differentiate my hypothetical OS with Windows.”

I know Completionists want the details. Don’t worry, I’ll write all that down, but the details aren’t part of the pitch. Pitch is about mass communicating… it’s about building awareness around a great idea and to do that, you need to talk to a lot of people and these folks are often in a big hurry.

First, there’s the executives that will hear about your product exactly twice and these folks sign your paycheck. Then, there’s the two engineering managers that everyone at the company needs a technical favor from… you’ll talk to these guys twice in two yeras, as well. How about the QA folks who already have way too much to do? How do you educate them as quickly as possible? Most importantly, there’s the random engineering manager you meet in the elevator who asks “What are you working on?” After hearing my pitch, he will choose to make a seemingly minor decision for his product that ends up saving your product team hundreds of work hours.

Pitch is designed for informal, high velocity communication that is the backbone of primal software design. It doesn’t matter whether you’re at a start-up or a Fortune 500 company. In order for your product or idea to survive, you, the engineering manager, must be able to talk about it quickly to wildly different demographics. You need pitch.

Now.

You probably have some person in mind. Some guy or gal in marketing or engineering that you believe is “All Pitch”. They are buzzwordy, fast talking folks who smile too much and they have no actual content. These people exist and they give pitch a bad name.

If you’re planning on using pitch, you must be prepared for the people who won’t be dazzled by your economy with words. They are going to test you because they’re not going to understand or believe what you are saying.

“Why is it Firefox on Steroids?”

“No, I get that you’re saying it’s faster, how much faster? And why?”

What these folks are saying is “Prove it”. Folks who are all pitch will often use more pitch to make it sound like they know what they’re talking about and that sometimes work because pitch can dazzle, but others will see right through this endless cycle of pitch and start to ding your credibility. They’ll whisper “marketing guy” and this is the kiss of death in engineering. This taints all future pitch.

Intrigued, yet? Wondering how to create pitch for good and not evil? There’s good news. You need do nothing more than listen because great pitch sticks. During your endless brainstorming meetings, one of your team members is going to say it. They’ll summarize the product, the 18 months of six engineers tirelessly working, in a single phrase,

“It’s Tivo with a hint of Google.”

The phrase will hang in the air with strength.

“That’s it.”

“That’s what we’re doing.”

The next question is, “How good is it?” Go ahead. Give your pitch a trial run. Your boss is a good place to start. Pitch him. Do his eyes light up? Great, we have pitch. Blank stare? Might want to keep brainstorming.

You don’t need pitch to develop a product, but my personal opinion is that product without pitch is a solution looking for a problem. You can have all the great features, great performance, and stunning APIs, but you’ve also got to have the pitch ready to go because you never know who you are going to talk to about your product and, when you do, you want to give that person an idea they can dig their teeth into.

There’s a big fat exception to this whole article and that’s original pitch. You’ve noticed a lot of pitch uses existing ideas, existing products as a basis of comparison. The question is, how do you pitch an idea so new that you have no basis for comparison? Better yet, how would you pitch Netscape Navigator to your Mom in 1995? Try it now: explain what a browser is without using the word browser. No fair calling it the “Killer application of the Internet” because know one knows what an Internet is either.

If someone is rabidly pitching you on a idea and you haven’t a clue what they are saying, there are two distinct possibilities. They’re nuts or they might be onto the next big thing. You’d think telling the difference would be easy, but it’s not.

Back to the offsite. The moment when marketing stops talking about facts and starts to pitch the next release. As an engineer, you need to suspend your disbelief and listen to each word marketing is using and decide which are the best. Realize that marketing’s job is to figure out how to create buzz about your product or technology and do to so they must boil the idea down to a sound bite.

These bit-size blurbs of information are the ones that travel best on the buzz stream that is the constant flood of information we all deal with during the course of a day. It will be judged in a moment because we’re buried in a flood of information and they only gauge of good pitch is if it stops and makes us think.

A Chance of Tag Clouds

Pet peeve on the 4th of July weekend. What exactly is this?

For those of you who think it’s performance art, I think you might be right, but let’s get you some facts first. Tags are all the rage right now and it’s a good thing. Google is a fine way to data mine, but it’s slow and and it doesn’t know who I am. Wow, I can’t believe I just said Google is slow.

It is slow. Go look at the popular page on del.icio.us right now. It’s a near real-time list of pages people have added to their del.icio.us bookmarks and it’s ranked by the number of times the page has been added. Show me the equivalent on Google and remember that del.icio.us has a decidedly nerd demographic… and I’m a nerd.

Unlike Google, anyone can add any tag to anything. Go chaos. Thing is, trends emerge after time. Common tags grow in popularity and we again demonstrate that while human beings really want to be unique, we just aren’t.

This brings us back to the photo above — a tag cloud from Flickr. It’s the list of all time most popular tags on Flickr and I know what you’re wondering “Where’s the sex tag?” Yeah, they probably edited that out..

My question remains. What is the purpose of a tag cloud? It’s more interesting than a bulleted list, but as user interface goes it’s a aflutter with clutter. If you tell me this is intended to a casual interface for browsing tags, I’ll buy it, but if it’s intended to more useful than a stumblable interface, I’d like to hear your theories…

The Bear Story

I’ve been spending a good part of the past six months considering a move back to the mountains. Right now, I’m heading into my sixth year in Suburbia and, well, I can’t complain. The Burbs are like fast food… everything you want… conveniently located… and at a sensible price.

Why screw with a good thing, Rands?

I grew up in the mountains. The Santa Cruz Mountains to be specific and that is my definition of living. For those of you not in the Bay Area, the Santa Cruz Mountains are an easy drive to all things Silicon Valley which means you can have your high power high tech gig and still drive home to the redwoods. Yeah, it’s a drive. Yeah, there are forest fires, earthquakes, and wackjob mountain folks. Some kooky shit goes down in the mountains, but it’s that precise lack of certainty that I enjoy… Living in the mountains is work. It’s a constant list of things to do combined with the occasional curveball. OH LOOK, LANDSLIDE.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The idea for this article popped in my head whilst reading the dialog betwen Kottke and Mena regarding observations on the evolution of the weblog community. Synopsis: Kottke notes that those who defined the blog-o-sphere are disappearing into a black-hole that is the company they’ve been successful in building. Mena responds by that she doesn’t like the idea that most companies are creatively stifling their employees and IN THE VERY NEXT PARAGRAPH says she can’t write about her favorite hot topic because “I’ll get pulled into a meeting about a upcoming business trip, will have to catch up on an email that builds up in my inbox”, etc. Hah.

I think the black-hole that Kottke describes as inevitable and it has to do with why I’m getting the hell out of Suburbia.

Story time. Consider the folks who took a chance and settled the western United States. Now realize I don’t have a smidge of credible data regarding these folks. I would likely be eaten by the first bear I encountered if I was stumbling around 1800s California, but stick with me for a moment.

What is the defining characteristic of these folks? They have a strong desire to change. It’s so strong that they’re willing to risk the bears and other challenges of frontier living.

Their first order of business is finding a piece of land where they’ll build their house. To be successful at this, a lot of things have to click. They’ve got rapidly learn about their environment, they’ve must adapt to changing situations, and they have to build a solid house. All of this must be done whilst also figuring out how to not be eaten by a bear.

The ones who succeed make it through the winter. The ones who don’t move back East or they die. Cruel natural selection at work.

Congrats! You made it through a year. Your proven success will have an interesting side effect: more folks will show up. You’re so happy you didn’t die that first winter, you’re tripping over yourself happy to help these new settlers using your hard earned year of experience. Being the good neighbor that you are, you help with the actual building of the house. Repeat this scenario a dozen times and you’ve transformed your house into a small town, a community.

Next step. Somewhere along the way, someone who is really good at building houses starts grabbing new settlers and saying, “Why don’t you save your time and money and pay ME to build your house. See, I’ve made it through five winters and I’ve yet to be eaten by a bear and don’t you want to start working on that farm anyway?”

Great. You now have a trade in housebuilding. Right behind these guys are the ones who are going to suggest they are great at keeping the roads clean while killing all the bears and then WHAM you’ve got a primal police force. When these guys start getting surly, you’re going to need laws and that means politicians. This is starting to look a whole lot like a full blown society, isn’t it?

My silly bear story is exactly what is happening to the weblog-o-sphere. It’s slowly turning into the weblog-o-burbs where all the real work to settle down is gone. It’s a single point and click to create your space which means the new arrivals don’t have any skin in the game because they’re not worried about being eaten by a bear.

Meanwhile, a subset of initial settlers have successfully have commoditized their knowledge. The Bloggers, the Moveabletypes, god bless ‘em, are bringing weblogs to the masses and they’re hopefully making money while their doing it. It’s hard to argue with success. Right behind this success are a new breed of settlers who will attempt to put policy and laws around weblogs. It’s going on right now and there’s more coming.

So, what’s the problem? Any society evolves, right? Problem is, the weblog community has seen their hobby turn into business in a matter of years. Many of the early settlers, these folks who wanted something different, have seen their compatriots sucked into the lucrative opportunities that are created when lots of smart people who have a knack for not getting eaten by bears work together.

The job of business is to commoditize a great idea by sucking out all of it’s art. It sounds cruel and it is… but only for those who cherish the idea. Think Netscape here. A bunch of kids at University of Illinois… pouring their heart and soul into the great idea and WHAM they’re bazillionaires buying swank pads in Northern California. Meanwhile, the company that spawned the great idea is getting it’s teeth kicked in by Microsoft who did nothing original with the idea… Microsoft just used it’s size, influence, and velocity to convince the world its version of the idea was better. And it worked. And then the great idea was left to languish for years while the original true believers sat in their million dollar houses wondering “Was the idea great? Or was I?”

A great idea is great. Netscape, the company, is effectively dead and gone, but the idea is strong enough to continue. There’s still art there.

Here’s the good news about weblogs and you can quote me: business can’t kill weblogs. Ever.

It just might be that the defining characteristic of a weblog that is a ‘singular voice’, and the moment a business is able to replicate that voice, we’ve got a serious problem because that means art is dead.

Art won’t die.

Still, let’s stress unnecessarily for a moment. Let’s make a leap and say that some nimble business actually consumes weblogs, pleasantly rounding the square corners of every layout and sanitizing our collective voice by molding our creative foolishness into consumable mediocrity. Sounds grim. If I saw this, I know what I’d do. It’s what I always do when I find myself languishing. I’d pack my bags and head for the hills because any new frontier represents opportunity.

The folks who started Movabletype are the same folks who started Apple, Netscape, Ebay, and countless other great ideas that started between a handful people and turned into revolution. Here’s the secret. The majority of the early settlers in each of those companies are long gone not because they’re rich enough or successful enough. They’ve left because what they are good at is living on the frontier. One day they wake up and realize the business is bigger than the idea and they do what they always do…

They move further West… where there’s more bears.

The Second Leap

Disclaimer #1. I know nothing about security and its relation to this entry’s topic. I’m saying this because in my career I’ve had more professional beat downs when I’ve sat in a meeting with security types and hinted that I know a thing about Security. Seriously. The last time I met with the security folks and tried to sound intelligent about security and it’s relation to my product, I was jumped, “You can’t say that Rands. Your product is a clear example of the Mxyzptlk conundrum and would be vulnerable to Chomsky-variant attacks.”

I have just said nothing. More often than not, that is how I feel when I leave my security meetings. I walk in smart and leave stupid because I hear nothing… and I’m smart.

Disclaimer #2. To whoever comments on the security-related aspects of this column, I pre-emptively say “You are right and I am wrong.” I realize security is your religion and I apologize for offending you.

Key to the web application revolution is that we’re all ok with the idea of our data being somewhere else. Your average Internet users don’t know whether their Gmail storage is sitting on their hard drive or on a server in Oregon. Don’t know, don’t care. At some point, they will. In the near future, bandwidth will be fast enough and storage will be cheap enough that it’ll make good sense to store everything somewhere else.

The reason for this is simple. You’re busy. Your job is not to reliably back up your data, your job is to do whatever it is that you do all day. Sure, you want to back-up your data because “it’s a good idea”. We all think that about back-up… we all say “it’s a good idea”, but we don’t actually do it because that takes work and we’re already busy doing all our other work.

Realize this. There are people out there who have these big red cell phones on their respective hips. These cell phones have a special ring tone that, when used, cause their owners to totally freak out because it means one or more of their servers are down. The owners drop whatever it is they are doing and they bolt to the data centers to get their servers back up because that’s their job… keep those servers happy no matter what.

This is why the mail sitting on Gmail is significantly safer than the mail sitting on your portable.

This is the point where security and privacy folks freak out. Let’s give them a moment to settle down and then I’ll continue.

I’m not saying it’s not convenient to have all your content following you around, it’s just not that convenient when all that content vanishes in a puff of OH MY GOD MY DRIVE CRASHED smoke when you could have trusted someone else’s well maintained server to care for your content.

The Internet is rightfully being made out to be a scary place. Apparently every hacker in what was the Eastern Bloc is out to break into your computer, steal your personal information, and sell it to the lowest bidder in some shady corner of cyberspace. You should be worried about these folks because they do exist and they are actively looking to exploit ignorant users.

But…

The second key to the web application revolution is what we need to make another leap.

We need to trust that other people’s servers aren’t evil.

This issue of trust in cyberspace has been around since the moment someone realized that money would need to transfer via the Internet. This spawned an industry of folks debating the creation of public key certificates. All of this discussion is important and I’m glad it’s mostly being handled by folks who are qualified to have an opinion, but it strike me as odd that we’re still arguing about this when I’ve got a trust model that’s working really well right on my desktop.

AOL Instant Messenger.

Stop laughing.

Some important facts about my AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account which I currently access with iChat.

• I’ve been using it every day since it was first bundled with Netscape back in the late 90s.
• At this very moment, there are 50 active folks in my buddy list.
• I hit the ceiling of 200 total buddies over two years ago.
• Unless I’m on vacation, I’m always online. Always.

Lastly and most importantly, in all of these years of usage, I’ve never received a single IM spam. Not a single one.

Does this mean that AIM is secure? That they haven’t shared my personal information with telemarketers? I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s been eight years and I still consider my AIM account to be an invaluable communication resource. A huge part of that perceived value is because AIM just works. I can’t think of a time I’ve been unable to access the service and, again, no spam. At this moment, there are over 900 spams sitting in my Yahoo account and over 3000 sitting on my Gmail account. Yes, they’ve done a fine job of filtering them into another folder, but they still sneak through.

How does AOL do it? It’s a feat. Eight years of usage of a free service and I have yet to be pimped to advertisers. Well, the solution is partly technical, but mostly educational. From the technical perspective, yes, AOL has done a fine job of keeping their database of AIM user names secure. One would assume if this database ever got in the wild that all AIM users would’ve been spammed at some point. Go AOL. Keep up the good work.

On the educational front, I’ve done two things. First, I know to never broadcast my AIM username is a public forum. Yes, I know there’s an account right there on the front page of the weblog, but that’s not my main account. (As an aside, the jerkyrands account has only been spammed once in a few years of usage.). Second, I choose the right people for my buddy list. This is a big deal. When you think about adding someone to your buddy list, you go through a blindingly fast qualification process: Who are they? Do I want to keep talking with them? Are they idiots? Are they who they say they are? What if I ask them this?

Your brain is an excellent judge of identity. When a random person sends you an AIM, you can qualify them as a decent human being with just a few random questions. This quality control creates a buddy list full of trusted relationships and that’s why I don’t receive spam via AIM; I don’t have buddies who are out to screw me.

The same idea applies to trusting web applications. We can define another dozen security protocols to make sure your credit card is getting from here to there without nefarious parties sniffing out your data. We can paste digitally signed certificates everywhere. We need that technology, but we also need the users of web applications to be educated. We need to keep explaining to them the clever ways phishing sites are trying to steal their PayPal accounts. We need to fill their brains with useful data about the four clever questions they should ask themselves before they ever enter their credit card information because trust is best assessed and maintained by a human.

The Web Application Leap

The size of the fervent rush towards the Ajax reminds me that folks are dying to discover the Next Big Thing. It’s been awhile since we’ve had a Netscape-magnitude holy shit and while there are have been many false positives… has any Internet technology in the past two years seriously knocked your socks off? Well, Ajax has not knocked my socks off, but I believe it’s a indication of a revolution that will involve all of us… but understanding that revolution will take one leap of faith on your part.

First, what is Ajax? You can skip the next two paragraphs if you’re Ajax_Aware. There’s scads of content regarding Ajax everywhere, but if you want the simple explanation, go fire up Google Maps, enter the address of your best friend, and hit enter. Great. Another web-based map solution. I’m shaking in my boot, Rands. Where’s the holy shit? Of course, the holy shit is when you draaaaaaaaag the map and see the real time redraw of the map. You think? Flash? Java? You glimpse at the source and see no such thing. It’s HTML people and, guess what, that’s not Ajax.

Ajax is a web development technique which shares a common technology with Google Map’s non-obvious coolness that is XMLHTTPRequest. Believe it or not, you have Microsoft and ActiveX to thank for XMLHTTPRequest. Gasp. Wheeze. The idea behind this technology is simple enough. It allows a browser to do a round trip request for information without reloading the page. If I told you this before I showed you Google Maps, you’d say, “So what?” Now, I can tell that when you’re dragging that map, Google is doing an XMLHTTPRequest for the new maps grids it needs and now you think, “Coolness”.

What is innovative about Ajax is, first, it provides a simplified development model for using XMLHTTPRequest, but, more importantly it gives a pronounceable name to a horribly named technology. It’s a little thing… picking a good name… but when you do it well, you get a lot more credit than you deserve.

So, when I’m saying Ajax, I’m actually saying “improved interactivity within web pages” and that’s where part of the revolution lies, but I need to give you some more background before we make our leap.

Another hot topic. Web Applications. Stale idea, but in need of a definition. Off the top of my head, one definition is “an application served via a web browser which attempts to borrow native application interface concepts.” Using this idea, the perfect web application would one where the end user would have no clue that they were in a web browser versus any other type of application on their desktop. The most obvious advantage of this perfect application is usability — the user has the same set of familiar widgets on their desktop as they have in their browser. This minimizes the knowledge tax from moving from one application to the next.

You can argue that your average user has no concrete idea about the technical difference between their my.yahoo.com page and Word. Still, they do know when they’re in a browser… they know they can hit the back button to, well, go back. It’s not surprising that we’re seeing versions of the back button show up in native applications because folks are so used to the concept. Go. Back. I digress.

The perfect web application does not exist. We’re not even close. In fact, the concept of web applications is no longer en vogue. You can go search HotJobs and find all sorts of web application jobs, but the buzz surrounding the concept has faded. Who cares, right? The Internet is merrily evolving while the idea of web applications gathers dust. Here’s the deal. We really really want web applications everywhere.

There are two phenomenal advantages of web applications. First, they require zero installation. They may require some configuration, but, as soon as you click on the link, you’ve “installed” the application. This is a big deal, but not as big of a deal as the second part, no upgrades. The maintenance of a web application to the end user is zero and end users will really like that. End users may not notice the absence of install/upgrades because they just vanish, but your IT guy/gal, the person responsible for installing every damn bit on your desktop, they drool over the idea of web applications. All they have to do is upgrade the server and then everyone gets the new version. Web applications can save IT departments a stunning amount of money.

The second advantage of the web application is that it has no baggage. The only thing you really need to gain access to your web application is a name, a password, and a connection to the Internet. This means you have access to whatever information your web application manages from any Internet computer on the Planet Earth as long as you can remember your name and password.

Case study. I’ve been using RSS readers for a really long time. Started with NetNewsWire and eventually moved to the NewsFire. Problem with both solutions was that my subscriptions were hiding on my machine at home which meant I didn’t really read my news until the end of the day… and I’ve got NADD… the end of the day is forever from now. So, I move to Bloglines… decent interface, but more importantly, it makes my RSS subscriptions omnipresent. I need nothing but what’s in my brain to get everything I need. What happened? My list of subscriptions has doubled in a week because I’m paying more attention to what I read AND I’m reading more. That’s called empowerment and I like to be empowered.

Web applications are cheaper to maintain, they empower their users, so why the hell aren’t they everywhere? Well, there are lots of web applications out there. Gmail, My.Yahoo, Wells Fargo… long list… very long list, but they aren’t the perfect web application because, well, they still feel like a web page. This leads me to the first part of the leap:

Because of Ajax-like advances, the interface of web applications can vastly exceed your expectations.

Google Maps is the popular example of this, but there is more coming. I predict you will not see much of this innovation precisely because these new applications will meet expectations you already have of native applications. Think of demo of Google Maps to the person who says, “Yeah, so? That’s how it should work.” They’re right.

It’s illuminating that the first stumbling block folks who are playing with Ajax are finding is that damned back button. At my prior gig, we had the same problem. We gave our users a complex web application that provided all sorts of cool filtering and sorting controls… that could be instantly totally nuked by the back button… a shift reload… you name it… ka-blooey, your state is gone. Ajax’s doesn’t care about the stateless nature of a web browser. Ajax just wants to quietly update your current page… and that’s the second part of the first leap:

Stop thinking of a web application as a collection of pages.

The back button is not a bug in Ajax, it’s a flaw in the browser metaphor.

I hearby serve notice to the following browser controls: forward, back, home, reload, and that URL field. You need to die… unless I need you. These controls are (rightfully) designed around the idea of the web as a collection of pages, but an application is collection of objects where you, the user, are guided by a well designed interface to get your job done. We don’t actually need to kill these controls because they do serve a purpose, but the web application developer should be able to choose when they’re available because the developer is designing the application and they are incented to do what’s right for their users.

No. The perfect web application will never be a direct replacement for your favorite native application. The medium, the technology that is the Internet, will always change the content that it delivers, but web applications are still in the dark ages. Take a leap with me and think about web applications that do not compromise in user interface, that do not settle for interaction models designed around a clumsy metaphor. All the richness of the best desktop application belongs in web applications… all you gotta do is want it.

There Was No Trilogy

Back when I first got wind that George Lucas was going to do the prequel trilogy, I had a holy shit moment. I realized what the last scene of the third movie was going to be. Here’s that shot:

FADE TO BLACK.

SFX: A strange mechanical breathing begins and repeats three times.

FADE TO HEAD SHOT OF A BLACK GLISTENING DARTH VADER. THIS IS THE FIRST SHOT THE AUDIENCE SEES OF WHAT HAS BECOME OF ANAKIN SKYWALKER.

ROLL CREDITS.

THE END.

I have just described the scene that I (and just about everyone else) has been waiting for since the mid-90s and I’m finally going to see it. While I’ve been waiting, there’s been a whole lot of bitching about the first two episodes and, yeah, they did suck. They were visually appetizing, but… they… they weren’t Star Wars.

I listened to it all. Poor acting, Jar-Jar Binks, poor directing… blah blah blah… I generally agree with much of the bitching, but as the very positive reviews of Revenge of the Sith start to show up, I finally put my finger on the most significant problem with the first two episodes.

Nothing actually happens.

Everything that I’ve been wondering about since the end of Return of the Jedi actually occurs in Revenge of the Sith. Darth Vader. The arrival of Luke and Leia. The death of their Mom. (Padm�, still a dumb name) The elimination of the Jedi… the fall of the Republic. The banishment of Obi-Wan and Yoda… wow, there’s probably more and I have no idea how they’re going to fit it all into one movie.

Now, quickly, tell me what happened in the first two episodes. Hmmmm… Well, Darth Maul was pretty cool aaaaaaand the sound effects on those ships in the pod races were stunning aaaand then there was the second movie. Stormtroppers, right? And that three second shot of the future Death Star… I was all a’flutter.

Nothing happened folks. George Lucas put together one the greatest story specifications together when he was writing Star Wars and he clearly put a lot of thought into the back story which occurred before A New Hope… in fact, he liked his back story so much he teased us right out of the gate titling the opening credits “Episode IV: A New Hope”. We immediately ask, “What happened before this whole mess?”

A lot did. The prequel trilogy is the story of the fall of Anakin Skywalker and that back story needed to exist to tell the of his eventual redemption, but that fall just isn’t that interesting… anyone can fall in a hole, it’s how they climb out that’s a compelling story.

Star Wars is Darth Vader. He is the story arc which ties the first trilogy to the second trilogy. It’s his story and it’s a helluva tale, but as I sit here with my fingers crossed that Kevin Smith isn’t lying to me and that Spielberg’s tears are real, I realize why I feel my enthusiasm has been wasted on the first two episodes. When Lucas picked the number four for the first episode he’d film, he may have made a mistake. He locked himself into three prior episodes and he simply didn’t have the content to fill three movies.

Rands Version 4

Ok, last post on the redesign and then I’ll start writing about the Zen of Terminal windows.

Four categories of notes: Disasters, Tools, Hmmmm, and Shout Outs. Let’s start with:

Disasters:

� I’ve used the same basic CSS design for the last three sites. The updated About page touches on this, but the fact is — I’ve got a years of cruft in my CSS files. It’s not pretty. Problem is, I learned CSS as I’ve designed and redesigned sites which means all my ignorance is stored there. I need to construct the next site from the ground up to purge the CSS crap.

� There are a decent number of folks who read the site and, for those who return, I’d like to create some type of community, but weblogs are not the place to have a complex conversation. This is mostly a user interface issue — most standard commenting system are linear which means you’ll never know if your witty comment actually struck a chord without going back and paging through every damned comment.

I kept cycling on the community idea during the redesign… there are good web-based conversation tools out there, but I’ve didn’t find a slick way of integration them with weblog entries.

� Trackbacks are gone. I get the idea, I turned them on because I thought they’d be valuable, but my experience with trackbacks for the last six months has focused entirely on trackback spam. For the eight of you who used trackbacks in the past few months, I apologize, but the effort involved with keeping this particular pipe open is not worth it.

SpamLookup does a fine job of drastically reducing comment and trackback spam. I went from daily comment spam maintenance to thinking something was wrong with the weblog when I didn’t see any comment spam for a week. SpamLookup did force me to reconsider my trackback ban, but I’m assuming it’s only a matter of time before spammers find a way around SpamLookup… so trackbacks are gone.

� Oh yeah, here are three logos that didn’t happen: One, two, and three. (Also, I miss the hat background)

Tools:

� I’ve had Transmit installed for years, but for some reason, this was the first time I used it for a major project. It rules.
� Similarly, I finally figured out the use of column view in Finder. Can’t live without it now when managing piles of files.
� The document drawer in BBEdit 8 was equally invaluable. At the peak of development, I had three separate windows open. One for new documents, one for referral templates from the old site, and another for templates in the new site. Add drag’n’drop from BBEdit to Finder to Transmit and I was the king of the world.
� I have a 20” and a 17” flat panel at home and I feel very cramped. This is not bragging — this is a simple fact — you can never ever have enough screen real estate.
� While there is still much to learn, I made a nice experience leap with Photoshop. It transformed from WORLDS MOST EXPENSIVE CROPPING TOOL to a product I feel I can actually manage.
� I can not live without xScope.

Hmmmm:

� The orange toolbar is just a list with CSS smeared all over it. I was in awe that CSS has that level of flexibility.
� The toolbar also uses very subtle gradients. I’ve so abused gradients in the past… I had no idea they were elegant.
� The letter-spacing CSS attribute does nifty things to text.
� I still don’t know how CSS figures out line-height.

Shout-outs:

I’d like the thank the following sites for various forms of design inspiration:

� Veer — A good jump off place for ideas. Also: Orange.
� Los Gatos High — My high school. Didn’t look at their website once during the design period, but you’ll notice our colors were black and, wait for it, orange. You now have additional insight to this horrible logo.
� ProFont — Very nice font which is readable at 9pt. Handy when there is HTML CODE EVERYWHERE.
� PhotoShop — The Mom gave me a Scott Kelby book for Christmas and I’ve been making my way through the exercises. They are extremely helpful for digital image rookies like myself. Photoshop no longer feels threatening.

Yes, I am a closet design nerd. There are two books on my desk right now. Joel’s User Interface Design for Programmers and Universal Principles of Design. The first book gives me the impression that I can design user interface and the second book reminds me of how little I know.

Chaos Complete

The new design is officially live and in the wild. Whew.

Briefly, I had four design goals going into this redesign.

First, I wanted to remove the sense of linear time from the site. While this is certainly a weblog, I want to give visitors every chance to find entries/essays which were published awhile ago, but are still relevant. The new toolbar makes sections of quality content very accessible. It’s also orange… which rocks.

Second, I wanted to remind everyone that words are paramount on this site. I really wanted to include Flickr integration or any number of other visual elements in the design, but I write words. If I’m going to be successful, it’ll be in words. The new BIG FAT headline (which is only used on the first article of the front page) is a tip of the hat to both words and to newspaper headlines… which I also love.

Third, I wanted to give visitors more reasons to return to the front page. I’ve added a Popular section which lists what I consider to be the ten best articles on the site. I’ve added a links section which uses my del.icio.us as a back end — it’s updated hourly. I’ve also added a recently commented section which lists articles that are currently generating buzz on the site.

Fourth, and lastly, I want to fix a pet peeve of mine… the archives page. In three prior designs, I’ve done the absolute minimum with this page, so I spent a good amount of time thinking about what was actually useful about an archive page and tried to design to that idea. The result isn’t fancy, but it’s nice and clean. Oh yeah, it’s also a linear timeline which, yes, is a direct contradiction to goal #1. Oh well.

I’ve got more to say about the tools I used for this redesign, I also have some thoughts on what doesn’t work in the design… and design ideas I had to abandon for various reasons. For now, I’d like to hear your feedback as well as any problems you see. I’ve tested this design on good many browsers/platforms… I’ve also bowed repeatedly before the validation gods and they’ve let me live… so far.

Thanks for reading.

2005 Holy Shits -- In Progress

I need a place to hold the various holy shits I stumble upon and this is that place. If you’ve had any recent holy shits, please feel free to add as comments. As the year comes to the end, I’ll likely reflect back on the year, tidy this list up, and figure out who actually changed the world in 2005.

Google Maps: The initial reaction to Google Maps is “Wow, a big fat map.” I’m certain that a majority of the people that use it have not figured out the holy shit feature — you can drag the map and redraws on the fly. The Net is a buzz about the technology surrounding Google maps, but that’s not the point. The point is that web pages have suffered from an immersion problem since day one… I can’t lose myself in a web page because I’m either staring at a static HTML page or I’m confined in a Joe Cartoon sized box. Web applications have evolved in 2005. There’s more coming.

HTMLArea: Staying with the web immersion problem for a moment. I’ve been frustrated since day #1 at Netscape by the fact that HTML (and subsequent cooler technoglies) gives developers a high degree of creative freedom… except if you want to edit text in a web page. We’ve been stuck with the lame textarea control where none of the rich formatting of the web is used. Try to edit any page on Wikipedia and you’ll see a great example of this problem Making text bold is a backwards non-intuitive nightmare.

My holy shit regarding this problem occurred while testing driving Jotspot — a recent entry into the commercial Wiki arena. Go check out this page right now (user: weblog, pass: weblog) and edit it. If you’re using Firefox, you’re going to see the HTMLArea control… this is a rich text editing control (which has been around for awhile) that solves the rich text editing problem. I can already hear the collective sigh of relief from the Web when this control garners a bit more browser support.

The Long Tail: A first for Holy Shits — it’s an idea. Go read about it.

Tags: I’m hesitant to put tags as a Holy Shit since they’re really just another name for metadata which has been buzzy for years. Still, tags are changing the way folks are managing and sharing huge piles of information. Del.icio.us is the first example which comes to mind followed closely by Flickr. The holy shit really is how tags are being used… social meta-data… hmmmmm…

More as it shows up… Stay tuned.

Free Electron

There’s a Screwed Scenario that I missed.

Back in my Borland days, we were working hard on Paradox for Windows. I was a QA engineer testing the database creation and modification functionality. My counterpart in engineering, Jerry, was working hard, but getting absolutely nowhere.

We were mid-to-late in a 1.0 product cycle and most of the engineers were slowly moving from development into bug fix mode, but not Jerry, he was still implementing… over and over again. That’s the Screwed Scenario, you’ve given a critical task to someone who is utterly unable to complete it.

Now, let’s first give Jerry a break. He was a fine programmer, but he had two major strikes against him. First, Jerry had never programmed for Windows. so he was learning while he was coding. Second, this was also a 1.0 product. I’ve got an article kicking around my head about 1.0 product development… it’s titled “1.0 spelled One point oh my god I’m never going to see my family again and, dead lord, I’m going to take the company out while I’m at it.” Short version: 1.0 is incredibly hard and combined with his Windows inexperience, Jerry was in trouble.

Yet, Jerry has pride. Jerry believed that he could pull it off, but being on the receiving end of his code, I observed a disturbing coding practice which we’ll call “moving crap around on your plate”. Jerry’s approach to fixing his bugs was to move his code around in interesting ways much the way you used to shove food around on your plate in a feeble attempt to convince your Mom that you actually ate your beets. Nothing substantively changes, it just looks different. Another name for this coding practice might be “Coding by hope”.

The end result with Jerry’s code was each time he’d fix something, we’d discover another fundamental problem with the feature. Yes, small incremental progress was being made with each bug fix, but Jerry was in a losing situation because his basic architecture was crap. When asked for status, his lists of excuses were astonishingly believable. They were the excuses of a person who honestly believed he could pull it off and was willing to put in the hours to do it, but all the hours in the world wasn’t going to help Jerry because he was in over his head.

If you’re the manager in this scenario, you’ve got to make a major change because you can not release crap. There are companies that do this and end up making a tidy profit. You are not that person because once you are rewarded for releasing crap, you begin a blind walk down a path of mediocrity that ends up with you working at Computer Associates on a product no one has heard of and that no one cares about.

It’s a two step fix process. We needed to make a Jerry adjustment and then we needed a miracle. I’ll start with the easy one.

We needed Jerry. He’s the only one who knows what the hell is going on in that pile of spaghetti and he can fix trivial bugs. The engineering manager sat Jerry down and told him we need to focus on quantity. There were scads of trivial little fixes all over the place that had been ignored and Jerry could handle those. Yes, he was pissed, but in a few weeks, Jerry was cranking because people always work better when they know they have the ability to complete a task.

With Jerry adjusted, we had to face another fact, we were six months from shipping and we had a major portion of functionality that was cobbled together and barely working. In this scenario, you need a unique talent. You need a Free Electron.

The Free Electron is the single most productive engineer that you’re ever going to meet. I have not even provided a definition and I’m guessing a person has already popped into your mind that fits the bill.

A Free Electron can do anything when it comes to code. They can write a complete application from scratch, learn a language in a weekend, and, most importantly, they can dive into a tremendous pile of spaghetti code, make sense of it, and actually getting it working. You can build an entire businesses around a Free Electron. They’re that good.

Free Electron Got’chas:

» There are two classes of Free Electrons. Sr. Electrons and Jr. Electrons. Both have similarly productivity yields, but the Senior versions have become politically aware. In technology savvy organizations, most CTOs fall into this category. Think Bill Joy. The Junior versions have all the ability, they just don’t have the experience of dealing with people because they spent a lot of the youth writing their own operating system as a intellectual exercise. These Junior electrons represent the single best hire you can make as a hiring manager. If you get two in twenty years, you’re doing something right.

» Misdirected Free Electron intensity can yield odd results. On one project, I assigned a couple of slippery memory corruption bugs to a Free Electron who nodded quietly and promptly vanished for a week. When he returned, the bugs were fixed and the entire database layer had been rewritten. A piece of code that’d taken two engineers roughly six months to design had been totally redone in seven days. Sound like a great idea until you realize we were working on a small update and did not have the resources or time to test a brand spankin’ new database layer. Oops.

» Free Electrons sometimes will never engage and they’ll never explain why. Free Electrons are high functioning and have a strong opinion about everything… but they may never tell you that opinion. If you’re asking them to do something that they don’t believe in, they aren’t going to do it… ask all you want. The worst case is when you ask a Free Electron to pull of a diving save and they nod in the affirmative and promptly return to whatever they were doing before you distracted them with your useless request One week later, you’re going to be expecting the miracle, but the Free Electron is going to plainly say, “Haven’t got to that”.

One week more, your hair is going to be mostly pulled out, and then you’re going to realize you didn’t need a miracle in the first place and inaction was the right move. Your Free Electron knew that two weeks ago. He/she just didn’t want to take the two hours to draw the picture for you… Annoying, huh? You’ll get over it.

» You might expect Free Electrons to exhibit the personality of other uber-nerds, but often they do not. The main Free Electron at Netscape was the most decent human being I’ve met in recent memory. He also rode a unicycle.

» There are two primary tasks in an engineering organization. Research and Development. While the Free Electron is imminently capable of doing the development, their value in the organization is research. They define the bleeding edge. If you leave a Free Electron in the development role too long, they will vanish and you will have permanently damage the future productivity of your organization.

Back to Jerry.

Enter Bernard, Borland’s resident Free Electron. Up until he started poking around the code, I had no idea what Bernard actually did. He had a office. It was full of books. He talked a lot and produced little visible work. “Blowhard” is what I thought.

Bernard started tinkering with Jerry’s code on a Friday afternoon. The next Monday, I was able to run through my functional test matrix for the first time ever. By the end of that week, Bernard had closed a majority of the high severity bugs and was beginning to tread in fix areas reserved for Jerry. The following week I was racing to file bugs to keep Bernard engaged.

That is a Free Electron at work.

Edward Tufte is Not Dead

I’ve had a copy of Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantative Information sitting on my desk for years. It’s one of those rare books you pick up every nine months and just wander about… pure visual eye candy.

Tufte’s content strikes such a classic note with me, I remain convinced that’s he’s dead because it’s generally known that to achieve greatness… you’ve gotta kick the the bucket. Well, Tufte isn’t dead. In fact, he’s so not dead, he’ll continues wandering the planet pitching his information design ideas.

One recent Tufte development is the aptly named Sparkline. Sparklines are “intense, simple, work-size graphics”. They are graph-life representations that are designed to sit along plain-text in order to convey complex meaning. An example:

Stock performance for Tivo has been pretty flat for the past few years while both Adobe and Apple appear to be kicking some ass.

Still confused? Go read the chapter.

More good news. James Byers has created a PHP graphing library specifically for Sparklines. Note to self: Incorporate this idea in future weblog designs.

Charlie

Christmas Morning, 1978. The usual mad dash from the bedroom to the Christmas tree promptly followed by the frenzied assessment of who got what and how much. Careful attention is paid to the respective weight of each present because, while quantity does matter, a heavy gift has a higher likelihood of extreme coolness and subsequent sibling taunting.

This morning there is a strange square box tucked away under the corner of the tree. While not huge, man, this sucker is heavy. I’m thinking, “If this is for me, the sister will cry for a week. Sweet!” A quick examination of the packaging reveals the disappointing “TO: The Family FROM: Santa”… it’s the kiss of Christmas present death. Oh well, MORE PRESENTS ELSEWHERE.

The Dad eventually opened the weighty box while the sister and I were catching our breath… a brand new Random House Encyclopedia.

I ignored the book for most of Christmas Day, but as soon as the candy cane coma kicked in, I grabbed the massive book, curled up on the couch, and started browsing. I’m probably eight at the time, so I’m more at the Beverly Cleary level, but the books reeks of readability… lots of text, well illustrated, and delicate, thin pages that give the content as sense of important fragility.

Over the next few months, the family would take turns diving into the encyclopedia… invariably popping out of a two hour reading session full of useless, entertaining facts. “No, Sister, I had no idea how many nerve endings where in my thumb. Fascinating.”

Eventually, we gave the encyclopedia a name… Charlie. He became a member of the family who was to be consulted whenever information controversy arose. “No, Sister, the civil war started in 1861… go ask Charlie.”

I’ve missed Charlie. Sure, he’s painfully out-of-touch… he doesn’t know Bill Clinton. He still calls the Russia the USSR. He’s quaintly ignorant. Still, over the past decade, sessions with Charlie are few and far between because his information is stale and stale information is an affront to anyone who believes a SHIFT-RELOAD makes all content current.

Fortunately, there’s an emerging NADD-savvy alternative.

Wikipedia has been on my radar for months. I’ve poked around some entries over the past few months, but there’s been enough buzz in the last month to start paying serious attention.

For those of you who haven’t checked it out, here’s the elevator pitch. Wikipedia is a wiki (meaning anyone can edit the content) that intends to be a general encyclopedia of all knowledge. You read that right. Someone is trying to create the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy except without the funny.

… and it’s working.

By Wired’s count, Wikipedia has 500k articles compared to Britanica’s 80k and Encarta’s 4.5k. Sure, the quality of the content wildly varies by topic, but go pick a topic right now and I’m guessing it’s going to quench your information lust. If it doesn’t, GO WRITE THE ARTICLE YOURSELF. Better yet, just click a random page and see where you end up.

For me, it goes like this, I like the name Churchill so last Friday night I type Churchill and starting reading about Winston Churchill’s role in World War II. Suddenly, it’s two hours later and I’m knee deep in Blitzkrieg tactics. Shit, I forgot to eat.

Sorry Charlie, you’ve been replaced.

Great UI Before Vegas

T-minus one day until Vegas and I’ve got some great UI for you:

First up, Baby NameVoyager. Yes, it’s a baby name site, but some has put serious effort into a stunningly useful application. Go ahead and fire it up and start typing names… slowly… watch what happens… yeah, real time graphical updates based on whatever you’ve typed so far. Wow. Edward Tufte will be proud.

Second up, Panic’s t-shirt store. Yeah, it’s a web page, but go ahead and drag any shirt to the bottom of the page. Ok, cool, yeah, I get it… now… drag that shirt OUT of the bottom. Did you see that? Yes, you did.

Lastly, it’s official. Google can UI.

Nuke and Pave

My first backup solution was a stack of 3.5 floppy disks. They contained every single Wordstar document I’d ever written, a copy of my bulletin board system, and small set of utilities that I’d knew I need if my feeble PC-AT decided to explode.

Those disk are still around here somewhere. Every embarrassing word of pre-adolescence captured safely by a program no one knows and in a file format that nothing can read. We call that security through obscurity.

When Windows finally showed up, I sifted through those 3.5” floppies to find the documents I’d need and copied them into my document directory. Ami Pro or whatever the hell I was using didn’t import Wordstar documents, so I had to use a tool to convert Wordstar documents to plain text and then import. This was a hassle. It was a five minute tax on every document that I wanted to read in my fancy word processor WHOOOO PROPORTIONAL FONTS.

When Microsoft decided to slap WordPerfect squarely across the face, they realized that the only way they were going to WordPerfect users to switch was to make the migration process for WordPerfect absolutely painless. Word 6.0 emulated every single byzantine WordPerfect command sequence and had an entire help section devoted to WordPerfect users. Oh yeah, it also imported every type of WordPerfect document known to man.

It worked great. Sure, it didn’t help that the WordPerfectians out there in Utah decided take their dear time getting a Windows version out the door. When they finally did, we were all enamored with Word’s slick table drawing widget WHO CARES IF WE NEVER NEED TABLES IT’S DRAG AND DROP.

Migration is the key to keeping your users happy. Every software application and operating system with a decent shelf life should make it priority to make it trivial to move from Version A to Version B.

With that said, I will directly contradict myself and explain to why you should never ever ever choose to let your operating system migrate you from Version A to Version B.

System administrators call the process of installing an OS “nuke and pave”. You purge every last bit of the previous OS and you start clean. For administrators, this eliminates variables and guarantees that the OS on my machine is exactly the same. This is a big deal when you’ve got an entire school district to maintain.

I like nuke and pave and I employ it whenever possible. Two reasons: one is technical and the other is practical.

The technical reasons comes from fifteen years of developing software. Here’s the dirty laundry. When we’re sitting down to design the next version of the browser or the web application… whatever… the task to “provide a migration facility from the previous version” is usually the very last piece of work someone signs up to do.

This is not because we feel the work is not important, it’s just you can’t very well write a upgrade script until you’ve done a majority of the feature work for the new version. Translation: you can’t get to Point B until you’ve defined Point B. Aaaaaand… welllllll… you seeeeeee… writing upgrade and migration scripts is BOOOORIng..

I AM NOT SAYING THAT MIGRATION IS NOT IMPORTANT. I AM NOT SAYING THAT. PLEASE TO WHOEVER IS GOING TO WRITE SAYING I DON’T CARE ABOUT END USERS PLEASE REMEMBER I AM SAYING I CARE ABOUT MIGRATION IN ALL CAPS.

Ok then.

The real reason to nuke and pave with major new versions of your OS is not that migration comes in late and is done reluctantly. The real reason is practical and it has a bit to do with your garage. You see, over time, both your garage and your OS do a phenonmenal job… of collecting crap.

It’s mid-to-late Winter now and that means we’ve made it through the holidays, but it’s generally too cold to go outside. This means that anything large and unwieldly (but important enough to keep) has been ungraciously thrown in the garage for further sorting. The cleansing process will start sometime in the next two months when I trip over that STUPID XMAS TREE ORNAMENT BOX for the THIRD TIME.

You do the same thing with whatever OS you’re currently using. Part of it is your problem because you appear to like to save stuff all over the place. Part of it’s the various applications you choose to use because they do the same damned thing. Crap everywhere.

When a major version of a OS shows up, lots of bright people spend a lot of time to make sure that your upgrade goes smoothly, but I always nuke and pave because the process forces me to seek out the important bits on my hard drives and put them somewhere safe.

Yes, I lose all my application preferences/options/control panels… and yeah, it’s a hassle to reinstall all of those applications, but, guess what, I’m only installing the stuff that I need. This means those fifty seven different apps that I’ve installed and used once will be consigned to oblivion.

Nuke and Pave is natural selection for your desktop.

Nuke and Pave also is self perpetuating. After doing it three times, you’re going to discover a nimble strategy to organizing your bits — a simple way of moving everything from Point A to Point B with ease. This is because you know that sometime in the new future, the new WhizBang OS is going show up and the more limber your bits, the quicker you can give the new hotness a test drive.

ALL CAPS Killed the Exclamation Point

That Fez article. Oy. It took four times longer than expected to write, but I’m happy with the result even though I feel once I pass the fourth page of writing that I’m violating some weblog brevity rule.

As I endlessly rewrote the article, I realized that I’ve fully embraced the ALL CAPS STANDARD as a means of conveying what is traditionally done with an exclamation point. A little search of my 200+ weblog entries shows that I vastly prefer ALL CAPS to the exclamation point.

Before I explain this grammatical fetish, let me first explain that All Caps gets a bad rap as a tool of boobs. I blame AOL users for this because it is generally known that they are the source of all Internet evil. In the early days of the AOL Internet invasion, AOL users were bumbling around Usenet, annoying the locals, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. One of their traits was the USE OF ALL CAPS IN MESSAGES DUE TO THE FACT THEY WERE TOO STUPID TO HIT THE CAPS LOCK.

In reality, AOL users aren’t stupid. They weren’t really using their keyboard much because AOL designers decided, as much as possible, their users should use the mouse because there were only two buttons on a mouse and, well, lots more buttons on the keyboard. Less buttons… less decisions… less errors… more satisfaction. When Usenet access showed up in AOL, I think of lots of users were regularly typing in complete sentences for the first time and so, of course, they forget about that darned CAPS LOCK key because they weren’t looking at what they were typing… they were staring at their keyboards.

Let’s not let the sins of the past taint the grammatical beauty that is All Caps.

Yes, All Caps is yelling, but it infinitely more.

First, All Caps is much more efficient than the exclamation point. Similar to foreign languages such as Spanish, All Caps alerts you to the mood change from the very first letter. You decide:

• I like bread!
• I LIKE BREAD
• �Tengo gusto del pan!

In the first statement, you’ve got to wait until the very last character to understand this guy has a bread thing going. All Caps tells you right away that BREAD RULES.

All Caps is much more flexible than your common exclamation point. You can sprinkle it anywhere and see stay grammatical coherent. An example from the Fez article:

… When is the last time they generated a great idea that blew your mind? Are they talking in meetings or listening? Are they EVER talking? Are they ALWAYS talking?

See what I’m doing in this last two statements? All Caps allows me to ask a question AND throw emphasis on key words. You simply can not do that with boring old punctuation and grammar. WAIT WHAT ABOUT BOLD AND UNDERLINES? Please, I’m writing, not doing word processing.

Lastly, most importantly, and most personally… All Caps sounds different in my head than an exclamation point. This probably comes from years of Jerkcity, but an exclamation point makes a statement that come from this guy:

“That’s swell!”

Whereas an All Caps statement reads modern to me… it reads as means of conveying frustration mixed in with sarcasm, a bit of anger, and dash attitude. Anyone can exclaim, not everyone can All Cap.

Movie N.A.D.D.

I’m down to one unopened Christmas present. It’s a sealed copy of Galaxy Quest. Thanks Mom.

The second to last unopened present was Peter Seller’s Being There. A Rands Top 5 movie. I’ve seen it ten times. I’ll see it ten times more, but I won’t actually see it. I’ll glance at it… infrequently… because I have NADD.

As I wrote in the first NADD article:

My mother first diagnosed me with NADD. It was the late 80s and she was bringing me dinner in my bedroom (nerd). I was merrily typing away to friends in some primitive chat room on my IBM XT (super nerd), listening to some music (probably Flock of Seagulls — nerd++), and watching Back to the Future with the sound off (neeeeerrrrrrrd). She commented, “How can you focus on anything with all this stuff going on?” I responded, “Mom, I can’t focus without all this noise.

Lots of folks have read this article and not a single person has asked, “Why, Rands, do you watch a movie with the sound off?” I can only guess all of you fellow NADD-afflictees know about Movie NADD. It’s absolutely the best way to watch a movie as long as there is not a living breathing soul in the building.

Movie NADD is just plain old NADD except with moving pictures. It happens like this. Someone in the family turns on a movie that I’ve seen before and I plop down to watch the credits… cool… Independence Day. Great popcorn flick.

Invariable, in twenty to thirty minutes, I bail. I walk out of the living room and walk into my office where I check mail, scan headlines… I just do something else. Everyone still watching Independence Day assumes that I’m done with the movie, but I’m not. See, I’ve seen the flick before and I know the three scenes that I like… they are:

• Aliens blowing up national landmarks
• Will Smith punching alien
• Will Smith / Jeff Goldblum saving the world

That’s about it. The entire movie. As soon as one of those scenes draws near, I show back up in the living room and I watch. As soon as it’s over, I’m gone again. Movie NADD. Great for me, annoying for those wondering about my comings and goings. Turns out that I’m not only saving time, I’m saving my life. I’ll explain.

The scientific community is aflutter with a concept they call “cognitive overload”. I’d point you at this article except you’ve got NADD and you want your information in bite sized chunks… so I’ll explain — cognitive overload is the absence of NADD. Cognitive overload is what happens to you when you chose not to selectively and intelligently grab bits of data from the perfect information storm that is your work day.

The formal report refers to a survey for 1000+ managers types across the world who reported “loss of job satisfaction because of stress associated with information overload”. It’s tricky not to sound like a pompous ass when I say this, but “ha ha ha”. Simple question, when you are presented with a very hard problem do you a) grind your teeth and give yourself a headache or b) solve the problem. If you answered b, keep reading.

The study goes on to wax poetic about the various ways we, as consumers of information, are inundated with information. There’s supply-related overload, oversupply of pushed information, oversupply of retrievable information, demand side overloading… Wow. Did you have any idea how bad all this information was making your life? No wonder it takes me three days to chill on vacation… I’m clearly teetering on edge of a informational nervous breakdown.

Right so, no, I’m not.

See, the information wave started for me in the mid-80s and rather than waiting for a black obelisk to show up and teach me how to deal with every increasing piles of information in my life, I adapted. I created a fairly complex information management system which keeps me sane, yet, informed. If you stood over my shoulder, you would notice there are no unread messages in my inbox. You would note that while my desktop does become cluttered, it is cleansed regularly. You would slowly recognize useful window layout methodology on my desktop and you realize I rarely answer my phone because I am attempting to teach those I work with that instant messaging is faster, it is less of a distraction, and it is saved to my hard drive.

I have NADD.

Yes, my NADD best practices may strike you as odd. So are yours. I actually do like watching movies… more than most, but I’m finding myself watching more of them on my computer. I’ve got Fight Club paused in the upper right hand of second monitor right this second. It’s the introduction shot of Helena Bonham Carter… slow motion… smoke coming out of the mouth. Man, that David Fincher is a fucking genius.

Wait, what was I talking about?

On Project Estimates... Briefly

Connery asks:

I’ve got a question regarding putting together time estimates…

I’ve got a boss who is asking for time estimates for a project. She does want any technical specifications done because he’s in a hurry for the answer and she believes specs “take a lot of time”. Incidentally, she is not and has never been a software developer.

My problem is that I can’t put together an estimate on how much work it’s going to take before I have a clue about a design. Her advice on this topic, “Gimme a swag… what’s your gut say?”

Should I just throw together some bullshit to get her off my back?

Two things. First, given your manager has never ever been a developer, it’s fundamentally hard to communicate with her. I don’t mean she doesn’t speak English, she just has no context for much of what you do, right? She has no idea about the true value of a spec and while you can explain it to her until you are blue in the face, she’s not going to get it… because she hasn’t done it. Blah.

Second. There’s a basic disconnect between you and her about what she’s actually asking for… Yes, she’s saying “give me a work estimate” and you’re hearing those words, but what is actually going is this:

SHE IS SAYING: “Roughly tell me how long it’ll take to do this as quickly as possible.”

YOU ARE HEARING: “Commit to a schedule regarding implementing this specific feature.”

See the disconnect?

What I suggest is this. You want to be comfortable with your estimate because someone yells at you if you come in two months late. You also want to do what your boss says not because you like being told what to do, but she does effectively sign your checks. Also, you’re probably a team player otherwise you’d be asking about this in the first place. Go you.

There’s a huge amount of time difference between writing a full blown specification and just taking a few hours, hiding in a conference room, and whiteboarding your design. Even better, add another hour while you grab Frank the Brain and do a mini-design review looking for gaping holes in your thoughts.

These three hours of design time are 75% of the serious brain power you need to spend on the problem given you’re familiar with what the heck your doing. Yes, there will be some HUGE (read: expensive) flaws in your off-the-cuff design, so the more people you can review it the better.

I’ve found that if a bright person carves off a few hours to actually write something down, they end up with a solid gut feel about what they need to do. The gut feel, hopefully, gives you the ability to swag an estimate that you don’t believe to be complete bullshit. And, no, I’m not talking about the design an OS.. or a database… I’m talking about designing a feature in a product you know.

Tool Cruft

It’s almost 2005 and I can tell you, right this second, most of the keystrokes to format a document in Wordstar. I could also navigate a DOS-based version of XTree in my sleep. Additionally, I could explain to you the color scheme I chose for Xtree and weigh the pros’n’cons of said color scheme against other schemes.

This is the crap that is in my brain after two decades of being a geek.

Of course, Wordstar and XTree are dead and gone, but that’s not the point. At their peak, they were the shit and by that I mean they were absolutely essential tools for me to get my job done… wait, I forgot Qmodem! ATDT-LORD-GOD-I’M-A-GEEK. These echos of tools gone by are called “Tool Cruft”… unique lightning fast keyboard/mouse combinations that you’ll never forget because they been burned into your brain by your NADD.

Tool cruft is created because, as software engineers, we love it when a tool just does it’s job to perfection. Go ahead, look at your desktop right now and pick out the tool that you just love. Maybe it’s an application or maybe it’s a utility, but I guarantee you have a something on your desktop that, you believe, makes you twice the engineer than that ignorant boob in the cube next door.

My current pick has gotta be LaunchBar. CMD-SPACE-BLISS. As I’ve mentioned far too often, I suck with the mouse and I rule with the keyboard which means I want to keep my hands over the keys as much as possible. LaunchBar does that without getting the way of my flying across my desktop. Twenty years from now when I’m sitting at my Mac G12, I’ll still type CMD-SPACE in empty space as I surf the web via my cranial plug.

Tool cruft, Rands? Sounds negative.

Yeah, well, it’s is.

Once we’ve found bliss with our respective tools/applications, we’ll go to extremes to keep them and when I say extremes, I mean over the board geek-like obsession-compulsive maniacal extremes. Some examples:

• Qmodem Tips and Tricks
• Wordstar Command Emulator for Word
• Xtree Fan Page

I haven’t seen DOS in a decade and there are folks with web-pages still spending time with these ancient tools.

“But I like ‘em, Rands”

So did I… but I moved on.

The question is this: What new tool are you missing out on because of your blind faith in old reliable? A better way of saying this is, what opportunity are you missing?

First, you gotta figure out if your tool is becoming crufty. Pick your suspect tool and ask:

• Do you have to explain to your engineers friends what the tool is?
• Have you rewritten the tool from the ground up just to have it on a different software platform?
• Do you spend more than thirty minutes configuring a similar tool to behave like the old one?
• Do you run an emulation package just so you can run this tool?
• Are you running an old version of an OS (say OS 9?) to run this tool?

A yes to any of these is a warning sign. Your tool may be getting crufty. If your tool is getting crufty, you’re getting crufty, too.

I LIKE MY TOOLS AND I GET MY JOB DONE AND RANDS YOU ARE WRONG AND I AM NOT LISTENING ANYMORE LA LA LA LA LA

Yeah, I forget another qualification question — do you find yourself defending your favorite tool? Loudly? To Everyone? Keep reading.

I gave away every cool trick in the book when I moved to Mac OS X and it pissed me off. I was angry about the Finder, font sizes, window management, keyboard layout… it was an endless amount of crankitude. It gave me a headache. I missed my Windows Start key. I missed my ability to triage common problems in Windows with my knowledge of the file system, the OS, and, most importantly, I missed my bag of tricks.

Gone. Empty. Sad.

Three years later and I’ve got a whole new set of tricks. Someone pointed lsof to me the other day and I was in heaven… LIST EVERY OPEN FILE… HELL YES I NEED THAT. Throw that on top of a every other Mac OS X tip and trick I’ve found in the past 36 months and I’m in bliss because my bag of tricks has doubled in size. I was delighted when a friend brought a cranky Windows box over and I’d diagnosed and fixed the problem in FIVE MINUTES. Hell, if I knew jack about Linux, I’d be a TRIPLE THREAT.

Your job as an engineer is to build stuff. Maybe you’re a user interface type… perhaps you’re a kernel guy… doesn’t matter. You will be judged by your ability to build stuff, but the problem is that while you’re busy building the latest hoozy-what, some smart-ass over at the University of Illinois is building a better hoozy-what… or even worse, he’s making hoozy-whats irrelevant by creating a whole new market for hibbity-jibbities… and he’s doing it for free… because he likes to build stuff.

No. I’m not saying that your love of an ancient editor is going to suddenly make you irrelevant… what I’m talking about is a state of mind. A crufty tool is a sign that the nimble thinking that made you a great engineer in the first place is fading. Yes, you need familiar tools to your job and XYZ editor is a fine tool, but there are different tools out there and some of them actually might be better than yours because we’re all being engineers… we’re all trying to make the job of being an engineer easier and faster. Let us help you.

XBox Live, Sort'f...

Yeah yeah yeah, I’m supposed to be telling you How to Lose Your Job, Pt. 2… but that column is turning into an opus and while it will rock, I’m also doing other stuff. Like… say… playing Halo 2?

I’m new to the Xbox platform, so I’m certain the following rant has already been heard in the weblog-o-sphere, but I do need to know whether the rant is relevant or not. See, I’m currently in a two month free subscription for Xbox Live and given my current experience, there is no way in hell I’ll be extending my subscription… AND I LIKE THE SERVICE.

Here’s my experience… night after night. I flip the switch, login in as ctrlAltDeath, and proceed to wait anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes to actually get into a game. Halo 2’s matchmaking system does a fine job of simplify the process of finding a game, but it’s record is crap. I’ve got a post-it next to my XBox and I’m keeping track of the number of times I say “Find me a game” and Halo 2 responds with “Sorry, couldn’t find you a match… try again later”. You braced for this? 60% percent of the time.

A majority of the time — Halo 2’s matchmaking does not find me a game. 30% of the time, I get ungraciously booted out of a game that I’m participating in. NETWORK TROUBLESHOOTER.

This is bad enough that I originally thought it was a screw-up on my side. Poor network configuration… packet loss, so I did my network sleuthing… nope… we’re in a good shape. Check. Check. Check. More head scratching.

The other shoe fell when I started playing XBConnect with friends and I had zero problem connecting to games and only a single instance of a game actually giving me the boot over the course of several nights This tells me three things: really, my network set-up is solid and, most troubling, a free service is kicking the snot out of the paid service. Wow.

I have a comment and a reminder:

Comment: The XBConnect model reminds me of the multiplayer experience I’m used to from my Quake days. HERE’S 10,000 SERVERS — YOU FIGURE IT OUT. While I have to engage my brain to find a low ping server, it seems that brain at work is doing a better job that Halo 2’s matchmaking in terms of actually finding an appropriate game. I get what the matchmaking is going for… I like the concept… I really like the community building aspects… but the world’s best feature is crap if it does not work.

Reminder: This is a rant… or a cry for help. Is anyone else experiencing this high degree of frustration with this fine game? I’m still hoping there is a some change I can make on my side to improve game acquisition inside of XBox Live. Thoughts? Fixes? Stick with XBConnect?

[12/28/04 Update]: Was playing with Arpanet tonight and he suggested to plug straight into my DSL modem rather than going through MODEM—>AIRPORT—>HUB. Once I made that switch, I had zero problems connecting to games quickly… and not dropping out of games 50% of the time. No clue what the hardware issue is w/ the basestation… or hub.

How to Lose Your Job, Part 1

Fez.

Fez is a senior engineer who works for me. He’s fictional, but you know Fez. He’s the guy who wrote that piece of code nine million years ago that everyone is dependent on, but no one knows what exactly it does because Fez didn’t bother to comment a single line… oh yeah and he wrote it in Forth.

Fez has his own office and he nods a lot. It’s the nod of a man who believes he’s got rock solid job security because his technology is critical. Fez bugs a lot of people, but when it hits the fan, Fez saves the day because he’s carefully cordoned off a critical path that his and his alone.

Each year Fez and I sit down and I present his focal review. I set the stage by asking about his aspirations and he responds with vague nodding.

Sounds good, boss.

Ok, boss.

Sure, boss.

Fez is not hearing a word of our discussion because Fez has heard this focal review mumbo jumbo for twelve years straight. He believes he’s immune.

The Fez approach is a rock solid way to become irrelevant and, more importantly, become unemployed.

The definition of a healthy business is a business which is growing and by growing I mean it is making more money each year. There a bazillion different ways that a company can create this growth, but the basic law of business physics that you should never forget is “as a business grows, so shall it’s employees”.

The manner by whicha business prunce the employees who aren’t growing is horrifically efficient. Employees who have consistently demonstrated an inability to grow are first shoved out of the mainstream… out of the products/services which matter. Some static employees find this banishment to be comforting… “aaaahh… no more fire-drills… the execs don’t even care about this project, so I can cruise.” That’s right. They don’t care about that particular division because it’s not strategic which means the second it’s time to tighten the budgetary belt, it’s the first group to be nuked. Poof. Welcome to unemployment. Did you learn your lesson, yet? Probably should have taken the time to figure out what XML stood for.

But wait, maybe you’re Fez. Maybe you’ve grown complacent with the knowledge that you are the only person who has a particular skill or set of knowledge. It’s a powerful position to be in… for awhile. Be warned, your complacency has been noted by those who are dependent on you and they are growing increasingly frustrated with your selfish attitude.

Maybe the execs can’t fire you because of your essential knowledge, but, I guarantee, those who are dependent on your black box of knowledge are concocting a devious plan to replace you and your knowledge because THEY WANT TO GROW. Incidentally, you will be the last person to figure out you’ve been replaced because you’re too busy handing down proclamations from your fragile knowledge pedestal. Sorry about that.

Whether it’s by organizational evolution or revolution, complacency is a job killer. Right this second, three guys down the hall have rewritten Fez’s code in C and they’re secretly demonstrating their work to interested parties. Building support, building a revolution and if you’re following me, you’re thinking Fez blew it.

Wrong.

I did.

I blew it by not not convincing Fez that growth is life.

In my next column, I’ll explain the most important tool a manager has to avoid the Fez.

A Del.icio.us Interview

The original headline for this article hit me last week in a post-Turkey haze… laying on the couch… staring at the ceiling in the living room — “Why Del.icio.us is more important than Google”. Let’s hear it for SENSATIONALISM! Woo-hoo!

It’s hard to compare the two… one is a web service and the other is a company, but they do have a common goal — they strive to manage the endless pile of information that is the Web. They are both viewed as doing a successful job of this as measured by their ability to provide their users with relevant information… quickly.

I believe where Del.icio.us succeeds that Google does not is buzz latency. Like weblogs, Del.icio.us’s social bookmarking system does a fine job of identifying buzz quickly. A quick glance of the popular page and you get a pretty clear idea what Del.icio.us’s 30k+ community cares about.

Yes, Google indexes 8 billion pages and, yes, it serves up the results of queries to those indicies to, well, The Planet Earth, but Google chews on their large bites of the web relatively slowly. A monthly Zeitgeist reports tells me what The Planet Earth cares about, but I could pretty much guess that the most popular retail query on Google was Ebay. I was surprised that the #2 male celebrity query was Matt Drudge, but I don’t actually care.

I do care that Joel on Software is gathering the Best Software Essays of 2004. I’m also oddly interested in how to fold a shirt… free graph paper you say? Well, sure. These are topics I learn about from my anonymous del.icio.us peers… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Del.icio.us more important than Google? Nah. It’s an AND, it’s not an OR. Can’t really write that article, so a different tact. We know there are several thousands Googlers in Mountain View… what about Del.icio.us?

Joshua Schachter is the decidedly low-profile author of Del.icio.us and he graciously agreed be interviewed via email.

RANDS: At whatever level of detail you prefer, what have you been up to since you graduated from Carnegie Mellon?

JOSHUA: I spend most of my time pressing the buttons in front of the big glowing thing. Occasionally, gunfire is heard.

From outward appearances, del.icio.us is the work of a single person… you… is this the case?

I do all the coding and other heavy lifting, but a cast of thousands contribute ideas.

Given there appears to be no revenue generated by your projects, how do you afford to eat?

I have a day job. I only work on del.icio.us one evenings and weekends. It’s not that expensive, just rack space and ALL MY SPARE TIME.

Do you expect to have to charge for del.icio.us at some point?

I don’t think charging is realistic. I probably could put ads on it to cover the bandwidth costs. I’m not really trying to make a business, just have fun.

Where did the idea for del.icio.us come from?

I had built a single-user bookmark system a few years ago. It had tags but otherwise wasn’t a lot like the current system.

I’d like to nominate del.icio.us for “Best Use of a Non-Dot-Com Name” — is there a deeping meaning to the name?

Not really. I’d registered the domain when .us opened the registry, and a quick test showed me the six letter suffixes that let me generate the most words.

In early discussions, a friend refered to finding good links as “eating cherries” and the metaphor stuck, I guess.

I somewhat regret using the domain name, because it’s almost impossible to discuss or verify without sounding silly. I’ll probably have to rename it at some point, presumably as something ending in -ster or -zilla or whatever.

From looking at del.icio.us from the outside, it appears you first design an architecture, throw it out in the wild, and then continue iteratively developing based off community feedback. �Is this a correct observation? � If so, how do you know when you’ve got enough of a product to throw it into the wild? �Is it a conscious choice?

I develop in the live system directly. I get pretty much immediate feedback about what works and what doesn’t, and I’m not above backing out a change I’ve made if it ends up working badly.

Usually I stay up really late hacking, and then as soon as I think I’m done implementing (but not debugging) I fall asleep. Then in the morning I fix all the damage.

Again, at whatever level of detail you prefer, can you give a high level architectural description of del.icio.us?

I’m using mod_perl, HTML::Mason, and MySQL. Pretty much standard stuff. It’s having some trouble keeping up with the load lately, so I’m starting to look into rearchitecting. The tags don’t map to standard RDBMS very well.

What’s the most interesting statistics you’ve found during the care and feeding of del.icio.us?

I built it to have an interesting dataset to look at for recommendation and so on.

Some folks have used it for interesting stuff. There’s a group of folks who use it to collaboratively find posts on one site, and they all use the same tag, and the feed for that is read by Livejournal…

I am a bit surprised that some people really just wanted to emit RSS feeds and nothing more.

I did have the expectation that users are much more clever and would use it for things that I did not imagine beforehand. I rarely tell people they are “using it wrong” or whatever (aside from the hierarchical categorization versus tags thing.)

Who do you consider to be your target user?

To start with: myself. I tend to collect lots and lots of links and need help managing it. The original predecessor system was built to manage tens of thousands of links I’d collected over the course of running Memepool.

After that, it’s a matter of listening to users, observing what users do (which is distinctly different,) trying to understand what people’s goals are, and what functionality can be added and what the interface cost is.

How many users?

30k or so.

A whole crop of third-party del.icio.us add-ons have appeared. �Do you have time to check these out? �Any favorites?

I love the nutr.itio.us bookmarklet, and I’m planning to integrate something very much like it into the site itself.

How do you approach user interface design?

Lots and lots of iterations until something feels right. Avoiding features until the interface for them is apparent. Seeing how users use the existing features to do things I didn’t expect, and then making those things easier.

Silver Bullet: No Games for the Mac

I can remember the exact moment when I knew Netscape was Screwed. It was an email from an engineer who attended a technology preview of Internet Explorer 3 and the bevy of other Internet technologies Microsoft had rallied behind following Bill Gates’ famous “Internet Wave” email.

I don’t remember the specifics of the email, but it read something like this, “IE3 does everything that Netscape Navigator does… it does it faster.. and it does a lot more… and they’re giving it away for free” Up until then, Microsoft had been tossing together half-hearted browser efforts with IE1 and IE2, but no one took them seriously because everyone knows it takes Microsoft three major releases to get anything right. Netscape dominated the browser space and thanks to a lucrative IPO, we had the cash and confidence to further that domination.

Most engineers didn’t sweat the IE3 email. They believed, “We’re leaner, we’re faster, we’re better.” I, on the other hand, was still stinging from my Borland days when we thought the same thing about Microsoft’s Office strategy and then promptly received a two year beat down which resulted in the dismantling of Borland’s office application organization.

I was watching with interest while Netscape engineering was singing our happy song of Monopolisitic Pride and our marketing department began to spin the message coming from Redmond, “We are Microsoft, we get the Internet, and we’re coming.”

This type of message coming from Microsoft is called FUD. It’s an acronym because we technology types measure progress by the number of useless acronyms we’ve created to describe what the hell we’re doing. The acronym is “Fear Uncertainty [and] Doubt”. FUD is usually an outrageous claim, an annoying fact, or an untrue opinion… they are statements which are designed to push someone else’s buttons and they are terribly fun to mull over. Some other examples of juicy FUD:

• Macs are more expensive.
• The US of A never landed on the moon.
• Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone assassin.
• Windows is virus-plagued.

You get the idea. FUD is not intended to be a statement of fact even though it might be true. They are statements designed to tap emotion and get people talking and/or yelling. FUD is viral, FUD is sticky, and FUD rarely goes away.

At Netscape, marketing did battle with with FUD with a curious non-acronym. The answer was a Silver Bullet… the only way to answer FUD. A Silver Bullet is a well reasoned answered to whatever lame questions the FUD implicitly asks. Let’s see how it worked then and then we’ll see how it works now.

One of the key advantages Netscape had in the early browser wars was cross-platform support. Netscape Navigator ran on Windows, Mac OS 9, and various flavors of Unix. Of course, Microsoft knew this, so they claimed, “We’re developing Internet Explorer for Unix and here’s the company that’s doing the port!” The press would then rush over to Netscape, FUD in hand, and ask, “Whaddya think?” THe response would be the carefully research Silver Bullet for IE Unix support which read something like, “IE3 hasn’t even shipped for Windows, let alone Solaris or HP/UX. Also what kind of track record does Microsoft have shipping Unix products? None. Lastly, has anyone even bothered to pick up the phone and call this company that is porting WINDOWS CODE TO UNIX? HELLO?” The press would nod vigorously and rush back to Redmond, “Well, Netscape says you’re full of shit…” And the cycle continues.

Here’s another Silver Bullet with different chunk of FUD: “There are no games for Mac OS X”

This is pervasive FUD… particularly among younger computer buyers who live for the latest and greatest is key to existence. It’s also untrue. There are many games, but that’s not really the question. The FUD is “There are no good games for Mac OS X” and that’s a blatant lie. What is true is that a majority of the games produced for the PC do not show up on the Mac platform, but the majority of the games produced for the PC are crap, so this isn’t a big deal. I’ll explain.

I’m current playing Knights of the Old Republic. This was voted Game of the Year by one of the bazillion game magazines out there. I’ll admit even with a dual G4 in hand, I was concerned that the quality of the games ported to Mac OS x was going suffer. This was reenforced by my first experience with a Mac game, Sim City 4. The game was plagued with annoying graphics issues which were only somewhat addressed by a subsequent patch. Still, that was one game.

Knights of the Old Republic just rocks. Amazing sound, graphics, and playability. My fear that I’d constantly be aware I was sitting at my Mac due to game limitations has vanished. I lose myself with my dual lightsabres and I kick major ass and becoming totally lost in a game is the requirement of a compelling gaming experience.

Still, one game doesn’t not a gaming platform make. More good news. I picked up Knights after I’d completed Neverwinter Nights… another game of the year from a couple of years back. I had the same level of satisfaction with the Neverwinter that I had with Knights and I’m officially calling two great games for Mac OS X a streak.

The first part of the Silver Bullet is this. Yes, I’m guessing there are about 1/10th of the games there are for the PC. Believe it or not, that’s good news because the games which are being developed for the Mac are… wait for it… the good ones. Why in the world would Joe_PCGame_Maker push a crappy game on the Mac platform? They’re only going to invest in games which are proven sellers. This means, on average, if you are going to grab a random Mac game off the shelf, the overall quality/playability has got to be higher.

Avid gamers are still going to snoot it up when it comes to Mac OS X because most new games don’t show up on the Mac platform and that is absolutely correct. You can say the same thing about the PC when it comes to the Playstation or the XBox … and that’s the ultimate Silver Bullet: When you’re buying a Mac, you’re not buying it because you want a new game machine… you’re buying the Apple experience. Your primary function on this hardware is not playing games, it’s development, graphic design, video/music editing, or just about anything else you want out of a personal computer. When you’re done with whatever you’re doing and you’re done playing Halo 2 on your Xbox… there are some great games for your Mac.

When you tell someone you’re buying a Mac and they throw the No_Mac_Game FUD in your face, they’re being lazy. Someone, somewhere, at some time, told them that “Mac Games Suck” and that’s simple idea to remember. FUD paints a world of black and white and the good news is it’s all gray people.

GBrowser Musings

I have never paid a cent to Google.

“Google is doing just fine without your money, Rands.”

Someone is paying the bills… who are they?

“Online advertising is the revenue stream at Google. This means that advertisers believe that ads on Google translate into sales of their product and they wouldn’t pay if this wasn’t true. Translation: People buy crap when they see the ad on Google.”

I can honestly say I’ve never purchased anything because of an online ad. Really. Ads bug me.

“Rands… you don’t matter. Google is doing just fine with you yammering about about other stuff.”

Ok. I will. No wait, I won’t.

Google must grow. Whether they choose to provide financial guidance or not, the law of the land is that to get noticed… you must grow. Just ask China.

I’m curiously watching Google to see how they are going to pull this growth off. Obviously, they’ve got the cash to try a lot different things out, but the question is, “Are they Yahoo or are they Microsoft?”

If I was a Google employee and I saw that question, I am calmly climb up on the table in the cafeteria and starting yelling, “RANDS, WE’RE NOT MICROSOFT AND WE’RE NOT YAHOO. WE’RE GOOGLE.” The argument being that Google is a unique thing unto itself… it’s a common misconception amongst the eager and the bright. Netscape felt the same way and they were systematically dismantled by external forces and internal fuck-ups.

Back to my question. Yahoo or Microsoft? Web services or consumer/business software? I, personally, think that Google will wax the floor with Yahoo over the next few years because I believe they’ve already got world-class infrastructure that will provide a majority of the Yahoo-like services… they just need to figure out what premium services folks will pay for and convince those rubes to starting provide credit card information. Maybe their brand is strong enough to just do that and, viola, 10% year over year growth… but that’s boooooring. Been there. Done that.

Google venturing into consumer/business software space is intriguing. Google doing instant messaging… or, better yet, a web browser is a big fat idea. IE competing with GBrowser? Not just yet.

I asked the question several months ago, Can Google UI? The answer is “Google does a fine job with web applications. One might say, they have the most successful web application in the solar system.”

Success with web applications does not mean success on the customer’s desktop.

Exhibit A:

Look familiar? Yeah, it’s a local Google for your desktop. Handy, no? If you’ve got a technical bent, you appreciate the simplicity. Write a local file indexer, making it smart about certain file types (instant messaging, mail), and then use a familiar user interface to present the application to users. Yay! Ship it.

The flaw in this reasoning is simple. Just because I’m willing sacrifice user experience in my web browser does not mean I’m willing to do with my desktop applications. Web applications continue evolve at a nice clip, but web applications are no where near replacing desktop applications in terms of visual sophistication. I’ll summarize: How is it we just figured out how italicize on a web form? We’ve been doing it SINCE 1984 PEOPLE.

Exhibit B and Exhibit C:

That’s the current Windows Search followed by Apple’s forthcoming Spotlight technology. Which of the previous is better or worse is irrelevant. My point is both of these solutions acknowledge that I’ve got lots of processor cycles and, oh yeah, a pretty good graphics card that I want my OS to abuse to give me great user experience. The current Google solution says, “We believe the best solution for searching your computer is our web solution”. And it’s not… at least from a user interface perspective.

Perhaps a better way to explain myself is to take apart the GBrowser meme. Let’s assume that Google hosting the Mozilla developer day was not a happy coincidence and that Google will use some flavor of Mozilla to develop a browser. Let’s also assume that Anil was buzz-word compliant as well as correct when, last year, he suggested that Google should produce, “.. a browser client focused on information retrieval, search, and management is a great first step.”

Drool over that for a moment. A web browser which integrates all that the Google database has to offer. Give me easy access to related information for any web page. Keep an eye on my browser history and offer me content based off my historical wandering. MMMMyeah. I get that. Wait a tick. How are we making money on this? How are we growing the company?

A Google-less Firefox is free. Wait, so is Internet Explorer. Hold on. No one anywhere is making money on browsers because they’re a conduit to e-commerce which is a business model that pays bucks, so that’s gotta be the Google play. They want to increase the number of eyeballs who see their ads. Makes perfect sense until you think about it.

A browser with ads? You must be kidding me. I’ll deal with searches on my own if the Google answer is an ad-laden browser. They must know that, so they’ve got differentiate in another way, right? An innovative new browser that integrates Google information in a manner that we’ve not yet seen. You realize we’re talking about a product that we’ve not yet seen out of Mountain View. We’re talking about a significant piece of compiled code that requires sophisticated interactive design, at least, as good as Microsoft and Apple.

Recent iterations of Firefox’s UI present a fine usable application, but Google’s job is to produce an application for the desktop domain and that means appealing to a class of users who might find Google easy to use (type something — hit return — repeat), but who will bolt the moment a product becames hard to use.

You can not point to any set of downloadable bits that are Google developed and say they provide stellar desktop ease of use.

I am happily looking forward to being proven wrong.

The Daily Show

Key job interview point: if you could pull off a one liner or otherwise make me giggle, the chances that we’re going to connect significantly increases. Adept comedy shennanigans are not a prerequisite for good interview, but, chances are, if you’re going to make it to the Rands Monthly Poker Game… you can tell a joke.

Wit. A Sense of Humor. Whatever you want to call it — to me, it’s a sign of a higher functioning mind.

Segue.

The Daily Show has been a staple in the household for many years now. It is the longest season pass on the Tivo and, on a daily basis, it’s the most likely chosen show if I’m planting myself on the beanbag and wondering “What to watch?”

For those of you who don’t know, the Daily Show is Jon Stewart. He’s a comedian. The show is fake news and Stewart is a fake newscaster. Like real news, there are brief segments on current events combined with indepth longer pieces focusing on a particular story, and, finally, an interview usually with some topical political or entertainment type. All of this is wrangled by Stewart who has a significant depth chart when it comes to comedy writers because every show is funny.

I mean it, you will laugh/giggle/smirk at least once in every single show.

The Daily Show’s importance in the political landscape changed significantly in the past year. It started with a couple of Emmys and was followed by an increasing prominent guests. To me, it started with The Daily Show landed Howard Dean as a guest followed quickly by presidential candidate John Kerry and then former president Bill Clinton.

Other news shows have taken note of The Daily Shows increased role in a public discussion… in fact, they’re probably jealous. First, OReilly called the demographic “stoned slackers and, just recently, Stewart was taken to task on Crossfire in a heated exchange that resulted in Stewart saying “Dick”.

If you’ve never watched the show, you are scratching your head thinking, “Didn’t Rands say it was fake news? Uh, what’s the big deal? Why do real news shops care what Comedy Central is doing?”

The deal is this.

My generation has no use for the regular news. We were first desensitized to news with the onslaught of 24 hour news channels which reduced the top stories delivered to us by taking heads in 22 second blips. Then, conveniently, the Internet showed up which gave us CNN.com, My.Yahoo.com, and Drudge. This berrage of media has given the ability digest the news for the entire planet in seconds. Local news is campy and dull, Sunday news shows are longwinded, and newspapers are really only kept around because they handily travel to the bathroom.

We’re the weblog generation. If you want to get our attention, you’d better not sound corporate, political, or stupid because we vote daily with our clicks. You better have a unique voice otherwise your information is no different than that news ticker scrolling across the bottom of every single cable news channel right this second. You want my attention? Engage my brain. No, better yet, respect my brain.

The Daily Show’s voice is Jon Stewart and Jon Stewart is funny. I’m not talking chicken crossing the road funny, I’m talking wit. The ability to discern original truths for daily events and to convey them in way that I’m going to listen. I listen to comedy because I respect the brain power it requires to land that zinger at the right place and the right time. Moreover, I’m convinced that it takes, at least, a basic understanding of what is going on in the world to make comedy topical and relevant.

A joke, witty repartee, laughing… this is not the answer to the world’s ills. The answers begin when informed people starting debating what the hell is going on. In my network of friends, we’ve remained curiously silent about current events until today… at lunch… we were all fired up and I blame Jon Stewart.

Crunch Time Cleaning

You can smell when crunch time is coming.

Engineering is saying the features are done. QA is pulling their hair out trying to get these working features actually working. Meanwhile, there is a steady flow of bugs trickling in and no one is looking at them. These are the side-effect bugs introduced by landing these Cool New features… no one is actually looking at these bugs because their focus is squarely on the Cool and the New. Problem is, these side-effect bugs are the unplanned work that will take the most time between now and the end. Call them integration bugs… call them unplanned consequences… but these are the bugs that will have you working the weekend… these are the bugs of the crunch.

Crunch time rules.

The first wiff of crunch time has the same affect on me as the first smell of spring. I think, “Shit, I better get ready.” I start cleaning.

This time around, I began with a complete rebuild of my bookmarks. I just won’t shut up about disappointed I am with the usefulness of bookmarks. They lack any sort of time-based or change information and they don’t scale even with all that help from tabbed browsing. Yet, I still have my fifteen or so standard bookmarks/tab groups that allow me to quickly grok forty or so websites. I tidy these up by reorganizing and prioritizing these bookmarks from left to right where left means “more important” or “often clicked”.

In this round of bookmark triage, del.icio.us has finally made it to the bookmark bar. After many months of casual usage, I’ve begun to actively use del.icio.us’s as a means of a organizing bookmarks outside of my browser. You can see them here. Couple of things: Del.icio.us scales. It’s brain dead interface is so simple that you immediate understand that it’s trivial to create, edit tag hierarchies as well as add new entries to that hierarchy. The service also reports and aggregates all new user additions and reports them via the front page as well as a popular page. Del.icio.us’s decidely geeky community finds some of the hottest pipin’est content on the web.

Of course, why do I need de.icio.us when I’ve got my favorite RSS reader? RSS was supposed to be the answer to my bookmark angst, but after a year and a half of steady RSS reader usage, I’m still jumping between different readers wondering when something will actually stick to my desktop. I’m still evaluating NewsFire, but I’m also still wondering out loud if building RSS straight into the browser is the right move. Sure, it’s convenient from a workflow perspective, but stateless nature of browsers means I’ve gotta click RELOAD in order to see if new feeds and I’m fond of news readers taking the time to do that for me. As part of my crunch time cleaning, I made sure I had my favorite feeds sitting in NewsFire… and… wait! New version of NetNewsWire! Dammit. Here we go again…

My last crunch time cleaning task is also the most time consuming. It’s home directory reconciliation.

First, I’d like to point out something sneaky which has happened in the past two years. Storage has become free. Google proudly flaunted this fact when they announced their GMail service, but they were only confirming something I’d know for some time… I am never going to run out of space again.

In the past, I’ve managed my ever growing pile of info_crap in two ways. First, whenever I switched jobs, I’d spend my last days gathering together a list of email contacts, packing my boxes, and then leaving every single damned bit I’d every typed or received AT the old company. RANDS ARE YOU INSANE? Maybe. Sure, there are probably some killer MRD templates in my past I should’ve kept. Maybe there is some email correspondence I should’ve held onto, but my thinking is simple: The majority of the stuff on my hard drive is similar to the stuff in my garage… it’s stuff I think I should keep, but never ever use. Plus, the time it takes me to find the one gem of a document is longer than it takes me to recreate the spirit of that idea in a new, more innovative way.

My other info_crap management tool comes into play whenever my hard drive grows dangerously full I grab my favorite disk usage utility which tells me, “Hey, you’ve got THIS much space consumed by THESE folders… go clean up your bloat, buddy.” During this crunch clean time, I realized that I have not used these disk usage reporting programs in years because the rate at which I accumulate crap is officially slower than the rate by which I accumulate additional hard drive storage. You’re thinking, “Duh Rands, throwing another 70GB at your home directory will ALWAYS solve the space problem.” No, that’s not what I’m saying. I never buy new hard drives, I just exist on the machines which pass by my desk and those standard machines now have storage which consistently exceeds my crap accumulation quotient.

Again, it appears I never have to throw anything away again.

This is a big deal and it has put a kink in my current crunch cleaning. With unlimited storage, I need a new home directory approach. It’s starts with reconciling my various home directories (main work machine, home machine, misc_firewire) into one home directory so I can stare it and figure out an organizational hierarchy that scales like crazy. Mac OS X is handy with it’s home directory template, but HELLO EVERYTHING I DO IS A DOCUMENT… a single Document folder doesn’t really help me. If you have any suggestions here, I’d like to hear them because I’m still chewing on this. Oh yeah, Spotlight better rock, too… because I’m about to have some serious search issues.

When I’m done with my cleaning, I feel relaxed, calm. This is exactly where I need to be because the hint of impending crunch time is a cue… a warning. Soon, I will have no time to think deeply… I’ll be asked to make quick decisions and I’ll be running on instinct. A clean desktop is a clean palette… ready for ideas, color, and velocity.

Rands Management Glossary

Ever wonder what the hell your manager is saying? You sit there and watch their lips move, but yet there appears to be no content… just flap flap flap. Thing is, they are trying to say something to you, but they’ve been going all day on three cups of black coffee and no lunch and, besides, you’ve been working together for years so, of course, you know what they’re saying.

The only time they realize they’re poor communicators is when the get home and crash on the couch with the coffee shakes. At that time, their husband/wife/dog walks in and asks them about their day. The moment they start flapping, the husband/wife/dog says, “Uh, I have no idea what an MRD is and why are you shaking?” It is then your manager realizes that a) they drink too much coffee and b) that even though they say big words with authority and enthusiasm, they’re just words and, without context, they’re useless words.

I’m here to help.

I’ve already taken issue with the inane language of managers, but bitching about it has not solved the problem and I’m a problem solver, so I give you the Rands Management Glossary.

The Rands Management Glossary is not going to help you explain your job to your dog, but the Glossary is going to demystify some common managementese terms that we, as managers, throw around meetings with impunity. As language is constantly evolving, so will the Glossary.

The Glossary is hugely biased. It’s based on the opinion of a software engineering manager which means that if you’re in Sales, I make fun of you. Sorry, I’m sure you work hard in Sales, but I don’t know your language which means your ways are foreign to me. Maybe if you read the Rands Management Glossary, we engineers won’t be so foreign to you.

As you read through the current version of the Glossary, you’ll see the tone is pretty much the same as the rest of the weblog — a bit of cynicism and a bit of yelling. They’re not intended to be definitive nor professional, but they should convey some wisdom. For example:

Interview: The day you wear a tie. Interviews are a pitch where you, the hopeful candidate, pitch yourself to a group of folks who have thirty minutes to figure out if they want to spend five years listening to your dumb jokes

Now, I don’t actually know whether your jokes are dumb or not. I do know that an interview is a bizarre thirty minute ritual where we’re asked to do the impossible: assess character, ability, and intelligence. Gimme a break, I’ve been staring at myself for decades I’m still not sure what I’m all about.

If you want some boring definition, just click on the term and I’ll whisk you off to dictionary.com where you will promptly fall asleep.

As I constructed this first version of the Glossary, I realized that it’s a handy way to explore much of the content on Rands in Repose, so I’ve linked relevant articles to many of the definitions and I’m hoping folks discover/rediscover some of the older articles which are deeply buried in the archives yet still relevant.

I also discovered that the Glossary is wordy to do list for me. As I was dumping terms into the database, I realized there are a couple of meaty management topics that I’ve said little about. Topics such as hiring, how to fire someone, what to do about HR, or how to great a great job offer… all of these articles are now bouncing around my head since I started tinkering with the Glossary. More on this later.

As I’m apt to do with personal projects, I seriously over-engineered the Glossary. It’s constructed using PHP with a MYSQL database. I’d like to give a small shout out to whoever is responsible for phpMyAdmin because it does everything you’d ever want a database administration tool to do.

There are two versions of the Glossary, one is alphabetical and another of recently updated entries for the our returning customers . At the bottom of both is a handy form where you, the Rands reader, can submit new terms for definition consideration. Have at it.

Here you go: Rands Management Glossary

I Miss Databases

A recent Slashdot article about, yet another, start-up founded by Stanford grads got me reminiscing about the good old days when databases where in your face… and… fun?

I was a Borland barbarian back in the late 80s and 90s and we had a head full of steam and we had a crazy Frenchman steering the ship. See, we’d done a good job at building tools for developers and a funny thing happens when you give useful tools to developers… they build cool stuff that people buy. Steve Ballmer was trying to say this a few years back in a popular video clip, but most folks thought he was just nuts… and sweaty.

My gig at Borland was working on the total and complete Windows rewrite of Paradox which was then a DOS-based relationship database product we’d acquired when we’d bought a company called Ansa. If you were alive and kicking at the time, you knew the database to beat in the late 80s was dBase by Ashton-Tate. Paradox did a solid job of kicking the snot out of dBase by just giving users a modicum of usability. That was the paradox, you see, a database that was easy to use.

It was around the time we were making a lot of noise about our killer new Windows database that Microsoft dusted off some failed database effort, cleaned it up a bit, released it at a way_low price point and dubbed the product Microsoft Access. It came out before Paradox for Windows and, again, it was cheaper.

The Borland Barbarians were up for the fight! YOUR PRODUCT BLOWS AND OUR CRAZY FRENCHMEN IS BETTER THAN YOUR AUTISTIC GEEK. TAKE THAT REDMOND.

Yeah, so, did I mention it was a cheaper product? Like $500 less than what we were charging for Paradox for DOS? That’s a lot of a cabbage. So much cabbage that early Windows database developer overlooked a lot with Access… like… well… it was a piece of crap. Didn’t help that when we finally got Paradox for Windows out there that we totally and COMPLETELY ignored the third party developers (developers developers developers) by providing no conversion path for the DOS Paradox-based applications. Developers were going to need to rewrite their applications anyway, so why not do it for $500 less? Oops.

Lesson learned: Doesn’t matter how crazy your Frenchman is if you’re developers don’t follow your lead.

That was that. Microsoft released many more version of Access. Borland released a bunch of Paradox versions. Paradox never regained anything resembling and lead and eventually sold the whole sha-bang to Corel who, apparently, had a crazy Canadian at the helm. Guess how that went?

Consumer facing databases were no longer chic. The emergence of the SQL behemoths pushed databases down to where they belong: boring, well understood, reliable, and with a bevy of different surrounding libraries that give any number of development environments convenient access.

Yet, I am a database guy. I get a warm fuzzy feeling when I know my information is sitting safely in a database somewhere. Who cares if it’s equally safe in a spreadsheet? I like my records well defined and my tables relational.

The Slashdot article reminded me that there are many small shops out there who are reasonably successful with their niche consumer database products, but the article also forced me to realize that the world which understood what a database application was… is gone. No biggie. It was merely replaced with another term that doesn’t mean much… the web application.

My impression is that while there are great prototyping tools for web applications, we still haven’t seen “the bomb” in terms of great web application development environment. I’m talking about a soup to nuts product where I’m not jumping between Terminal, BBEdit, and any number of browsers just to see if my primal application works on my development machine.

I tend to build my web applications from the ground up, so I don’t know if the likes of Microsoft, Macromedia, or Adode have created easy to use development tools for web that don’t suck.

Maybe you do.

UI is Humble

Designing phenomenal UI is a thankless, unfair task which is full of contradictions.

Let’s go over the list of goals for good UI and notice how screwed our UI designers are.

Good UI should:

• Be easy to learn, but powerful to use
• Be pleasing to the eye, yet not annoying
• Integrate with a user’s natural workflow, but also train them in new concepts or ideas

And that’s just the contradiction list. I haven’t even started to rant about how many times an UI designer has walked into my office with something totally amazing on paper, but utterly impractical to implement as it would take a team of engineers six months to implement. So, I say “No”. They get pissed and look for alternate means of sneaking the feature in. They try convincing the individual engineers who are happy to be asked, but give our designers the same stunned glare of “Are you insane?”

The cycle continues. Great ideas hammered into insignificance by those damned practical, conservative engineers. Tenacious UI designers keep pushing the engineering team and, in doing so, start to gain appreciation of the technical aspects of writing code and, oh shit, now they’ve totally betrayed their profession. They start to believe those engineering estimates because, well, yeah, it sure does look like it’d take six months to land my whiz-bang concept in the product… sigh… I’d best get back to organizing these text controls neatly.

No no no no no no no also no.

Take a moment to download the following product:

NewsFire 0.1

NewsFire is an RSS reader by a fellow named David Watanabe. David is apparently also responsible for the popular Acquisition application, but, more importantly, David is a Dunstan Orchard-like talent in terms of user interface design.

Done downloading? Good. Fire that sucker up and tell me what you think.

Your first thought is, “Whoa, no cool application icon? What’s this crap?” Get over it.

Your second thought might be, “Uh, Rands, this is pretty simple man. What’s the big deal?”

That’s right. It is simple. In fact, your first impression is that you could fire up Interface Builder and slap this together in a ten short minutes. You’re really quite wrong. Keep using the product. Add some feeds… read some articles… and you’ll start to appreciate the work that has gone into this application.

Little things like the opacity adjustment when the application moves to the background. It says, “Hi, reading feeds is something which is part of your desktop… not part of your dock.” Yeah, that’s right. Or how about the choice to lead with the headlines in the feed list as opposed to the title of the news source. That says, “The article is more important the source”. Hey, that’s right, too. Hadn’t thought of that, either. Spot on!

What makes this early version of NewsFire great is that it nails all of the delicate contradictions I explained above as well as satiating what I consider to be job #1 of great UI… Simply nail that first impression.

I haven’t a clue whether David Watanabe is an engineer turned UI designer or vice versa, but I do know that he’s not listening to that engineering voice in his head when he’s working. He’s thinking about the user and the domain… “How do people really want to read their news?”

With those requirements in mind, he’s build a simple, approachable product which is now resting comfortably in the bottom corner of my second monitor. It’s happy there and it belongs there because good UI is humble.. it’s working best when you notice it the least.

Messy Thinking, Pt. 2

It had to be done.

Entropy's A Bitch

At the end of the day, I’m for free speech. This means that you’re entitled to say whatever it that floats your boat as long as you don’t yell it right in my face or in the face of someone who doesn’t have some sort of concept of right or wrong… like, say, a seven year old.

This free speech belief applies to spam. Go ahead. Send as much spam as you like. I’m also for free enterprise and despite the fact spam is flooding the inboxes of the world, someone out there is making money doing so. While they might have nefarious motives, making money is making money even if it’s money from some dipshit who thinks that anyone in Nigeria has time to send email asking for cash.

We, as a society, gotta take our lumps… somehow. I can’t say that I personally know anyone who has bought, thought, or considered any spam-like offer, but PEOPLE OUT THERE are supporting these enterprises. Filling the Internet with THAT MUCH SPAM is a lot of work and takes a lot of effort and money from folks who, while they are unthinking jerks, are making a living.

With that said, I’ve made comments on Rands In Repose require authentication via Typekey. This depresses me because every hoop I put between you and you posting a comment decreases the chance you’ll say something bright and that’s a bummer. I wish you would, but you’re in a hurry. So am I.

Rands in Repose has been flooded with comment spam for the past few weeks and I’ve grown tired of a MT-Blacklist-less world where simple IP blocking just doesn’t cut it. MT-Blacklist for Movabletype 3.0 is imminent, but it hasn’t been fast enough, so I flipped the switch on Typekey authentication.

Typekey is just a hoop. For now, it tries to enforce that you are a human being rather than some script concocted at three in the morning by some mass marketing blow hole coming off a Twinkie+Jolt high. It’ll work for now and then it’ll stop working and then we’ll think of something else clever.

Support free speech. Speak out against spam and post a comment… and, uh, vote for Kerry.

The Spot 2

There are a couple of early websites that are just burned into my memory. So much so that I often go to the Internet Archives to see the ancient versions of the sites in their original GOOD LORD WE NEED CSS SOON glory. It’s the same feeling I get when I return to my high school or junior high and go check out my locker and reminiscence, “Boy, I used to really care about this tiny steel box.”

The list is short: Silicon Graphics, Mosaic Communications… maybe Pointcast. Oh yeah, and The Spot. The first web-episodic soap opera… which has apparently been relaunched.

Whoa.

Messy Thinking

Having a full blown case of N.A.D.D., I know two things:

• There is an infinite amount of information out there
• I have a limited time to find it all

The consequence of these truths is simple. I’m in an incredible fucking hurry to learn as much as I possibly can.

My desktop is my primary window to all of this information which means I (and all N.A.D.D. sufferers) develop a unique relationship with our workspace. We develop what others may see as quirks, but, to us, the quirks represent pure information acquisition acceleration.

These interactions… these preferences… are developed over time; they are refined to support whatever variant of N.A.D.D. you might have (and there are many… another column). Some are created as a reaction to technology while others emerge from our very personality and each is unique.

Here’s the history of my N.A.D.D.

The Cold, Dark Years of DOS (Early 80s)

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker conduit to information than a DOS command line. How am I supposed to multi-task behind 64k memory, a 2400 (nay 300) baud modem, and a monochrome display? The only glimpse we had of N.A.D.D. were memory resident programs (TSRs, remember that?) . Think SideKick. Think XTree. Yeah, I was there… tinkering with the XTree color scheme to get it JUST RIGHT because green text with yellow borders is HOW IT SHOULD BE.

Mac, The Real Deal… 15 years early (Mid-80s)

I’ve already described my holy shit moment with the Mac, but it’s interested to reflect on it now given what I understand about N.A.D.D. The introduction to a graphical user interface is a seminal moment because I understood that this new desktop metaphor reflected my mental process… which is messy.

Messy?

Yeah, most thinking is messy. Really messy. So are GUIs… they are imprecise and they are HELLO WINDOWS AND FOLDERS EVERYWHERE and I like that because it reflects the imprecise nature of our thinking. GUIs give us the ability to construct a visual structure for organizing our thoughts and each structure is different. By organizing your thoughts in a single, visible location, you encourage idea cross-pollination and that’s what our brains are good at… making new wholes greater than the sum their parts.

My first twelve minutes with the original Mac were life changing and, chances are, I could have saved myself a lot of productivity over the past two decades if I’d somehow weaseled my way into owning one, but they were amazingly expensive and the Dad could read the writing on the wall about the coming Microsoft monopoly, so we were a PC house. Weak.

“The Unix Moment” (Late 80s)

With Microsoft still spending a lot of time stumbling around in the dark and bumping into shit trying to figure Windows out, I had another formative moment in college which, like the Mac, I recognized, but stupidly, didn’t do anything about.

The University of California @ Santa Cruz gave you a Unix account when you showed up for your first computer science class. There were rumors in the hallways that this was “cool” because you could send “email”. Being a BBS dork, I got the concept, but did not understand the Internet implications thinking “Well, I guess I can email other UCSC accounts… OH YOU MEAN THE ENTIRE WORLD… oh.”

My first homework assignment involved compiling and submitting my first Pascal program via my Unix account and, armed with some basic Unix commands, I poked around a bit. “Who” revealed there were twenty other folks on this machine. I ask the guy next to me, “So, when the machine crashes, do we all have to re-login?” His response, “It doesn’t crash”. Well now.

Unix was a glimpse of extreme multi-tasking. A prerequisite of N.A.D.D. The problem was there wasn’t a messy GUI to provide a model for using it. Command-line multi-tasking just isn’t a turn on. Sure, you can do it, but you gotta work for it. If I’d stuck with Unix at this time, I would’ve probably turned into a tremendous Unix nerd with no appetite for UI asthetics… I would probably have also grown my hair long.

Windows Tries Really Really Hard (Early 90s)

My N.A.D.D. hit it’s stride with full time use of a GUI. In this case, during my Borland years, the GUI was Windows 3.x and Windows 95. Microsoft had finally created a semi-non-ugly version of Windows. Borland was in the midst of moving all our applications over to Windows so we could ride the wave that was becoming Windows 95.

I developed two significant N.A.D.D. interactions during this time that are still with me:

First, I developed a strong pro keyboard policy. This is partly due to the fact that I’d begun my stint as an engineer and I appreciated the precision of the keyboard. As I’ve said before, if you use a mouse, sometimes you just miss. Keyboards don’t miss… and if they do, just hit the BACKSPACE.

With every release of Windows, I’d comb over the document to determine what keyboard support was available. This ultimately resulted in the discovery the Alt-Tab command which allowed me to cycle through active applications with zero mouse interaction. As a N.A.D.D. sufferer, I can safely say that I’ve used that keyboard combination more than the spacebar.

Another keyboard convention I adopted was the Windows key which handily fired up the Windows 95 Start menu. From that menu, selecting the first key of any menu item would select it. This meant that for launch applications, I simply type WINDOWS-R(un)-. Avid mousers out there are staring at that and thinking, “Lotta work Rands”. I promise that in the time it takes you to leave your keyboard, grab your mouse, and successfully double-click that Excel icon that I’ve already fired up Excel and moved onto something else. Keyboard. Faster.

The second interaction that developed during this time was my predilection for maximizing all windows. Remember, thinking is messy and we like GUIs because they encourage this messiness, but I really can only focus on thing at a time. Please don’t tell my N.A.D.D. support group this… they’ll kick me out.

Yes, the 15” monitors of the time looked big at the time, but they were small especially since we were suddenly ACTUALLY MULTI-TASKING. Combining my Alt-Tab aptitude with my maximize windows fetish, I refined my N.A.D.D. Folks would drop by my office and be dazzled by my keyboard mastery… never leaving the keyboard while surfing a pile of windows.

I also had a brief hint of blissful things to come during this time thanks to Borland’s C development environment. Little know fact, if you installed a Hercules video card in your PC, you could do something revolutionary (for PCs). On your primary monitor, you had the windows application that you’d be debugging. On your secondary Hercules monitor, you’d have your debugging information. Given present day technology, this is a serious yawn, but remember, we’re talking about the early 90s here. Macs remained spendy and it’d be another eight years before Microsoft landed dual-monitor support in Windows 2000.

I’ll say this now and I’ll explain it in a bit, “If you’ve ever experienced a dual-monitor set-up, you will never ever be happy with a single monitor again. Ever.”

Windows Gets It Right, Too Late, Rands Bails (Mid-to-Late 90s)

The Internet bubble was good to N.A.D.D. Money was free, so the technical superiority of your average desktop set-up improved. Big, faster, more. Suddenly, everyone had a 21” monitor which meant more pixels. Microsoft finally landed dual monitor support and I couldn’t buy a second monitor fast enough. Sure, initial support was pretty sketchy, but who cares… I’m dazzling my co-workers by dragging a single window across two monitors.

The full time presence of dual monitors changed my maximize-everything N.A.D.D. interaction. While I tended to still keep my primary monitor maximized, my second monitor became more of a palette desktop… a careful organized set of always running applications that I tended to constantly refer to. Think instant messaging, music, calendar… The adjustment here was that now that I had more screen real estate, I realized that moving my eyeballs was faster than all that alt-tabbing. That means more information with less work. mMmmm… NAAAAAAADDDDDDD.

The Big Switch (Early 00s)

I’ve already documented my switch to Mac OS X back in 2002. The article points out many of my issues with Mac OS X, but, in terms of N.A.D.D., they can be summarized thusly:

First issue: Mac OS X’s design for heavy reliance on the mouse. This frustrates my N.A.D.D.. A mouse is swell, a mouse gives you precision, but it does not give you speed.

Second issue: Window management. The concept of “maximize a window” appears to vary based on application. Maximizing to fill an entire monitor isn’t a no-no, it just doesn’t do anything useful except make the window bigger… kind’f.

I solved both issues incrementally. For mouse and application launch issues, LiteSwitchX gave me my task switching while LaunchBar gave me speedy access to applications for both launch and selecting. Since Jaguar, Mac OS X has taken a stronger keyboard stance by adopting Alt-Tab as Apple-Tab in Panther. With Tiger, Spotlight appears to be landing an integrated means of finding/launching applications.

Unfortunately, my maximized_windows_everywhere tendancy has just not translated Mac OS X, but, two years later, I think I’ve accepted the transition. Allow me to explain visually. Brace yourself for a big segue.

Folks, that’s 30 inches of flat panel. You’ve got a strong opinion about this beast, but let’s forget the hugeness for a second and remember a simple, important fact:

Thinking is messy.

You don’t want to admit this because you’ve been carefully orchestrating yourself out of the chaos by constructing your personal version of N.A.D.D. These interactions with your desktop, your content, your thoughts exist because information is messy, too. It’s all a big mess and our job as consumers of an infinite amount of information is to find a system of organization which best suits our interests and our attention spans.

The comment I’ve heard most about this new 30 inch flat panel is, “Who in the world needs it?” You do. Right now. So do I. 60 inches would better, but 30 inches is all we got.

Yes, I can’t afford it. Neither can you because we’re not working at Pixar or PDI where they’ve got a present day politically correct justification for all those pixels, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. It just means we haven’t successfully convinced the bill payers that more pixels means more productivity.

I know, I know, it sounds like an engineering boondoggle. MORE MONITORS MEANS MORE FEATURES AND LESS BUGS. Right and I’M REALLY WORKING AT HOME. Of course our managers are going to be suspect and they’re going to ask for proof positive about why a tremendous monitor is going to improve our productivity and I don’t have said proof, but I do have an opinion.

My maximize-every-window tendency was a reaction to technological limitation, namely, monitors are too damned small. Mac OS X’s lack of aggressive window maximization forced me to start using my desktop as a organization mechanism. I resisted it for about three months, but, invariably, my desktop became populated with the usual collection of folders, half-thought-out documents, fire wire drives, and stickies.

My desktop became a two dimensional, colorful snapshot of my life and that’s the point… my desktop became a living, breathing reflection of how I think. If the sky is falling in my life, my desktop is a disaster. If life is proceeding as expected, my desktop is clean and predictable.

Your desktop is structured clutter and so is your brain. Sitting in this clutter is everything that you’re up to. It’s your budget, your journal, your to do list, your status reports and that half written flame-o-gram that you’re never going to send, but you constantly revise. These thoughts sitting in close visual proximity to each other allow them to cross-pollinate… to borrow from each other or to merge into something you were not expecting. Sure, it’s not the desktop doing this, it’s your brain… but the desktop is the essential tool which gives you this clutter abstraction process.

Look at your desktop right now. Now, I want you sit back in your chair, fold your arms behind your head, and imagine four of those desktops forming a square as your workspace… get past the slack jawed amazement about the sea of pixels and think about how’d you work in this space.

That’s right. As your desktop size increases, as the borders become wider and taller… they vanish. You now realize that, yes, you’ve been staring at a world of information through a tiny 17” window for the past decade… who knows what you’ve missed with this myopic vision. No wonder you’re writing that flame-o-gram… I’d be pissed, too.

30 inches is big. It’s huge. Don’t let your size envy prevent you from seeing the evolution it represents for your desktop. It’s a step out of mediocrity into greatness because one of your favorite tools, your desktop, is doing exactly what it should… it’s getting the hell out of your way and allowing you to move faster and learn more as you stumble through your messy life.

That’s the pitch for your manager. It’s a soft pitch and they probably won’t get it, so send them this article to them and tell them this, “Genius is defined by the ability to make connections between dissimilar subjects and, boy oh boy, can I get a bunch of dissimilar subjects on screen with 4 million pixels.” Good luck and get one for me while you’re at it.

I warned you. It was a big segue. Now, what was I saying? Oh yeah.

Your N.A.D.D. is different than mine. You never had a chance to live on Mac OS X… or maybe you’ve never used a dual monitor set-up. Doesn’t matter. You’ve got your quirks well defined and, boy, LOOK AT YOU FLY WITH THAT TRACKBALL. The one constant we share as N.A.D.D. sufferers is the ability to evolve because, by definition, NADD keeps you relevant. We want to know it all… and we want to know it all right now. (And 30 inch flat panel can help!)

Movable Type 30D

I’m scratching my head regarding my recent upgrade to Movable Type 3.0.

Back in April, it became fashionable to rip on Six Apart and their apparent desire to make money as a company. Rabid discussions ensued regarding their pricing and, to their credit, the general agreement is that they’ve nailed their revised pricing, but still lack a compelling solution for small shop weblogs with lots of authors. Oh well, here comes WordPress for those who prefer good and free.

I’m a Movable Type fan. Never in my many months of usage have I run into a significant defect in the software. Sure, it lacked functionality regarding comments and rebuild times were atrocious, but it worked, it stayed out the way and I was fully expecting to pay cash money for the 3.0.

… and then I upgraded.

My first issue has to do with the PR around the 3.0 release. Take a look at the download page. Anything on there give you the impression that the software is anything than less than ready for production? I mean, they’re charging for it, right? It works, right?

Mostly.

My upgrade experience was pretty solid. The weblog suffered no immediate ill effects from moving to 3.0 and, hey, the new MT administration interface is cleaner. I like clean. I like fast.

When I started poking around comments, I found some problems. They were:

1) Cookies were not being saved for users
2) The TypeKey authentication system wasn’t working
3) There appeared to be no way to alter the comment moderation features. All comments were being pended for my approval
4) I was getting slew of errors when rebuilding pages from the mt-rssfeed plugin

The solutions for each of these problems were:

1) Completely rewrite my comments templates as the ones included w/ MT30D are just plain broken. (Thanks Tweezer)
2) I need to add a trailing slash to my randsinrepose.com entry on Typepad (Thanks MT Support)
3) I had to turn off MT-Blacklist (Thanks Tweezer, again)
4) I simply removed the mt-rssfeed plugin which I was not actively using (Go me)

Now, I triage bugs for a living, so let me explain the perceived priority/severity of each of the issues I described now that we understand the solutions:

1) Cookies broken — This is broken functionality. Stop ship. Don’t ship broken code
2) Authentication not working. This is an easy work around, but given the simplicity of the solution, it’s odd that this problem still exists
3) Comment moderation features broken. MT3 is a “platform” release, so turning off older third-party plug-ins seems reasonable AS LONG AS IT’S NOT THE ONE PLUG-IN THAT NEEDS TO KEEP WORKING. HELLO CONSTANT COMMENT SPAM
4) No biggie

Back to my first point. Look at the front page of the MT website. It’s a public release right? No big bad bugs? Wrong. On both counts. It’s a developer release. It’s a “hey, develop your plug-in our platform” release and I’m assuming it’s not ready for prime time release… but I’m assuming that… there’s nothing to back up that assumption except that Developer word hanging off the end of Movable Type. If this release isn’t for the world, shouldn’t there be a little waving yellow flag where you download the bits which says, “Hi, Developer release… there’s likely bugs here, folks.”

Ok, great, it’s a developer release and, hey, my upgrade went ok, so why exactly am I scratching my head again? Well, those bugs bug me. Folks that ship software know that the out of box experience with a piece of software taints the rest of the experience and what I felt with MT30D was significantly different than the many prior releases of the 2.x codebase. They plant a seed of doubt in my head that has now sprouted into the question, “Well, if I (a non-power user) found these significant issues… what else is there?”

If Six Apart’s quality track record wasn’t already established in my mind, this head scratching is a non-issue, but I’ve experienced the quality of their products. My impression of their quality has moved from just great to pretty good. That means I’m now double-checking functionality on my weblog that I took for granted in prior releases. Yes, it’s a developer release, but what exactly does that mean?

Quicksilver Holy Shit

It takes time for a holy shit to sink in and become a real holy shit, but the holy shit experience is so few and far between that when you even get a whiff of one, you pay attention.

I’m likely the last person to discover Quicksilver, but I’ve been using it all damned day and it’s definitely pointed in a holy shit direction. It’s one of those “I had no idea what was bugging me about Launchbar until I tried something else” experiences.

Dan Dickinson explains…

Can Google UI?

I’m fond of my Gmail account.

I’ve got enough email accounts out there that pointing all of them at a single account is a time saver. Combined with the Google blazin’ fast search, I feel like I’ve got a usable meta-mail account.

And that’s about it.

The folders, filters, labels… I know all that stuff is there, but the fast search makes the necessity of organizing your mail a second order task. The Google lesson is: Just search doofus.

What is unique about Gmail is that it’s Google’s apparent first foray into a sophisticated web application. There’s a user interaction more complicated than “Type something — Hit Enter”… and that’s what my question is: “Is Google any good at user interaction design?”

I’m an engineering manager which means I’m often deluded into believing I know what I’m talking about when it comes to user interaction. I don’t. Engineers design UI based on how they see the code working in their head and this had lead to years of confused end users wondering, “What the hell were they thinking?”

What we were thinking the code and the interaction experience is somehow related and it’s not. Yes, the code does create the application, but how that application is used by folks who actually need the product to work is not something most engineers are equipped to understand.

I like interaction designers.

They piss me off.

They bring a radically different perspective to the design table and, if they’re good, they’re not going to be swayed by know-it-all-engineers who blindly say, “Well, that’s just the way it works”.

The question is, “Does Google have good UI?”

I can’t tell.

Best. Class. Ever.

The current gig has presented me with a technical scenario I’ve never been in. I’m managing engineers who are writing in a language that I’ve never programmed in Cocoa… Objective C. Yes, many of the lessons of Java, C, and C++ do apply, but when I sit down to do a code review ALL THE SQUARE BRACKETS SCARE ME.

Brief Sidebar: The situation has the unintended side effect of preventing me from violating Rule #7 of Rands Management No No’s: “Don’t try to save the day by turning yourself into a programmer”. If you are the manager of an engineering team and you commit this error, you’re waste everyone’s time. Yes, I know you know you think you know the code, but you don’t… your engineers know this code and mastering this subtlies of this codebase is going to take more than a long weekend.

You’re confusing the hell out of the team. Aren’t you the conflict resolution guy? The person your team goes to when a decision gets sticky? Now, you’re putting yourself on the front line. Who are they supposed to bitch to about management? The time trying to figure this out will now waste more time and, guess what, now you’re now further behind.

Nice move.

Ok, the real point. I’m still able to have a technical discussion with my team because I was a software developer for a decade… I also went to college (Go Slugs!) for a computer science degree. The combination of the education and the experience means I’m technical even though I’m a management boob.

While I’m confident experience is much more relevant than education, I still remember, on a daily basis, the first time I learned about certain computer science topics and that’s what my question is. What class in college do you still refer to on a daily basis?

Easy easy easy. Introduction to Abstract Data Structures. Taught by some professor who essentially read from the book, but the book was quite good. Arrays, queues, hashes, linked lists… all the basic building blocks of constructing data structures combined with a healthy dose of abstraction. I apply the ideas I learned in the one semester class every single day.

How about you?

Brains in a Bucket on Alpha Centauri

In Ian Banks’ exceptional Excession, we find ourselves in a distant future when human beings have populated the universe. To help out with this task, humanity has developed sentient computers to fly their planet sized ships, fight their wars, and keep their houses tidy.

There’s a hierarchy to these sentient beings. There’s the drones. Human sized machines buzzing around… sentient… helping out the humans, but having independent lives. Then there’s the Minds. These are the heavy hitting deep thinking AIs which run the joint. Think of a computer program that was responsible for keeping all the folks on Planet Earth happy and you’ve got an idea of the complexity of thought than Banks is suggesting.

In the book, the plot moves along in chapters where the Minds discuss current book events with each other in big monospaced fonts. What’s unique to the discussion is that the reader has no other context for these Minds other than what they say. They have no physical form which describes them as a being, so the reader must piece together an impression of a personality based off what these Minds say.

Relationships completely based off words… ideas. Sound familiar?

I hit my two year of weblogging mark on April 4th. During that time, I’ve wrestled with the fact I’m using a pseudonym for this weblog. I’m not losing any sleep over it, but it does strike me as odd as I look at my Orkut friends list and I’m the only boob who doesn’t have a last name.

Who is Rands? Oh, the Jerkcity guy. Still, who is he? It reminds me of a puzzler they throw at you in your first year of college in that 9am Intro to Philosophy class… how do you really know Rands isn’t some brain in a bucket on Alpha Centauri? The internet has translated this euphemism into “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog”.

I’m not a dog nor a brain in a bucket, but, chances are, I’ll never truly prove that to you.

No big deal.

In the weblog world, you are defined by what you say, not what you look like or what you do. You have no idea that I love hockey (Go Sharks!) or that I live in California (Go Weather!) or even if I have two legs (Go headshot cam!). You probably have discerned that I work in high technology (Go Apple!) that I’m a manager (Die meetings!) and that I’m a total geek (Go NADD!). These are carefully chosen aspects of my life that I’ve chosen to document and they create Rands… the character you know on the Internet.

This nebulous type of relationship has become increasingly commonplace in my daily life. I’m interacting more and more with people that there’s a good chance I will never ever meet in person. It’s not that I don’t want to meet you, I’m pretty sure you’re not a brain in a bucket, it’s just you happen to live in Romania and I don’t.

My assumption is that over the course of the next decade, web relationships are going to be more prevalent than real relationships simply because you can maintain more of them with less of your time. None of that expensive getting to know you crap… just read my weblog. You’ll get an idea of what I’m about and I don’t have to do a damned thing other than write something down which, by the way, I’m going to do whether or not you’re there or not.

It’s not that I don’t care whether you’re reading or not… I actually do, but I’m doing this for free and I’m doing this for me which means if you keeping coming back there’s a good chance we’d actually get along… but we’ll probably never know because, again, you appear to be in Romania… or Alpha Centauri… I can’t tell from where I’m sitting.

My other assumption is that the influence of weblogs over the next decade will only increase, again, because of productive information economy the weblog-o-sphere encourages. I write a weblog because I choose to. My credibility either goes up or goes down by what I write. The more credibility I have, the more hits I get, the more eyeballs are on my words, the more credibility potential I can achieve. We’ve been over this.

Every weblogger is subject to these rules and if you assume the weblogging population is just increasing, it’s just a matter of time before the weblogging elite, the top 100 influenential webloggers, are formed not because of who they are, what they do, or who they work for, but because of what they say. These are the Minds of the weblog world. I find the admittedly optimistic idea of unbiased opinion having a say in current events rather comforting in a world increasingly populated with people who influence the world through terror and through ignorance.

You probably aren’t one of the elite, but don’t sweat it. It’s a tough gig. You see, once these Minds are well defined, they’ll immediately come under attack or they will abuse their power… there will be revolution, some Minds will say “fuck it” or, worse, they’ll be ignored, and their seat will become available. Next!

If your goal in life is to be influential… to attempt to change the world. You should be weblogging. The goal is not to become a Mind, it’s to make connections… make connections with people you don’t know. Sure, some of these folks you’ll end up meeting in person, but that event is, by far, the exception. Most of the connections that you make… the moment when your idea affects that anonymous brain in a bucket… will happen and you’ll never know that you’ve been heard.

Your Redesign Toolbox

At some point in the near future, you’re going to punt the entire flippin’ design of your website/weblog. Maybe you’re tired of it, maybe you want to learn some new fangled technology, but you’re going to wholesale nuke your site and start fresh.

After twelve seconds of feeling liberated, you’re going to panic… where to start?

The following is a list of miscellaneous tools that will help you begin:

CSS / Layout:

• CSS Vault: All sorts of CSS starting points
• Mezzoblue’s CSS Zen Garden: All sorts of CSS wizardry
• Mezzoblue’s CSS Crib Sheet: Aspirin for CSS Headaches
• Cascading Style Sheet Optimizer: Tighten Up that CSS
• CSS Positioning: Nitty gritty positioning details
• Web Page Layout Gallery: More basic starting points for CSS layouts
• Little Boxes: Even more CSS layout starting points

Color / Style:

• 4096 Color Wheel: Pick the perfect color palette
• ColorMatch Remix: Slightly more useful color palette selection tool
• Get The Look: 520 Styles To Start With
• Squidfingers Patterns: More art to start

Tweaks / Tools / Images:

• Button Maker: MORE ANNOYING BUTTONS PLZ
• Listamatic: Tame your lists
• Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms: User interaction matters
• iStockPhoto: Stock photography
• morgueFile: Stock photography (really)

Fonts:

• Font Browser: Handy web-based font browser
• Veer Typefaces: Flont it
• Fontleech: Font blog

I’ve collected this small list from frequent jaunts to del.icio.us. If you’ve got a killer site chock full of brilliant ideas, send it.

Bugsssszzzzzzzz

I’m in the midst of chewing on an article regarding things you absolutely, positively must have in order to design, develop, and ship product and what to do when those things just don’t exist.

The article and my current work situation has reminded me the importance of bug tracking. In each company I’ve worked, the bug tracking system has always emerged as the premiere source of truth regarding the state of the product. For better or worse, it’s often the authority regarding the question, “How close are we to shipping?” The one company that chose to ignore bug data, not surprisnly, failed miserably… releasing poor quality bits on a dictated schedule.

The question is: How do you track bugs for your development process? Doesn’t matter if you’re IBM or Portland Indie Development Shop (PIDS?)… I want to know how you manage your bugs. Spreadsheet? Home grown tool? Professional tool? Let’s hear it…

We're Doomed

At some point during the software development process, the engineering team will suddenly decided there is no way the product is:

1. Going to be done on schedule and/or
2. Going to be an acceptable quality.

The realization is going to paralyze the team with fear, work will stop, and hands will be thrown in the air.

During my Netscape days, this group realization was tucked neatly under the statement “We’re Doomed”. The simple phrase summed up the collective despair in a neat little package that allowed us to focus on the problems at hand rather than the fact there were an infinite amount of problems.

A hypothetical example:

You: “Hey Rands, I can’t get the Mac build to compile, Reggie hasn’t a clue what to do about that memory leak, and no one has seen Zack in three days and he’s got four show stopping bugs on his list.”

Me: “We’re Doomed.”

You: “Yeah, so can you help me with the Mac build?”

The good news about “We’re Doomed” is that it pushed aside the impending falling of the sky and allowed us to continue to work, but, in the back of our minds, we knew the sky was still falling. I’m here to tell you how to first detect Doomedness in your team and then suggest one specific way to unfreeze the team from the state of despair.

DETECTION

In this scenario, you’re a manager or director . You are directly responsible for the product being shipped even though you may not be working on it on a day to day basis.

If you are a manager, you already know there are lots of false positives when it comes to “We’re Doomed”. If you’re a decent manager, folks come by to vent. Sometimes their venting needs action, sometimes it’s just the vent that needs to occur. Your call. Don’t screw it up.

There are two situations when you need to be concerned:

1. The venting is consistent in tone and content across the team and
2. It is confirmed by co-workers OUTSIDE of the team

Number one is pretty easy to detect if you have regular 1:1s with your team. You’ve heard venting before, but now the vents are peppered with qualifiers like “We’ll never…”, “We’re screwed”, or “There’s no way…” Observations of the work situation have moved from “This is tough” to “This is impossible” and that means work is not getting done because no one can see the end game.

The second part, external confirmation, is trickier, but essential. You’re looking for someone else, your boss, another manager, a product manager to walk into your office and say, “They’re screwed.” What you should hear isn’t that the team is actually screwed, but that the team convinced that person of their screwedness. The observation here is that the screwedness is spreading… like a virus… now the company is tense… people without access to the facts are concerned rather than just you and your group.

Time for action…

TREATMENT

SIDEBAR: I’m an optmisitic guy and that means I believe that for most states of screwedness, there is a course of action that will help. It’s entirely possible that your team is saying “We’re Doomed” and they are and nothing you can do is going to change that. Bummer.

The key to getting past the “We’re Doomed” state is to get the team stop thinking about the fact the task appears impossible and get them moving forward. What has likely happened, especially in software development, is that the details become overwhelming. The thousands of small pieces of work that need to get done are mind boggling. There’s user interface to finish , thousands of bugs to triage, oh yeah that feature isn’t even done, and WHAT DO YOU MEAN MARKETING WANTS TO BETA THIS CRAP?

What you really need to do is get your team breathing again. How I do that is pretty simple.

Once I’m certain the team has qualified for Doomedness, I sit down with each one, dry erase marker in hand, and give them opportunity to tell me, in specific terms, what they are stressing about. To give this vent some structure, I tell them we can only list five specific concerns on the white board. No more.

Now, more often than not, co-workers see this another vent opportunity. They start spilling over with vagueries like, “Too much work” and “Not enough time”. Stop right there. What your looking for are five specific concerns. Too much work? Where is that work? What feature? Too many bugs? How many? Are they all yours? What else?

You’ll find once you get one or two specific bullets on the white board, the rest are easy. Your inclination as a manager will be to problem solve, but don’t. There’ll be plenty of time after you’ve assessed what the hell is going on with the team. Thank your co-worker and move onto the next.

What you’ll find about halfway through your team is that a course of action will become obvious. Two or three specific themes will arise from chaos and these are things you need to fix. Great. You know what to do, but that’s not the key benefit of this approach. You also got the team to quantify their concerns… more often than not, the action to resolve the issue will come from them.

Told you it was pretty simple. Here’s the hard part:

• Timing is key to this process. If you do it too early, you’ll get a set of work, but it won’t be the right work since there’s another four months of work to do and the real issues haven’t arose yet. If you do it too late, you won’t have the time to actually change anything.
• You can only do this process once per project cycle.
• Congratulations, you timed your intervention perfectly. You’ve got a specific set of actions and the team is temporarily happy because they know what’s stressing them out. Don’t ever take their temporary sense of calmness as a sign of victory because in 72 hours they’ll have made some progress and if they perceive you sitting there in status quo mode, you’re doomed. Credibility down. Chaos up. Back to square one.

Each time I end up in this type of intervention, it’s never pleasant. Co-workers are not happy… they’re pissed… they not feeling empowered… and they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. You can argue that it’s poor management which got the team in this spot in the first place. Yeah, maybe. The problem is that every software project I’ve been a part of (either as an individual or a manager) has a Doomed inflection point late in the product cycle. I don’t think it’s avoidable.

Personally, my favorite part of the software development cycle is the time between We’re Doomed and We’re Done. Not only is it the time when the most team bonding occurs (ie: no one ever leaves the building), but it’s also the time when the product moves from paper to screen. Every hour is filled with tests for the original design in the form of questions, “How is THIS going to work in our model?” These tests will show whether what you’ve designed actually works or whether you are truly Doomed.

Referral Rant

Back in the day, Pants wrote a silly piece of Perl to watch the Jerkcity logs in real time. In a terminal window, you could watch who was reading Jerkcity, where they came from, and how many strips they read. Yes, it’s ego_ware, but it demonstrated a couple of interesting points.

First, at the time, Rotten.com would occasionally throw some free PR our way with a front page link. We sometimes knew when these links were coming and it was fascinating to see the flood of hits appear. Lesson: You may think you get a lot of hits. You don’t.

Second, I could see where hits where coming from and see what type of community Jerkcity was resonating with. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

Through a couple of server moves and continued code hackery on the Jerkcity engine, the Perl developed bitrot. I started to use webalizer for traffic analysis… it wasn’t real time… or maybe it was and I didn’t throw the switch, but who cares, I’d moved on.

I stumbled on Textism’s Refer utility whilst surfing my NetNewsWire feeds and immediately throw it on the RinR server. In a nutshell, the script:

• Analyzes all hits to your HTML pages
• Throws them in a database (mmmMmMMM database)
• Provides real time analysis of what they’re looking at and where they’re coming from
• Provides filtered aggregate views which gives you referral counts for the past 24/72/week as well as lists of which queries were landing at your site

Hardly a holy shit, barely a gee whiz, but worth talking about.

As mentioned above, referral surfing is ego_ware, but then again, so is a weblog, so let’s stop getting all giggly when we publicly discuss referrals. Say it loud, say it proud, I CARE WHETHER OR NOT PEOPLE READ MY STUFF.

The #2 reason on why you should weblog is: “Shrink the world, Meet people you may not hate”. That’s right, you’re surfing weblogs to find interesting points of views… these views are attached to people. Don’t tell me you’re not community building because I know you are.

A recent example. I sat down this evening to scan the logs and found this gentlemen had referred to the N.A.D.D. article. Turns out, he’s based in Las Vegas and plays a lot of poker. What’d I do? I fired up iChat, dropped him a line and got the skinny on poker rooms in Vegas because I’m headed there next week. What that’d cost me? Well, the cost was taking the time to write down observations that everyone else sees, but hadn’t bothered to record.

The real question: What’s the benefit? What’s in it for me? I got paid in information. I now know which poker room suits my needs… probably saved me a couple hundred bucks in drunkenly bumbling around Vegas.

Let’s stop thinking we’re weblogging for free. Information is the currency here and your weblog makes you either a broker or a bank. You’re either passing on carefully selected information to others or printing your own for consumption. Probably. Your success in doing this will not be rewarded in cold hard cash, it will be rewarded in… wait for it… more information. The kicker is this information “should” be prefiltered to be relevant to you because folks hang with people they relate to. Like attracts like. I’m sure there’s fancy math here which proves this, but I’m not a math guy and, if I’m right, neither are you.

Choosing to ignore this information, these referrals, just doesn’t make sense. If you didn’t care to see your impact on the network, why are you weblogging? Why are you learning XHTML and CSS2 when you could be simply writing in that leather bound journal sitting next to your bed?

In Defense of N.A.D.D.

Nothing can kill a good buzz like facts.

A University of Michigan study is often thrown in the face of N.A.D.D. by those killjoys who assume N.A.D.D. has something to do with A.D.D. It doesn’t.

The alarming bullet points:

“People who are multitasking too much experience various warning signs; short-term-memory problems can be one. Intense multitasking can induce a stress response, an adrenaline rush that when prolonged can damage cells that form new memory…”

Even worse:

“Chronic high-stress multitasking also is linked to short-term-memory loss…”

Holy shit.

You read it here. N.A.D.D. causes brain damage. Forget “Senior Moments”, we’ll have “Nerd Moments”. Don’t sweat that you keep forgetting where you put that mobile phone… who needs a phone? You’ve got thirty seven other ways to get in touch with your friends about… that… that thing… it’s on the tip of my tongue… you know… the thing. We were JUST talking about it.

Where was I?

Yes, N.A.D.D. is multitasking, but N.A.D.D. is weapons grade multitasking.
Anyone with a mouse and a short attention span can bumble around sixteen open windows on the desktop, but it takes N.A.D.D. to organize them by function based on location on the screen. It’s N.A.D.D. which creates arcane (but useful) patterns of icons on the desktop. N.A.D.D. loves hot keys, syntax highlighting, color coding, and transparency.

N.A.D.D. is when your brain is fully engaged in information identification and consumption. It’s the state of mind which creates a sense of doing-ness… of learning… of exercising those essential mental muscles that teach us to instinctively know what is relevant and what is not. What better skill to exercise in a world where anything you ever wanted to know is just a google away?

One of the new articles covering the multitasking woes actually comments on this potential upside:

“It’s possible to consciously tone your multitasking muscles. Meditation can cultivate the ability to willfully control your mental focus. Other steps may help, such as weeding out distractions, honing your mental skills by making a point of continuously learning about new things, and getting plenty of rest.”

N.A.D.D. is hard work. In the first article, I pointed out how little we like our desktop environment touched. I didn’t mention the hazards of trying to pull us out of our N.A.D.D.-like state. We’ll be pissed, really pissed. You’ll ask why and we’ll respond with some vague response like “I was working”. What we were really saying was, “I was working well”.

N.A.D.D. is the zone. It’s the state where we’ve successfully constructed a healthy information processing engine through a combination of our tools, our mind, and the environment. It’s a tenuous state. Don’t mess with me , I’m N.A.D.Ding.

Sure, poor multitasking is unhealthy. Think repetitive stress injury except where you brain is the victim. If you do it poorly, you’re going to hurt yourself. There are times when I’m trying to achieve N.A.D.D. and am just doing poorly… giving myself a splitting headache repeatedly clicking on the same tabbed set of pages in Safari just waiting for something relevant to happen on the Planet Earth that catches my interest. Stuck in a rut. Apt attention wasted on nothing.

Maybe some folks never leave this endless loop of uselessness, but I learn. I improve my approach. I adjust my bookmarks. I ping a random friend in my buddy list and somehow alter the flow of data across my desktop. Maybe Orkut friend surfing is just the task to pull me in? Maybe not, but who cares? I’ve got a dizzying array of N.A.D.D. tricks designed to tickle my brain.

The folks who get N.A.D.D. know that when they summon their own bizarre set of desktop rituals, they are able to construct a healthy mental space where they can successfully surf waves of information that would baffle your average multitasker.

The folks who don’t get N.A.D.D. set it as a bizarre alien force which kidnaps their significant others and transform them into some headphone-wearing, multiple monitor-viewing, clickity-clackety keyboard-surfing freak.

That’s cool.

ed: At this point, you’re either nodding your head in agreement or still wondering what the hell I’m talking about. In either case, you should join the N.A.D.D. Support Group over at Orkut. Come define or refine your N.A.D.D and save some brain cells.

RinR Templates

I’ve had a couple request for the templates for the new design. Here they are.

I’ve included the style sheets as well as a templates necessary to generate the front page. These are templates for Movabletype and will not work for other weblogging software without heavy massaging… or maybe someone has written a slick import utility… I don’t know.

Archives, comments, about, etc, etc… are not including in this archive, but a cursory examination of the templates will show that it’s relatively easy to build these secondary pages from the basic provided templates.

Oh yeah, there are no graphics included, either. You can already poach these easily enough.

Lastly, I can recommend enough the use of the style guide to model whatever crazy CSS ideas are bouncing around your head. This will save you time, time, time…

[Update 1/25/04: #5]: If you are thinking about a site redesign… Alex King is running a CSS style competition for WordPress. Lots of great design ideas to be had…

Beta is Dead

ed: Reading this article in the context of the recent rise and fall of Orkut service might give you the impression I’m pissed at the Orkut folks. Nothing could be further from the truth… I actually wrote this article late last week. Thing is, I don’t think I’m the target demographic for such services (looking for sex and/or friends), but I am an advocate of treating customers with respect.

I’m the midst of writing a blurb on the ever growing number of social networking services. One thing I noticed right out of the gate is that these services like to use the term BETA in their title. Friendster, Tribe, Orkut… sitting there right in the logo is the term Beta.

What does word mean? The short response is “prepared to be screwed”.

A bit of history. The term Beta means something to software geeks. It’s a milestone in software development which roughly equates to “We believe this software is suitable for customers who are interested in seeing a preview, but it might explode. Really.” Betas were often released to select customers for feedback which, given the product was not complete, had a chance of making it into the shipping product.

Back in the early 90s at Borland, we had two other terms similar to Beta that we used to describe the state of the software. There was Alpha which meant “Well, if you stand on the other side of the room, it looks like a product, but lord god, don’t touch anything.” On the other side of the spectrum, there was Gamma which meant, “We’re done except for issues which would block us from shipping.” Similar to Beta, Gammas were released to customers with the hope they might find obvious errors that we overlooked because we hadn’t had a day off in four months.

At every company since Borland, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma existed in some form. The interesting one has always been Beta because Alphas were a management sham to give us the impression stuff was moving forward. Gammas were anticlimactic because, well, the software was done and it would take an act of God to stop it from shipping. Betas actually got in customers hands which meant we were motivated to clean-up our mess. Betas were validation. Betas were information.

Netscape screwed it all up for everyone, forever. In a good way.

Simple math. The software Netscape (or Mosaic Communications, at the time) was shipping a (duh) web browser. Implicit in the usage model of this software was the idea that you, the user, had a Internet connection which meant you had the means of downloading the software.

Given this emerging handy distribution model, an overall “let’s do shit fast” company philosophy, and (I’m guessing now) a background on long standing Unix traditions, Netscape began releasing free Betas of their Navigator software. Folks were scratching their head about this move at the time, wondering “How are they going to make money?”

At the time, the money was coming from enterprises who a) “got” web browsers and b) purchased site licenses for the browsers. Netscape sales folks would comb download logs, see what companies had employees downloading the browser, call ‘em up, and sell ‘em site license. Nice model. Too bad about that whole Microsoft screwing.

At Netscape, the concept of Betas had undergone it’s first definition change. It moved from “A use-at-your-own-risk release for select customers to a use-at-your-own risk for anyone who cared.” Cutting edgers like myself loved it because it moved us to the bleeding edge. Netscape loved it because they got free beta testing. Corporate IT types were still trying to grok what a browser actually meant to the enterprise, so they didn’t much care that there was pre-release software all over the computers they were responsible for maintaining. Everyone’s happy. Or ignorant. Same thing, really.

The Netscape model of software development and distribution caught on. Suddenly, everyone was releasing betas and try-before-you-buys via the web. Yay! No more middle man! Better yet, I don’t have to go to Frys! Fucking-A!

Present day. Friendster has gone from a primal meme to a Kleiner-funded start-up. All of this success on the backs of a community that appears to be A-OK with Friendster’s #1 feature — it’s slow as shit. I was an active member of that community for a good couple of months and as I was nodding off waiting for the web page to load, I’d take solace in the fact that, well, the logo says it’s a Beta, so I can’t really complain about the performance… it’s pre-release, right?

Wrong.

Friendster is not Beta by any definition that I know. There are almost HALF A MILLION people in my Friendster personal network . You’re telling me that Friendster is Beta when there’s an active population the size of Las Vegas JUST in my personal network?

Please.

The term Beta being used by Friendster, Tribe, and now Orkut has nothing to do with the maturity of the software, the size of the community, or the eventual feature set. It’s a scam. The term Beta is sitting there waiting. It will vanish the moment the population for the respective service reaches some unknown size where some folks with significant spreadsheets can safely say, “We can now start charging for this service and we won’t lose a statistically significant portion of our population”. Translation: We can charge for it and survive as a business.

I’ve got no problem with the goal. I spent a good portion of the late 90s watching very bright people spend massive amount of moneys on tremendously stupid ideas, so actually having a business plan can’t hurt. My issue lies with the word. Beta.

Friendster et all aren’t saying, “Try at your own risk” with their Beta label. They’re saying, “It’s our call when we’re going to screw you for cash.” Uncool. Unclear. And disrespectful of the community.

Orkut

Google has dipped it’s toe (again) into social software with Orkut. While this service is not featured as part of the Google porfolio of products, it is developed by one (or more) Google employees so, well, it’s a Google product at the end of the day.

Haven’t seen it — clearly, my trusted friends are not in the know. A stale personal page on the guy behind Orkut is here.

Orkut backwards is Tukro which makes about as much sense as Orkut.

[Update 1/23/04: #1]: I’m in. Thanks to a couple of trusted friends who I don’t know.

[Update 1/23/04: #2]: Interesting. The site appears to be based on ASP.NET. It’s performance was nice and spunky until the last hour when it went all-Friendster-like… currently down or terribly slow… can’t tell. Strike that, it’s spunky again.

[Update 1/24/04: #3]: I’ve now got roughly the same number of friends in Orkut as I do in Friendster. If you assume they’re counting folks in my “personal network” the same way (no idea if they are), you can compare the total network size. # of friends in Orkut: 5746. # of friends in Friendster: 472,161.

[Update 1/25/04: #4]: 12 hours later. # of friends in Orkut: 7354 # of friends in Friendster: 472,619.

[Update 1/25/04: #5]: It appears that no one but Tribe.net knows how to build a scalable social network:

We’ve taken orkut.com� offline for a few days as we implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users. Since orkut is in the very early stages of development, it’s likely to be up and down quite a bit during the coming months. None of the data you’ve entered will be deleted, and none of the connections you’ve made will be lost. And, if all goes well, you should see some significant improvements when we come back online.

We’ll send an email once everything is ready and running again. Thanks for your feedback and for bearing with us as we work our way up the learning curve.

The orkut team

Editor Religion

Your text editor is religion.

You start ignorant… wondering what all the fuss is about and then you either discover or are forced into a particular editor. In time, you grow comfortable with it, like your favorite type of pen, and that’s it… you’re done. You are the wizard of Emacs or the king of bbedit. Arguing with you about moving to a different editor is pointless. Might as well compare and contrast reasons to breathe. (I’m for it)

My first conversion to (hold your breath) Wordstar. This was an editor which ran many years ago on CP/M. I would literally reboot my Apple ] [ (equipped with my swank CP/M hardware card) in order to get to my word processor. Who cared none of my other apps ran in CP/M… I knew Wordstar… and still do today. Start a block = ^KB. End a block = ^KK. You thought I was kidding.

When forced to abandon my Apple ][ for a PC, Wordstar was there and continued to be there as early versions of Windows arrived. I did most of early college work inside a DOS window running Wordstar even as Wordperfect, Lotus Ami Pro, and early versions of Microsoft Word were kicking the shit out of Wordstar. Nope. Don’t care. I fly Wordstar.

It’s entirely possible if I wasn’t afflicted with N.A.D.D. that I’d be running Wordstar in a Virtual PC window on my Mac right now. You would never believe me how many people on this planet are still using DOS-based versions of WordPerfect right this very second… so I’m not going to tell you… you probably know one.

But I am a geek and geeks evolve because if they don’t they become a joke.

Wordstar was dead and graphical user interfaces were the shit, so I spent a brief time courting relevant versions of Microsoft Word within Windows 95, but I quickly learned this wasn’t going to work in my industry. See, you can’t code in Word. Well, you can, but your code looks horrible because graphical user interfaces do a splendid job of forcing look and feel down your throat, but as a programmer all you care about is the precision of the content. The words.

At the time, I was working at Borland and the engineering community used Brief. Like WordPerfect, Brief used an obscure set of keystrokes to get the done. Like WordPerfect, Brief went out of it’s way to get the hell out of your way which, given real estate situation with text based non-GUI editors, was a plus. Unlike WordStar, I don’t remember much of these keystrokes although I suspect Ctrl-Arrow is a holdover from those days.

When I left Borland for Netscape, I kept Brief nearby mainly because another tool, Coderwright, provided a Windows-based programmer’s editor as well Brief keyboard emulation. I still have my cwright.ini preferences sitting around somewhere that made Codewright look EXACTLY like my favorite DOS-based editor. Black background with stunningly annoying syntax highlighting. Further proof that all you need to see to understand the origin story of a programmer is what colored background they use in their editor: Black = Unix or DOS. White = Windows / Mac.

After Netscape, the shit hit the fan. I turned into a manager. I was now tweaking email sorting rules rather than highlighting syntax. I kept Codewright around for grins, but I was never really using it. For writing I was using Word, getting lost in font selection, page spacing, and other irrelevant formatting tasks that took me away from what mattered. The words.

Fast forward to my conversion to the Mac. Amongst the promise of Unix was the promise of a new religion. They say the first application developed for Mac OS X was BBEdit. The buzz about BBEdit is actually is loud enough to hear about in Windows land. Folks ask, “Do they have BBEdit for the PC?” They ask knowing nothing about the actual application, they ask because the reverence for BBEdit sounds like religion and that means it must be important.

I’m writing this article in BBEdit right this moment and I’m here to ask you, “What’s the big deal?” Heresy.

I want the religion. Honest. I swear I want to love BBEdit. I’m still a manager and maybe that’s my problem… I don’t have a real word use case for an editor. It does everything I ask for it. It’s aggregated common meta-commands as tools right on the main menu. I can tweak the keystrokes to my heart’s content, but I’m still waiting for my BBEdit holy shit moment that demonstrates it’s greatness.

Perhaps it’s where I came from. A requirement for a editor may come from my Wordstar days… it’s gotta be a chore to learn how to use. I’ve gotta have mental skin in the game. Using that logic, you’re going to point me at Emacs to which I’m going to respond, “I want a new text editor religion, not a new religion, a new language, and a new operating system”.

Not an Emacs guys, Rands? Then Vi is for you. Obscure commands. Black background. Just what the doctored ordered. Right? Nope. Paragraph #6: “Geeks evolve lest they become a joke” and Vi pre-dates all my other editor excursions… I want something new. A good religion doesn’t tell you how things were, they tell you how things are going to be.

Do You Miss Your PC?

The well documented switch to the Mac last year is going swimmingly. There is not a single mainstream application that I find myself missing on the Mac platform, but I still have a well defined need for access to a PC.

The first issue is that I have N.A.D.D. and I continue to travel in PC circles. This means that my PC pals occasionally stumble upon random independent developer brilliance that I really want to sample. Recent examples have been FeedDemon and Huminity. I don’t need full time access to these applications, I just want to feed my insatiable lust for information by seeing what these applications are about.

My other issue is that I often develop for the Web and,well, Internet Explorer for the PC is the market gorilla. Not verifying your web applications against the browser the majority of the planet is using is simply dumb. Web standards will help, but, at the end of the day, if you’ve built anything of significant complexity, you’ve gotta see how it looks/works in Internet Explorer on the PC or else you’re just a manic Mac-person with their head stuck in the ground.

Your first suggestion is going to be Virtual PC. Sure, that’ll give me the PC I’m looking for… all wrapped up in Mac OS X window. Problem is, that’s emulation… and emulation bugs me. It means… slower. It means… bizarre hardware issue. Emulation is a great theory, but in my limited experience, emulation is hard to pull off without sacrificing part emulated operating systems soul.

Besides, Virtual PC assumes I don’t have a PC and I’ve do. Fifteen years of work in Windows land means I’ve got boxes of unused PC crap including a solid Dell which is currently gathering dust under the workbench.

How do I get to this system from the warm comfort of Mac OS X? The answer is simple. Remote Desktop Connection (“RDC”). Microsoft did a whole slew of work in Windows to make remote desktop-like functionality easy to implement for clients. The Mac OS X client takes advantage of these services and gives you full access to virtual desktops on your Windows boxes with all the familiarity of the Mac OS X.

This isn’t VNC-like screen sharing where when you take control of an existing PC desktop. Logging into RDC gives you a full virtual desktop on the PC… if someone was sitting at the PC when you fired up RDC, they’d have no clue you were mucking around. Slick, but unnecessary as my PC will now headless, keyboardless, and mouseless… sitting in a dark corner of my office… under a blanket.

Yes, I now have a PC I need to maintain and that means future headaches I could have avoided, but mucking around with Windows every six months or so isn’t such a bad idea. The buzz that arose out of the recent Professional Developer Conference around Longhorn was significant. Any sort of forcing function which keeps me tinkering with Windows is a good thing.

No, you’re not going to be running Doom3 in this set-up. Performance is spunky on broadband, but for the latency sensitive, RDC will begin to annoy after anything more than occassional usage.

Status Reports, A Retraction

In this article, I start tackling the idea of replacing status reports with some mutant combination of emerging social software tools. My two requirements for this next version of a Status Report was:

- Makes it easy/attractive for larger organizations to share their information
- Provides a facility to publish scheduled structured reports to executive-types

This requirements are fundamental contradictions and I think trying to construct a tool which mixes the two requirements together will result in failure.

Both requirements are a good thing. Yes, we want organizations to share information more fluidly. Yes, we want to push that information to various influential people in the organization, but when we mix the requirements together, you’re going to hurt the information flow in your group, not encourage it.

Fluid information flow in the organization facilitated by weblogs, wikis, or something else is already happening at progressive companies. Alpha geeks are tweaking their favorite tools for internal usage and people are starting to write stuff down. All we need now is some significant public success story to start pointing our fingers and saying, “Look. We want to be like them!”

As for pushing information around to executive-types via Status Reports, well, I think that practice needs to continue in pretty much the same fashion. Status reports are press releases for a group of people which should be carefully constructed by the group’s managers to push whatever the group agenda is. Status reports are political documents. They’re not the truth.

If your resonse is, “Rands, man, that’s the point. We want GET RID OF THE POLITICS!” Sure, you do. You probably think that managers don’t really do anything all day, as well. My advice to you is, first, politics is a fact of life in any group of people… just like managers. If you don’t like that, go fire up your own start-up and see how quickly the managers and politics land… it’s happens just after you hire employee #2.

Back to the problem at hand. When I considered mixing the organic ways of weblogs and wikis, I kept running into this problem. How do I automagically extract my group’s agenda from sources of truth? You can’t. The moment the group realizes their web-based-musings are being used for Status Reports, the source will be tainted… people stop recording the truth, start saying “what they think they need to say”… this practice will effectively lobotomize a wiki or weblog.

Ick.

The good news is that while these two efforts need to be deliberately separated, they’re going to benefit from their mutual existence. As web-based organic information tools (I’m sorry, I just can’t call it social software) become more prevalent, info_savvy managers are going to have more access to the issues their people care about. This will increase their ability craft their weekly Status Reports with more of the truth in mind.

Teams represented by more compelling Status Reports are going to be rewarded by getting their agenda fulfilled. People will talk about these teams and wonder about their success. Soon, we’ll be talking about the products created by these teams and trying to figure out what is the secret of their success… which is simple… they’re just writing down the truth.

R.I.P. NetNewsWire?

I stopped using NetNewsWire a few months back and felt pretty guilty since I’d foamed significantly at the mouth regarding RSS readers a few months back.

It fell out favor during the great Jaguar/Panther migration… it was “yet another thing” I needed to ressuciate after my many and frequent upgrades and I just stopped doing it. At the time, I wondered, “Well, let’s see how much I depend on NNW… let’s see if I miss it.”

Two weeks later, I still hadn’t brought NNW to my work desktop. I’m made some adjustments within Safari… a couple sets of grouped tabs… promiscuous use of the Apple-Clicks on URLS… all the same sort of pre-NNW information management tricks I’d cooked up to sift those bits.

Today I got fed up.

After french pressing myself a cup of Peet’s Holiday Blend, I was settling into my morning routine of information consumption. I was clicking hither and yon and I realized… there’s a better way to do this.

Welcome back NNW. Sorry Brent… brain cramp. My bad.

[Update]: I completely nuked all the existing subscriptions in NNW and have started fresh. Incidentally, I do the same thing with my address book whenever I switch jobs — it’s a Darwinian selection of the relevant process.

Anyhow, as I started add new subscriptions, I quickly needed to start grouping subscriptions. Current groups are FAVES, EYEBALLIN’, BIZ, APPLE, and NEWS. I was wondering, if you do use a newsreader, what are your current group names?

PDA Boobs

I surround myself with Alpha Geeks because they do a fine job of keeping me abreast to the latest trends which keeps me pleasantly on the bleeding edge. It’s a simple process, just listen to the Alpha Geeks. See what is floating their respective boats and when you see enough boat floatage, you jump on board.

We’ll call it Alpha Geek Trend Detection, but that’s another column.

The current buzz amongst my selection of Alpha Geeks is the PDA. There are two pieces of hardware sitting on the respective hips of the geeks, the Treo 600 and the Danger’s Sidekick.

None of this hardly news. Both PDAs have been exhaustively described elsewhere. What’s unique about this particular buzz is that I have no absolutely desire to join their geeks in their PDA exploration because I’ve been there before… many times.

Literally, right this second, I have a drawer filled with various incarnations of the PDA. You see, the Alpha Geeks identified the original Palm as the “thing”. This was followed by the various other Palm form factors (thin! color! more memory!) which, after a few months of usage, ended in exactly the same spot as their predecessor… unused… sitting in their drawer… praying for a second life via Ebay.

The Alpha Geeks followed up by convincing me that the Blackberry solved of the problems I had with my plethora of Palms by… wait for it… getting rid of functionality and elegance. The insanity of such reasoning should have been a clue, but I bought it hook, line, and sinker because the value of having an always-on network connection really did offset the fact the Blackberry looked like crap.

The Blackberry’s usefulness window was longer than that of the Palm, but when I switched jobs and the new gig didn’t provide me with Blackberry service, I didn’t miss it because I knew I’d be traveling less, so the need to have all-the-time access to my email decreased.

Present day. The Alpha Geeks are out in droves, sending me mail, cornering me at parties, and instant messaging me. MY PDA IS THE SHIT. I’m sure it is. Yes, yes… the Sidekick has a fascinating form factor. Yes, it has all the apps I’d expect from my desktop. Gosh, it’s pretty. No, no, no, you Treo folks are cool too. It’s shiny! It’s got a camera? Well, isn’t that fancy. Yes, I want one.

Yes, I reeeeeeeeeeeeeally want one.

The problem is, I’m going to buy one, I’m going to dance around the house in anticipation until it arrives and when it does, the dancing will turn into jumping up and down. I’ll unpack it, load it up with all my content, and head off to the closest Alpha Geek and they’ll nod approvingly.

… and then I’m going to feel like a total boob because I was duped again.

See, I thought I’d learned my lesson regarding the Alpha Geeks almost fifteen years ago. The Geeks were all in a tizzy about Compaq’s latest and greatest portable computer. It looked like this:

Yes, folks, a 286, 12Mhz portable feature an orange plasma monochrome display weighing in at over 20 pounds. Sweeeeeet. It’s the Alpha Geeks that got this on my desk over a decade ago and that failed promise was followed by subsequent disasters from HP, Dell… the list goes on and on… and this was before Ebay when a boob-like-purchase could hope for a recouping of losses.

The point is this: There’s an adoption curve on new technology. At the peak of that curve, the technology has sufficient value that it will appeal to a significant population that will make it successful. Alpha Geeks will have you believe the time to jump on the curve is as soon as possible because, really, you don’t want to miss a thing, right? You’ve got N.A.D.D.… that means there’s no difference between ignorance and a lobotomy.

To me, for now, the PDA feature set still lags. I have a large list of contradictory demands that only make partial sense. They are:

- Broadband network access. There should be no difference between my office connection and my connection sitting in the car on the way to work.

- Big fat screen. Pixel real estate is key for me. I don’t need 17”, but I want more than is currently provided.

- Accessibility. Blackberry made strides here with the QWERTY keyboard, but the design still forced most users into writing their emails in Blackberry-ese meaning “Im writing briefly bcuz this keybrd iz smll”. I want zero restrictions on my ability to get my bits over the wire.

- Phenomenal application support. I’ve got the same list of requirements that made of my Mac. I want easy access to all my usual business apps (Word, Excel), I want access to all of my various communication mediums (Terminal, AIM/iChat), and I want a burgeoning developer community who are actively seeking new ways of exploiting the PDA platform.

- You’d think I’d not want amazing 3D games on this mythical PDA, well, I do. Some needs to figure out how to jam stellar graphics performance into one of these babies because Solitaire ain’t going to cut it.

Sounds like a portable, right? Wrong. I have a portable. Portables have evolved to pretty much meet all the requirements above without apologies. PDAs have not. Portable computing was a niche player until it matched desktop computing feature for feature and PDAs have the same burden.

And… yes, my strict list of requirements is motivated by a financial defensive mechanism which allows me to keep my dollars on my pocket and not in a drawer… gathering dust.

Comments and Cash

The rapid evolution and adoption of the MTBlacklist plug-in is a surprise to no one. Comments have been sitting there with scads of exploit potential the moment the first decent looking woman (who could type AND owned a digital camera) discovered the wonders of LiveJournal.

The MTBlacklist plug-in strikes me as a very good solution for the wrong problem. MTBlacklist will “block incoming comments/trackbacks with content matched by any one of the entries in the blacklist.” Groovy. It also features a “Default blacklist [that] contains over 400 known spam strings for immediate protection on install.” Super groovy.

So, what we’ve done here is move from a world were webloggers afflicted with spam stop blocking IPs and start blocking based on content strings. My question is, simply, “what is the difference?” Now, I have not installed MTBlacklist, so I am not an expert, but the problem which needs to be solved isn’t the content, it’s the people who are generating the content.

Segue.

Back when everyone was still shaking in their boots about transferring money over the Internet, a company called PayPal had a problem. They were complementing Ebay as a (semi) neutral clearinghouse for cash transactions and, by doing so, needed to provide various financial vehicles to move money. This meant they need to support credit card transactions and interface with banks. The russian mafia saw PayPal as a great way to launder money, so they set-up an automated system to create accounts on PayPal using stolen credit cards and they started to move money around. Go bad guys!

To handle this fraud, PayPal came up with what seems like a goofy idea. They started requiring new account holders to read a graphic which contained some bizarrely formatted text. The idea was that the text could not be read by optical character recognition software which meant that every new account would need to be touched by, at least, one human being. Human interaction and automation doesn’t scale… they’re aren’t enough humans or enough time, so problem solved. The PayPal “human interaction” authorization is all over the place now. Go good guys!

Back to our original topic.

Yes, I am suggesting that there is little difference in being authorized to have a bank account and being authorized to post on a weblog. In both cases, the person who wants to post must prove they are a human being. The PayPal goofy text graphic approach might sound like overkill and will likely decrease the chance someone will post to your weblog, but it solves the problem. Human beings don’t spam.

[10/22/03 Update]:

The folks at MovableType are all over this.

Windows Webloggin'

About a year a half ago, I made the switch to Apple. One of the handy facts of this existence is that there is a large community of folks who stare significantly at “All Things Apple”. This provides a fascinating running commentary of Apple’s public facade which, in recent months, has been rapidly evolving.

So, the question is: Where are the equivalent sites for Windows and Intel? Off the top of my head, I can think of Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows, NeoWin, and OSNews, but I’m looking for weblog-ish sites which use a bit more of a personal voice to observe the Windows world.

Whaddya got?

Added:

— The Old New Things
— The Scobleizer Weblog
— Black Viper

Keeping Track of Everything

I’m a database guy.

This means when I have to build something with software, the first thing I’m going to think is, “How is a database going to help me here?” I’d argue there are two other application cults in this realm, there are the spreadsheet guys (sales/marketing/management) and language guys (engineering).

My database biases began as part of my first real gig testing the first version of Paradox for Windows at Borland. This was back when Borland had teeth and user-friendly relational databases were all the rage because Microsoft didn’t have one. DOS-based Products like dBase, FoxPro, and Paradox were earning scads of cash as small and large businesses were buying PCs and learning they didn’t need a mainframe to have a database.

At the time, there were two major Borland products making the transition to Windows: Paradox and, our spreadsheet program, Quattro Pro. For being in the same engineering organization, these groups had very little to do with each other because, at their very core, they knew that anything you could do in THE OTHER TEAM’S PRODUCT, you could do better IN YOUR PRODUCT.

The pinnacle of this useless competitive insanity was when both teams decided to see who could build a better version of Tetris in their respective business application. Yes, Tetris in a database program and a spreadsheet program. In hindsight, it makes a lot of sense that Microsoft kick the shit out of us… we were spending time arguing about the programming structures necessary to perform ANIMATION IN BUSINESS APPLICATIONS.

The obvious and simple fact is that, yes, there is quite a bit of functional overlap between spreadsheets and databases. They both, basically, are representations of tables of data and most folks want to perform interesting operations against those tables. Databases are more structured, spreadsheets appear more flexible and easier to use.

It’s important to note that Borland did have a language group created stellar products during this chaos. They mostly just sat back, pointed their fingers, and giggled at us. Those same language guys are mostly still at Borland and have contributed much to their recent success.

I’m a database guy.

Fast forward to the past year. As I’ve rambled about in the past, my professional life revolves around my to-do list. I’ve tried a few professional tools to track this list and found each to be distinctly unacceptable. They either force functionality or language on me which I find irritating, so I toss them in the trash.

When I find myself without an acceptable tool, I usually go home grown. Given my database background, one would think I’d start data modeling and designing forms, but a funny thing happened on my way to middle management. Desktop databases essentially vanished. Paradox was sold into obscurity. I haven’t heard the word dBase or FoxPro in a decade. Microsoft Access is still part the Office Professional Suite, but I’m a Mac guy now which means… FileMaker?

Given the prospect of tinkering with FileMaker or resurrecting a PC to run Access, I chose a spreadsheet to manage my to-do list. At the time, it seemed like a good compromise. I could get something up and running immediately… it’s portable… it’s visual… it’s Excel… and I know Excel fairly well. Let’s go for it.

As described, I created a simple spreadsheet to track my to do list. I spent a good many months deluded that this solution was working for me. HEY IT’S GOT LIST MANAGEMENT! I can sort, filter, AND GOLLY IT’S GOT SYNTAX HIGHLIGHTING. Pathetic. Pathetic. Pathetic.

It’s a spreadsheet. Sitting on my hard drive. What if I want to look at it from home? I should copy it to the network, but I FORGET TO DO THAT which means I write my to do on a post it and HI WE’RE BACK TO TRACKING THIS CRAP ON PAPER. This means that I am spending more time thinking about what I should be doing than actually doing it. As is common with things you should not do, you stop doing which, in the case of a to do list, is a bad thing. I started to looking for another solution.

Paint savior on StevenF over at Panic software, as he recently pointed out a potential solution in the form of Alex King’s TASKS web application. Take a look at it right now. I was amazingly lucky when it came to TASKS because, as it turns out, Alex King and I pretty much think about task management in the same way. We use the same language to describe tasks and we apparently want to interact with our tasks in similar ways. Again, this is luck. You may look at the application and have no clue what a sticky tasks is, but I did… didn’t need to look it up in the documentation.

Task mind meld aside, what is more relevant about the application is that it’s web-based. No, strike that, the big deal is it’s DATABASED. Ahhhhhhhh. Sure, I had to enabled MySql on my Mac OS X Server box (it’s built into Mac OS X Server) and I also had to set-up PHP on that box (2 minutes — thank you MarcL), but, at end of the day, I’ve got web-based to-do list solution. This means I can fully use it from any computer on the planet which has a net connection and I can count on one hand, the number of times a day, I’m not within twenty feet of a wired computer.

Other TASKS wins:

It remembers everything. Deleted in database land means “I set the deleted flag, please don’t show this anymore”. How many times have you crossed something off your to-do list and later wondered, “Did I cross that off? Did I even add it to my list? How screwed am I, anyhow?” Problem solved.

It’s extensible. While I haven’t delved into the nuts and bolts of TASKS, I’m reasonably confident that an afternoon of poking around PHP reference manuals would show me how to add my favorite feature to TASKS. My spreadsheet solution was already filling my screen with unnecessary rows and columns with the only extensibility prospect being Visual Basic for Applications. STABBING MYSELF.

It’s a web application done well. Anyone who has designed an application for the web has run into the problem, “Do I make it act like a web page or native application?” King has done an intelligent job of mixing native application functionality and web sense without going overboard.

What’s crossing your mind right now is this, “Rands, how is setting up a database server, a web server, PHP, and configuring a web application easier than tinkering with a spreadsheet?” It’s not. It takes some semi-non-trivial terminal-surfing expertise to get TASKS running, but when you’re done you get the geekish satisfaction of tinkering with the plumbing of your server. This is doubly important for manager types who constantly run the risk of, well, becoming stupid. Getting under the hood of an application and figuring out what makes it ticks is good mental exercise that will help keep you relevant.

Regardless, it’s the end product that matters and, for the past two weeks, I’ve successfully used TASKS to keep track of the miscellaneous details of my day which, at any time, could erupt into CAREER CHANGING DISASTERS. A huge part of management is the art of skillfully handling a fire hose which is spewing information and knowing what pieces are relevant and, more importantly, which pieces might be relevant… at some future date… maybe.

TASKS can help.

The Comments Controversy

There are certain hazards in running a weblog. There’s the GOSH I DIDN’T KNOW MY MOM WAS READING moment. There’s the JESUS YOU MEAN I HAVE TO TEST MY LAYOUT ON MULTIPLE BROWSERS weekend. Then, there’s the I AM TURNING COMMENTS FOREVER AND EVER realization.

In order, my advice for each situation is as follows:

First, your Mom probably knows you’re bisexual.

Second, HTML is never easy no matter what Macromedia tells you.

Lastly, when you decided to turn comments off, you’re basically choosing to stop engaging in a conversation your weblog was supposed to start. That’s ok if you think you rule the weblog planet, but, chances are, you don’t.

Comments in weblogs are a burden. For every fifty coherent replies, there is one which, for some reason, gets under your skin. Maybe it’s an angry ex-lover, maybe it’s a co-worker who happens to be right, or maybe it’s just that incessant troll who just won’t shut up.

More often than not, when faced with a comments controversy, webloggers bail on comments completely or fall back on Trackback-like solutions to improve the credibility of those they allow to comment. Either choice does the same thing, it hinders the conversation your weblog was intended to begin. This is a direct contradiction to the reason you started weblogging in the first place… to share your own little version of reality with the rest of the world and see what the rest of the world thinks.

You ask, “Rands, I don’t care what the rest of the world thinks.”

I respond, “Then save yourself a lot of time and sanity and move that journal back to paper.”

There are three obvious ways to figure out if what you’re saying via weblog is relevant. Hits, links, and comments. Ego surfing your access logs gives you visibility into what how many people are visiting your site and what they’re looking at. Link review via referral logs or Technorati-like services gives you another dimension on who cares about what on your weblog, but it’s still simple content… THEY LINKED TO ME. ALERT THE MEDIA.

Folks may choose to write about your entry in their weblog, but that is still within the comfort of their own home and for their own gratification. Actually taking the time to comment on the weblog where the entry resides, is a selfless act of creativity and, let’s face it, that’s a big deal in a world where the limelight is so readily quantifiable.

A comment on your weblog takes actual thought. A comment means that someone took a few minutes out of their day to string together some words in response to something you said. Given the tremendous amount of incomprehensible crap present on the Web and in weblogs, a comment is a big deal. However small, you altered the day of a person you do not even know.

Intel Personal Server

I’m am incrementalist which means I’m A-OK when change occurs a little here and a little there. I’m OK with it because the world is a big place and there is a lot to pay attention to. If I was a completionist, I would like my change with a bit more finality, but I’m not. So I don’t.

This article is a solid reminder of why we desperately need Completionists. My Incrementalist strategy for living on my three different Macs has been a combination of saving some stuff to a Firewire drive, saving some other stuff on a server, and writing down a list of stuff I need to change on a virgin Mac OS X installation. Elegant, no?

Yes, I want a doo-hickey around my neck which has everything I ever write/said/received/sent/thought/yelled/ALLCAPPED. No, I don’t want it sitting on a server somewhere because I still don’t trust that my network connection is going to be there. I barely trust the wiring between my hard drive and my processor. Yes, I am willing to carry this with me all the time, but it better be small… ID badge-like. No, not everyone is going to get this, but I will and I’ll tell all my Incrementalist friends and they’ll jump up and down a lot.

Call for BBEdit Wizardry

Today the last vestige of the PC left the building. I replaced the old Dell 500Mhz machine at home with a Dual G4 and a 20” flat panel monitor. This means that all of my primary machines are now Macs. <insert little dance here>

I’m quite comfortable on the Mac. With Panther adding the groovy AppSwitching doo-hickey, I feel like I’ve got a majority of my keyboard navigation techniques. I’m still not quite happy about the desktop clutter that just seems to appear, but I’m assuming that is residual “I’m not quite sure what is going on here so I better save it some place I can see” syndrome.

The one class of application I’m not comfortable with are text editors. I’ve been debating two strategies here: finally breaking down and learning Emacs or learning the intricacies of BBEdit. The Emacs strategy appeals to the keyboard N.A.D.D. in me, but BBEdit feels like the politically correct thing to do.

So, are you a BBEdit user? If so, what is your favorite tip/trick in BBEdit?

Looking for the Next Big Thing

Robert D. Hof writes eloquently and intelligently about the Next Big Thing.

Three things of note: I was surprised that he discovered and identified the smart mob emergence as the only interesting development in the last few months. I agree — there was a small holy shit moment when I first read about smart mobs.

I was surprised he did not mention weblogs. Maybe this meme is old hat, but weblogs are the only thing on my radar which are currently shaking things up. Sure, no one hows to make new money on it. Sure, barriers to entry are amazingly low, but folks aren’t shutting up about it. Always a good sign.

Lastly, identification of the next Big thing is really really hard. Folks who are avidly looking for it are, unfortunately, intensely biased by various forms greed and; therefore, apt to leap at something which only vaguely resembles innovation. VCs want the cash, A-list entrepreneurs want the return to glory, and everyone else is willing to jump when either party says, “This is it. Let’s do this thing.”

Take comfort in the fact that, you, nameless Joe or Joe-ette are the people who actually get to decide what the next Big Thing. It’s the collection of each of your personal holy shit moments that will actual drive what is successful or not successful.

Whew.

N.A.D.D. Communication Hierarchy

I live near my parents and they have no idea how to effectively get in touch with me. This is infinitely frustrating to me because, at any given, moment there are, at least two to three ways to instantly get in touch with me. Still, my parents choose to email an account I don’t use or call my house line… my house line… I haven’t picked that up in over a year.

HEY PARENTS — GET WITH THE NADD.

The following is a prioritized list of how I prefer to be contacted. This list tries to be as generic possible about you, the person who wants to contact me, and what you’re all about. You may be a total stranger, you might be a co-worker, or you might be my Dad… in any event, here’s how to find me:

INSTANT MESSAGING (iChat/AIM: jerkyrands) I love the instant message. I’ve said this before. It’s non-intrusive, it’s fast, and it has the added bonus of the buddy list which shows you/me whether or not you/I are available to talk. Instant messaging is about instant gratification. None of this waiting around for an email response or voice mail crap… you’re in, you’re out… you’re done. I’d say I do about 20-30% of my communication via instant messaging, but it continues to rise. Sweet.

ELECTRONIC MAIL (rands@jerkcity.com) When someone moves from instant messaging to email, the mental note I make is, “This person wants a record of this conversation.” Ok, fine. Email is also a much better medium for complex reasoning. Conversely, it’s also a better medium for significant misunderstanding. I’d say email is where I do 40% of my daily communication.

IRC / CHAT ROOM My interactions via IRC/chat rooms has been on the decline for the past year. I continue to hold onto the experience probably because of my late 80s BBS experiences, but I believe the emergence of instant messaging has eaten into my usage. Still, there are a small set of people that I primarily interact with via chat rooms. I’d say 5% of my communication is chat room based.

CELL PHONE Again, there is a very small population of folks that I interact with via cell phone. Cell phones have the added advantage of always being with me, but most folks know that I’m online all the time and try an instant message first. Cell phone communication makes up about another 5% of my daily interaction. Text messaging is worth mentioning here — I don’t use it — I’ve tried it, but I don’t use it. No keyboard, no way.

There are three more means of communication that pop to mind, two of which are mostly useless and one which we must learn to use more.

WORK PHONE It might be my gig, it might be instant messaging, but no one uses the work land line. I’ve got voice mails there right now… the light is on and I’m not checking it.

US POSTAL Snail mail. Unless you’re Amazon or Netflix, this isn’t a timely means of communicating with me. That’s a bummer because I enjoying seeing what people’s handwriting looks like.

FACE TO FACE Ah yes, human contact… that awkward hallway conversation… 1:1s with your boss… lunch with a co-worker. As a population, we, the engineers in the Silicon Valley, appear to be getting much worse at this. Why? Well, read this article again and tell me why. We’ve got all these rapidly mutating communication toys (oddly enough, developed by engineers) which lend themselves to rapid communication without all fuss of actually need to look someone in the eye.

This deficiency of tools is the actual reason my parents have difficulty getting in touch with me. They believe that unless they’re able to have a face to face conversation with their son, well, what’s the point? They’re right… much is lost the various translations we need to apply to the different mediums at our disposal. The lossiness of essential non-verbal content in these mediums, I’m certain, is the source of much of the peacemaking I’m required to do as a manager.

The first question I ask anyone who walks in my office ranting about THAT FREAK IN THE GROUP JESUS HE’S ANNOYING is, “Did you talk with him?” Invariably, the response is , “YES I DID WE’VE BEEN GOING BACK IN FORTH IN EMAIL FOR TWO DAYS NO.” So, I ask again, “Do you talk with him?”

Unlisted Typepad Features

There will be some inane debate regarding the Typepad Feature List and what FEATURE X is in PLUS PACKGE while FEATURE Y is in PRO PACKAGE. Fact of the matter is, there are, at least, two features in all of the packages which make the Typepad service superior to anything I’ve tried.

Speed. I’ve got the most recent version of Movabletype install on a variety of different pieces of hardware. While the performance of the applications varies from machine to machine, it’s a generally slow experience. Until Typepad showed up, the speed of MT was fine with me. I did most of the work for the weblog OUTSIDE of the weblog and used MT simply for posting, minor, edits, and template tweaks.

Typepad (at least in it’s BETA form) is fast… really fast. Waiting for the software to complete your last action is a thing of the past and that simple fact transforms the user experience. Typepad becomes a sophisticated weblog dashboard as opposed to a useful conduit for publishing.

The other unlisted feature is usability. Six Apart is clearly thinking of a specific spectrum of end user as their design presents a simple, useful interface which scales from sophisticated new users to power uses with ease. If you think this is easy to do, I ask you to take a look at the administration interface for any competing services and compare against Typepad.

Fortunately, Six Apart has not lowered the usability bar to the level of the AOL user and, personally, I’m glad. While brain-dead-weblogging probably means more cash money in the door, Six Apart continues to target the moderately sophisticated user and that means the voice of the Typepad community won’t sound like lunch time at highschool.

N.A.D.D.

I just finished reading Guns of the South (tip of the hat to JayBees for the recommendation). The gist of the book is straight forward, yet odd… what if, during the Civil War, the South became equipped with a lot of AK-47s. Long story short, they would have won. Harry Turtledove chose to not focus on time travel or other delectable sci-fi tidbits; he spends the time on “YAY! The South Won! So, uh, what are you going to do about that whole slavery thing?”

While I’m certain Civil War enthusiasts would enjoy this book, it is not geared for someone with my particular disability — Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder… or NADD. This innocuous condition reared it’s head during Guns when it became clear the book was a tome dedicated to the exploration of lifestyles during an alternative post-Civil War period. Zzzzzzzzzzz.

Now, Guns was a fine read, but, more than once, I was flipping through the pages wondering, “Ok, HOW long is this chapter?” When I neared the end of the book and it became clear that some time traveler from the future wasn’t going to appear and, using some whizbang futuristic device, join the North and South together, well, I was disappointed. Sure, I’m happy that President Lee learned his lesson and started to abolish slavery on his own, but, please, no lasers guns? Sheesh.

Folks, I’m a nerd. I need rapid fire content delivery in short, clever, punch phrases. Give me Coupland, give me Calvin’n’Hobbes, give me Asimov, give me The Watchmen. I need this type of content because I’m horribly afflicted with NADD.

If you’re still with me, it might mean you know that you already suffer from some type of NADD-related disorder. Let’s find out:

Stop reading right now and take a look at your desktop. How many things are you doing right now in addition to reading this column? Me, I’ve got a terminal session open to a chat room, I’m listening to music, I’ve got Safari open with three tabs open where I’m watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I’ve got two notepads open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I’m writing this column, as well.

Folks, this isn’t multi-tasking. This is advanced case of Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. I am unable to function at my desktop unless I’ve got, at least, five things going on at the same time. If your count came close, you’re probably afflicted, as well. Most excellent.

My mother first diagnosed me with NADD. It was the late 80s and she was bringing me dinner in my bedroom (nerd). I was merrily typing away to friends in some primitive chat room on my IBM XT (super nerd), listening to some music (probably Flock of Seagulls — nerd++), and watching Back to the Future with the sound off (neeeeerrrrrrrd). She commented, “How can you focus on anything with all this stuff going on?” I responded, “Mom, I can’t focus without all this noise.”

The presence of NADD in your life is directly related to how you’ve dealt with the media deluge of the new millennium. You’ve likely gone one of three ways:

1) You’ve checked out… you don’t own a TV and it’s unlikely you’re even reading this column.

2) You enjoy your media/content in moderation. When I asked you to count how many windows were open on your desktop you either said, “One, my browser for which to read this article” or you made yourself a note to yourself to check this AFTER completing this column. In a previous age, you were the type of person who kept their pencils very sharpened.

3) You enjoy the content fire hose. Give me tabbed browsing, tabbed instant messaging, music all the time, and TIVO TIVO TIVO. Welcome to NADD.

The presence of NADD in your friends is equally detectable. Here’s a simple test. Ask to sit down at THEIR computer and start mucking with stuff on their desktop. Move an icon here… adjust a window size there. If your friend calmly watches as you tinker away, they’re probably NADD-free, for now. However, if your friend is anxiously rubbing their forehead and/or climbing out of their skin when you move that icon 12 PIXELS TO THE RIGHT, there’s NADD in the house. BACK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER.

I’m making NADDers sounds like obsessive power freaks and, well, we are. How else would you deal with a world where media is forced on you at every turn? You’d get very good at controlling it. Here’s more good news:

1) Folks not afflicted NADD think those who are can’t focus because, look at us, we’re all over the place. PLEASE STOP CLICKING ON THINGS — YOU ARE GIVING ME A HEADACHE. Wrong. NADDers have an amazingly ability to focus when they choose to. Granted, it’s not their natural state and, granted, it can take longer than some to get in the zone, but when we’re there, BOY HOWDY.

2) Weblogs are designed for those with NADD. The web digested into short little blurbs of information. NADD heaven. My guess would be that the population of regular webloggers is mostly NADD-afflicted. Otherwise, they’d be writing books… not paragraphs… at random times of the day… always.

3) NADD can advance your career… if you’re in the right career. Ever worked at a start-up? Ever shipped software? What are the last few weeks like? We call it the fire drill because everyone is running around like crazy people doing random, unexpected shit. NADD is the perfect disease for managing this situation. It develops the skills to sift through the colossal amount of useless noise and hear what’s relevant.

Here’s a tip: If the building you are currently in is burning to the ground, go find the person with NADD on your floor. Not only will they know where the fire escape is, they’ll probably have some helpful tips about how to avoid smoke inhalation as well likely probabilities regarding the likelihood you’ll survive. How is it this Jr. Software Engineer knows all this? Who knows, maybe he read it on a weblog two years ago. Perhaps a close virtual friend of his in New York is a fire fighter. Does it matter? He may save your life or, better yet, keep you well informed with useless facts before you are burnt to a crisp.

I’m making NADD sound like a rosy affliction. There are several downsides.

First, it’s a lot of work to figure out your personal program of digesting the world and, sorry, you are going to miss things. This will annoy you, but it will also drive you to incessantly look for the NEXT COOL THING.

Second, you’re going to sound like a know-it-all. Try not to.

Third, and lastly, you’re not going to have much patience with those who have not chosen a NADD-like life. Ocassionally, you’ll attempt to impart your fractured wisdom only to throw your hands up four minutes later when it’s clear, “Jesus, they just don’t get it.” Chances are, they might’ve gotten it, you’re just afflicted with a disease where your attention span is that of a second grader. Oh well, embrace your handicap.

Frontier Software

The latest shareware utility I’ve actually paid for is LaunchBar. This utility, which I’ve already talked about, sits in your menu bar and allows you to launch applications, web pages, documents, system preferences by typing their respective names via the keyboard. Frequent readers will know of my hatred of mouse. It is a imprecise tool in the hands of a imprecise person (namely me) which means when I try to do something (like click on an application on the desktop), I sometimes miss. Yuck.

LaunchBar keeps me on a tool I’m intimately familiar with — the keyboard. Rather than clicking on Safari, digging around my bookmarks for that link I’m looking for, I just type APPLE-space-“Name of the link” and hit RETURN. If you’re not really comfortable on the keyboard, you will not understand this. (Note for Windows users: I achieve a similar effect in XP by typing WINDOWS-R-“Name of Application”)

The emergence of LaunchBar on my desktop is, yet another, example of a small, independent developer who has actually extracted money from my wallet. Since my move to Mac OS X, this has been happening more and more. The question is, why? Do independent developers have a larger chance of success of creating useful applications/utilities given the size of the development team Apple has on Mac OS X compared to the hoards of Microsoft Windows developers? Has the emergence of the web as a solid distribution channel leveled the playing field? Does the added communication value of independent developer weblogs have anything to do with it? Or, am I just a guy who likes to live on the bleeding edge out on the frontier of new software?

Simple Credibility Networks

I’ve been apt to rip on bookmarks because, well, they suck. Browser makers, for some odd reason, have decided to mostly ignore bookmarks as a means of organizing information. Thankfully, bookmarks are quickly becoming irrelevant because bookmarks are being replaced… by people.

(Note: If you’ve no idea what NetNewsWire or RSS Readers are, please read this article first… you’ll get a lot more out of this column).

I have the following groups configured in NetNewsWire: news, people, apple, metalogs, writing, and tech. It should come as no surprise to those familiar with weblogs that the most interesting group in that list is people. I often entirely skip over the other groups in favor of perusing the new links in the people category.

Why?

Simple. I hand selected these people/weblogs because I consistently value their opinion. These weblogs constantly sift through this big, noisy would of data/news/horror, add their own twist, and more often than not, that twist appeals to me. This group of people are my credibility network.

You’re already familiar with credibility networks in your daily life. This is the group of people in your inner circle. The ones you sit down with at the bar and start in on any topic for hours on end. A good term for this type of interaction is “a high bandwidth relationship”. A good example of this relation is the following exercept from any random conversation:

YOU: “Remember that time when we…”

THEM: “Totally.”

YOU: “I was so drunk that…”

THEM: “That you stuffed those chicken tenders into that slot machine and then I…”

YOU: “You, you idiot…”

Etc, etc, etc.

Take a minute and think of these people in your inner circle. I guarantee there are a bunch of obvious ones and a few less obvious. There’s probably a couple people who are always at every single social event, but are NOT on the list. You’ve gone through some process of selecting a network of people that you trust. Maybe you’ve known them for years, maybe it’s family, or maybe you just met someone and, boy howdy, did you two hit it off.

You trust these people.

In the world of the weblog, we need a different term than trust because, no matter hard you try, you just don’t know who is sitting at the other end of that weblog. Yes, weblogs are net_people, but net_people are not real people… they are carefully filtered abstractions. I would argue that unless you have a face to face, personal relationship with the person running a weblog, you’re unlikely to trust them. BUT! You can read what they think and observe how they link to other information.

For whatever reason, you will place a value on the weblogs you care about… It’s almost quantifiable, this credibility you assign to these weblogs and with each new weblog you collect, you continue to build your credibility network.

Some observations about credibility networks:

- Why do I care about credibility networks? I care about them because they do something I can not — they digest the world better than I can. I’m just one guy stumbling around the Net who, occasionally, finds bits and pieces of information that need to be shared. In my credibility network, there fifty weblogs… fifty people who are stumbling along with me and because they’ve provide information I’ve cared about in the past, it’s pretty likely they’re going to do it in the future.

- Credibility networks should be well structured and machine readable, but they aren’t. Ideally, we could use the concept of Movabletype categories to create an index or directory for weblog entries , but no such standard current exists… yet. Over here, there is talk of using the DMOZ open directory as just such an index and THAT IS A REALLY GOOD IDEA. Think of a weblog search engine where you could ask, “Show me the highly credible weblogs who know something about start-ups and ice fishing.”

- But Rands, are these credibility networks insular? Aren’t your discouraging cross-pollination by surrounding yourself with a network of Rands-approved-people? Yes and no. Yes, there are similarities between my weblog and those on my credibility A list, but there are also huge differences. One day, I might be admiring a post from NSLog() regarding some topic I’m knowledgeable/care about… but who knows what he’s going to write about the next day? Or the next? The amount of information flowing through weblogs is mind-boggling, but let’s just pick a single topic, a single news idea. I promise if every weblog in my credibility network needed to comment on that topic, you’d have fifty different opinions. Yum.

There are two answers to the question, “How are people going to make money with weblogs?” Answer #1 is terribly depressing. It goes something like, “Weblogs will make millionaires out of those who provide weblog services (blogspot, typepad) and weblog software (mt, textpattern, others).” How dull. Just another fad. What a waste of material.

Answer #2 is “out there”. Answer #2 is, “We’ve discovered a new medium with which to communicate… like painting or writing or music. The difficulty we have in defining what it is, how to explain it to friends is because of it’s simplicity. The big idea which will come from weblogs is like nothing you’ve ever seen… so stop trying to make it sound like something familiar.”

I’m staring at Answer #2 and still scratching my head. It’s been almost a year since I’ve started a weblog and we’re well passed the “new toy” phase… I’m still hooked. The recurring observation I have with weblogs is how they are evolving to mimic relationship structures I have in the real world. Credibility networks are one such structure that, I’m sure, contains some part of the big idea.

The Holy Duh of Weblogging

When I asked Brent Simmons whether he thought there was any way for people to making money via weblogs other than providing software or services, he actually answered a much bigger question when he responded:

“… I probably wouldn’t hire anybody for anything unless they had a weblog.”

He continued:

… The main thing is: if you don’t have a weblog, I probably don’t know you, and I don’t have an easy way to get to know you. If you have a weblog, I’m either reading it already or I can read it and look in the archives a bit to get a sense of who you are. “

After sitting staring at the ceiling thinking about this comment, I realize it crystallized, for me, a very basic question about how to think about weblogs. The painfully simple question is, “What is a weblog?” The painfully simple answer is, “A weblog is the representation of a person on the Internet.”

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. I am so happy to clear this up.

The “what is a weblog” debate festers on the Net like the PC versus Mac debate and my simple observation will do nothing to allieve that problem. Folks are still going to have deeply philosophical debates on this topic when they really should be saying, “Who the hell cares?”

Weblogs are Net_People. Just like your circle of friends, some are particularly good at original content, some are just great at relaying links to other information. Some say too much, some say too little, but a weblog is the singular voice of a person.

This explains why I get the heebie-jeebies when I read the AlwaysOn site or even the Corante blog pieces. I stare at the masthead wondering, “Hey, are these people speaking for themselves or for the corporation?” Their association with a faceless corporate entity, in my opinion, decreases their credibility. Even Gillmor bugs me because I don’t know if his weblog is his voice or his voice translated by the mothership.

20 Questions

I’ve played this version of 20 Questions twice now and the computer has correctly guessed what I was thinking… which is just kind’a freaky.

Link courtesy of centricle.

Interview: Brent Simmons

In Mac OS X, you vote with your Dock.

Think about this. How many applications are sitting on your hard drive. How many of those came with the OS? How many did you read about on the web, download, try, and forget. How many of those did you buy? How many actually made it to your Dock?

If you’re a tidy desktop freak like myself, placing an application in the Dock is a bigger commitment than forking out the $19.99 to get rid of that annoying pay-for-me nag-o-grams. Dock placement is an honor. It says, “You are useful enough to stare at me all day.”

Currently, other than internal applications necessary to get my job done, the only application in my Dock that I’ve chosen to put there is NetNewsWire. (Recap: It’s an RSS reader and you can read all about it here.)

Simply put, NetNewsWire is Brent Simmons. A former employee of Dave Winer’s Userland, Brent set out in early 2002 as an independent programmer based in Washington state. Working alongside his wife, he released the first public Beta of NetNewsWire in July of the same year. It rapidly became the de facto RSS reader for Mac OS X and won the recent Mac OS X Innovators Contest.

I had a chance to interview Brent via email.

RANDS: Can you make a living off NetNewsWire? Is that your goal? How far can one husband and wife team scale before something gives?

BRENT: Yes, we do make our living from NetNewsWire. We’re paying the bills — which means we get to keep making software.

One husband-and-wife team can scale to handle a few products. It helps to have products that don’t require much technical support — NetNewsWire isn’t a complicated and powerful development environment, it’s not Director or WebObjects or even Photoshop, it’s a news reader with a familiar interface, similar to other news readers and email apps.

Not having to spend tons of time on technical support means we can fix bugs and do new features and do all the business things we need to do.

Being a recent convert to the Mac, I was surprised to find a slew of tools and utilities provided by small software shops that I was willing to pay for. This contradicted my Windows experience where most of what I wanted I got out of the core operating system. Do you think there is more opportunity for small software shops on the Mac? If so, why?

The markets are so different, and every product and every developer is unique. It’s hard to generalize.

I think that developers who care very strongly about user interface and aesthetics, and who have the drive and ability to back it up, can do very well doing Mac software, since that’s what Mac users care about. Mac users love to reward well-designed software.

Windows is different. Even though I’ve worked on Windows software I can’t claim to understand the Windows market. It’s a little mysterious to me. (Mysterious, but not actually intriguing.)

What’s the next big feature in NewNewsWire that you can talk about? What feature in the current product could you not live without?

I’m right now trying to decide what the next big feature will be. One strong possibility is Rendezvous support. I’d love to have people be able to share subscriptions with people on the same LAN. I’d love to be able to find out what the weblogs are of the people near me. That kind of thing.

But there are tons of other ideas, big and small. Another big one is synching between two copies of NetNewsWire. (It may be that synching and Rendezvous support are related. Or not. I’m still thinking about it.)

I’m not sure what feature in the current product I couldn’t live without would be. I want to say: all of them! It’s a hard question.

ed: Brent has recently published a potential feature list.

What’s the biggest hassle of developing in Cocoa? The biggest benefit?

The biggest hassle so far has been the lack of a decent HTML renderer. The one NetNewsWire uses — the one that’s built into Cocoa — is totally lame. To be fair, no one, not even Apple, ever claimed it was anything but lame.

The good news is that that’s about to change: Safari’s renderer will be available to Cocoa developers via WebKit. I expect NetNewsWire will benefit hugely from WebKit.

The biggest benefit to developing in Cocoa? Probably that so much comes for free, that so much is just so easy and just works.

It goes back to your question about how far a husband-and-wife team can scale. Cocoa allows us to scale farther faster, since we don’t have to spend time doing the boring bits that Cocoa handles for us.

With Mac OS X representing ~3% of the PC market, wouldn’t it make more sense to build a Windows RSS reader? Why Mac?

Have you seen how many three-paned RSS news readers for Windows there are? A dozen, maybe? Many more than there are for Mac OS X.

So that’s the downside to doing Windows apps: there are more people doing the same thing you’re doing. And then there’s Microsoft — who I’ll remind you is in fact a convicted monopolist.

But the thing is I don’t really care about the numbers that much. I like Mac OS X, and I do Mac software because I enjoy it tremendously. I work very hard because I like the work. Were I doing Windows software I wouldn’t like the work, so I wouldn’t work hard, so I’d probably never ship any software at all.

Back to the numbers — ~3% still means millions of people. They don’t all have to buy NetNewsWire for me to be able to pay the bills.

How/when did you know when NetNewsWire was a success?

When the public beta of the Lite version first came out, and people were writing about it on their weblogs, I got the first hint that NetNewsWire could really be a hit. I don’t think anything’s really surpassed that, yet — except perhaps for winning O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Innovators contest. That meant a lot to me.

But it’s hard to define success. In some ways NetNewsWire isn’t a success yet, but it could become a success.

Quote from your MacSlash interview: “And with user interface the best innovation is often *no* innovation — in other words, you take something new like RSS feeds and present them in a familiar way.” Can you describe the development process you use to achieve this?

The process is simply described: take a problem, break it down into smaller problems, then solve each problem.

For instance, before NetNewsWire there was MacNewsWire. It was a Cocoa app, a newsreader — but it had a fixed subscription list of Mac news sites. It had just two panes: one for headlines and one for the description. You didn’t even see the subscription list.

So the problem was how to extend the interface to make it so you could pick and choose your subscriptions. The answer was to add a third pane for subscriptions. And that sounded a lot like Outlook Express and Mailsmith and lots of other apps. So I just laid it out the same way that people are used to.

That’s just a snapshot, of course — how did I get to the two-paned approach in the first place with MacNewsWire? I don’t remember exactly, but I’m sure it seemed obvious at the time.

The answer for me then is that you take things one small step at a time. Those small steps are often obvious steps.

Do you see any way for companies to make money via weblogs other than providing software (like NetNewsWire) or services (like LiveJournal)?

It’s not something I’ve thought much about, actually.

I probably wouldn’t hire anybody for anything unless they had a weblog.

What about having a weblog would be a prerequisite for hiring? Is it having a weblog would give the candidate a familiarity with the space you work in? Or that they have a command of the written English language? Both? Other reasons?

The main thing is: if you don’t have a weblog, I probably don’t know you, and I don’t have an easy way to get to know you. If you have a weblog, I’m either reading it already or I can read it and look in the archives a bit to get a sense of who you are.

It’s kind of like if we all lived in the same small town. The people who have weblogs are like the people who make a point of going to Main Street at least a few times a week. They go to the barber shop, the grocer’s, the lunch counter — they get out and talk to people.

If you don’t have a weblog, it’s like you live on the outskirts of town and have all your food delivered and you even have people come mow your lawn so you don’t have to go outside.

No matter how big the web gets, it will always be a small town because that’s how you interact with it. You can’t help but make your own small town out of it.

As your body is to your physical presence, your weblog is to your web presence.

Pick one; I’m in Vegas and I can’t do without: Gambling, Booze, or Girls Girls Girls.

Booze. I’m married, and odds are pretty long against me going to Vegas without my wife. And though gambling is fun, booze is much more fun. (Note that in my regular life I hardly ever drink.)

Does your cat hang out with you when you program?

Yes. He’s in the office most of the day when Sheila and I are in there. But he usually prefers to watch TV (through closed eyelids) at night.

The office has two big windows. His habit, especially on cold mornings, is to go to one, meow until I open it, then go to the other and meow until I open that one too.

If I then close the one he’s not at, he goes back and meows at it until I re-open it.

His name is Papa. He’s named for both Ernest Hemingway and Mariners’ designated hitter Edgar Martinez.

Name your favorite software development tool. Why is it your favorite?

Project Builder. It’s my favorite because that’s where I write code.

BBEdit is my other favorite. I don’t tend to do my Cocoa code-writing there, but I do PHP coding there, take notes, etc.

Do you program best in the morning, afternoon, or evening?

I’m not a morning person. Afternoons and evenings are tied.

Do you keep a to do list and, if so, what does it look like?

I have to-do lists of varying scopes. I make lots of to-do lists. Sometimes they’re on paper. I also use NetNewsWire’s outliner and I use MORE. (The only reason Classic ever comes up on my machine is for MORE.)

Some lists are just the steps it takes to complete a certain feature. Another list is the list of what’s going into the next beta. Another list is a list of good ideas for the future. And so on.

Name three web sites / weblogs you are obsessive about reading.

How about 146? That’s how many subscriptions I have in NetNewsWire. My unread count is usually zero, so I suppose I’m obsessive about all of them.

However — here are some of my favorites.

Daring Fireball is cool because I love user interface, and John Gruber is good at thinking and writing about user interface.

http://daringfireball.net/

I’ve been enjoying ongoing, Tim Brayfv site, because I like how he writes about things like programming languages, standards, and the occasional odd thing like the history and psychology of flaming.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/

I like Surfin’ Safari because I like reading about the challenges of other developers — and it doesn’t hurt that he’s writing about Safari, an app I use and like.

http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/

I could name lots more, but you asked for three…

What gets you coming back to a web site / weblog?

Good writing. It helps when it’s on topics I care about — but then I care about lots of topics, and good writing *makes* me care about a topic.

I’ve always been an obsessive reader, since even before I knew how to read. I just kept staring at the words until they started to make sense. It’s no surprise that I wrote a news reader — I need it to feed my habit. I can’t read enough quickly enough with just a web browser.

Name one gadget (for whatever your definition of gadget might be) you can’t live without and why.

I’m not a gadget kind of guy. I’m a software guy and a words guy. I have a difficult relationship with actual physical things.

Oh! I know! I love my hot-air popcorn maker. Mmmm, popcorn.

Jerkrooms

As anyone who has read The Big Book of Jerkcity knows, the Jerkplayers sit in a private IRC-like chat room pretty much 24 hours a day. It was Pants who originally invited me into the room in 1996? That sounds about right. This means I’ve effectively been logged into this room for seven years. During that time, I’ve had three jobs, three cars, and one cat.

The novelty of the room wore off long ago, so the question is, “Why do I keep coming back?” Well, first, it’s a known quantity. I personally know all the people in the room even though we sometimes go years before we see each other face to face. Also, it’s private, which means they are not random twits stumbling in and creating useless noise… a primary reason I tend to avoid the major IRC networks.

Lastly, and most importantly, it’s a very good place to work.

Whuuuuuuuu? Rands, did you say work?

For me, the work done in the Jerkroom is not the classical definition of work. Work is what I do for money and, as of yet, I’ve yet to see a single penny for Jerk-related adventures. Still, we do produce a product and that product is comedy. When more than one person is active, it’s almost always a free-form comedy stream. A stream which, among other things, becomes Jerkcity.

The question: is there other work a Jerkroom-like set-up might be useful for?

At the gig, one of my development teams has begun a heavy duty design phase for a product. The manager is struggling with how to keep tabs on the team while not coming off as a micro-manager. He was playing with several ideas: daily team meetings, daily status emails, or daily 1:1s.

Anyone who has worked in software will look at those three options and shudder. While there is a time and a place for daily meetings, it’s not early in the product cycle. The design stage is the creative one and, while you want collaborate on ideas, you don’t want to stifle the process with daily management overhead. So, what’s the compromise?

A Jerkroom — a private IRC room. Here’s why:

PULL, NOT PUSH: Team members who want to collaborate do so at their pace. This means that if I’m deep in design land, I don’t need to break stride to write a 5pm status email to the boss.

COLLABORATIVE: If I’m stuck, I can ask for help from people who know what they’re talking about and who I trust. “Why isn’t this building?” “Has anyone seen problem X?” “Anything thought about design Y?” “Tacos? Anyone? Anyone?”

HISTORY: When I do have a problem, ie: “The product isn’t building”, before I type anything in the Jerkroom, I can scroll back to see if anyone else has had the problem. (Note: A Wiki is probably a better tool here as the history in a chat room will be limited… A Wiki has more memory)

PRIVATE: This is obvious, but important. The folks in the room are invited and trusted. There is no banning or OPS or twits_in_general which means a good signal to noise ratio on the content. That’ll keep ‘em coming back.

FAMILIAR TOOLS: All that is needed to participate in the conversation is chat room and a keyboard. As engineers are, by definition, creatures of the keyboard, providing a Jerkroom is a natural extension of their desktop. Regular 5pm meetings downstairs in the meeting room that looks like a fishbowl are not.

This is not a new idea. There are scads of rooms on IRC that a devoted to the collaborative development idea… #mozilla is one I’ve participated in. If you are a denizen of ones of these, I’d like to hear about the experience. Did it work? Why? Did it degrade to dick jokes? I’m shocked.

E3 Weblog

HEY. E3 is this week. How’d that happen? The fact I’d no clue that it was this week means one of two things: 1) I’m don’t travel in in the right game geek circles or 2) there is nothing buzz worthy about the event this year.

Anyhow, anyone know of a weblog for someone who is actually attending? I see Gamespy’s coverage, but was looking for something a little more personal.

From Gamespy… reasons you should care about E3:

• Half-Life 2 steals some wind out of DOOM 3’s bloody sail
• The wave of multiplayer gaming finally washes over the console landscape
• Starcraft: Ghost makes an impression like a tactical nuke
• Thief 3, finally getting the graphical treatment it deserves, makes a lot of ironic noise
• Soul Calibur 2 pierces the hearts of those who haven’t imported it yet
• Star Trek: Elite Force II proves that the Quake 3 engine is still kickin’
• The Sims 2 goes 3 (dimensions), causing money to start shooting out of Will Wright’s ears
• Homeworld 2 gives Relic fans reason to rejoice

.tcshrc aliases

Over at NSLog(), they’re chatting about their favorite .tcshrc aliases. Given the time I’m spending at terminal in Mac OS X, finding a great script can mean huge, instant time saving as well as the discovery of, yet another, utility which ships with the OS that I had no clue existed… case in point, the curl utility.

My meager contribution… directory list by recently changed:

alias lr ‘ls -lagFqt \!*’

Jaguar and Longhorn

For you visual ascetic types, here is Jaguar sitting next to Longhorn.

Yes.net

You’ve had this problem. You’re driving home from work and you hear this killer song on the radio. If you’re like me, you attempt to remember some key lyric and then, if you remember, get home to Google the lyric and find the band/song and THEN OF COURSE YOU USE THE APPLE MUSIC STORE TO LEGALLY PURCHASE THE TUNE. THAT IS JUST GOOD KARMA.

Yes.net offers, what appears to be, real time listings for a great many radio stations around the country — it had all the relevant stations from the Bay Area. It also have something called the Yes Bar which appears to give some ability to use the service within your website.

O'Reilly Emerging Technology

It seems that most of the folks who are on my MUST READ weblog list are headed to Santa Clara for O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference. I’m busy emerging technology for my own company and will not be attending. Alas.

The track list is here and worth of a look-see if you often wonder “what’s next?”. If I had to pick one session to attend, it would be the Data Mining Social Cyberspaces: Tools for Enhancing Online Communities.

Killer quote from the session description:

Information about basic social properties of online environments, their size, activity, and composition of their populations, for example, can be constructed with database and data mining tools. The resulting “social accounting metrics” can be used to support accountability by highlighting the future value of identity and reputation. Built on mutual awareness, the resulting institutions may be more resistant to invasion and disruption.

Yum. Social accounting metrics. That’s about one choice adjective from being pleasantly terrifying.

BlogShares

BlogShares is a “fantasy stock market for weblogs.”

The idea appears to be that folks get $500 virtual dollars to invest in weblogs whose valuation appears to be based on “the incoming links to it and a host of other calculations”. Translation, if “higher priced” weblogs link to you, your valuation goes up.

At this exact moment, RinR has a valuation of $93.72 with an outgoing link value of $32.29. RinR has .0089% of the total weblog market which, wow, really means nothing to me. I’ve laid a claim for this weblog which means that I had to stick an image on the front page of the site. It’s on the right side below the search form. This proves that I own my weblog and allows me to IPO the site. Strangely, I feel after this IPO I will still be eating cheerios for dinner.

My gut tells me that while an interesting toy, Blogshares will suffer the same fate of Friendster. HEY INTERESTING IDEA — IT’S VIRAL — MUCH SUCCESS — NO BUSINESS PLAN — SERVERS FULL — NO MONEY TO BUY MORE — END OF TOY.

[3/30/03 Update]: The current top player is Mena Trott. Why? Because given the rule set Blogshares uses, Moveable Type is the most valuable weblog. Trott is co-creator of the site/product and; therefore, gets a chunk of the initial shares making her the instant Bill Gates of the fledging Blogshares community.

Additionally, here’s my current holdings:

Rands in Repose - 1000 shares @ $.02
NY Times - 10 shares @ $18.87
Popdex - 5 shares @ $4.09
WSJ - 5 shares @ $2.34
Agonist - 2 shares @ $10.05
Movable Type - 1 share @ $273.13

My portfolio is currently valued @ $576.02 — the Movable Type stock is up ~ $50 since I invested two hours ago. Wuuuuuh?

[4/2/03 Update]: Several days later and my portfolio is now worth a cool $952.66 dollars. I sold my WSJ at a slight profit, but relative to the gains of the rest of the portfolio.. it was a pittance. The Movable Type stock has essentially doubled. RinR IPO’d earlier this week and has held steady at two cents a share. Even with such a dismal share, a majority of the available shares have been sold. I’d like to say that I’m committed to increasing shareholder value, but that’d just be silly.

[4/7/03 Update]: Five days later and with zero trading activity my portfolio has dropped to a dismal $436.39. The majority of the loss appears to be Movable Type dropped from ~$600 a share to it’s current price of $71.47. No news as to why MT dropped to a tenth it’s price, but the Blogshares site appears to be handling decent load with dignity.

Webcams as Holy Shit?

Eliza demonstrated a potential holy shit the other day when she sent the following message showed up in a chat window… “Click to see my video”.

Being a regular surfer of the Internet, I immediately thought, “Cool, porn.”

When I clicked on the link, I was surprised to see a small window appear with Eliza in it. She was working at her desk, typing away. This happened also immediately with no plug-ins or software to install… it “just worked”.

A reminder: “just working” is a leading indicator of a holy shit experience. The Mac “just worked”. Using a web browser “just worked”. Looking up in Quake “just worked”. What “just working” means is there is zero difference between what you expected to occur and what actually occurs.

Live webcams have been around forever. I remember showing off CuSeeMe to co-workers back in 1995-96, so why in the world would I call this Eliza experience a holy shit moment? What about her webcam showing up so easily on my desktop made me run to my garage and grab my box of technical odds’n’ends, looking for my old Logitech camera? It was because Logitech made it brain dead simple.

In the past, setting up your live webcam involved purchasing the software, setting it up, making sure you had a connection that supported it, and then, this is the killer, finding people to broadcast to. In the Eliza experience above, all I needed to do was click on a link. That’s the beauty of the solution. Logitech solved the last mile problem of finding people to broadcast to by riding piggy back on great source of quality people you care about, your AIM or Microsoft Messenger buddy list. Coupled with the fact that Windows XP/2000 has the entire infrastructure built in that is necessary to receive a live cam, it’s likely that you can receive this streams right this very second.

Why has Logitech made it so easy? Duh, they want to sell cameras. They’ve probably already sold a ton, but they want every person with an AOL-level intelligence and higher to buy one. They want Suzie Lou and Grandma Ethel to be able to see their nephews and grandkids. They want MARKET PENETRATION. With instant messaging integration and zero set-up, they’ve taken a large step forward.

Useful video on the Internet stalled when promise of unlimited bandwidth disappeared along with a good portion of your 401k savings. In the past week, I’ve shared a birthday party with close friends who have moved to Seattle and to Portland. I saw the daughter of a friend in New York for the first time. During that time, I am also directly responsible for selling three Logitech cameras. I am willing participant in Logitech’s viral marketing campaign because I love the product and so will you.

[Update 3/23/03]: By the way, the software requirements to broadcast are reasonable, but they are Windows only. Blah.

Looking for a good PS2 game

Ok, so I’m on a bit of PS2 platform game kick — I’ve completed Ratchet and Clank (killer fun) and just recently completed Jak and Daxter (not as fun as Clank, but still fun)… both of these, for those who pay attention to PS2, are “platform” games.

I like them mostly because they are brain dead. They are end of the day brain candy that I can complete without a) too much trouble and b) without committing weekends at a time.

I’m looking for some recommendations in the same vein… I’m not looking for first person shooters… I’d consider RPGs, but only if they aren’t terribly complex and annoying. I’ve played Final Fantasy VII? It was fairly entertaining… are they newer versions worth it?

[3/22/03 Update]: I purchased Rayman 3 and Kingdom Hearts — played both briefly. Rayman strikes me as a funkadelic solid platform game. Kingdom starts out with an Ultima-like “choose you personality set-up” and then Donald Duck shows… huh? More later.

Current Addiction: Friendster

With a painfully lame name such as Friendster, you’d probably never visit this domain unless someone threatened you, yet, this social networking site has gone viral with my group of friends in the past week.

The competitive differentiator for Friendster is that you can’t see anyone on the network until you add an actual ‘real’ friend. Once you’ve added someone, you inherit all of their relationships — this means that networks grow amazingly quick… I’ve added 8 friends and my personal network (personal?) includes over 8000 people.

I’ve been wandering around 2nd order friends for a day or so… these are people one step removed from my 1st order friends. I believe the theory is that there is a high probability I should get along with these people.

[3/22/03 Update]: Like any good virus, Friendster burned hot and rapidly burned out. The servers are consistently unreliable and now that I’ve established a group of “friends” there is no real compelling reason for me to go back… which I can’t… since the servers are so damned slow.

/usr/share/misc

Sunday afternoon hacking on Mac OS X. A mailing list showed me some nifty Perl which listed appreviations for states… pointing at the directory /usr/share/misc. Now, I’m a Unix virgin, so I have no clue what this directory is for, but upon examination I find the following files:

Airport : Lists airports and airport abbreviations
Birthtoken: Birthstones by month
Units.lib: All sorts of different standards and abbreviations
Flowers: What to read into different flowers

… and the list goes on.

A quick google of “/usr/share/miscs” tells me it’s used for “Miscellaneous architecture-independent data”. Ok. Right. So, if I’m ever really wondering what to think when someone gives me a vase of white violets… I’ll… head… straight to… /usr/share/misc?

Right.

p.s. White violets = Modesty.

Google/Pyra: Winners and Losers

Google’s purchase of Pyra/Blogger is guaranteed to do one thing: Reignite the inane discussion whether it’s “blogging” or “weblogging”. For what it’s worth, my vote is for weblogging for the same reason I don’t like pronouncing the word “meme”… I don’t much like words like sound like your mumbling when you’re actually speaking English.

All those who are in the weblog space are likely to get carefully scrutinized now that a major player has actually come out with an aggressive weblog move. Please note, I did not say strategy because it’s completely unclear what Google is going to do in this space although someone whose name I’ve already forgotten mentioned that Google “lives on fresh links”. If you’re looking for link freshness, weblog networks are one way to go.

So, who are the winners and the losers because of this move? Here’s the list off the top of my head:

OBVIOUS BIG WINNER: Pyra. A small team suddenly gets access to Google’s significant resources. What are they going to do with it? Who cares - there are lots of resources there and it’s Google, so even fuck ups are going to have people talking. (Note: at the time of this writing, repeated attempts to get to blogger.com have failed — looks like they need the infrastructure)

ANOTHER BIG WINNER: Google. There has been a growing discontent with Google primarily because they’re the only gig in town and folks love ripping on the King. This move temporarily gives Google the appearance of “caring about content democracy” which can’t hurt.

TANGENTIAL BIG WINNERS: Anyone who is currently producing credible weblog software/service. I would list Movabletype, Livejournal, Bloxsom, Greymatter, and Radio Userland only because those are the ones I regularly hear about. Winners here are sure to be getting all sorts of calls from potential suitors and I would suggest that they listen. The weblog software competitive landscape looks a whole lot like the early days of browsers… EVERYONE IS WRITING ONE. History would suggest that we’re entering the BIG CONSOLIDATION PHASE and 90% of the players are likely to be dead, absorbed, or vanished in the next five years.

PSEUDO BIG WINNERS: Anyone who is running a weblog. I wonder if the term weblog or blog is on the front page of the San Jose Mercury tomorrow… I wonder if my Mom or Dad is going to give me a call and ask, “Hey, don’t YOU run a weblog?” This false sense of importance will rapidly vanish as a function of number of new folks who suddenly GOTTA WEBLOG BABY. (Update: The Mercury buried the story halfway through the front section of Sunday’s edition)

BIG LOSERS: Anyone running weblog aggregator sites. Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, and others. While weblog software/service providers have a chance to parlay their work into a sustainable business, weblog aggregators are screwed. Why? What’s the one thing Google does very well? Crawl the web and gather the data. Look for Google to go after this space first and look for the little guys to vanish. Sorry. You knew it was coming.

While I’m happy to see Google give weblogs a vote of confidence, I’m also a bit disappointed. Even as a relative late-comer to the weblog-scene, it still felt like 500 people and me chatting with each other about nothing in particular in the tranquil calm of the wilderness. Suddenly, someone plops in the Transamerica building right in the middle of your sunset. Sure, you’re amazed someone could pull that off, but, hey, it’s still a flippin’ skyscraper.

Google buys Blogger

Dan Gillmore is reporting that Google is buying the small company behind Blogger, Pyra Labs.

I have been wondering for some time where Google was at with the regard to the weblog pheonmena and, well, this is clearly a direction.

I am having difficulty seeing Google moving from a “finding stuff on the web” strategy to a “generating content” one, but hey, they do good work and more power to them for validating the weblog space.

Instant Messaging Etiquette

On a recent trip to Seattle to hang the boys, I was completely floored when the topic instant messaging etiquette came up and EVERYONE agreed that I was an instant messaging prick. The basic complaint being that, “You never know when the conversation begins or ends with you… You jump in and jump out with zero pleasantries.”

That’s right. I do. Ain’t changing.

First, let me say that I’m a tremendous fan of instant messaging. Been so for years. At 12:05 on a Sunday afternoon, there are 20 people active on my buddy list with another 106 on the inactive list. When I started the new management gig, my introduction email to the team read something like, “Hi, I’m Rands and here’s my AIM account - I’m always on it which means you can always talk to me.”

Second, in the spectrum of communication mediums, instant messaging is unique because, duh, it’s instant. This is good if you happen to urgently want a piece of information from someone, but it’s bad if you’re the person who has the information and does not want to give it. For me, the keyword in that previous statement is “urgent” - instant messaging, during the business day, is for urgent communications. What I’m saying when I send that “Did you look at bug #2173148?” is that “I really need to know about this right now.” If I didn’t think it was urgent, I would have sent an email.

Third, and last, I really respect your time. I’m generally a fairly polite guy which means I was confused when the Seattle crew called me an instant messaging clod. What they didn’t understand (and you now do) is that by not say the equivalent of “hello” and “good bye”, I’m actually trying to save you time. I’m not trying to have a personal interaction and, if I did, I’d pick up the phone and call you.

(ps. I debated throwing my instant messaging ID in here, but that seems like a “bad idea”… if you’d like to instant message, drop me a line and I’ll set you up.)

UPDATE: After staring at my instant messaging habits for the better part of a week, it’s readily apparent that there is a generational gap between my usage of IM and a lot of other folks. As indicated above, my interactions are brief, to the point, and often considered rude.

The gap is this: There is a generation behind me which really finds it A-OK to have a personal inteaction via IM. This is great, it makes the world a smaller place, but it’s not for me. A large majority of the people in my buddy list are folks who, at some point, I’ve had personal contact with. I don’t tend (keyword: tend) to form new relationships via IM/IRC/forums/etc.

This odd because I am child of the BBS days of the 80s where a majority of my social interaction came from online discussions. Hmmm… wonder when that changed.

NetNewsWire

I get really annoying when I find a new toy. I tell every person I know about it, I construct my day around it, and every answer to every question passes through the new toy neuron in my head. This means if you ask me, “Hey Rands, what’s 7 + 3?” I first think, “How can the new toy help me answer this?” before I say, “10”.

The toy (which is not a toy) is NetNewsWire. This product has allowed me to not only change the way I gather information on the Net, but it’s also given me the ability to digest much, much more information. To understand the complete holy shit here, we first need some background.

Long ago, I read a lot of Usenet news, but over the years, the signal to noise ration grew intolerable. I know there was good content to be had, but I didn’t want to sift through crap to find the rare gems. Yes, you could use kill files to filter out the crap, but suddenly you’re spending more on your kill files than reading actually content.

Enter Weblogs. The problem of high quality content is solved by a trustworthy individual finding and sifting through the web to find content they care enough about to post. Content is centralized and filtered by a person.

It works like this for me. I search for information on Google, say, “Safari change log” which invariably, points me at a weblog. Finding the data on the weblog useful, I bookmark the site thinking, “Well, if she/he had that data surely they’ll write/find something else relevant”. So, I bookmark the site, but what I’m really bookmarking is the person because what I care about is not the content on their site, I care about how the person sifts through fact, fiction, and opinion and weblogs it. The person has credibility, not the website.

The next step is monitoring these weblogs. Occasionally, I crawl through my bookmarks looking for changes. Two problems with this process: first, I’m a data freshness nut case. I want to know as soon as humanly possible when something goes down and bookmark surfing is pull technology which means I only hear about when I happen to stumble on the weblog. I want push because I want to know and I’m on the Net ALL THE TIME.

The second problem is the time it takes to go to a site and figure out if there is new content. I can keep track of ten or twenty sites in my head, but more than that and I start wondering, “Did I already check this site?” Suddenly, I’m limiting the amount I can digest because my memory blows. This is an additional violation my data freshness ethic.

NetNewsWire gives me a terribly sexy data consumption rate by giving me great tools to manage my credibility networks. Wondering what a credibility network is? You can probably guess, but I’ll explain in my next column.

NetNewsWire does two things amazing well, first, it reads RSS feeds. I’m not going to explain RSS here, but I will point you at this. The good news is that most weblogs I care about sport an RSS feed. When I asked Emma why her site didn’t, she claimed, “I think weblogs are about the content and the presentation” and she’s right… they are. They’re also published with the intent that it’s reasonably easy to discover and read them.

While I appreciate the huge amount of work that goes into sites, I’d argue that without an RSS feed, the individual weblog has less of a chance of being discovered, let alone read because more people can read RSS-based sites than crawl their bookmark files (keep reading re: scalability). Besides, it’s just a matter of time before NetNewsWire embeds a browser to gracefully display weblog content in it’s fully HTML rendered glory thus making this concern irrelevant to both Emma as well big media types who avoid RSS because of a few of lowering click-thru rates.

The other rock star feature of NetNewsWire is its scalability. I discovered this in two distinct phases. Phase #1 we’ll call, “What’s the RSS-thing all about anyway?” This was when I downloaded the application and subscribed to ten of my favorite weblogs. Now, whenever I schedule it, NetNewsWire pings all the weblogs, finds new articles, and flags them, Depending on the RSS feed, additional sortable data shows up in the table at the top as well as an excerpt or the article in the detail view.

The side effect of a successful Phase #1 is Phase #2, “Scale, Scale, Scale”. As soon I got in the zone with 20+ feeds, I find more weblogs I want to read and I start adding them to my list because my credibility network is growing. The list grows longer and suddenly fills the entire list. Wait, I don’t want to start scrolling, so what do I do? Groups. Using the collapsible tree control, NetNewsWire allows you to group sites and then does a spectacular job of rolling all the new content contained in ALL the sites to the top level. This means that for every group, I only see the content that is hot and juicy. Are you drooling, yet? You should be.

NetNewsWire has painlessly scaled to handle hundreds of weblogs for me. This means I’m scanning the fact/fiction/opinion of hundreds of people every minute of every day. I challenged anyone who is currently bookmarked or tabbed based to efficiently read hundreds of weblogs in the time it takes to drink your coffee. If your answer is, “I don’t care about hundreds of weblogs”, I would suggest you are a state of technical denial where your tool (i.e.: a browser) has limited your vision. Think about it like this, if you were lucky enough to find ten weblogs that you like isn’t it possible there are, at least, another ten and wouldn’t it great if there were a whole lot more?

Other random NetNewsWire comments:

1. The application is stunning because it’s on a Mac, but, well, it’s on a Mac which inherently limits its popularity to 5% of the PC market. Fortunately, for NetNewsWire, many of the popular webloggers appears to Apple fanatics. This bodes well for NetNewsWire. [Sidebar: Would it be ironic if the technology which toppled the Microsoft monopoly was information packaged in weblogs?]

2. I have many machines and they’re not all Macs which means I’m currently out of luck when I’m sitting at a machine which a) isn’t a Mac or b) isn’t my primary machine with my NetNewsWire preferences. This likely to lead to web-based RSS-readers since it’d be really handy to be able to surf my news independent of what computer I happen to be on. [Sidebar: I’m distinctly unwilling to part with the Cocoa smoothness of NetNewsWire]

3. NetNewsWire comes in two flavors a Lite and (presumably for pay) Pro version. The Lite version is simply the RSS browser while the Pro version includes a weblog publishing tool as well as a notepad-like outliner. Considering Ranchero is currently a one man effort, this seems like a lot to bite off especially since I’d be more than willing to part with twenty ducks for the Lite version.

Movabletype Plug-in Directory

I’d no idea that the MT Plug-in directory had grown so large…

http://love-productions.com/mt/docs/plugins/

Organica

Just found this in the my referral logs — http://organica.us/. Seems to be of the same nature as daypop, blogdex where the goal is to track buzz.

2002 Continued Technical Blunders

Since everyone was worried about their jobs in 2002, not a huge amount of attention has been paid to technology this year. This doesn’t excuse software developers from the following list of products/technologies I still CAN’T BELIEVE haven’t been done well. In the vein of Holy Shit Lists, this list could be considered a brief WHAT THE HELL? list.

Bookmarks.

The problem: The bookmark format has, essentially, not changed since Netscape 3.x - this an atrocity. In Internet Explorer 6, I’m still baffled about how to move one bookmark to another without firing up the tremendously useful “Organize Favorites” dialog.

Both IE and Mozilla variants have sidebar windows which present bookmarks/favorites in a more scalable, search form, but it’s STILL the same old boring bookmark format.

Why it’s hard: No one really cares about bookmarks because, face it, they’re just a small step above writing URLS on that piece of paper sitting next to your keyboard in terms of usefulness. Links organized in web pages appear to suffice for most folks who want to have more than SIX BUTTONS across the top of their browser, but the caring and feeding of such pages ultimately makes them stale.

The glimmer of hope: I’m seriously hopped on RSS kool-aid as of recent which means I’m seeing all solutions to problems in terms of RSS, but I do think RSS feeds will totally replace bookmarks in the next several years. Why? They do what bookmarks should have done long ago - they’re dynamic. If I tell my RSS reader that I care about this feed, the reader regular checks that feed for new stuff and tells me where that new stuff is.

While RSS popularity growing, RSS readers while have the same issues of scale that bookmarks have/did. Fortunately, there are very bright people devoting entire applications to the cause.

Centralized, OS independent storage.

The problem: I’m officially a two operating system guy. I’m using XP half the time and Mac OS X the other. This means I’m reading and finding stuff on one machine that I must have on the other. There are a variety of nuts and bolts ways to do this (FTP, Network Home Directories, iDisk), but solutions tend to be OS dependant and when they try to bridge the gap, the integration bugs make them annoying to use.

Why it’s hard & the glimmer of hope: Both Microsoft and Apple spent the 90s and the early 00s fortifying their operating system fortresses against incursion making sure the inhabitants were content while blissfully ignoring other fortresses. Problem with that scenario is the inhabitants start to inbreed and then the offspring get weird. Thanks to the Net and the United States government, Microsoft appears to be open the portcullis and acknowledging that integration is a good thing. Meanwhile, as a survival tactic, Apple’s Jaguar has a bevy of bridge gapping features geared at making Mac’s useful in a Windows environment.

The worth-mentioning glimmer of hope: I haven’t used WebDAV, but “folks who know” claim it’s a step in the right direction. Great, so when are Microsoft and Apple going to build seamless access into the OS?

Centralized, OS independent identify caching.

Riding on the centralized storage idea, I’d also like a secure way to store my identity and preferences. Microsoft has blown millions on trying to do this with Passport, but, in my opinion, consumers (and, more importantly, businesses) have avoided it. Bright move.

Sun’s Liberty Alliance hasn’t been in on my radar for months, but a quick glimpse of their site shows they’ve got a FLASH demonstration of what their 1.0 specification will provide. Go Sun?

The glimmer of hope: Privacy advocates are justified in being concerned about identity caching mechanisms. I am happy they are super paranoid about this stuff because I just don’t have time to be rabid enough. Still, there is a solution out there and the personal productivity gains I’ll reap by not having to remember one of a dozen passwords I currently have in play are significant.

Ok, what’d I miss?

REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION

A reader pointed out that our two RSS feeds were slightly stale, so we just fixed that in our “first project of the Xmas break”. RSS inclusion in Rands In Repose is merely a by-product of using Movabletype… if I was maintain the site by hand (HURRRRRRRR), I probably wouldn’t have the RSS feeds because I don’t see the value.

RSS is one of those technologies that I get (ie: structured syndication of news), but don’t actually use (ie: I surf the web for my news and I enjoy that I surf the web for news). Now, Pants is going to yell at me now because he’s got Perl doing all sorts of fascinating things with RSS, but HE’S THE TOOL GUY AND I DO CONTENT OK? OK SO WE BOTH DO CONTENT.

Using my poorly formed train metaphor, I’d been sitting in the middle car with regard to RSS, sitting comfortably with my ignorance while Netscape, Dave Winer, and others champion the definition and redefinition of the specification. This is pretty much standard operating procedure for me… hang out in the middle car watching the guys in the first car wrangle through the horrible difficulties of thinking different and when it starts to smell like they’ve won, I jump to the first car, “HEY GANG - THIS IS COOL STUFF - LET’S GET STARTED CHANGING THE WORLD.”

Generally speaking, I make the jump before THOSE FOLKS IN IOWA care about the technology/product, so I still look like thought leader while not having to endure the public floggings necessary to develop a new standard. The exception to this wait-and-see tactic is if I work for the COMPANY/PEOPLE who are developing the standard. In this case, I am in the front car, serving high balls, and YELLING AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS, “HEY YOU IOWA TWITS! WE ARE CHANGING THE WORLD HERE WHILE YOU’RE STILL TRYING TO FIGURE OUT AOL.”

I jumped to the front car this morning regarding RSS because, first, I’m reading lots of weblogs these days and it’s quite annoying to have to check twenty seven sites to only find four have been updated. I’ve stopped adding weblogs to my list because of this and THAT IS DUMB. Second, several Windows and Mac OS X based newsreaders/feedreaders have crossed my desk in the past month or so indicating such tools are making the jump from the front car to the middle car.

So, the questions are: Are you using RSS right now? If so, how? Second, are you using a newsreader right now? If so, which one?

p.s. Happy Merry!

MOVABLETYPE 2.5.1

Movable Type 2.5.1 landed. There are two features which landed as part of 2.5 and 2.5.1 that have me noodling site redesigns in the back of my head. First, they’ve integrated search into the core application - in the past, this was done with the, admittedly pretty cool, Atomz service.

The other feature is the introduction of the MTElse template tag. Folks, that means conditional processing which opens all sorts of opportunities up to we structured thinking types.

Site redesign is probably a post-Xmas type activity. Simply no time before then.

Rands The Stalker

In the past decade whenever I have a job interview, I always ask for the list of folks that I’ll be interviewing with before I actually arrive for the interview. Why? Because I want to stalk them, of course.

Right so, I don’t actually want to stalk them, mostly what I want to do is figure out where their head is at, what they care about, what they do when they’re not working for the company. I actually have no interest where they live or what their phone number might be unless that detail somehow gives me additional detail for their cultural profile.

This knowledge gives me a very solid advantage walking into an interview. For example, in a recent stint of interviewing, I discovered one of my potential peers went to the same college. I was sure to mention this when the interview began which was handy because, as it turns out, this interview was going to be the terribly difficult technical interview where I was to ramble about Model-View-Controllers.

When it became clear that I was seriously stumbling with the details of my answer, the interviewee took mercy… he segued to our mutual college experience. Whew. This would not have occurred if I hadn’t taken the time to stalk and find a common ground.

BUT! This column is about interviewing stalking tips, it’s about stalking…

I’m interested in ways folks use the �Net to find stuff out about folks. Again, I’m really not that interested in finding out personal details like phone numbers and home addresses (unfortunately, I suspect this will be a natural side effect of these operations), what I’m looking for are handy slash clever ways that folks dig up information via the web.

To get us started, I’ll describe the web sites and processed I used for the interviewees above. For all of these, I’m assuming I have a full name that is correctly spelled. Also, as is the nature of the interview, I generally know the state that the interviewee lives in.

GOOGLE. Duh, no extra points for this one. For someone who has any type of virtual presence, this is usually the one stop shop for finding out tasty info-tid-bits.

GOOGLE GROUPS. Again, fairly obvious, but also very targeted. This search assumes a person posts to USENET groups which means they KNOW how to do so. If you’re looking at non-technical types, you won’t find much here.

SAMSPADE.ORG. This is more of a second level search once you’ve ascertained that your stalkee has a website or an email address. Lots of technical mumbo jumbo here.

YAHOO! PEOPLE SEARCH. I haven’t used this much since, as stated, I don’t much care to find out where stalkee’s live or if they have a phone. People Search can give you a home numbers, but, more importantly, it can give you email addresses. Again, if you’re talking about a technical non-AOL user, this can be very revealing.

Via Yahoo People, I also found USSEARCH.COM. Using their free service I instantly found my home town and age … which is kind’a freaky. More freakiness was discovered when I found for anywhere from $19.95 to $95.95 I could find relatives, roommates, neighbors, real estate ownership status, and much much more. Shudder.

Again, all of the resources listed above are only as useful as you are smart. You may well find very little about the person you’re interested in. In fact, you may be even be able to find the person in the morass of bits that is the Internet.

Which is why I’ll ask again, what are the sites and processes that folks use to find out stuff about folks on the �Net. I’m not just interested in useful websites, I’m wanna hear about processes folks go through (possibly using multiple sites?) to dig up useful information.

Best answer gets a Jerkcity postcard signed by Rands.

MOZILLA 2002

It seems that with every week, someone releases a browser based on Mozilla. This is good. Mozilla continues to cause a discernable buzz. The question remains, is it a buzz like an annoying mosquito who won’t go away in an Internet Explorer dominated world OR is the tasty cultural buzz that precedes a technological shift?

I’m not an active user of Mozilla. On the PC I’m still mostly using IE6 and on the Mac, I’m using whatever is the most recent version of IE. In retrospect, the only significant recent annoyance I’ve had with IE is on the PC - something is screwed up with the View Source command and it appears to be caused by a corrupted cache.

Now, there are two points here. First, for being a very active user of IE, having one relatively small bug turn up in the past year is pretty good news for the IE code base. The bad news is that I’m a big fan of the View Source command, I’m lazy, and I know there are other browsers out there.

Now, when I need to snoop around HTML source, I’m firing up Mozilla to use their view source utility while also getting a feel for the new browser.

I’m currently using two flavors of Mozilla for evaluation. Mozilla 1.0 is already, apparently, out of date and Phoenix which is a bloat-free version of the browser totally written in XUL (rhymes with cool). It’s also worth noting that I’ve tinkered with Chimera which is a Cocoa-based Mozilla targeted for OS X.

From a buzz perspective, the features I’ve heard Mozilla has going for it are:

1. Support for tabbed browsing
2. Support for pop-up blocking
3. Support for anyone who doesn’t want to want to use IE.

That is paltry differentiating feature list. One might even call it pathetic, but Mozilla has been spending many years just getting a reliable, standards-based browser out the door to compete with IE. Evidence supporting this is found simply by looking at the release notes for Mozilla 1.1. Under “What’s New”, the first four bullet items are:

1. Improved application and layout performance
2. Improved stability
3. Improved Web site compatibility
4. Improved CSS, DOM, and HTML standards support

All of this work has given Mozilla and, in particular, Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine the distinction of being a “fine piece of code” and, now, all the projects based on it can now actually start throwing significant punches at IE and getting into a meaningful feature fight.

The brief feature list above demonstrates that the menagerie of teams working on Mozilla are innovating… they are creating features which address post Y2k problems like intrusive advertising (pop-up ad eaters) and messy desktops (tabbed browsing), but these are single punches. Where is the KO that is going garner significant buzz? My guess is that it’s not a feature or set of features that is going to lead to Mozilla’s success. It’s a combination of using business muscle on the dorks and zealots while eliminating transition barriers for the non-dorks while giving everyone good reasons to stay. Oh, and you need to be lucky, too. I’ll explain.

Business muscle. Believe it or not, most people in the United States are scared of their computers. These are the dorks. Sure, they love getting email from Cousin Suzy, but when you ask them if they want to switch browsers, they look nervous and quickly change the topic. There are more of these people than there are righteous Microsoft haters, so simply having a decent browser which isn’t built by Microsoft isn’t going to cut it. What will work with these people is not giving them a choice. Force it on them. No one is better at forcing technology down people’s throats than AOL and, if the rumors are true, an AOL switch to Netscape/Mozilla could instantly re-ignite the browser wars. (Read: Access to 30 million AOL subscribers)

Another ideal group of Mozilla adopters are those who are pre-disposed to being zealots. Those who will follow the mother ship in whatever direction it takes. With their contract with Microsoft gone, Apple is free to deliver whatever browser it wishes with its popular Mac OS X operating system. It’s only 5% of the market, but it sure is a noisy 5%. Tell me the last time you saw a parody of a Microsoft ad?

Business muscle, unfortunately, pays little attention to what is new and what is cool. To business muscle, the fact that Phoenix is written in XUL is just another example of “those geeks over-engineering something to death”. Still, we need business muscle to direct the mindless masses to drink the proper koolaid because more people using Mozilla means more money for the likes for AOL and Apple which, in turn, means more money to promote future development.

Our second class of browser users are those who are capable of deciding for themselves: the non-dorks. To these users, there are two essential tactics Mozilla browser makers must employ.

Elimination of barriers. Barriers are basically cost. Ask yourself, what is it going to cost me to switch browsers? Thanks to the Marc Andreesen, there is no actual cash involved in switching browsers, so the cost must be measured in how much time it’s going to take you to get running with a Mozilla-flavored browser. Let’s forget about the potential download time of a new browser over a still scarily prevalent 56k modem. Let’s talk about the first time I, the new user, fire up, say, Phoenix. All of the following questions must be answered YES if any Mozilla project is going to have a chance:

• Does it display ALL my favorite web pages correctly?
• Does it load ALL my favorite web pages as fast as Internet Explorer?
• Is the user interaction model familiar? (i.e.: Can I find the reload button?)
• EXTRA CREDIT: Do all of my bookmarks, preferences, and other personalized hoo-hah show up automagically?

This is a simple list. Browser makers are going to look at this list and say, “duh”. Then, they’re going to get really excited about a new feature and plop it smack dab in front of a new user who is going say, “Uh, this doesn’t feel like home… buh-bye.” Incidentally, this embrace and extend strategy is one Microsoft used on Netscape back when Navigator owned 75% of the market. So, hey, we know it works! (NOTE: your mileage may vary if you happen to not be a multi-billion dollar monopoly)

So, you’ve got your zealot or your non-dork regularly using your browser. That’s great news. Here’s the bad news: Microsoft has scads of money that they’re willing to pour, on a moment’s notice, into whatever project they like. This means that there is a loaded gun pointed directly at the heads of each developer of a Mozilla-based browser.

There are only two things which will prevent this gun from firing. First, you have the United States Government who may actually do something about the Microsoft monopoly. Unfortunately, even with a marginally level playing field, Microsoft still has scads of cash. This makes the second preventative measure even more important: Innovation.

Not only is innovation a requirement to stay ahead of Microsoft, it’s also a must-have tactic in oreder to keep the non-dorks onboard. Mozilla-based browsers need to be perceived as being the cutting edge and the only way this will happen is if the developers are constantly innovating. They need to be looking at the problems the majority of the users of the Internet are having here in 2002 and they need to be thinking, “How are we going to solve this problem in a new way?”

Lastly, Mozilla browsers need a bit of luck. There needs to be some fundamental change in technology which presents an opportunity to differentiate a product. Also, the change needs to be ignored by Microsoft for a significant amount of time. This is hard because Microsoft looks for precisely these situations so they can rally the Redmondians around “Cause Du Jour”. This means that we need one more piece of luck. We need this technological shift to occur at a time when Microsoft, for whatever reason, is incapable of responding.

I do not know what this shift is. Perhaps it’s an application which hits critical mass only when a majority of Internet users have broadband connections. Perhaps it’s a rethinking of peer-to-peer networking. I’m comfortable not knowing what it is and I’m certain I won’t recognize it when it arrives, but I do know that Mozilla browser-makers better be lucky enough to be brighter than I.

The browser wars are over and Microsoft won - they own 96% of the market. Internet Explorer is essentially integrated into the operating system while AOL stumbles along with its measly 3% market share trying to figure out a strategic direction. No one cares about the browser because it’s become a commodity. No product has publicly differentiated itself enough from IE to actually merit anyone taking notice.

The plethora of Mozilla-based browsers proves that it’s either easy to build a browser or that Mozilla open source development model is finally achieving some semblance of critical mass… maybe both. The question remains, of this group of browser upstarts, who is willing to pick a fight with an unbeatable opponent using a technology most folks don’t care about?

AMAZON GOLD BOX

I was shocked today when I clicked on my AMAZON GOLD BOX and all of my offers were of a power tool variety. What the? I’ve never purchased power tools from Amazon. Come to think of it, research shows that I’ve never even purchased a power_tool_like book on Amazon. Even my wish list is devoid of anything remotely hardware-like.

I wracked my brain trying to think why they’d think I’d jump at a DeWalt DW788 20” Variable Speed Scroll Saw. Then it struck me, I looked at a circular saws last Christmas. To my knowledge, that is the only hardware related query which has passed between Amazon and me in a great many years.

And, yet, here is my Gold Box… full of INCREDIBLE HARDWARE DEALS.

As marketing gimmicks go, Amazon’s Gold Box has grown on me. The pitch goes like this: Every 24 hours, you are presented with five items which are allegedly discounted more than usual. If you choose to buy it, YAY FOR AMAZON, if you pass on it, then you’ll never see that offer again. Really, it’s just a high tech version of the “Boy, Do I have a deal for you, BUT YOU MUST ACT NOW!” con.

What makes the con work is simple. Amazon has gone to great lengths to carefully watch every single move you make while on their site. The Gold Box hardware experience is yet another piece of tangential evidence that, while logged into the site, Amazon records EVERY SINGLE MOVE you make.

This is not a new revelation, I realize. The revelation is that Amazon has, at its disposal, a tremendous rich profile of who you are and what you like. Privacy dorks probably never login to Amazon, but, then again, their Gold Box is probably full of Winnie the Pooh puppets. I, personally, don’t mind getting offered stuff I might actually be motivated to buy.

A+B = G

Not that I don’t want to folks to stop talking about Jerkcity 3.0, but I know, at some point in the next three months, someone is going to say “802.11g”. You are going to respond, “You mean 802.11a or b, right?” They wil respond, “No, 802.11g”.

Then, you are going to look for this link.

The Dark Underbelly of Holy Shit

The discussion generated by the original HOLY SHIT LIST has been far more interesting than the first post. Of particular obvious note, people’s lists varied based on their relative age. GO FIGURE. Whereas one person found Doom to be of particular significance, another would point at Ultima Online as being the seminal gaming event in their life. What is interesting to me isn’t that the lists are different based on a person’s age, it’s how a HOLY SHIT such as Doom becomes assumed or maybe perceived as irrelevant because it occurred outside the scope of a person’s life. Your HOLY SHIT list is a lot like your Amazon wish list. It is an indirect way of explaining who you are relative to what you care or cared about WITH LESS 1-CLICK OFFERINGS.

o o o

The second pass on my list:

Macintosh: One rule about anything on this list is that you must distinctly remember the moment when you first saw the thing in question. The Mac is easy, I was a punk kid who liked to get my jollies walking to computer stores and writing dumb programs in Basic on Apple ][s.

10 PRINT “BALLS”;
20 GOTO 10

One day I went into the shop and there was a Mac sitting there in the middle of the store. No one was using it. I walked up and stared at the mouse… WHAT THE HELL. A quick nudge of the mouse and there was the HOLY SHIT. Two dimensional control over the desktop. MacPaint was open. I clicked on a circle, selected one of the horrible fills on the original Mac, and clicked’n’dragged my first circle. HOLY SHIT.

I don’t remember the tiny little screen, I don’t remember the lack of applications, and I certainly don’t remember the price tag. What I remember was that my IBM PC felt like a clumsy piece of junk and I didn’t come close to forgetting that feeling until Windows 95.

Windows 95: The years between the arrival of the Mac and Windows 95 were painful ones. As my community of friends were PC users (including the Dad), we were constantly engaged in a useless conversation about when the PC was going to catch-up with the Mac user interface. We deluded ourselves into thinking that Windows/386 was actually useful, but we mostly used it because Ami Pro was the only decent graphical word processor out there. We praised the day that Windows 3.0 showed up, but were mostly just happy that we no longer had to stare at Windows/386.

I was working at Borland the day I first installed a beta of Windows 95. I’d read rumors they’d made progress on the user interface, but when I finished the EIGHT DISK INSTALL I arrived at the HOLY SHIT. No longer was I trapped in the program manager, no longer was I forced to stare at a horribly conceived user interface… Finally, Windows was an operating system that outwardly appeared to slightly care about the user experience.

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been wrangling with whether or not to leave Windows 95 on the list. As I compare its impact relative to the other items on the list, it feels like a second class citizen because, face it, it was an operating system simply trying to keep up with the Macintosh experience. “Me too” products probably don’t belong in my HOLY SHIT experience.

Telnet: This should really read “Unix”, but as I’m a Windows dork, I’m going to leave it as telnet. In college, we needed to submit our programs via shell accounts on University servers where they’d be compiled and graded. During this process, I quickly learned there was a bevy of programs on these servers. It was here I was introduced to various multi-player games as well as the wonders of VI. A friend mentioned I should telnet to another server to check out a MUD and he might as well have been speaking Swahili. Obediently, I typed telnet some.other.server.com, logged in, leaned over to my friend and said, “What’s the big deal?”

“You’re on that server.”

“And?”

“And it’s in the U.K.”

I stared at the screen, typed return a few times, and then the HOLY SHIT that would become the Internet dawned on me.

Mosaic / Netscape Navigator 3.0: Many years after my telnet epiphany, a co-worker at Borland dropped my desk. He said, “Hey, you want to get on the web?” Again, sensing that I was missing something crucial, I nodded my head and he went to work on my network preferences. A few minutes later, Mosaic was on my desktop. He pointed me at his personal site, smiled, and said “Oh, and you can order pizza, too.”

I don’t remember what sites I traveled to in that first day, but I’m guessing it was the primal Netscape site along with SGI’s which was viewed as cutting edge at the time. The HOLY SHIT was of a similar nature to the TELNET HOLY SHIT in that the technology suddenly, violently made the world feel overwhelmingly accessible.

Netscape 2.0 gets honorable mention here because of the sheer amount of paradigm shift it packed into a single release. Frames, Java, and Javascript. Now, I’ve learned to hate frames in my later years… but at the time the combination of the three was a clear signal that it wasn’t a browser… it was an application framework.

Napster: Atandt gets props for pointing me at Napster many years back. I was searching for an MP3 on the Net and was growing increasingly frustrated with the distinct lack of an organizational system to easily find what I needed.

“Try Napster”

“Napwho?”

A quick search pointed me at an innocuous little site. I downloaded and installed the program, typed in my query, and sixty copies of the song I was looking for showed up in the list. HOW IN THE? Knowing nothing about peer-to-peer file sharing, I spent the morning figuring out the technical details of P2P while downloading my first gigabyte of music.

I called everyone in my family that night. I stumbled over my words as I tried to explain that YOU COULD GET ANY MUSIC YOU WANTED INSIDE OF FIVE MINUTES. YES, ANY MUSIC. DON’T BELIEVE ME? TRY ME.

EBay: I was way late on EBay. Sure, I got the basic idea, but the only way to truly experience a HOLY SHIT is from personal experience and I waited a good many months before I dove into EBay to find it was the Napster of Random Crap You Could Buy.

My HOLY SHIT was at Thanksgiving several years back. I knew EBay was stocked with stuff, but I hadn’t tested it. I asked everyone at the dinner table to think of an antique or hard-to-find item and write it down. I took the list of ten items to EBAY and searched for antique Jane Austin books, random electrical engineering gadgets, some type of strange microscope I’d never heard of, and the rest which I’ve since forgotten. EBay had multiple listings for every item. I printed them out, brought them to the table, and HOLY SHITTED my way through turkey and mashed potatoes.

EBay is a HOLY SHIT which keeps on giving because I later discovered that it not only represents a great place to buy, but it’s also a place to sell. Being gadget oriented, I’ve spent thousands of dollars on Palms, routers, and other useless crap that I use for three months before I throw it in a box to rot in favor of next version. While it’s not painfully convenient, EBay allows me to recoup at least some of the countless discretionary dollars I’ve thrown out the window.

Doom: Probably my favorite HOLY SHIT because I like to think I saw it coming. Set the way back machine for the early 80s. A friend and I had just spent hours playing some low resolution dungeon game. By low resolution, I mean that the dragon was a single green square. A troll was a single purple square. Yes, this was the peak of entertainment in the early 80s. That and the Dukes of Hazzard.

In our post-game-haze, we dreamt of new version of the game. You were literally walking down a hallway with a first person perspective, picking up gold, battling creatures building from more than a single pixel. It was this moment that I remember when I friend showed me Doom. He moved the mouse left and the character looked left, right… right… and up… well, he looked up, too. (Incidentally, UP is the reason I’m not listing Castle Wolfenstein… I don’t remember being able to look up and, for some strange personal reason, up made all the difference in Doom).

o o o

The beauty of the HOLY SHIT list is that it represents truth. An honest HOLY SHIT is one which completely penetrates the PR, the BUZZ, the marketing. It’s the moment when you clearly see the value of a technology and how it will permanently alter your world.

BLOG CREDIBILITY

Quote from a Think Secret Editorial regarding Apple allegedly denying press access to �rumor sites’:

In the opinion of many reporters, with a “John Doe” badge on, you’ll uncover much more background information than you normally would as a member of the media. This is a practice many journalists are turning to, despite it being a major break of journalistic ethics some news organizations still try to abide by.)

Personally, I don’t care one way or the other whether rumor sites get press access or not. What dawned on me as a potential reason for the popularity of blog sites as an alternate source of information/news is that these sites have more credibility simply because they aren’t major corporate news organizations.

The credibility also comes from the fact that, I’m assuming, people are very selective about the blog that they read. They glance over the first entry that they see and if something grabs them they might page through the archives. If that goes well, they may even bookmark the site and occasionally return.

The point being, the credibility of a blog doesn’t come from the information contained within its pages, it comes from the strength of relationship the reader has with the information.

Your Holy Shit List

I’ve starting a HOLY SHIT list. This is list of technologies/software/hardware that blew my mind when I first understood them.

You know what I’m talking about, it’s those HOLY SHIT moments where the unlimited potential of a “thing” just spills out of it. I have two litmus tests for this type of realization. It’s either when I start calling random friends who haven’t heard from me in months just to tell them, “HAVE YOU SEEN NAPSTER? DO YOU REALIZE THAT THE WORLD JUST CHANGED?” The other test is when I try to explain the HOLY SHIT to someone I know will never get it. “NO SEE, YOU CAN BUY ANYTHING ON EBAY. ANYTHING. NO I DON’T KNOW WHAT EBAY STANDS FOR GRRRRRRRRRRRR”.

Here’s the unordered list so far. Please feel free to add or create your own list. I’m certain I’ve forgotten some key HOLY SHITS:

o Macintosh
o Doom
o Telnet
o Windows 95
o Ebay
o Netscape Navigator
o Napster

There’s a future column which will walk through these items and talk endlessly about their personal significance. I’m guessing I’ll also need to explain why obvious candidates such as the PC aren’t on that list.

ALL THINGS BLOG

Here’s a link to all sorts of fancy tools to support your favorite blog.

Update (7/4/02): Here’s a link to a variety of external goodies for the Movable Type system.

IS BLOGGING A FAD?

Great academic analysis of the blogging “fad”.

MOVEABLE TYPE

When Movable Type (“MT”) was suggested to me as a means of managing Rands In Repose, I was immediately put off by the requirement of having to display the MT logo on the web page. HEY SCREW YOU PAL, IT’S MY WEBSITE AND I’M NOT AN ADVERTISING WHORE.

After just under a month of using MT, I have no problem adding the MT brand to my webpage. I’ll explain:

FOUR REASONS WHY ANYONE DEVELOPING A WEB APPLICATION SHOULD SPEND TIME WITH MOVABLE TYPE:

Let’s first talk about what I define to be a web application. Yahoo is a web page. Yahoo Mail is a web application. Get it? Let’s move on.

1) MATURE USER EXPERIENCE, SEXY USER INTERACTION

Face it, there are widgets that you’ve gotten used to on your Windows XP or Mac applications which are very hard to do in the stateless HTML world of the web browser. Think of those slick explorer-like collapsible tree controls. Implementations of such controls in a web-world either mean signing up for technology you don’t want (Flash) or an experience you dislike (excessive page reloads).

The lack of these mature controls makes the development of a familiar and useful user experience difficult when it comes to web applications. While my experience with MT has been limited to the management of fewer than thirty entries to date, I’ve had no problem using the web-based design to easily maintain my site. Where it looks like a user would have obvious scalability issues, MT has place filtering mechanism to give easy access to subsets of data.

As for the user interface, it’s just sexy. The selection of the Trebuchet font and soft gray-blue color palette conveys that someone with taste modeled the application. This “warm fuzzy” feeling is key to getting and keeping customers. Just ask Steve Jobs.

2) SIMPLE INTEGRATION OPTIONS

Want to notify weblogs.com when you’ve posted a new entry to your web log? Simply click a button in your preferences section and MT sends an XML-RPC ping to weblogs.com when your new entry is posted. Want to display Google search results via the Google APIs? Just insert your Google API key and you’re ready to roll through the user of integrated Google tags.

You buzzword compliant types might be wondering, “Hey, does this mean MT supports web services?” HELLO YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT, it doesn’t matter what it’s called, what matters is whether or not the functionality does something useful. MT has made it trivial for folks who have no clue what a web service is to do useful simple integrations to Weblogs.com and Google. This concept (and, hopefully, underlying architecture) opens the door to a bevy of other types of integration that we haven’t even thought of yet.

3) VIRAL, COMMUNITY BASED

In terms of installing an application on your Windows or Macintosh desktop, MT is not for the faint of heart and herein lies the only obvious MT weakness: an AOL user can’t even spell CGI and the MT installation involves a lot more than that.

Having no insight into the MT’s business plan, I can’t say whether this was a deliberate choice or not, but I like to think of it as a secret weapon. Here’s my reasoning:

a) It’s non-trivial to install MT. Doing so involves some understanding of Windows/Unix file permissions, CGIs, Perl modules, and other technologies. Translation: installing MT requires a brain of some significance.
b) Since the intellectual requirements to set-up MT are comparably high to, say, sticking an AOL CD into your computer and pressing GO, it stands to reason the average IQ of a MT user is higher than your average AOL user.
c) Given these decidedly non-AOL users are now equipped with a quality personal publishing system, it stands to reason that they’re likely to tell like-minded friends that, “Hey, MT works great!” OH AND LOOK THEY’VE GOT A WEBLOG TOO, FANCY THAT. FREE P.R.!
d) Thus begins the vicious viral cycle of building a loyal, intelligent base of users who (gasp) might actually pay for a product.

4) BUG FREE, WELL DOCUMENTED

Again, with fewer than thirty entries in my weblog, I’ve not right saying that I’ve fully tested the MT system. What I have done is take the system from an archive, installed it, set-up my first weblog, added a whole slew of entries, and tinkered with my templates incessantly. In all of that time (let’s call it over a month), I have not encountered a single significant bug which has impacted my use of the product. I honestly don’t know the history of MT, but if their release cycle is anything like the rest of the planet, a 2.0 product of this quality is unusual. There are bugs, I’m sure of it, but why haven’t I seen a single one?

Oh, and the documentation works. This is documentation which was done as a painful afterthought; this is documentation which has co-existed with the development of the product. Sure, there are support forums for random questions, but I didn’t need them until I wanted to do something really goofy?

o o o

So, yes, I am biased towards MT because I’m using it and its working amazing amazingly well for me. And, yes, there are lots of other weblog solutions out there that I didn’t spend a second with that I’m sure have rich feature sets, high quality, and a lack of twits. And, yes, installation requirements can be a little stiff, but MT works and works well. When I use it from any browser on the planet Earth, I feel like I’m using a next generation web application. This is a web application which does not look back at how “things we done” in a desktop or client-server world, this is an application designed from the ground up using technologies developed on the web in order to provide a high quality web service.