UX = User eXperience. Very good presentation on dubious proposition (IMHO of course). Or maybe not. How to be and manage user experience part of a project, probably but not necessarily a Website. “Design the box” is an interesting exercise even for products/projects that won’t ship in a box.
SXSWi: UX Team of One
March 15th, 2009SXSWi Book Readings on the Day Stage
March 13th, 2009Both of the book readings were content-lite, mostly reciting their media appearences. I’ve saved the URLs, maybe there’s something there but I wasn’t intrigued by the presentation. Of course, both of these are print authors, not tech presenters like the other sessions.
SXSWi Lines
March 13th, 2009I arrived an hour early to get my badge. At that point the line ran the length of the building and the wait was about 40 minutes (the staff’s estimate was right on). By the time I had my badge the line was around the corner and the wait was over an hour.
SXSWi, Early Friday Afternoon
March 13th, 2009South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) has started. First presentation, “Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong” was very useful, basically most Websites are “print in disguise”. When the podcast becomes available, grab it.
Next up,” How to Rawk SXSW: The Basics“, let us say I’m not the demographic it was aimed at. Can’t think of a reason to check out the podcast, yesterday’s fish wrapper.
Currently I’m at “Career Renegade: How To Make A Great Living Doing What You Love“. Somewhere is the middle, inspiring story but not much content that I can use. Not a keeper.
If It Has a Timer, It Needs a Pause Button
February 28th, 2009My electric toothbrush and the flashcard (jMemorize, very nice) program I am using to learn Spanish both have timers. The toothbrush has a builtin 2 minute timer with beeps every 30 seconds to switch quadrants. I knew 2 minutes suggestion for effective brushing and thought I was fairly close; turns out not to be the case. jMemorize has a selectable lesson size either by time or by number of cards. Two 17 minute sessions works better for me.
Both have a problem handling interruptions, e.g. the phone rings or my wife asks me a questions. If you are creating a program or device with a timer, have a way to pause it. Only hermits have the luxury or reality of no interruptions, for the rest of us, most things need to be interruptable.
System Monitoring = Real-time Regression Testing, AKA Continuous Integration
February 5th, 2009I’m noticing a convergence between the tools and widgets I’m using for system status monitoring and for software testing. There are red/yellow/green backgrounds for specific components, RDD strip charts to track status over time, hierarchies of sub-systems/components, etc. I wonder how much I can leverage the tools and expertise on one side to improve the other.
Manufacturing Applied to Software Development Makes Me Nervous
January 26th, 2009There is a rash of recent software development methods (e.g. Lean, Kanban) that are based on manufacturing, usually Japanese. Manufacturing is doing the known over and over, trying to squeeze the last nickel out of the recurring costs. Software development is largely exploring the unknown. There aren’t repeatable, consistent tasks. Many of these methods strike me as attempts to replace expensive, talented individuals with cheap, generic labor. And sacrificing long-term viability (and costs) for short-term gain.
There are consistent, repeatable parts of software development and where they exist they have been pushed into compilers, scripts, and code generators. Valuable effort has gone and is going into squeezing another couple of percent performance out of the optimizer in compilers. This is so successful that few projects generate assembler/machine code by hand any more. The repeatable parts of well run projects are automated, compiler back-ends, scripts, automated builds, automated tests, etc. Much more cost-effective than hiring poorly paid, poorly educated, unexperienced people.
Or not bothering with documentation, comments, and clean code because it doesn’t provide immediate “customer value”.
Fragment Caching Not Worth It
January 20th, 2009After adding fragment caching to Amethyst, I found it did a couple of things I didn’t like. They would have been obvious had I thought more about it. I like the “10 minutes ago” style of time stamps. Makes it easy and fast to scan for recent or old articles. Well, the 10 minutes ago gets cached and quickly becomes stale. I can move it out of the cached fragment, but it looks out of place.
Article fragment caching only sped up display by a factor of 2 (i.e. 54 seconds for the full display dropped to under 30 seconds). Paging looks really unnatural when pages are different sizes. However, “endless paging” (appending pages as you scroll down to the end) works moderately well. And works well with “10 minutes ago” style timestamps.
So I’ve dropped fragment caching.