Jeff's Austin Blues

SXSWi: UX Team of One

Jeff — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:21:07 +0000

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.

Links: slides and followup.

SXSWi: Christina Wodtke – Social Architecture

Jeff — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:27:16 +0000

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web was another “book reading” but she spent almost all of her time presenting solid information with just a mention at the end of her book and where to buy it (Barnes & Noble at the Trade Show). Very nice contrast to the two presentations yesterday — same place, same channel, different result.

SXSWi: Co-Working

Jeff — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:44:54 +0000

Informative session on co-working, shared workspaces: coffeehouse groups, incubators, labs, studio spaces, etc. One thing that came up repeatedly is people looking for the business model. A very useful model I found for many things is a metaphor from Fritz Lieber’s sword and sorcery fantasy series. In the main city there is a street that runs from a city gate all the way to the main temple at the center of the city. Someone comes in from the desert with a vision and begins preaching. If he/she attracts a crowd he/she stays and expands the vision and the crowd/congregation. If not, back to the desert for a better vision. Congregations and the preacher may expand until they move into a building. There is continual movement of congregations moving up and down the street as their size/wealth/etc. increase and decrease.

I’ve found this a useful business model, a fine grained spectrum of niches. None of the “You Must Be This Tall For This Ride”. In Austin, someone may start selling tamales out of their truck, progress to a taco trailer where you can touch all four walls without moving, then a taco truck, a bigger taco truck, then a permanent location while building a restaurant on the other end of the property. One big stumbling block is downsizing as gracefully.

If tacos are your thing, BBQ. Start selling the meat and meals out of the back of a truck, then a BBQ pit on a trailer, etc.

SXSWi Book Readings on the Day Stage

Jeff — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:29:18 +0000

Both 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

Jeff — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:53:20 +0000

I 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

Jeff — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:45:51 +0000

South 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

Jeff — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:57:03 +0000

My 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

Jeff — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:06:41 +0000

I’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

Jeff — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:39:53 +0000

There 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

Jeff — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:57:02 +0000

After 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.