Coding as the New Literacy

Super article by Tasneem Raja for Mother Jones. The first section in particular - about computational thinking - gives a really interesting counter-point to the "everyone must learn to code" theory:

“What if learning to code weren’t actually the most important thing? It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. As the cities that have hosted Code for America teams will tell you, the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn’t the software they write. It’s the way they think. It’s a principle called “computational thinking,” and knowing all of the Java syntax in the world won’t help if you can’t think of good ways to apply it.”
“So what is computational thinking? If you’ve ever improvised dinner, pat yourself on the back: You’ve engaged in some light CT.

There are those who open the pantry to find a dusty bag of legumes and some sad-looking onions and think, “Lentil soup!” and those who think, “Chinese takeout.” A practiced home cook can mentally sketch the path from raw ingredients to a hot meal, imagining how to substitute, divide, merge, apply external processes (heat, stirring), and so on until she achieves her end. Where the rest of us see a dead end, she sees the potential for something new.”

I'd love to be able to code, and taking a Code Academy course seriously is on my perpetual to-do list. I want to be able to code mainly so that I can have a better understanding of what the software engineers I work with are explaining. What I'd never thought about before was why I do understand their explanations at all, and why they understand mine better than they do most others. I think the answer is that I have a natural proficiency for 'computational thinking'.

For a software engineer, the hardest part of their job is know what to build, not how to build it. This is because of misunderstandings and mis-communication between the 'client' and the engineer. Having everyone at least understand how computers work - even if they don't know the first thing about coding - would go a long way to solving this problem.

“Unless you can think about the ways computers can solve problems, you can’t even know how to ask the questions that need to be answered”

That's exactly it.

Product Management: Big Companies v Start Ups

Super interesting post by Doug Fallstrom on the differences in a product manager's role at a start-up compared to a big company. This bit especially hit home for me:

“One of the most challenging aspects for PM is answer the question from engineering: “How do I know a customer will use this if I write the code?”. In a large company, especially with an established customer base in the multi-thousands scale, running various studies and talking to customers is relatively easy, there are so many customers to get feedback from at any point in time. In a startup, especially a storage startup, getting time from the right set of customers can be very challenging and we don’t have the time or money to run expensive 3rd party studies.”

As someone working in a big company, it is easy to take for granted the nearly endless list of users that I can (and do) speak to to help inform enhancements and new features, and to bring bugs to our attention. I love talking to customers, and can well imagine missing it (as Fallstrom clearly does) were I ever to work for a start up.

Are you a Jerk?

Eric Schwitzgebel in Aeon, with a pitch-perfect, slam-dunk appraisal of ‘what it means to be a jerk’:

“I submit that the unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers. This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship. The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests. ”

The whole thing is a wonderful, quasi-scholarly article that has too many great points to quote. While it is not primarily workplace focused, the parts that consider the attitudes of those higher up office hierarchies rang completely true for me, as someone that is relatively new to the corporate world.

Jerks - according to Schwitzgebel’s definition - are often found to be in senior positions at work. This could be a consequence of the fact that jerks assert themselves more, and asserting yourself is a prerequisite of climbing the ladder. On the other hand, these senior, workplace jerks were more than likely not necessarily always jerks (although they probably did always exhibit some jerkish qualities). Schwitzgebel’s hypothesis is that “success might or might not favour existing jerks, but I’m pretty sure that it nurtures new ones.” That sounds correct to me.

Jerkishness is defined by the inability to appreciate that others might be right and that you, the jerk, might be wrong. This is because, by merit of being in a senior position, you will have more reason to believe that you are right and ‘they’ are wrong, because how else could you be in such a senior position whilst they are so junior?

In some work environments, a lot of stock is placed in ‘Insights' or 'Hartman Personality' profiles. These assign people a ‘colour’ (or rather a preference for certain ‘colours’) based on their personality. Loosely defined,  ‘greens’ are friendly, ‘yellows’ motivational, ‘blues’ analytical and ‘reds’ decisive. In senior positions, at least where I work, ‘reds’ are particularly prevalent. Often these ‘reds’ like to talk a lot about how ‘red’ they are, how frustrated they get when people don’t do what they say, don’t do it now, don’t do it quickly. Schwitzgebel again:

“Here’s a characteristic jerkish thought : “I’m important, and I’m surrounded by idiots!””

Sound familiar? If you have found yourself thinking this thought, or, worse, saying it outloud, odds are that you are a jerk. And, I’d guess, a ‘red’.

Crowd-sourcing Product Development

Report by James Robinson at Pando Daily, on 'Quirky' - a platform for crowd-sourcing product design:

“On April 25, a smart air conditioner went on sale, a partnership between crowd-sourced manufacturer Quirky and GE. Its inventor, Dr. Garthen Leslie, was a former Department of Energy executive who had never manufactured a thing in his life. Leslie submitted the idea to Quirky on November 15 last year, where many of Quirky’s 800,000-plus members evaluated it, crowd-sourced ethnographic research, and voted on a name and tagline, before Quirky and GE got on with prototyping and manufacturing it.”

Quirky president, Doreen Lorenzo, explains what she sees as the benefits of this:

“...today the voice of the person that you want to use your product is available to you. With Quirky, the community tells us what the product should be, we know what they want, and you get this really interesting perspective.”

Quirky seems like an interesting experiment, and the commitment to customer-driven products is admirable, but I see 2 main problems with their approach:

  • Can crowd-sourcing design bring the refinement necessary for a hit product? ‘Design by committee’ is often thought to bring mediocre results - the famous line is that a camel is a horse designed by committee - and this is because there is no one there to say "no". And as we all know, saying "no" is the most important part of product development.

  • The ‘customers’ that are giving feedback on design are only a small subset of the potential customer base. Focusing only on the comments of the niche type of customer that participates in crowd-source manufacturing risks missing the bigger picture. The product needs of Quirky members may (very likely) not be the same as those of the wider market.

Everything is Broken

Scary post by Quinn Norton, on how precarious our online security is:

“When we tell you to apply updates we are not telling you to mend your ship. We are telling you to keep bailing before the water gets to your neck.”

As someone that works in a software business, this bit especially rang true:

“It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.”

A trip to the 9/11 Memorial Museum

Awesome, over-whelming writing by Steve Kandall, for Buzzfeed:

“I am allowed to enter the 9/11 Museum a few days before this week’s grand opening for the general public, but why would I want that? Why would I accept an invitation to a roughly $350 million, 110,000-square-foot refutation of everything we tried to practice, a gleaming monument to What Happened, not What Happened to Us? Something snapped while reading about the gift shop — I didn’t want to duck and hide, I wanted to run straight into the absurdity and horror and feel every bit of the righteous indignation and come out the other side raw.”

The $500,000 Chair

Fascinating article about airline-seat design, by David Owen for the New Yorker:

“Seven years ago, I flew business class on Qantas from Australia to California, a thirteen-hour trip. I hadn’t had much experience outside economy, but I didn’t want to look like a front-of-the-plane rookie, so I stowed my “amenity kit” without ripping it open, declined the first cocktail a flight attendant offered me, and tried to appear engrossed in a book while the passenger nearest me bounced around like a four-year-old at a birthday party. I didn’t begin to play with my own seat until after dinner, when I lowered it into its fully extended position, and stretched out—not to sleep, which is something I hardly ever manage on airplanes, but to see how the thing worked. The concave back of the seat shell formed a domed enclosure over my head, like a demi-cocoon. Suddenly, I heard people speaking in loud voices and banging things around. I sat up, indignant—and realized that the noise was the sound of breakfast being served. I’d slept for eight hours straight, something I never do even at home. In a little while, we began our descent into Los Angeles.”

The attention to detail is incredible:

“No design change is made casually, because even small ones can affect operating costs. Gulf Air, which is based in Bahrain, reduced its annual fuel bill by a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a few years ago by using slightly thinner leather in the upholstery of its first-class seats—a change that involved just sixteen seats on fifteen planes.”

When Businesses Make Business Decisions

MG Siegler, on Instagram switching their location service from Foursquare to Facebook:

“Facebook now owns Instagram, so of course they’re going to want to use their own place database, right? I guess. The issue I’m having is that for the first couple years after the deal, the database remained in the hands of Foursquare’s trusty API. Now, for whatever reason, that has changed (at least for some users). And we’re all worse off as a result.

That’s the real problem here. I get that Facebook owns Instagram and so they want to bring the geo functionality in-house as well. But the product is worse because of this change. Facebook’s place database is a nightmare of mislabeled and mislocated geo-barf. The data makes Apple Maps look like a pristine globe of information (more on that in a second).

Of course, Instagram/Facebook are hardly the first team to do such a thing. In fact, similar situations seem to happen quite often. The removal of Google Maps from the iPhone is perhaps the most well-known recent example.”

See also the fuss kicked up about Comixology/Amazon and in-app purchase.

The Stupidity of Disabling Paste in Password Fields

“There are many, many valid reasons why people would want to paste passwords in order to increase their security profile yet the perception of those blocking this practice is that it actually decreases security.”

So stupid. Short of photographic memory, the best way to keep your passwords secure is to let a password management service like 1Password or LastPass (that's what I use) generate a long, unique, random string of characters for each account that requires a password, and then remember them for you. Crucial for these services to work, however, is the users' ability to copy passwords from their password manager and paste them into a website.

'Security theatre' sounds about right.

Design is About Intent

John R. Moran has a great article on what "design" is, and how it is different to what most businesses think.

“Intent means purpose; something highly designed was crafted with intention in every creative decision.”

So:

“The opposite of design, then, is the failure to develop and employ intent in making creative decisions.”

This is a brilliant piece - and you should read it - but do yourself a favour and Instapaper it. John's site, 'Rampant Innovation', is white and red text on a black background which isn't kind on the eyes...

Everyone starts with simplicity

Steven Sinofsky (formerly of Microsoft), on the difficulty of keeping your software product simple:

“This is by far the most stressful time in product development—you can’t just step back and not change things, but you constantly feel like changes are all part of a slippery slope. You constantly find yourself struggling between the minimalist view of the product you have been perfecting and the need from different types of customers for seemingly contradictory types of features. It is why at this stage as a designer you feel like you are succumbing to feedback and introducing features that you know some people will value and others will see the other way or maybe just not even notice—you feel like you’re bloating your simple product. These are the hardest decisions to make and are the price of success. If you try to hang on to simplicity, you will see competitors pass you by or you’ll see engagement stagnate.”

Google+ Was Doomed to Fail

With the news that Vic Gundrota, the head of Google+, is stepping down, here is a damning account of Google+ by someone who worked on it.

Danny Crichton, for Techcrunch:

“Now, for the first time, I got to look upon the future of the world’s most recognizable Internet company and, perhaps, the future of social as well.

The product, internally known as Emerald Sea, was just two weeks from launch, and a digital counter near my desk was ticking down the days to June 28, 2011. I had just gotten my Google-issued laptop, so I opened up my web browser, and navigated to the internal version of the product, and …. stared. Just stared. It’s hard to exactly describe the state of the product at that point, but it was reminiscent of Facebook, albeit with a cleaner profile page and more whitespace.

After about 10 minutes of using it, I got distracted and left to find some food. I never reopened the product that day, an ominous sign in retrospect. Later, I hung out with some of the other new graduates who had just joined the team, and there was an awkward silence that can only come when the emperor walks by without his clothes on. No one could figure out why anyone would use this. As we would learn soon, we weren’t the only ones.”

The Untold Story of Larry Page

Great piece by Nicholas Carlson, for Business Insider, on Google (co-)founder Larry Page. Not sure I agree with the Steve Jobs redemption parallels he tries to draw at the beginning, but an otherwise great read. I particularly liked this section, on Page's vision for 'perfect search':

“The key to understanding the diversity of Google’s moonshots is understanding that Page’s vision of “perfect search” only works if all the products you interact with are compatible with one another.

For example, Google’s most advanced search product today, Google Now, is able to do things like alert Android users that they need to leave now if they are going to beat traffic and make a flight on time. But it can only do that because it has access to the Android users’ inboxes, Google Maps, Google Flight Search, Google Calendar, and, of course, the users’ smartphones.

So while it may seem random for Google to get into businesses as diverse as cars, thermostats, robotics, and TV production, there is an overriding objective behind it all: Page is envisioning a world where everything we touch is connected with and understood by an artificially intelligent computer that can discern patterns from our activity and learn to anticipate our needs before we even know we have them.”