Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 43

Preparing an online conference talk

I���m terrible at taking my own advice.

Hana wrote a terrific article called You���re on mute: the art of presenting in a Zoom era. In it, she has very kind things to say about my process for preparing conference talks.

As it happens, I���m preparing a conference talk right now for delivery online. Am I taking my advice about how to put a talk together? I am on me arse.

Perhaps the most important part of the process I shared with Hana is that you don���t get too polished too soon. Instead you get everything out of your head as quickly as possible (probably onto disposable bits of paper) and only start refining once you���re happy with the rough structure you���ve figured out by shuffling those bits around.

But the way I���ve been preparing this talk has been more like watching a progress bar. I started at the start and even went straight into slides as the medium for putting the talk together.

It was all going relatively well until I hit a wall somewhere between the 50% and 75% mark. I was blocked and I didn���t have any rough sketches to fall back on. Everything was a jumbled mess in my brain.

It all came to a head at the start of last week when that jumbled mess in my brain resulted in a very restless night spent tossing and turning while I imagined how I might complete the talk.

This is a terrible way of working and I don���t recommend it to anyone.

The problem was I couldn���t even return to the proverbial drawing board because I hadn���t given myself a drawing board to return to (other than this crazy wall of connections on Kinopio).

My sleepless night was a wake-up call (huh?). The next day I forced myself to knuckle down and pump out anything even if it was shit���I could refine it later. Well, it turns out that just pumping out any old shit was exactly what I needed to do. The act of moving those fingers up and down on the keyboard resulted in something that wasn���t completely terrible. In fact, it turned out pretty darn good.

Past me said:

The idea here is to get everything out of my head.

I should���ve listened to that guy.

At this point, I think I���ve got the talk done. The progress bar has reached 100%. I even think that it���s pretty good. A giveaway for whether a talk is any good is when I find myself thinking ���Yes, this has good points well made!��� and then five minutes later I���m thinking ���Wait, is this complete rubbish that���s totally obvious and doesn���t make much sense?��� (see, for example, every talk I���ve ever prepared ever).

Now I just to have to record it. The way that An Event Apart are running their online editions is that the talks are pre-recorded but followed with live Q&A. That���s how the Clearleft events team have been running the conference part of the Leading Design Festival too. Last week there were three days of this format and it worked out really, really well. This week there���ll be masterclasses which are delivered in a more synchronous way.

It feels a bit different to prepare a talk for pre-recording rather than live delivery on stage. In fact, it feels less like preparing a conference talk and more like making a documentary. I guess this is what life is like for YouTubers.

I think the last time I was in a cinema before The Situation was at the wonderful Duke of York���s cinema here in Brighton for an afternoon showing of The Proposition followed by a nice informal chat with the screenwriter, one Nick Cave, local to this parish. It was really enjoyable, and that���s kind of what Leading Design Festival felt like last week.

I wonder if maybe we���ve been thinking about online events with the wrong metaphor. Perhaps they���re not like conferences that have moved online. Maybe they���re more like film festivals where everyone has the shared experience of watching a new film for the first time together, followed by questions to the makers about what they���ve just seen.

Prototyping on the Clearleft podcast

The latest episode of the Clearleft podcast is live and it���s all about prototyping.

There���s a bit of a narrative thread in there about airplanes, kicked off by a great story Benjamin tells about testing a physical prototype ���of the inside of a transatlantic airliner. Lorenzo recounts his story of mocking up a fake CMS with readily-available tools. And Trys tells of a progressive web app he whipped up for our friends at Suffolk Libraries. There���s even a bit about Hack Farm in there too.

But just to make sure it isn���t too much of a Clearleft love-in, I also interviewed an outside expert: Adekunle Oduye. It was very kind of him to give up his time, especially considering he had just moved house ���in a pandemic!

There are some great words of wisdom, immortalised in the transcript:

Prototypical code isn���t production code. It���s quick and it���s often a little bit dirty and it���s not really fit for purpose in that final deliverable. But it���s also there to be inspiring and to gather a team and show that something is possible.

���Trys

If you���re building something and you���re not really sure if it���s a right solution, use the word prototype versus design, because I feel like when people say design, that���s like the end result.

���Adekunle

I always think of a prototype as a prop. It���s something to look at, something to prod. And ideally you���re trying to work out what works and what doesn���t.

��� Benjamin

The whole episode is just over 21 minutes long. Have a listen and enjoy the stories.

If you like what you hear, please spread the word. Tell your Slack colleagues, your Twitter friends, your LinkedIn acquaintances. And if you���re not already subscribed, you can remedy that on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and anywhere that accepts RSS.

Fifty

Today is my birthday. I am one twentieth of a millenium old. I am eighteen and a quarter kilo-days old. I am six hundred months old. I am somewhere in the order of 26.28 mega-minutes old. I am fifty years old.

The reflected light of the sun that left Earth when I was born has passed Alpha Cephei and will soon reach Delta Aquilae. In that time, our solar system has completed 0.00002% of its orbit around the centre of our galaxy.

I was born into a world with the Berlin Wall. That world ended when I turned eighteen.

Fifty years before I was born, the Irish war of independence was fought while the world was recovering from an influenza pandemic.

Fifty years after I was born, the UK is beginning its post-Brexit splintering while the world is in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic.

In the past few years, I started to speculate about what I might do for the big Five Oh. Should I travel somewhere nice? Or should I throw a big party and invite everyone I know?

Neither of those are options now. The decision has been made for me. I will have a birthday (and subsequent weekend) filled with the pleasures of home. I plan to over-indulge with all my favourite foods, lovingly prepared by Jessica. And I want the finest wines available to humanity���I want them here and I want them now.

I will also, inevitably, be contemplating the passage of time. I���m definitely of an age now where I���ve shifted from ���explore��� to ���exploit.��� In other words, I���ve pretty much figured out what I like doing. That is in contrast to the many years spent trying to figure out how I should be spending my time. Now my plans are more about maximising what I know I like and minimising everything else. What I like mostly involves Irish traditional music and good food.

So that���s what I���ll be doubling down on for my birthday weekend.

Accessibility on the Clearleft podcast

We���re halfway through the second season of the Clearleft podcast already!

The latest episode is on a topic close to my heart: accessibility. But I get out of the way early on and let much smarter folks do the talking. In this case, it���s a power trio of Laura, Cassie, and L��onie. It even features a screen-reader demo by L��onie.

I edited the episode pretty tightly so it comes in at just under 15 minutes. I���m sure you can find 15 minutes of your busy day to set aside for a listen.

If you like what you hear, please spread the word about the Clearleft podcast and pop that RSS feed into your podcast player of choice.

Ten down, one to go

The Long Now Foundation is dedicated to long-term thinking. I���ve been a member for quite a few years now …which, in the grand scheme of things, is not very long at all.

One of their projects is Long Bets. It sets out to tackle the problem that ���there���s no tax on bullshit.��� Here���s how it works: you make a prediction about something that will (or won���t happen) by a particular date. So far, so typical thought leadery. But then someone else can challenge your prediction. And here���s the crucial bit: you���ve both got to place your monies where your mouths are.

Ten years ago, I made a prediction on the Long Bets website. It���s kind of meta:

The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

I made the prediction on February 22nd, 2011 when my mind was preoccupied with digital preservation.

One year later I was on stage in Wellington, New Zealand, giving a talk called Of Time And The Network. I mentioned my prediction in the talk and said:

If anybody would like to take me up on that bet, you can put your money down.

Matt was also speaking at Webstock. When he gave his talk, he officially accepted my challenge.

So now it���s a bet. We both put $500 into the pot. If I win, the Bletchly Park Trust gets that money. If Matt wins, the money goes to The Internet Archive.

As I said in my original prediction:

I would love to be proven wrong.

That was ten years ago today. There���s just one more year to go until the pleasingly alliterative date of 2022-02-22 …or as the Long Now Foundation would write it, 02022-02-22 (gotta avoid that Y10K bug).

It is looking more and more likely that I will lose this bet. This pleases me.

Reading resonances

In today���s world of algorithmic recommendation engines, it���s nice to experience some serendipity every now and then. I remember how nice it was when two books I read in sequence had a wonderful echo in their descriptions of fermentation:

There���s a lovely resonance in reading @RobinSloan���s Sourdough back to back with @EdYong209���s I Contain Multitudes. One���s fiction, one���s non-fiction, but they���re both microbepunk.

Robin agreed:

OMG I���m so glad these books presented themselves to you together���I think it���s a great pairing, too. And certainly, some of Ed���s writing about microbes was in my head as I was writing the novel!

I experienced another resonant echo when I finished reading Rebecca Solnit���s A Paradise Built in Hell and then starting reading Rutger Bregman���s Humankind. Both books share a common theme���that human beings are fundamentally decent���but the first chapter of Humankind was mentioning the exact same events that are chronicled in A Paradise Built in Hell; the Blitz, September 11th, Katrina, and more. Then he cites from that book directly. The two books were published a decade apart, and it was just happenstance that I ended up reading them in quick succession.

I recommend both books. Humankind is thoroughly enjoyable, but it has one maddeningly frustrating flaw. A Paradise Built in Hell isn���t the only work that influenced Bregman���he also cites Yuval Noah Harari���s Sapiens. Here���s what I thought of Sapiens:

Yuval Noah Harari has fixated on some ideas that make a mess of the narrative arc of Sapiens. In particular, he believes that the agricultural revolution was, as he describes it, ���history���s biggest fraud.��� In the absence of any recorded evidence for this, he instead provides idyllic descriptions of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that have as much foundation in reality as the paleo diet.

Humankind echoes this fabrication. Again, the giveaway is that the footnotes dry up when the author is describing the idyllic pre-historical nomadic lifestyle. Compare it with, for instance, this description of the founding of Jericho���possibly the world���s oldest city���where researchers are at pains to point out that we can���t possibly know what life was like before written records.

I worry that Yuval Noah Harari���s imaginings are being treated as ���truthy��� by Rutger Bregman. It���s not a trend I like.

Still, apart from that annoying detour, Humankind is a great read. So is A Paradise Built in Hell. Try them together.

Design engineer

It���s been just over two years since Chris wrote his magnum opus about The Great Divide. It really resonated with me, and a lot of other people.

The crux of it is that the phrase ���front-end development��� has become so broad and applies to so many things, that it has effectively lost its usefulness:

Two front-end developers are sitting at a bar. They have nothing to talk about.

Brad nailed the differences in responsibilities when he described them as front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development:

A front-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code.

A back-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing JavaScript code necessary to make a web application function properly.

In my experience, the term ���full stack developer��� is often self-applied by back-of-the-front-end developers who perhaps underestimate the complexity of front-of-the-front development.

Me, I���m very much a front-of-the-front developer. And the dev work we do at Clearleft very much falls into that realm.

This division of roles and responsibilities reminds me of a decision we made in the founding days of Clearleft. Would we attempt to be a full-service agency, delivering everything from design to launch? Or would we specialise? We decided to specialise, doubling down on UX design, which was at the time an under-served area. But we still decided to do front-end development. We felt that working with the materials of the web would allow us to deliver better UX.

We made a conscious decision not to do back-end development. Partly it was a question of scale. If you were a back-end shop, you probably had to double down on one stack: PHP or Ruby or Python. We didn���t want to have to turn away any clients based on their tech stack. Of course this meant that we had to partner with other agencies that specialised in those stacks, and that���s what we did���we had trusted partners for Drupal development, Rails development, Wordpress development, and so on.

The world of front-end development didn���t have that kind of fragmentation. The only real split at the time was between Flash agencies and web standards (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

Overall, our decision to avoid back-end development stood us in good stead. There were plenty of challenges though. We had to learn how to avoid ���throwing stuff over the wall��� at whoever would be doing the final back-end implementation. I think that���s why we latched on to design systems so early. It was clearly a better deliverable for the people building the final site���much better than mock-ups or pages.

Avoiding back-end development meant we also avoided long-term lock-in with maintainence, security, hosting, and so on. It might sound strange for an agency to actively avoid long-term revenue streams, but at Clearleft it���s always been our philosophy to make ourselves redundant. We want to give our clients everything they need���both in terms of deliverables and knowledge���so that they aren���t dependent on us.

That all worked great as long as there was a clear distinction between front-end development and back-end development. Front-end development was anything that happened in a browser. Back-end development was anything that happened on the server.

But as the waters muddied and complex business logic migrated from the server to the client, our offering became harder to clarify. We���d tell clients that we did front-end development (meaning we���d supply them with components formed of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and they might expect us to write application logic in React.

That���s why Brad���s framing resonated with me. Clearleft does front-of-front-end development, but we liaise with our clients��� back-of-the-front-end developers. In fact, that bridging work���between design and implementation���is where devs at Clearleft shine.

As much as I can relate to the term front-of-front-end, it doesn���t exactly roll off the tongue. I don���t expect it to be anyone���s job title anytime soon.

That���s why I was so excited by the term ���design engineer,��� which I think I first heard from Natalya Shelburne. There���s even a book about it and the job description sounds very much like the front-of-the-front-end work but with a heavy emphasis on the collaboration and translation between design and implementation. As Trys puts it:

What I love about the name “Design Engineer”, is that it’s entirely focused on the handshake between those two other roles.

There’s no mention of UI, CSS, front-end, design systems, documentation, prototyping, tooling or any ‘hard’ skills that could be used in the role itself.

Trys has been doing some soul-searching and has come to the conclusion ���I think I might be a design engineer…���. He has also written on the Clearleft blog about how well the term describes design and development at Clearleft.

Personally, I���m not a fan of using the term ���engineer��� to refer to anyone who isn���t actually a qualified engineer���I explain why in my talk Building���but I accept that that particular ship has sailed. And the term ���design developer��� just sounds odd. So I���m all in using the term ���design engineer���.

I can imagine this phrase being used in a job ad. It could also be attached to levels: a junior design engineer, a mid-level design engineer, a senior design engineer; each level having different mixes of code and collaboration (maybe a head of design enginering never writes any code).

Trys has written a whole series of posts on the nitty-gritty work involved in design engineering. I highly recommend reading all of them:

I think I might be a design engineer…The designer and developer relationshipSystemised design foundationsPrototyping

Employee experience design on the Clearleft podcast

The second episode of the second season of the Clearleft podcast is out. It���s all about employee experience design.

This topic came out of conversations with Katie. She really enjoys getting stuck into to the design challenges of the ���backstage��� tools that are often neglected. This is an area that Chris has been working in recently too, so I quized him on this topic.

They���re both super smart people which makes for a thoroughly enjoyable podcast episode. I usually have more guests on a single episode but it was fun to do a two-hander for once.

The whole thing comes in at just under seventeen minutes and there are some great stories and ideas in there. Have a listen.

And if you���re enjoying listening to the Clearleft podcast as much as I���m enjoying making it, be sure to spread the word wherever you share your recommnedations: Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, your own website, the rooftop.

The moment after eclipse

I���m almost finished reading a collection of short stories by Brian Aldiss. He was such a prolific writer that he produced loads of these collections, readily available from second-hand bookshops, published on cheap pulpy paper.

This collection is called The Moment Of Eclipse. It���s has some truly weird stories in there, as well as an undisputed classic with Super-Toys Last All Summer Long. I always find it almost unbearably sad.

Only recently, towards the end of the book, did the coincidence of the book���s title strike me: The Moment Of Eclipse.

See, last time I had the privelige of experiencing a total solar eclipse was on August 21st, 2017. Jessica and I were in Sun Valley, Idaho, right in the path of totality. We found a hill to climb up so we could see the surrounding landscape as the shadow of the moon raced across the Earth.

When it was over, we climbed down the hill and went online. That���s when I found out. Brian Aldiss had passed away.

Associative trails

Matt wrote recently about how different writers keep notes:

I���m also reminded of how writers I love and respect maintain their own reservoirs of knowledge, complete with migratory paths down from the mountains.

I have a section of my site called ���notes��� but the truth is that every single thing I post on here���whether it���s a link, a blog post, or anything else���is really a ���note to self.���

When it comes to retrieving information from this online memex of mine, I use tags. I���ve got search forms on my site, but usually I���ll go to the address bar in my browser instead and think ���now, what would past me have tagged that with…��� as I type adactio.com/tags/... (or, if I want to be more specific, adactio.com/links/tags/... or adactio.com/journal/tags/...).

It���s very satisfying to use my website as a back-up brain like this. I can get stuff out of my head and squirreled away, but still have it available for quick recall when I want it. It���s especially satisfying when I���m talking to someone else and something they say reminds me of something relevant, and I can go ���Oh, let me send you this link…��� as I retrieve the tagged item in question.

But I don���t think about other people when I���m adding something to my website. My audience is myself.

I know there���s lots of advice out there about considering your audience when you write, but when it comes to my personal site, I���d find that crippling. It would be one more admonishment from the inner critic whispering ���no one���s interested in that���, ���you have nothing new to add to this topic���, and ���you���re not quailified to write about this.��� If I���m writing for myself, then it���s easier to have fewer inhibitions. By treating everything as a scrappy note-to-self, I can avoid agonising about quality control …although I still spend far too long trying to come up with titles for posts.

I���ve noticed���and other bloggers have corroborated this���there���s no correlation whatsover between the amount of time you put into something and how much it���s going to resonate with people. You might spend days putting together a thoroughly-researched article only to have it met with tumbleweeds when you finally publish it. Or you might bash something out late at night after a few beers only to find it on the front page of various aggregators the next morning.

If someone else gets some value from a quick blog post that I dash off here, that���s always a pleasant surprise. It���s a bonus. But it���s not my reason for writing. My website is primarily a tool and a library for myself. It just happens to also be public.

I���m pretty sure that nobody but me uses the tags I add to my links and blog posts, and that���s fine with me. It���s very much a folksonomy.

Likewise, there���s a feature I added to my blog posts recently that is probably only of interest to me. Under each blog post, there���s a heading saying ���Previously on this day��� followed by links to any blog posts published on the same date in previous years. I find it absolutely fascinating to spelunk down those hyperlink potholes, but I���m sure for anyone else it���s about as interesting as a slideshow of holiday photos.

Matt took this further by adding an ���on this day��� URL to his site. What a great idea! I���ve now done the same here:

adactio.com/archive/onthisday

That URL is almost certainly only of interest to me. And that���s fine.