Michael Lopp's Blog, page 47

Losing Aaron

Janelle Nanos in Boston Magazine:

Comprehensive and compelling article on the death of Aaron Swartz. Elegantly written. Includes details from the MIT-commissioned investigation by professor Hal Abelson that documents:

[The Abelson reports] notes that “MIT is respected for world-class work in information technology, for promoting open access to online information, and for dealing wisely with the risks of computer abuse. The world looks to MIT to be at the forefront of these areas. Looking back on the Aaron Swartz case, the world didn’t see leadership.”

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The Builder’s High

When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. It is an effort to simply get past the foulness in order to start building, but once the building has begun, the foul beast loses ground.

I don’t know what cascading chemical awesomeness is going down in my brain when it detects and rewards me for the act of building, but I’m certain that the hormonal cocktail is the end result of millions of years of evolution. Part of the reason we’re at the top of the food chain is that we are chemically rewarded when we are industrious – it is evolutionarily advantageous to be productive.

And we’re slowly and deviously being trained to forget this.

A Day Full of Moments

Look around. If you’re in a group of people, count how many are lost in their digital devices as they sit there with a friend. If you’re in your office, count how many well-intentioned distractions are within arm’s reach and asking for your attention. I wonder how many of you will read this piece in one sitting – it’s only 844 words long.

The world built by the Internet is one of convenience. Buy anything without leaving your house. All knowledge is nearby and that’s a lot of knowledge, but don’t worry, everyone is pre-chewing it for you and sharing it in every way possible. They’re sharing that and other interesting moments all day and you’re beginning to believe that these shared moments are close to disposable because you are flooded with them.

You’re fucking swimming in everyone else’s moments, likes, and tweets and during these moments of consumption you are coming to believe that their brief interestingness to others makes it somehow relevant to you and worth your time.

The fact that the frequency of these interesting moments appears to be ever-growing and increasingly easy to find does not change the fact that your attention is finite. Each one you experience, each one you consume, is a moment of your life that you’ve spent forever.

These are other people’s moments.

These moments can be important. They can connect us to others; they briefly inform us as to the state of the world; they often hint at an important idea without actually explaining it by teasing us with the impression of knowledge. But they are often interesting, empty intellectual calories. They are sweet, addictive, and easy to find in our exploding digital world, and their omnipresence in my life and the lives of those around me has me starting this year asking, “Why am I spending so much time consuming other people’s moments?”

This is not a reminder to over-analyze each moment and make them count. This is a reminder not to let a digital world full of others’ moments deceive you into devaluing your own. Their moments are infinite – yours are finite and precious – and this New Year I’m wondering how much we want to create versus consume.

The Builders High

What’s the last thing you built when you got that high? You know that high I’m talking about? It’s staring at a thing that you brought into the world because you decided it needed to exist.

For me, the act of writing creates the builder’s high. Most pieces are 1000+ words. They involve three to five hours of writing, during which I’ll both hate and love the emerging piece. This is followed by another hour of editing and tweaking before I’ll publish the piece, and the high is always the same. I hit publish and I grin. That smile is my brain chemically reminding me, Hey, you just added something new to the world.

Is there a Facebook update that compares to building a thing? No, but I’d argue that 82 Facebook updates, 312 tweets, and all those delicious Instagram updates are giving you the same chemical impression that you’ve accomplished something of value. Whether it’s all the consumption or the sense of feeling busy, these micro-highs will never equal the high when you’ve actually built.

Blank Slates

This New Year, I wish you more blank slates. May you have more blank white pages sitting in front you with your favorite pen nearby and at the ready. May you have blank screens in your code editor with your absolutely favorite color syntax highlighting. May your garage work table be empty save for a single large piece of reclaimed redwood and a saw.

Turn off those notifications, turn your phone over, turn on your favorite music, stare at your blank slate and consider what you might build. In that moment of consideration, you’re making an important decision: create or consume? The things we’re giving to the future are feeling increasingly unintentional and irrelevant. They are half-considered thoughts of others. When you choose to create, you’re bucking the trend because you’re choosing to take the time to build.

And that’s a great way to start the year.

Conversation Power Moves

Megan Garber in The Atlantic:

Conversations, as they tend to play out in person, are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and assorted awkwardness. But the messiness is what allows for true exchange. It gives participants the time—and, just as important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights. “You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.”

My current conversation power move is eye contact. Eye contact. All the time whether I’m speaking or listening. For speaking, my natural state is to look away when I’m talking so I can focus on what I’m attempting to say, but I miss essential nuanced feedback. For listening, eye contact can feel uncomfortable because it can feel like staring, but, again, if you look away, you might miss essential conversational data.

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2013 in Rands (Briefly)

I’ve got more to say about the New Year, but let’s start with data around the year in Rands.

The top 5 articles published in 2013 by traffic:

The Process Myth
Regular Audio Human
Full of Interesting Strangers
Entropy Crushers
Titles are Toxic

All of these articles fall under the “decent amount of work” category so it’s satisfying that they generated good traffic.

Article count by category for long form pieces:

Tech Life 8
Management 6
Tools 2
Apple 2
Writing 1 / Rands 1

So, yeah, I write about nerd stuff and leadership. Not a ton of news there. There is more to be said about writing, but I feel I’ve said in prior years.

Other interesting facts:

The #1 article in 2013 based on traffic was The Nerd Handbook which was written in 2007. Bored People Quit was also in the top 10 and that was written in 2011.
Since the redesign two months ago, traffic has almost doubled. I’d like say this due to the design, but I have been posting more long form and excerpt pieces which confirms the rule: post more = more traffic.
Since the redesign, pages per visit are up 17%, visit duration is up 30%, and new visits are up 5%. So, more people are finding this place, they’re reading more, and staying longer. Welcome.

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The No Manager Model Has a Name: “Holacracy”

Aimee Groth on Quartz:

In its highest-functioning form, he says, the system is “politics-free, quickly evolving to define and operate the purpose of the organization, responding to market and real-world conditions in real time. It’s creating a structure in which people have flexibility to pursue what they’re passionate about.”

Reads delicious and the Wikipedia page on Holacracy is also worth a read. Per that page, most of the adopters who are using Holacracy in practice read to be smaller companies. I think communication, roles, and responsibilities are much more fluid and easy to discern at this size which makes these organizations great test beds.

What happens at 150+ employees is a different situation. Communication becomes fundamentally more expensive and that’s when we inflict all sorts of new structures, roles, and responsibilities on our teams. It’s also when such cancerous growths as politics starts to take root and because the team has become so large, it becomes harder to inoculate against these culture killing developments.

If ever there was a company to give Holacracy a legitimate chance, it’s Zappos, but I’d like to see a report card in a year.

On Delegation

John D. Cook on The Endeavour:

If something saps your energy and puts you in a bad mood, delegate it even if you have to pay someone more to do it than it would cost you do to yourself. And if something gives you energy, maybe you should do it yourself even if someone else could do it cheaper.

A good breakdown of the different variables to consider when decided whether to delegate or not. You’re probably delegating by gut right now and it might be worth taking apart the decision. Wish I wrote this.

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Do You Want to Write?

I’m once again writing with a product from the folks at iA — Writer Pro. I gave their first product, iA Writer, a good long try last year, but eventually gave up when I discovered I couldn’t adjust the text size to see additional text on my screen.

It’s seems like a minor nit, but it was a major violation of my writing process. My pieces tend to start with a couple of random paragraphs and over time they begin to form a narrative. This chaotic creative process requires that I can see a good chunk of my writing so I can figure out how to tie thoughts together. iA Writer is a self-described “focused writing app” that nobly attempts to corral your creative energy. Their marquee (and patentable?) feature “focused mode” highlights only the current sentence so as to keep your focus where it should be — on your current thought.

The problem is: my thoughts are all over the place, and as a designer of applications, iA had not yet convinced me there was a better way.

A Complete Absence of Choice

As I wrote in How to Write a Book, I’ve done the majority of my writing in Mac OS X’s TextEdit. The reason being that the simplicity of the application allows me to get to the task of writing. No toolbar, few preferences, just a window bar and a big empty box that I can fill with text.

Writer Pro (and its predecessor iA Writer) prides itself on its ability to strip away everything not essential to the craft of writing. As I sit here writing this piece in full screen mode, all I can see is the words. I compulsively keep glancing to the upper-right of the screen to check the time, but it’s not there. Right, keep writing.

There’s nothing novel about full screen mode, but Writer Pro takes minimalism a step further — Writer Pro, a $19.99 application in the App Store, has no preferences.

Your knee-jerk reaction to the lack of preferences might be, “Well, how do I do X?” To which my response is, “Why do you want to do X?” Your X feature request is likely somewhere on a spectrum where, at one end, is “I need to X because it is an essential part of my writing workflow,” and at the other end is, “I need to X because I’m an OCD nut job who can’t write unless the typeface is 15pt Sentinel.”

It’s not my job to judge where your favorite feature lands on this spectrum, but it is iA’s, and they’ve done a beautiful job judging you and it’s about time.

There’s an App for That

As a society, we’re still suffering with a lot of well-intentioned engineering-led software design where the mindset originally was: Give all of them every feature they could ever need. In a world where software was new, engineers ran the show, and the unsuspecting public thought a good pen and paper was state of the art. This kitchen sink design strategy made sense. We didn’t know what features would work in a digital world — nor did the users — so we gave them everything. It is this “strategy” that gave us Excel, Word, and Photoshop.

The companies that gave us these kitchen sink applications had little incentive to reduce the cognitive load they caused. They convinced the world that they were state of the art; they published books and created classes that would explain these feature-laden monstrosities; and they made piles and piles of money. The world said they were world-class and there is no better way to kill innovation than believing you’ve won.

To me, the phrase “post-PC” doesn’t just apply to our hardware, but every single part of the device formerly known as a PC. We’ve left the world where there is a large beige box full of spinning media wheezing beneath your desk. The frustrating details of an operating system such as file systems, memory management, and command lines are vanishing. Finally, traditional applications have been shattered. Which part of Word do you actually need? Guess what? There’s an app for that.

Great Design Elegantly Reduces Cognitive Load

The gift of the “post-PC” era is that we’re unloading a tremendous amount of useless crap that was originally intended to help us. Application preferences are intended to be useful; they are intended to give you, the user, options. But preferences are bad design.

A preference gives me a choice. On or off? Font size? Which font size? Display name? Window size? Display it? Don’t display it? No one in the history of ever thought they were doing a bad thing by giving users choice, but while I will never admit it, I don’t want choice. I want to get to the task at hand.

Preferences are a sign of design laziness; they are an indication the people responsible for building the application don’t have enough empathy or desire to do the work they intend to be paid for: design the application so I that I can work, not think about how I might work.

My Thoughts Are All Over the Place

In a world full of $0.99 applications, I’m certain there are those who are shocked by a $19.99 writing application. If they actually purchased it, they would be downright outraged — I paid twenty bucks for this? Where the hell are my knobs and dials? All I see is a big white screen and I can’t tinker with my fonts!

I’m still adapting to Writer Pro, but my initial read is that the application is helpfully making decisions for me. The marquee feature is a set of workflows that roughly map to my writing process: note, write, edit, and read. Each of the first three has a slightly different typeface and functionality that is designed to assist with that particular part of the process.

Yes, I am wondering why this typeface is better for writing than the typeface in Read mode. I’m certain that I could spend the next two hours performing this research, or, hey, I could write.

A good chunk of the money I spent on Writer Pro is to pay iA to obsess for me. Go watch the videos. They’ve clearly spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours considering the many aspects of writing and attempting to make the best decisions for me: the writer. The lack of clutter, options, and choices might turn you off, but my question is, “Do you want to write? Or think about writing?”

No Innovation in 2013?

Christopher Mims for Quartz:

All in, 2013 was an embarrassment for the entire tech industry and the engine that powers it—Silicon Valley. Innovation was replaced by financial engineering, mergers and acquisitions, and evasion of regulations. Not a single breakthrough product was unveiled…

As I read this, all I kept thinking was Christopher Mim didn’t get what he wanted for Christmas.

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Billions of Selfish Neurons

My friend Kevin Simler on Quora:

In other words, the selfishness of neurons incentivizes them to be useful — to hook up with the right network of their fellow neurons, which is itself hooked up with other networks (both ‘up’ and ‘downstream’), all so they can keep earning their share of life-sustaining energy and raw materials.

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This Headline Sucks

From Simone Stolzoff on Medium:

According to a recent study by Copyblogger, on average 8/10 people will read headline copy, but only 2/10 will read the rest. We have all become headline hunters.

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