YakShaving

I mentioned earlier that Bret Victor’s talk was one of the most profound talks I’ve looked at for creatives/hackers to check out.

Chalk one up for execution, because the talented Chris Granger took the same idea and turned it into a conceptual IDE that is well within our reach. He calls it “Light Table”. I’m glad that it’s getting some buzz on the interwebs and on HN — I really want to see this thing actually come to fruition.

He’s creating a Kickstarter campaign for it — I’ll update this post just as soon as I know when it’s available.

This cartoon is a parody for what happens to us so often when we’re deciding on a product, restaurant, or a movie.

There’s no shortage of startups and entrepreneurs trying to give us recommendations, star reviews, ratings, user generated feedback, expert appraisals, and extensive analysis on what we should and shouldn’t purchase/patronize.

I’m neither arguing that this way of decision making is good nor bad, just amazing to think how quickly (less than 10 years) our habits can change given the right catalyst (In this case, online reviews).

Almost everywhere I go, I have to explain what “Design” actually means to people, as I’m sure many Designers do. Most people still think of design as making a page look pretty and aesthetically pleasing enough for people to purchase it/consume it/identify with it. I’m currently reading the book “Little Bets,” which contains myriad references to design thinking. A book review with notes is coming soon, but I couldn’t wait to blog this b/c I thought it was fascinating:

Regarding Afghanistan and the counterinsurgency operations, strategists for the US Army thought that preconceived template and plans are obsolete and need a creative approach to warfare. So, army strategists use a system they call “Developing the situation through action“.

To me, this sure sounds a lot like “Making to know,” one of the core messages that every designer needs to live by.

What’s cool is that it doesn’t stop there. The army’s prestigious School for Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), where it trains the best and brightest, offers courses on what they call “the art of design“…

“What?! A bunch of artsy designers in a military school?” most might ask…



Design is, in fact, in the middle of the revised U.S. Army’s field manual FM 5-0: The Operations Process, chapter 3. It reads: “Design is a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe complex, ill structured problems and develop approaches to solve them.” As far away from military matters as design may seem to be, with design thinking destined as such, its applicability to the challenges of navigating a mission within an uncertain Middle Eastern city is immediately clear.

The philosophy is apt for those working on the cutting edge of a new market, or solving problems in new, unexplored areas. Startups, which are all about finding a business model, are similar to the army. Every day, they engage in small battles and “reconnaissance” so they can learn what they don’t know.

It’s amazing to me how many simple ideas still exist out there and have the potential to change humanity forever… if people just had a little bit more curiosity to power through and seek answers to their questions. As I type that, I realize maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we’ve been looking really hard for answers to our questions, when really we should be having more questions.

I think we all have some part of our brain where there exists mysteries in the sense that Richard Feynman wondered about a ball, wagon, and this inexplicable phenomenon his father told him was called “inertia”.

We’re giving a panel on Redefining Data Driven at SXSW EDU this year. If there’s any chance you’re in Austin and can sneak in, or are coming to the event, come check us out. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the meme creator this morning.

Our talk has been listed twice on the top 5/10 unmissable talks of SXSWEDU!

Please use hashtag #dataftw to ask questions.

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

This talk by Bret Victor was almost certainly the best talk I’ve ever watched online.

Some of my favorite insights:

• “So much of art.. so much of creation is discovery. And you can’t discover if you can’t see what you’re doing”
• You have to be able to try ideas as you think of them
• …”That’s what it might be like to write an algorithm without a blindfold on”…
• Every new medium that someone creates should have a much tighter feedback loop between the creation and what it is you’re creating.

I think I just learned something very, very important as a developer and creator by watching this video. I realize that half of being a good programmer is about keeping things in short term working memory. That’s incredibly hard when you’re a visual/spatial reasoner. Bret’s experience trying to keyframe in Flash is not dissimilar to how most people learn new technologies and languages. His realization that a robust feedback mechanism is a necessary precondition for people to “stick with it” and follow their creation through to completion.

Oscar Wilde has said that there’s an abyss between the mind and the pen. I’ve agreed with this for years, but now I recognize that there’s more granularity in the process than I previously understood. It’s not just that there’s an “ability” gap between what the mind perceives and the hand creates, but a gap that exists between what the hand creates and what the eye then perceives. Seems like a huge revelation to me.

Here’s just one example where Bret just nailed the deficiencies in the commonly accepted perception of a programming text editor.

This has implications for inventors of tools that other people use to build from. If you are building an API or tools that you’re expecting someone else to grok and use, make sure that they provide salient feedback as quickly as possible to the creators. If this were accepted as axiomatic, you’d bring the joy back into creating, and you’d have a lot more people building for you.

Bret is fascinating, honest, and compassionate. You really just have to watch the entire talk to appreciate it.

via kottke

Nice, someone’s made an infographic video of my favorite little part of Ira Glass’s video about getting better at something. I posted first about it here, but saw it on HackerNews today.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Twitter has an article in A List Apart about how they created Twitter bootstrap.   I loved learning about their process

If I can help it, this is how all of our teams work from now on.

“Yada yada yada…. It all boiled down to one core concept.   Pairing designers with developers“

Ultimately this boiled down to one core concept: pairing designers with developers. Constant interaction with developers is what sparked Bootstrap and continues to drive its development over a year later. From whiteboarding ideas to coding rough prototypes, collaborating across disciplines is what made Bootstrap successful for internal use at Twitter. This process informed the development of nearly every feature in Bootstrap and has worked remarkably well over time.

Building Bootstrap in this way meant communication was key and most design work happened in code. Since the final deliverable for Bootstrap is always code, it made the most sense to work there as often as possible to communicate our ideas. This put one into the mindset of a good developer, encouraging succinct components, but with the visual polish and thoroughness one expects from a dedicated designer.

I was reading this post about the history of software version control and was amazed by the types of innovations that we have seen in the past several years.

In order to understand the article, you’ll first need to understand version control — It’s the way that individual and groups of developers maintain versions of software and code that they’re writing.

Here’s my favorite part of Francis’ commentary:

Have a quick look back up at those decades of progress. Yes, some of the advances were also enabled by increasing computer power. But mainly, they were simply made by people thinking of cleverer ways of collaborating.

I was intrigued that the ones that have happened in the last decade or so have been ones that are oriented around collaboration with other people. In the last 7 years, we’ve learned how social networking can help connect us to other people.

It’s clear to me that social networking is a precursor to connecting with other people for a more specific intent or purpose. This is very different from the timid, klugey, and “forced” ways we connect with each other today. I think we’ll look back at the “Like” on facebook and “Share” on twitter and wonder how we ever survived with them exclusively. The same user interface (UI) patterns and metaphors that we use on these networks (like activity feeds) will eventually fade into the background and pave the way for more collaborative, action oriented networks with new user interfaces.

Also blogged at BetterAt.

Here’s a quote from a Steve Jobs interview from 1995:

Many companies get the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people here’s this great idea then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want.And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

At BetterAt, we’re lucky that every day brings a new learning about a problem or an opportunity to fit these things together differently. It’s been a fun journey that’s starting to get a lot more interesting.

If you’re stuck in the old paradigm, these developments could seem like a crisis. You might fret that no one is reading encyclopedias anymore. Or that these kids who resist newspapers are so ignorant. Or that your nation used to lead from the front and now lurks in the back. Or that the government should be “creating” jobs but isn’t.

I found this snippet notable as it relates to my next point about content:

Media outlets might rethink themselves as curators of complex reality rather than purveyors of wholly produced scoops — much as the Al Jazeera English program “The Stream” does, inviting viewers and social-media users to help craft its topics and ask questions of its guests, then reading their feedback live on the air.

Ira Glass: I feel like as a people we have to officially stop asking if radio is going to survive. It’s so boring! I feel like I get asked that, like, every two weeks of my life, and the fact is we don’t have to decide that. You know what I mean? We don’t have to come to a judgment on that.For some reason radio seems to survive, and I believe it’s because as long as there are cars with radios and people are lazy, people will get into a car and turn on a radio. And thank God people are fucking lazy. And like radio sort of just is there. And then in addition, people who are on radio doing anything interesting can put it out as a podcast and get a second audience, and so it seems like the whole computer thing has just been actually good for radio and the style that we do it. And I think it’s going to be fine.

I don’t think we have to worry. If radio goes away, something else will happen, and who gives a fuck that it’s gone?

Ira Glass:  I think the question of, like, “Is radio going to survive?” — it’s disturbingly nostalgic. I mean, who cares if it survives? Who cares if radio survives? Like, something else will happen.

We all (should) know by now using Apple’s examples that it’s all about sweating the details and getting everything. just. right.

This blog post and lesson by Aaron Swartz is a great reminder that details that impede your user tend to overshadow details that delight your user.   I think he hit the nail on the head — speaking from personal experience as both a Kindle and an iPad owner.

Bezos must have spent tons of energy getting this stuff right. And he must be sitting there, pissed, that Steve Jobs gets all these laurels while no one ever recognizes the stuff he’s done. But I don’t think that’s because Jobs is a better marketer and showman than Bezos (that’s the easy way out); it’s because the small details that delight get buried under small details that annoy.

He continues…

That’s the thing about delightful details: they’re not just another thing you can add on top. Unless you sweat the details all the way through the user experience, the ones that delight quickly get drowned out by the ones that constantly annoy. I hope someone at Amazon will take that to heart.