Category: observations

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Expert Conversations

Time and time again, I find myself amidst highly qualified individuals. Take the previous weekend for example. We were hanging out at a cafe after lunch. Present there were a panel highly trained individuals whose combine knowledge would span the disciplines of psychology, dietetics, mechanics, geoscience, econometrics, and multimedia (and that’s just counting the formal paper certificate stuff).

What puzzles me is how little we get to converse about the very things that we invest most of our waking hours working on.

After asking around for a bit, it came down to an infinite number of variations circling around two main themes:

  1. I don’t think it’s interesting.
  2. I don’t think anyone else is interested.

Responding to 1, I’d suggest that one would seriously need to reconsider the career that one has chosen. It’s one thing to attempt to objectively gauge the interesting-ness of a particular line of work; it is a completely different matter for one to give five seventh’s of ones adult life to something that bears no interest even to its beholder.

As for theme number 2, very few of us have cultivated the skills required to engaging domains of knowledge beyond what we are accustomed to, myself included. In other words, it is not your fault, but you could try cultivating an interest in what others are working on.

I don’t know how such a skill would be cultivated, I sure wasn’t taught any of this in all my years in the education system, but I’m going to learn to be interested, and I’m going to try and seize every chance to celebrate the abundance of expertise around me.

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Working with a team of developers

For the last three months, I’ve been working at a web startup that’s building a social network service for events (i.e. concerts, parties, pretty much anything that has a place, date and time).

Perhaps one of the most enlightening experience I’ve had is the chance to work alongside two other excellent Ruby on Rails developers.

Now I’ve been part of cross-disciplinary teams before where there’s maybe a graphics guy, a marketing guy, a video/motion guy, and finally a web/tech guy which invariably ends up being me. Either that, or I’d slog it out alone on some pet project as the sole developer.

But working alongside fellow developers is different. Because I’m part of a team of three, and the other two are super-competent, I feel like I’m producing 3 times the amount of work for every unit of work that I put in. It’s the same feeling you get when you chant along at a thousand-strong sports match, or you when you sing along to a song playing through your earphones. Tiny, insignificant input, absolutely awesome output*.

So I’d spend two days working on a commenting feature on the site, but in those very two days, a new search feature and a swanky Google Maps feature was added to the site. 1 unit work, 3 units value produces.

Then again, isn’t that the reason why I became a software developer? To write lines of code that have the potential of infinite value.

*Though there’s also much to be said about being part of a team where 3 units of effort gets whittled down to 1 unit of value (or even less) because you’re having to clean up after the incompetencies of your colleagues. Not today. Life’s good.

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Myki and tacking on pronouns

Talk about poor brand message. Off the cuff, here are just two of the many ways this could go wrong.

Myki – It’s your key
If you didn’t quite get what my means, we’re referring to you,  get it?

Myki – It’s your key
I know I said it’s Myki, but it actually really is yours.

On the topic of tacking pronouns to the front of your core brand, doing so makes it very awkward for someone to refer to it in a sentence. One would invariably have to either squelch the pronoun (and diluting your precious brand) or risk sounding like he or she has bad english.

Consider the following:

“My Myki is usually in my wallet , but I can’t seem to find it today. Can I borrow your Myki for the time being?”

“Have you been to the thefreshgrocer in Bendigo? They have very friendly staff”

“Can you believe it? He left such a lame comment on my thefacebook wall” (which, thankfully, isn’t the case)

Here’s not to say that it should never be done. In fact products like newspapers do it very well by way of frequent exposure and being an everyday product. Still their escape isn’t completely unscathed.

“Did you get your tickets to the The Age journalism conference?”

So rule of thumb – consider all the varied and wondrous ways you’d like people to talk about your brand – and try not to make it too awkward to do so. Or, as Mr. Timberlake’s character would say “It’s not cool”.

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Magical floating typography

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There’s something about letters that float with nothing holding on to them from behind or beneath. I’m not sure about you, but till this day, my mind does a double take before being reassured two split seconds later that they are in fact mounted to the patterned plane above.

Still you’ve got to admit that it is pretty magical.

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Remembering PalmJournal

Back in my high school years, I used to tap out my entries on a Palm IIIx in an app called PalmJournal.

Thinking back, here were the things that made it the ideal journaling platform.

  1. Its form-factor. The small screen and “small device” experience was ideal for a rather private activity.
  2. It only did one thing. The interface was sparse and utilitarian. There were no pop-up notifications, medals to earn, no internet connectivity or even color. It simply left me alone to process my thoughts.
  3. It was tangible. The fact that PalmJournal lived on my Palm IIIx meant that it had a certain material tangibility about it – i.e. I could lock the device in a drawer, and I’d know that it is safe. No messing around with passwords, encryption, to-the-cloud-crap.

Amidst the deluge of supersmart devices currently flooding the market, there is definitely still room for single-purpose devices that are far better suited to specific activities than multi-purpose devices could ever be.

Long live PalmJournal.