A Spork in the Road

Jonathan Follett, in one of two current articles posted on A List Apart, discusses The Rules of Digital Engagement:

When it comes to work style and culture, virtual teams—especially groups of contractors—are inherently less formal and more flexible than traditional office-based organizations. We are, as William Gibson puts it in his novel Pattern Recognition, “post-geographic”—operating beyond physical boundaries. But when workers no longer collaborate within a particular physical space, they must adopt a disciplined devotion to process. In digital space, the physical artifacts of day-to-day business we share are gone—what remains are discussions and deliverables. The way we hold discussions and create deliverables becomes increasingly important.

I love collaborating online, except when I’m dealing with someone who has poor communication skills. These are never people we enjoy dealing with, but the problems are magnified by geographical distance. When you can’t sit down with a person and hash out what she’s trying to tell you—in person—it can double or triple the amount of time it takes to complete a simple task.

I’m always discovering ways to improve electronic communication. For example, I try to limit emails to one topic or main question, and I use a lot more paragraph breaks than I otherwise would. I agree with Follett that, a decade into mainstream electronic communication, we’re still figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

As is my wont, I’d like to celebrate the combination of whimsy and insight that characterizes the best software development approaches.

Today’s exhibit comes from the programming language Ruby. Duck typing is a concept that is summarized in Chapter 23 of Dave Thomas’ excellent Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide:

…the type of an object is defined more by what that object can do… If an object walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then the interpreter is happy to treat it as if it were a duck.

Non-programmers may find the exact meaning of that quote obscure, but hopefully you can appreciate the humor and common sense of looking at the currency of everyday code (integers and characters and files and arrays and other, more complicated elements) through the lens of the old “walks like a duck/talks like a duck” cliche.

I’m reading a fantastic book about agile software development: The Art of Agile Development by James Shore and Shane Warden. And as I’m reading, I’m thinking about how to scale some of these principles — designed for and derived from teams of approximately 3-20 people — down to a team of 1.

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Riddle me this, Batman: why in the world does any enterprise website use ASP at all?

Now, I’m a Firefox user, for reasons too numerous to describe here and now. I’m on the web constantly. I design for it, and I explore it for business and leisure. Most particularly for business, and here’s where I absolutely cannot fathom business websites that insist on utilizing a website framework that does not work on a significant portion of their user’s browsers.

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I’ve been refactoring code today. This is the programmer’s equivalent of a thorough edit: I’m not rewriting the story, just reworking everything so it’s clean and compact.

This is not my own code. It’s an application that we bought and are translating from one scripting language (PHP) to another (Ruby on Rails). I have to admit that I like refactoring, which I manifest by my copious complaints about all the mistakes the previous programmer made, his lack of style, his illogical choice of variable names, and so forth. It is SO much more fun to complain about someone else’s mistakes than it is to clean up after your own. Read the rest of this entry »

I love HGTV. I love decorating and choosing paint colors and buying accessories. To my great delight, it’s finally time for us to decorate our kitchen/sitting room area. I was inspired by a gorgeous throw we got from Maureen, and after a few iterations of paint color choices (the first pair of yellows we chose clashed with the blue-gray marble, for instance), we’re finally settled on a color scheme: Adriatic Sea (blue), Fortrace (gray), Ranch Red, and Crushed Pearl.

But I didn’t let my color fancies go to waste. I now have five AcePaint booklets and a slew of paint chip panels on file in my office, because I had a fabulous revelation last week: home decorating tools are a great tool for choosing website color schemes.

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I know that the STC’s Technical Communication: Journal of the Society for Technical Communication sounds dry; and frankly, it sometimes is, although in a useful and interesting way. But the August issue features a delicious article by Russel Hirst called “Virtues and Vices of Omission” (is it somehow Freudian that I often try to spell the word with an extra “m”: ommission?).

…what I’m pondering in this article is the idea that all effective communication, even an amplification, is inseparable from the art of omission.

Most delightful to me is that Hirst links the principle of omission, or brevitas, through diverse fields including technical writing, creative writing, visual art, data graphics, and software development. Read the rest of this entry »

Optimism afflicts me in both my worlds, web development and fiction writing. The flip side of optimism is, of course, despair: when I realize it’s impossible to reach the dizzying heights to which I so casually aspired at the beginning of a project, my brain siphons away every happy chemical and erases my buzz, leaving me with a creative hangover and a depressive unwillingness to finish the project and thus prove my incompetence.

Maureen McHugh charts this emotional course, from “This is the greatest idea I’ve EVER had” down to the Dark Night of the Soul, and then back out.

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I love NPR.

This morning I heard a spot on Morning Edition about a group in New York City called Jelly: freelancers meeting up in people’s home for a workday, once or twice a month on average, to help alleviate the isolation of working from home. The host provides wifi, the guests bring their laptops, and everyone gets to work in a social environment for the day without all the stuff we all hate about working at an office.

Simple. Brilliant.

They’ve spread (get it?) to Philadelphia and DC. Who knows — maybe Tampa/Clearwater will get a Jelly group someday soon. Hm…

I won’t pretend I’m not embarrassed to have injured myself sitting in a chair.

Of course, I’m not alone; as soon as I say “severe neck and back pain” to anyone who works at a desk, I get instant sympathy and advice. (Best advice from a colleague so far: crunches to build abdominal strength.) Sitting in a bad posture for 10-12 hour days and stressing out over work has installed a little pain machine in my back, and the pain machine is trained to work long hours and take its duties seriously. [sigh]

I’m sitting in a brand new chair right now, waiting for my brand new desk to arrive, and stopping once an hour to do my brand new exercises recommended by my brand new massage therapist. Chair, desk, and massage therapist are all things I’ve meant to find over the past year, but always with the thought that I’d wait “another month or two” because of time, money, etc. All those delay tactics were tossed out the window by the screaming agony that’s taken up residence in my neck and between my shoulder blades.

I’ve actually thought seriously about a neck-ectomy. Last night I fantasized that my neck could just be removed because - wow! - wouldn’t that feel good?

Instead, I take handfuls of ibuprofin and spend a lot of time sitting in a very precise position to minimize the anguish.