Things I Like
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It’s about the users. It’s about finding ways to make our content available to them no matter how unpredictable the path that lies between us and them.
It's about users! 'nuff said.
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Small steps move us forward. They may not be the amazing, overnight success stories we hear about, but that's because you don't hear about the thousand small steps that contributed to that overnight success story.
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Some will point out, correctly, that even educated people can still be racists, but this shouldn’t remove the spotlight from anti-intellectualism. Yes, even intelligent and educated individuals, often due to cultural and institutional influences, can sometimes carry racist biases. But critically thinking individuals recognize racism as wrong and undesirable, even if they aren’t yet able to eliminate every morsel of bias from their own psyches or from social institutions. An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated by fear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions. Sound familiar?
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The post-work proponents acknowledge that, even in the best post-work scenarios, pride and jealousy will persevere, because reputation will always be scarce, even in an economy of abundance. But with the right government provisions, they believe, the end of wage labor will allow for a golden age of well-being. Hunnicutt said he thinks colleges could reemerge as cultural centers rather than job-prep institutions. The word school, he pointed out, comes from skholē, the Greek word for “leisure.” “We used to teach people to be free,” he said. “Now we teach them to work.”
This is a long, but really fascinating article on work and what would happen if there is no work in the future. I've read and thought a lot about work in the past several years. I'm not sure that I agree that if we have no work we will become like the people on the spaceships in WALL-E, I would like to think it would be more like Star Trek, where we still do things, but we don't have to worry about earning wages or the basics of life. What I found most fascinating is how people in Youngstown have a revitalization of culture and creative pursuits, because they have the time for it now.
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But I’ve also come to see writing as a material in itself. Something we can play with and manipulate. Something that can change over time as questions come up in the design process or an idea evolves. Writing can be a tool for talking to ourselves when we’re still figuring things out. A sort of mirror or feedback system. A way to understand and articulate design.
Over the past several years, I've come to love words more. I've also realized that words in design/applications/etc are so very important, more important than we often think. And I love the way Nicole talks about this, using words in design and as part of the process.
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Years later, a wise friend said he found the more interesting people tend to be ones who can’t exactly describe what they do day to day. Instead, of forcing prescription, let’s embrace 'and.'
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I want to defend it not because it’s a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents. Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city. Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth.
I saved this link because I love the way the architect talks about the building in Paris. We are going through a huge building boom in Portland, and because we limit sprawl and growth, it means lots of new buildings in old neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods, like mine, are changing, but I'm not sure it's for the worse. It's just change. And I, for one, would rather encourage density and deal with the change.
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Digital devices are not eating away at our brains. They are, however, luring us toward near constant outwardly directed thought, a situation that’s probably unique in human experience. A flat cap on time with devices — the restriction we first think of for ourselves and our kids — might help. So would parking devices in another room for a while. But it would be more effective if we could learn to recognize in ourselves when escape from our thoughts is O.K. and when reflection is in order. As a bonus, judgments like that require inwardly directed attention, a mental habit that in our smartphone era, we’d be dumb to lose.
I've been going through a bit of a step away from devices and from the internet in general when I'm not working. What I've found, my mind has time for rest and ideas form. It's been good, and it's been my choice. I don't think the devices are doing anything to us, they are just pointing out that we lack the will power to step away from them.
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I think the biggest policy is to assume a remote stance by default: that is, assume everyone is remote all the time and behave accordingly, accommodating people in offices as need be, rather than the reverse. In practice that primarily means leveraging written communication (whether asynchronous, like email or shared docs, or synchronous, such as chat) over oral, since writing is easier to transmit, archive, and reference later.
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He then gave an example of what this narrative can do to people. At the University of Kansas's geographic information system (GIS) day a few years ago, he sat in on a "fantastic presentation" about predicting seasonal floods on the Kansas River. The student had used tools that should be familiar to many of those at PyCon: Amazon Web Services, Linux, PostgreSQL, Python, Django, GeoDjango, and so on. Kaplan-Moss was hiring at the time, and she (the student) had just written thousands of lines of Python, so he asked if she wanted to interview for his company. Her response was that she couldn't do that, because she "was not really a programmer". That came from a woman who had just invented her own distributed GIS data processing pipeline, he said—but she's not really a programmer. That's because "programming is something you are in this myth, not something you do".
Really interesting read on how we talk about programming, and how we should be talking about it.
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The weird thing about removing a chunk of time from our weekly calendar is that, as far as I can tell, we do the same amount in a week as everyone else. Work gets done, deliverables get delivered. No client has ever cared that we’re not available for calls on Tuesday mornings.
I adore this idea. When I freelanced, Fridays were my day. I usually did admin in the morning and generally caught up on little things so I could start on Mondays with things squared away. But the afternoons, they were mine. I would read, write, relax, explore Portland, or whatever else I wanted to do. I think it's beneficial to have this time and would love to work out a way to do this in my current job, even if just for a couple of hours to recharge.
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I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that's considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, "Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated." Hurting a student's feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.
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That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip — but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step — when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough — then it's time to grow up.
This whole article is fantastic and I am grateful to Rob for the link. I had a hard time picking out a quote, so picked the above, but there is also a fantastic section on mistakes and how a mistake isn't owned by one person since the team reviewed code and it was allowed to get to the point of error. I really like that idea, the idea of things being a team effort, truly. And the rise of Gitblame, in my opinion, can be harmful for the team attitude when it comes to writing software.
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It’s routine from the cockpit to see storms form in real time, and from them the fall of new rain on the roof of the ocean, or to overfly the endpoints of glaciers, where shards of the ancient snow-glass tumble into the police-light blue of northern seas. When, after long hours over desert or sparsely inhabited land a city appears, the water we see near it — lakes, dams, rivers locked in their rolling green frames of vegetation — looks holy as blood.
I really love this piece and the way the pilot describes his point of view on flying. So very different from what we experience in our seats. I've started to be much more nervous about flying lately and it coincides with having to do it more than ever, so it was nice to be reminded of the amazing parts of it all.
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This is a great podcast on how tech was used in the 2012 US Presidential election. But more than that, I really love the way Harper Reed talks about how we talk about tech. He makes so many great points, so much to think about.