For the past four months, I’ve been traveling about and haven’t had much of the necessary time nor the inclination to write. In lieu of that, I had been aggressively updating my Facebook photo albums. Being back at school for the summer will reinstate blogging as among my primary procrastination measures, so expect more content in the coming weeks, including a much-needed update to WP-Cats.

In the past I’ve always enjoyed the changes from school to work and vice-versa. The variety offered by Waterloo’s co-op program is a wonderful blessing: Working is money and free time and independence. School is community and friendships.

This time does feel different, though, and I’m not the only one feeling it.

I’m trying to be excited to go back to school, but I’m really just not. New York is a beautiful city; I’d come to love it there. Meanwhile, my connection to Waterloo this term was little more than a tuition bill and an increasingly broken and mismanaged professional development program. Here, I was in a job where I could leverage my existing skills, learn far more than I have in any academic term, and yet still make a meaningful, appreciated contribution.

I do know that I will one day be back in New York—I love too many things about it to not return. This leaving is temporary; whether back in months or years, for a few days, or for a decade, I cannot say. But I do mean to return. Leaving now is not a permanent farewell, only a temporary parting.

About a month and a half ago, I lost my new camera somewhere in New York. I spent a day and a half looking for it, but I pretty quickly accepted that it was gone. I’d only bought it at Christmas, so there was no homework to do—I was getting the exact same model again, the excellent Canon SD600.

Having to replace a lost or stolen item is a frustrating process. But as I dropped $200 on another camera, I stopped for a moment to be thankful for what I didn’t lose: In just a month and a half of service, that first camera covered Christmas with the family, as well as my first few weeks in New York, a total of 681 pictures. In the weeks since I bought its replacement, I’ve been to Vermont, Boston, Philadelphia, and D.C., where I’ve racked up over a thousand more snaps. Read on…

One of the troubles with putting a website to sleep is you have difficulty finding a topic interesting enough to be worth waking it up for. Each whack at the snooze button makes trivial posts about nothing that much sillier.

I’ll have more to say about New York over the coming weeks, but this is just a kind of funny side observation from my time in the city, unrelated to the city itself. (For the impatient, there are a handful of pictures here and here)

And it has to do with memory. Read on…

I lost my credit card a few days ago, and had to call to have it cancelled. When they asked me when I’d last used it, I had to say, “Well, I used the physical card a week and a half ago at a Harvey’s, but I made an online software purchase last week, and my monthly donation to Wikipedia went through a few days ago.”

In the two years that I’ve had my MasterCard—and thus, PayPal—I’ve tried to make an effort to support those folks who are willing to give away the fruits of their labour. This post isn’t about trumpeting my generosity; most of these donations were only $5 or $10. The post is about highlighting quality, and thanking those that let me try their creations for free, and pay for them in my own time. Read on…

Looking at my DVD library, I’ve pretty much come to terms with my tastes: drama, intrigue, and witty relationship comedy. Action just doesn’t do it for me. And horror definitely doesn’t do it for me.

Case: Minority Report. For an “action” movie, we’ve only three major action sequences, and all of them border on the ridiculous. A runaway jetpack that grills hamburgers? A factory that builds a car with Tom Cruise alive and kicking inside it? A “flush the tank” lever that no one knew about until the moment a hero needed a quick getaway? Read on…

Douglas Bowman has posted a piece about the role of the designer in collaborating with their clients. This same philosophy is as applicable in software design as it is web development and branding.

I’ve recently moved from being a hobby programmer to a hobby programmer who sometimes gets money. Which sort of makes me a ‘professional software developer.’

“Development”

To me, the term software development reflects a distinctly corporate attitude toward the creation of software:

• The developers’ natural tendency is to Mess Up.
• We must meticulously document every facet of every feature in order to Prevent This.
• We will Design It. They will Implement It.
• We are not interested in a work-in-progress, we will see it when it’s Done.

It’s not hard to see how this pattern of thought may have developed: Hackers speak in programming concepts. How intimidating it must be to hear expressions like ‘referencial integrity’ thrown around the design table!

It should be our job to carefully explain these things as necessary, rather than jumping to conclusions and leaving the client in the dark. After all, when decisions need to be made, how useful is a customer who’s full of buzz-talk but has no basis for understanding the underpinnings of their new software?

The other part of this is that they need to show us the flow of their business. Not what they percieve the flow of the application should be, that can come later, but the actual product process. The more time is spent showing your programmers the big-picture view of what’s going in the company, the better their understanding will be. The more they see where their new application fits into the existing framework, the more ‘little things’ they’ll be able to add to make it that much better.

With all this teaching going on, there’s an upfront time commitment to be made. But it’s a worthwhile one. And it’s time that would have been spent writing a spec, anyways, so instead of just saying what needs to be done, why not persuade each other of what needs doing?

The Risk

What’s the problem here? The problem is that you can end up with a pig-headed hacker who thinks he knows what you need and won’t bother to learn even if you try to persuade.

Fire him.

And when you’re hiring to replace him, look for someone who’s 50% teachable and 50% able-to-teach.

Pick a project from their portfolio and ask them to talk about it. You’re looking for an explanation of the lowest-level and the highest-level. What makes this thing tick under the hood? And what role did it play in the greater scope of the organization? After data left your program, where did it go?

The amount they’ll share about that project is indicative of what they’ll bother to learn about yours… and what they’ll teach you about it.

Mike