No need to thank us; we’re pretty proud of what we can offer.

Walking home through my neighbourhood last night, I was confused. How do I describe what I’m seeing? So: a drunken taxonomy:

When drunk X becomes:

• Yuppies: self-important and obnoxious.
• Teenagers: loud and obnoxious.
• Footy fans (any code): violent and obnoxious.

This year hallowe’en was popular with the teenagers with a little bit of footy fan thrown in. And who were they actually? Australian.

And these are all wonderful things. But, from the inside I think we forget the single best thing about agile software development:

Agile means your customers no longer want to throttle you.

Don’t forget this: it keeps everything in perspective.

My first real software development job out of Uni was at a small technology company. We had a core product, an expert system runtime, that the company was built around. We were organised into two major divisions: Products, who worked on the core technology; and Solutions, a traditional consulting division who delivered projects (usually) based around the core technology. Products would have been about 20% of the company’s employees. The rest, admin staff and Solutions.

I worked in Products. I like to think we did good work: during the four years I was there the product became much faster, finally ran on more than one OS, supported multiple platforms and countless other features were all delivered. Delivered on a three month release cycle. We had a roadmap of releases covering the next year and a half or so, with features allocated to each release. And every three months there’d be a new, mildly tested, release that had some of the planned features, some last minute features and a bunch of bug fixes and improvements for features from the last couple of releases.

At this point I would like to remind the uproariously laughing peanut gallery that this was my first job out of Uni and I knew no better. Clearly, neither did any of the managers.

I can still remember the moment of revelation when I discovered that all of Solutions hated us. Hated the Products staff, hated the product. One wag had joked that the company was divided into Solutions and Problems. How could this be? Our technology was great! Really! It was genuinely the best of its kind in the world. Why did they hate us so much? How could they hate us so much?

It’s obvious now: Solutions were trying to win new business and then deliver projects on time and budget. Invariably they’d find bugs in the product, or new features they needed. And our response? “It’s too late for this release; we’ll try to include it in the next one.” In four months time.

Now on an agile team what would I say? “OK, we’ll include that bug fix in the next iteration. You’ll have it Friday week.” That’s a bit glib of course. In reality there will have to be a discussion about what is going to get pushed out of the next iteration, and estimation of how long the new work will take. But when your answer can honestly be in terms of tested, working software and a couple of weeks delay, everyone is happy. And in particular your clients are not going to be frustrated and furious.

On only a couple of occasions since have I had to be the client to a waterfall team. And every time I’ve ended up wanting to throttle them: “How can it take as long to plan the work as it’s going to take to do, ferchrissakes?” And every time I have to remind myself that they’re not trying to be difficult — they genuinely want to help — it really is just this hard to turn the boat.

There are now nine people in the world who have walked on the moon, and unless something dramatic happens [...], it won’t be long before there are none. That might not mean anything to a lot of you, because you are, I am led to understand, young people, and the moonwalks didn’t happen in your lifetime. [...] But it means a lot to me, and Andrew Smith, and when the Apollo missions, the future as we understood it, become history, then something will be lost from our psyches. But what do you care? Oh, go back to your hip-hop and your computer games and your promiscuity. (Or your virginity. I forget which one your generation is into at the moment.)
— The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby

A passing reference to Nick Hornby led to me picking up this book again and re-reading one of his columns. At random. And that perfect little précis of what happened to the future we were promised was buried in there. The whole collection is replete with such examples.

Now excuse me while I spend the afternoon reading.

Timing. What makes a good comedian? No, wait. I think I told that wrong. Let me try again. And again. And again. It’ll be funny in the end. Believe me.

At the end of each term at the ACP, a student exhibition is run. And as I was a student this term, I get to enter a photo. One of these here. Help me pick. Which do you think I should enter? Presented in the order I took them…

swan with food

blue mountains balcony

between the cascades

stairs

v is for verisimilitude

a flower under a bridge

raven

uplit fig

wall with movement

blowing sign

Thank you. Comments greatly appreciated.

Like a match struck in a darkened room.

There was something in those simple eight words for me. Some image. Some sense. Some rhythm. Something I still can’t identify, but something that instantly said to me this is a special book. As I read that line aloud now I can hear the brief scratch and then the hiss. I can see the bright white flare; the flare that leaves a faint yellow outline in the darkness, the darkness that suddenly seems all the deeper. And then the steady fade as the flame turns from white to orange and the match burns itself out.

There, in those eight simple words, is the entire novel.

From those simple words I was hooked.

This is one of the greatest books I have ever read: Lethem is now in the rarefied league of Graham Greene, and, well, not many others. Someone who can write a deep, lyrical, beautiful but entertaining story that moves you.

I wish I could capture precisely why this was such a good book but it feels indescribable. It’s a story of a boy growing up. In the only world he has ever known, a world where he feels like perhaps he should be special — but he’s not. It’s a world to which he doesn’t belong, a world that he will forever be outside. The obvious escape into a fortress of his own devising is, however, a far more dangerous trap.

In the writing, the tone and the pace the sense of growing up was captured as I’ve never read before. It’s like a street scene coming into focus as the rising sun burns the morning fog away. The story starts with everything obscured and dreamlike. The descriptions are as if Dylan (the boy) isn’t really there, as if he is reporting a story told to him, about him. Which is precisely what all our earliest memories really are. As the fog clears and Dylan himself comes into focus he moves from being an outside observer to a passive participant to someone in control of his life. As if the story is the focal ring of a camera slowly spinning him into the right place in his life. Almost. Almost placing him where he belongs. In focus along with his world. Almost.

The beginning of the second part very nearly disappointed me. It appeared the book was about to head towards a very predictable place. But Lethem steered gloriously clear. Leaving us with the tantalising possibility of fantasy, the possibility of belonging, and the reality of the best damn book I’ve read in a long time.

So, if you’re going to manage to convince the world to change the way it does something, it had better have an benefit that’s immediately obvious and take no more than a few seconds to explain how to do.
— A long, rambly exploration of the state…, this is stevenf.com

The desktop metaphor seems to be dying out. The Newton’s notepad metaphor was stillborn with the Newton. Web applications use the ‘enterprise green screen’ as their metaphor. There must be something else.

Fantastic Four, Vol. 1
J. Michael Strazcynski and Mike McKone

It’s been sometime since I’ve read any graphic novels or even comics. I read Watchmen because I knew the movie was about to open. I’d previously enjoyed both of the V for Vendetta comic and movie, but I wish I’d read it before seeing it, so I wanted to this one the other way around.

Impressive, both the comic and the movie. Though the movie was largely just a moving version of the comic, apart from that great title sequence. So, I’ll ignore the movie and talk about the comic. This is really a graphic novel. It is a work of fiction telling a story using the core elements of characterisation, plot and pacing to drive the single, coherent piece to its conclusion, it just happens to tell this through pictures as well as words. It felt like more of a graphic novel than V: it is far more focused, the characterisation is better and the pace is well maintained. V had a tendency (common to all serial forms) to bog right down. For an Alan Moore work, Watchmen is also surprisingly low on violence. Sure, there are some pretty gruesome parts, but not too many — or they are well used.

There are some interesting experiments with alternative ways of telling parts of the story. One chapter is told entirely from the perspective of a character who does not perceive time as linear. But the jumping through time is well used and not confusing. There are also long sections of prose at the end of each chapter, these provide another angle on the main events. It creates this sense that as well as following the story you are also seeing history unfold. Above all else this is a highly ambiguous work — I am still not sure what I think of the ending. And that would be about the highest praise you could hope for.

Fresh from this success and inspired by another book I read shortly after Watchmen, I finally read the Fantastic Four book that I bought some time ago.

And oh boy was that a mistake.

This was bought when I realised that all the comics I was reading were from a certain niche of the market. I wanted to remain balanced and went looking for something from the traditional mainstream of comics. This was the first volume in a sub-series, was written by the highly respected J. Michael Strazcynski (he wrote the TV series Babylon 5, which I have never seen but is well-regarded in sci-fi circles,) how could I go wrong?

It went very wrong: the characters are childish, the plot predictable and laughable, even the artwork is disappointing – the female character almost never looks the same in any two panels. I read the entire thing — only an investment of 45 minutes or so — but by the end I was pretty disgusted. The most annoying thing is how much time is spent referring to past adventures. This is not because this story is part of some decades long arc, I am completely unfamiliar with previous stories but I could always understand the plot. Instead it felt like listening to that annoying friend of a friend down at the pub drone on and on about these great things that happened to him this one time. I am quite happily returning to my niche; I’ve dipped my toe in the mainstream and it’s polluted.

And to further reinforce that, I had a major comics success shortly afterwards. Comics are still firmly on my agenda.

Still, there’s nothing technically preventing you from using [mouse button] chording in your program. If you want to code it up, then more power to you.
— Why is there no support in the window manager for mouse button chording?, The Old New Thing

Does not mean it is a good idea.

There was one aspect that Orwell did get glaringly wrong: the impact of technology. the limited technology shown in 1984 is all very much in the service of the state: the newspaper re-writing tools and the continuously broadcasting screens for example. But these two are both very poor predictions of how technology actually evolved over the three and a half decades between writing 1984 and 1984. Photocopiers deeply limit the effectiveness of re-writing newspapers – people would have their own copies, not much point in changing the centrally stored version then? And a network of screens continuously streaming into everyone’s homes? That’s just crying out to be subverted as a peer-to-peer network.

But these are just details and a symptom: Orwell got something much more fundamental, and surprising, wrong.

Technology is inherently liberating, not controlling; equalising not oppressive.

How is this possibly so? Modern history is replete with examples of dictators using weapons technology to do pretty horrible things in stamping out rebellion and even more recent history shows huge corporations attempting to do exactly what Orwell predicted, to their customers. But these are just anecdotes. Other anecdotes show mobile phones and hand-held GPS units being of incalculable aid to rebels. Corporations are trying to spy on their customers precisely because they were completely blind-sided by developing technology. I want to address a more fundamental point than these anecdotes.

Technology is probably reasonably described as the output of humanity’s tool-making instinct. No one really thinks of it as broadly as that, especially now. It’s inconceivable to regard the chair and the kettle as technology even though they were both once cutting-edge. Instead, technology is regarded as the recent output of our tool-making instinct. There is a question going begging here though: how do recent technological developments migrate into that background of things we just have?

Going back beyond the kettle and the chair, the spear would have once been cutting edge technology, developed after extensive R&D and in the face of punishing market conditions and intense competition by some family somewhere in the African savannah. The immediate effect of this new development within that family would have been stunning. Instead of only the elite runners capable of running down an antelope being the ones providing meat, anyone strong enough to wield a spear suddenly could. Given the very different physical requirements for the two hunting techniques this was certainly a different set of family members. And right there, the spear as a piece of technology has liberated some members of the family. Sure, hunting is still the domain of strong, young males, but this is the savannah of African a million years ago we’re talking about; it took until 1900 before we even gave women the vote. Equality is a luxury the ancient savannah could never afford.

This is still just a fascinating theory, but think on the implication: the spear was a valuable piece of technology because it helped overcome a physical limitation of the family. And this is generally true of all technology: it is valuable when it lets people do something they otherwise couldn’t. Technology is about placing the unobtainable within more people’s grasp – but not by devaluing the goal, instead by extending the grasp. As the spear placed more meat within the grasp of the family on the savannah, so the mobile phone places more of your friends within range of a chat or a helping hand now. Technology is leverage; it takes what you are already capable of and then by adding a little more in just the right way, makes you capable of something new. By it’s very nature technology is about raising the average standard of what can be achieved, leveling the field for all.

It is, in two words, inherently empowering. And to me, this is the answer to that question. When technology perfectly articulates its own empowerment it migrates into the background of society, no longer a big deal. Just there for everyone to enjoy.

Of course, that’s not to say all technological developments achieve this holy grail of leverage. Much development results in brand new technology that never sees widespread use. Many times this is the natural inefficiencies in a capitalist market. Frustrated technologists try to cope using open forums for ideas and development. Open source is a modern example, but public universities have always openly shared their work.

But still we see failures of technology.

Now, if you accept that technology has succeeded when it multiples out the abilities of humanity then the development of the technology is just part of the problem. Just as important is the interface between it and actual living, breathing humans. For technology to effectively leverage our abilities, it must become an invisible extension of ourselves; the interface, the line the technology draws around us, must be a perfect fit between humans and that goal, right there, the one they’re really after. Without something close to perfection, you’ve got just another disappointment, and worse: a waste of someone’s time spent thinking. There is a huge class of ignored and overlooked problems here in these interfaces. These are problems of design; not in the narrow ‘how-does-it-look’ sense, but in a much deeper ‘how-is-the-functioning-of-this-going-to-interact-with-a-human’ sense.

And I have come to realise that this is a question that I care deeply about. Technology is not an end-in-itself. It must be designed to be used. No, that’s too weak. Technology must be designed to make people’s lives better. When designing something don’t just think ‘how will this be used?’ Instead, think ‘how will this make someone’s life better?’ Don’t waste your life on simple, easy half goals: aim for the big one. Find your target market and work out how your idea will make their life better. And I mean, really make someone’s life better. Imagine your product fully integrated into their life. Can’t see it yet? Well, back to the design then. You’re aiming for a glove here. Accept nothing less.

Looking back at some of my essays I can see that I’ve been talking around this indirectly for some time. I recently listened to a podcast by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders and John Gruber of Daring Fireball that managed to crystallise my obsession for me. So I’m now planning of focusing on this idea. I want to see technology designed first and foremost to interact with humans, to fit into their lives invisibly and to thus make their lives better.

There will still be book reviews, because I love to read and writing those makes me a better reader, but I will be attempting to focus my other writing on this central idea: Technology Designed around People. I have no idea if I’m going to succeed, but at least focusing my rants might make me less annoying to be around. I also believe that society has a fixed amount of attention, this will be an attempt to focus some of that attention where I think it should be.