photo credit: Extra Ketchup. This is not me … but it practically could be!

I saw Google last week proclaiming the impending death of the desktop computer, in favor of ubiquitous mobile computing with computing power provided by the cloud.  I see more people replacing their gaming PCs with consoles, their family desktops with notepads, and their notepads with iPads and iPhones.

As a geek who loves gadgets, I’m not opposed to this.  I love progress, and I love the shiny new technology we have access to now.  But I can’t help but look at what happens when a young kid first boots up a device like this.

Imagine a world where the iPad is the ubiquitous platform of choice.  Where do you get applications for your iPad?  From one vendor: Apple.  How do you write an application for your iPad?  You ask Apple for permission.  You apply to be a developer, ponying up $99 a year to do so.  You buy the specific hardware they support, so you can develop and test.  You learn their proprietary SDK, write something, and then want to share it with your friends.  How do you do that?  You ask permission again, before they’ll put your software on their store.

These are not huge barriers to people who seriously want to develop iPhone or iPad software, as demonstrated by the 100,000+ applications currently available for download.  But it’s a moderate barrier to the hobbyist, and an insurmountable one to the middle-school kid with a dream and some spare time, and a further insurmountable one to the person who just wants to experiment and share with friends and has no desire to publish to the world.

I don’t want to make Apple look like the villain here.  Consumers are demanding easier to use devices that “just work” and companies like Apple, Sony, and Microsoft are stepping up.  But I have to wonder what impact this is going to have on the future generation of software engineers who are being born today (or who were born 3 to 5 years ago).  Will we have a generation of people who are expert users but have no inclination to build?  Or will the definition of “build” change in some way?

(Thanks to Michael Surran for the completely awesome photo on flickr which I am using in this post.  His use of the Creative Commons license has made it possible for me to show you exactly the image I wanted for this post with a clean conscience.)

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

The concept: write a project where multiple EMC developer technologies can be used in a single program.  Bonus points for incorporating other online technologies.  Win money and fame and the adoration of the world.

I’m waiting for the detailed T&C, but you can read up more on it here.  Innovation through contest is something EMC has tinkered with quite a bit, as you may have read on Steve Todd’s blog last year.

Definitely check out the link for more info. I’m hoping I can find some time in between all my “real work” to put a couple of these tools through their paces.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

It was hard to create, it should be hard to use (or maintain).

Basically, we worked hard to get this stuff done and we expect you as a user or future maintainer to put the same effort into it.  After all, it took many man-years to write the software, it’s not too much to expect you to spend a few weeks reading manuals and understanding it before you start complaining that it’s hard to use.

As Paul Young recently wrote, though, imagine if wood-chippers took that approach.

Imagine if an author did?  “It took me years to write this novel, you should have to do some research before you read it.”

Some do, I guess.  I’ve read a few novels that require major work to get through.  Sometimes the end result is even worth the work.  But as my fiction writing friends tell me, in general you don’t want your readers to be thinking about your writing, you want them thinking about your story.  Similarly, you don’t want your users thinking about your software design, you just want them thinking about the task your software enables.

I feel the same way about maintaining and testing software.  We want developers thinking about the code, not about the way you wrote it.  You don’t want someone looking at your code, peering at it for a few minutes, and then saying, “Oh, I get it.  Wow, that’s clever.”

There’s a famous quote attributed to a half-dozen different writers (and perhaps originated by Blaise Pascal), that says, basically, “I am sorry I wrote such a lengthy letter; I did not have time to write a short one.”  It takes time to create simple, elegant software.  When we force the issue and compress the time spent on a project, you end up with complex code and complex user interactions.  We should consider this a problem, not a point of pride.

When we present some difficult software to our users, we should apologize to them.  “I’m sorry this UI is so complex.  I didn’t have time to make it easier.”  Instead, we make them feel guilty.  “Ah, perhaps you should have taken the training,” or read the manual more carefully, or attended our seminar.

Think about the people on your team, and ask yourself if they “get” this concept.  Realize, that if they don’t, you’re eventually going to lose your market share to a competitor who does.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Why the sudden burst in activity?  Why am I letting my day job run away with my life?

I’m not, really.  The truth is my shift into a more technical role was just the first part of a two-part shift I didn’t see coming.  I also inherited a handful of work from another colleague who had recently changed jobs within EMC.  I did the best I could playing both roles for the month of January, but I basically spent the entire month stressed out and losing track of everything.

The answer, in true EMC style, was to invest more time into work — but in a smarter way.  I set aside chunks of “me” time at home (and at work, to be fair) to organize my tasks, organize my team’s tasks, organize my information.  Cleaned my inbox.  Set up a system for tracking open issues, for organizing my meeting minutes, all that.  I didn’t do a full GTD reset or anything (I keep thinking I should, but …), but I did invest heavily into my work infrastructure.

The end result is that at the end of the day I’m tired and spent, but I’m not lost and overwhelmed.  I know where I am, I know what I need to do tomorrow, and I know what my team is doing.

Mostly.

The truth is, how hard you work isn’t really the determining factor in how you feel at the end of the day.  It’s how you do that work.  For me, the weight of inheriting someone else’s “tracking system” was too much to carry, and I had to do extra work to create my own.  It made the past calendar week pretty much unbearable, but now that I’m coming out of the weeds I can see February shaping up to be a pretty good month.

Busy, but good.

That’s how I like it.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

So here, as requested by Natalie, is my version of the web at 20…

How has the web changed my life?

It’s a bit of a cheat for me to answer this question, because what truly changed my life were the networks that predated what we think of as the Web.  The web made them easier to use and broadened their scope by orders of magnitude, but the damage was already done.

I would not be where I am in life without the Internet.  As a teenager, I hungrily sought out information from any source I could.  On a TRS-80 Color Computer hooked up to a tiny black&white TV, at 300 baud, I connected to (and eventually ran) bulletin boards, snuck into unprotected university dialins to play MUDs and read Usenet, and connected to individuals and information from a much bigger world.  I am still in contact with some of those people, still use the behaviors I learned back then every day.

But it wasn’t until college, in 1993, that I saw those things melded together into The Web.  It may have been technically 3 years old by then, but it was just getting its momentum.  It became my immediate and constant companion, and has been since.  Everything I cherished about the Internet was boiled down into one magical term: Home Page.  We didn’t have net connections in our dorms, so all that gweeping was done in the semi-dark basements of the CS building, in labs shared with giant line printers and dozens of black and white monitors.

I can still taste the Mountain Dew … and the freedom.

I created my first web page in those years, when the best web search engine was called WebCrawler and people still coded for users of Lynx.  The Internet Archive has a version of that page, from right before I graduated.  Most of the links are incredibly broken, but you can still see a snapshot of my personality in the text, personal branding way before the Millennials “discovered” it.

This was the brave new world.  And we thought we’d keep it to ourselves forever: nerds arguing over Star Trek and D&D, posting pictures of our cats, and researching new technologies.

And then some damn fool figured out how to make money off it all.

How has the web changed business and society?

I like to say the changes to society and business associated with the web have come (and are coming) in waves.  For a long time, businesses saw the web as nothing but a giant Yellow Pages, and society saw the web as a place to argue over Star Trek.  I remember a magical period in the Web’s history when business hadn’t caught on yet, but there were enough people for actual connections to be made.  You could find people who had been to far away places and talk to them about their experiences.  You could bump into groups who were dedicated to obscure programming languages and figure out how to solve bizarre software problems.

And then the marketers took over, clumsily but powerfully. When you tried to find real people, you found storefronts instead.  Search engines were new, and SEO technology outpaced the search algorithms.  You couldn’t trust the web any more.  Communities were buried, hard to find.  It was difficult to meet new people and form new interactions.

Eventually the old sense of community emerged from its hibernation.  Strong web forums with passionate moderators helped people with similar interests hook up, and some of them lasted long enough to become trusted sources of information.  Social media sites formed and helped us track trusted crowds.  Web page technology got decent, bandwidth got cheap, blogs became mainstream, and suddenly (if you knew where to look) the web was social again.  Now there were two webs, the social web and the static clumsy business web.

Then, most recently, businesses figured out how to leverage the new (old) online world.  Instead of trying to take over, they tried to engage.  And the business web became social.

And so we’re back where we started, but better.  We’re free to argue over Star Trek and post pictures of our cats … and route around government censorship … and collaborate on new technologies … and tallk directly to our government … and order pizza online … and monitor millions of conversations until you find an unhappy customer in Paraguay … and finally engage with that person following the same unwritten rules we geeks help put into place 20 years ago.

It’s a beautiful time to be an information professional.

(What I think is an important followup point here is that there are areas where the web hasn’t changed society.  Vast stretches of people are not connected, and the disconnect isn’t shrinking.  Let’s not forget this.)

What do I think the web will look like in twenty years?

To answer this I tried to think back on the past twenty years.  Many of the technologies existed when the “web” was born, but we found innovative ways of tying them together, made bandwidth cheaper, and exponentially extended its reach.  So what do we have the technology to do now, but aren’t doing yet?  What will change when (and if) the digital divide narrows?

The easiest answer is that dumb search will disappear.  All search will be contextual by default, whether that context is geographical, social, historical, or something else we haven’t thought of yet.  Our tools will serve us, help us filter the world automatically in contexts that make sense to us.  Based on aggregating data about ourselves, our histories, and our friends, the tools will be highly predictive and accurate.  They’ll work on objects other than text (we’re improving image search, but let’s imagine all of youtube indexed not by metadata but by the data itself!).

This will come at the cost of privacy, of course, and the mad scientists of the 2030s will be those who refuse to make that trade.  Like a person in today’s world who refuses to have a credit card or a bank account, most of us won’t be able to understand how they can reject all that convenience.

Another easy one is that we’ll take the cloud for granted.  If you have data somewhere, you’ll have that data everywhere.  The concept of remembering a URL or bookmarking it and losing that bookmark will seem archaic.  There’s some fascinating security and usability problems to be solved there, of course.  It’ll be fun to see that fall into place.

Fads will come and go faster than they do today.  With the ability to spin up a virtual data center and tear it down with no delay, a startup can flare up and disappear within hours.  Low-budget clones of such companies will appear worldwide, and the battles over who had an idea first will be epic.

Another trend I think will continue is the shrinking of content.  Real writers will be harder to find, as the majority of content providers end up doing nothing but sharing links and snippets.  Our attention spans will shrink further.  If we can’t read it or watch it in 30 seconds, we won’t care.  And the few of us who insist that things used to be better will be laughed at by our juniors.

One thing I can predict is that twenty years from now, my daughter will 21 years old, and she will laugh uproariously at how wrong we all are about where things are headed.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I’ll ask Jamie Pappas, a colleague at EMC, to continue the discussion next.  Jamie?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

In real life, this is a problem, and one which is solved by the fact that my wife has no sense of nostalgia and will throw my garbage away behind my back.  I pretend not to notice and we move on peacefully.

In the digital world, though, it has amusing results.  In a fit of nostalgia, I recently stumbled onto the oldest archived version of my first “web page,” from 1995.  In it, I mention someone as a good friend.  Fifteen years later, I cannot remember who this person was.  There’s something sad about that, don’t you think?  The Internet never forgets, though.  I’ve found much older stuff out there, archived on weird mailing lists or whatever, stuff I have trouble believing came from my keyboard but obviously did.

I also have carried the same text files from computer to computer since the first PC-compatible machine I ever got, in the late 80s.  Since I was an awkward teenager in the late 80s, you know what this means?  I still have all the awful stuff I wrote as a misunderstood loner in high school.  Lyrics to heavy metal songs that never got set to music.  Nasty unsent letters.  Poems that would delete themselves if they could, they’re so bad.  The beginning of a horror novel which thankfully never got finished.

Yup.  It’s all there.

And I back it up nightly on Mozy too.

My name is Dave, and I’m a digital packrat.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

We’ve staffed this team with people who have worked on successful, shipping products.  Many of them “grew up” in a world where certain things (like, say, continuous integration, or test-driven development) were unheard of.  There are inevitable growing pains as we push for certain behaviors and results.  Sometimes there’s a failure in the software pipeline and the answer from the responsible party is “This wouldn’t have happened if we had XYZ in place,” where XYZ is a practice from some product they used to work on.

As a technical lead, it’s my responsibility to try and educate people and raise the quality of everyone’s work.  I’m supposed to push for the best practices we all need to understand and employ.  But I also need to make sure a product goes out the door.  So when I’m in a closed-door meeting with senior management and they say, “Do you think we should put XYZ in place?” I have to stop and ponder.

The answer, in my heart, is no.  Take away the crutch, make the team fail a few times.  People learn from failure.  In a few months they will adapt and be better for it (or they will have gotten fed up and left).

The answer, in my brain, is yes.  I know that without this crutch, they will be less productive for a few months.  And I know where we’re supposed to be in a few months, and I’m not sure we can get there without the crutch.

I tell management both these answers.  They ask me what we should do.

And this is why our jobs are hard.

(I usually end up leaning towards the practical side here, and hope that we can educate in parallel.  But I’m always left wondering if I should be more extremist….)

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

The first question I ask is the most obvious.  Do you know what your strengths are?  If not, you have a bigger problem than your self-appraisal to deal with.

Your successes generally come from doing one of two things: finding circumstances that match your strengths, or adapting  yourself to match your circumstances.  But without knowing your strengths and weaknesses, you are relying on blind luck to achieve either.

(You may want to read up more on this subject: if so, I recommend understanding the concept of the Johari Window and perhaps looking at some of Marcus Buckingham’s writing)

Most people realize, then, that self-knowledge is important.  But sharing that is more challenging.

Some people are simply unused to making rational assessments of personality traits and talents.  They become emotionally invested in those traits and have trouble disconnecting. I have little advice here except that practice makes perfect. If you are uncomfortable describing yourself in this way, try starting with others.  Write up a “self-appraisal” of your manager, of a peer, or of someone whose work ethic you admire.  For added challenge, write one for someone whose work ethic you find fault with — look for overlooked strengths.  Just the act of disconnecting emotionally from these personality traits will make writing your own appraisal easier.

More common, I think, is a sense of humility, a desire not to self-promote.  Many of us grew up being told it was unseemly to broadcast your own accomplishments.  If you take just one thing from this post, take this: you are not bragging when you describe your strengths.  You are not saying “I am an excellent coder because I am awesome and I worked so hard and I deserve lots of money.”  You are saying “I am an excellent coder.”  Your manager may not know you are an excellent coder until you tell him or her.  You are not taking credit for your strengths.  Maybe you just won the genetic lottery and happened to have a great mentor.  Your manager doesn’t care why you possess certain strengths.  But it’s crucial that your manager know that you do.

You want to be humble?  Recognize that your unique strengths are probably not so outstanding that everyone’s already aware of them.  In other words, it’s presumptuous to assume everyone knows what you’re good at.

Not only that, but true humility comes with making the rational assessment of your traits and then being able to discuss it with someone else.  You want a lesson in humility?  Sit down with your manager and discuss why he or she thinks you aren’t that good of a coder, even though you think you are.

For some people, then, maybe it’s fear, not humility, keeping them from having that conversation.

That is much harder to break through, unfortunately.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Early this month, I ran in a charity road race along with some family members.  I wrote up the experience on my personal blog, and as in any writeup, I included both positive and negative aspects of the day.  My intended audience was small — this particular blog is not publicized.

In this particular case, though, a couple hours after my post went up, the director of the race had found it, read it, and posted a follow up.  She directly addressed my concerns and invited me to discuss it in more detail via email.  We did, and then I posted a final comment explaining how things had progressed.

What happened here?

• Within 12 hours of the race, I had written a report and posted it in a public place.
• Within 12 hours of that, the race director had found my post and directly engaged me.
• Within 12 hours of that, a two-way conversation had taken place and I had posted the results.

Within 36 hours of the event, one participant out of 4,000 had a personal conversation with the person directly responsible for the event about what went well and what didn’t. Do you think perhaps the race director had urgent matters to attend to, and that it might have been hard to find the time to scour the web for mentions of her race?  Probably.  Clearly this was a priority.

I’m a customer for life now, but honestly one participant more or less out of their race is not a huge deal.  What is huge is that the situation played out in a public place and for years to come the evidence of that interaction is preserved for every potential participant in the event.

Not only that, I went from being a participant to an advocate.  I’ve spent my personal time talking to others about how great an event it was, and how much the organizers obviously care about the race and the runners in it.  You can be sure when the race is run next year, I won’t just be signing up, I’ll be talking about it in public and drumming up more interest on their behalf.

I can’t beat this drum long enough.  You cannot measure the Return on Investment in social media using traditional means.  But it should be clear to anyone watching these kinds of events unfold that the Risk of Ignoring is huge.  Retell this story, but replace the race with a product launch, and my report with a simple installation report written by a low-level employee at a small customer.  And remember, in the professional world, we’re not talking about how good the end result feels for everyone involved, but about how you can differentiate the experience of working with your product as compared to your competitors’.

Are you listening?  Do the people who are listening have the knowledge and power to engage your customers?  Can they escalate and get the right people in conversation in Internet Time?  Can you picture a situation where the person directly responsible for your setting the direction of your product is in contact with a single customer within 36 hours of that customer unboxing it?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop