Diana Kimball

Inventing on Principle

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:04:00 -0500

The video is of a talk in a dark room, but listen and you’ll hear conviction. Bret Victor is a crusader; his cause is giving creators an immediate connection with their work. This talk is about crusades, causes, responsibilities: urgent, vital imperatives; darker language than I’m used to. So often we talk about discrete problems as “opportunities,” injustices as “challenges”—reframings that, perhaps, makes our imperfect world feel less grim. But if everything is an opportunity or a challenge, then how do we decide which ones to face down? Better to find a cause, a principle, and invent in a direction that brings the world closer to what it should be. Let’s find preoccupations that can last our whole lives.

with thanks to Erik, who had an inkling of how much this would mean to me

Nessa Robinson on The Importance of What We Care About

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:49:00 -0500

Nessa Robinson on The Importance of What We Care About:

I’ve recommended Harry Frankfurt’s essay “The Importance of What We Care About” energetically and often, but Nessa Robinson is one of the first people to actually take me up on the suggestion. Here, she provides a lovely summary of its arguments and a sense for who might enjoy the piece.

"Virtual goods elegantly fill up the demand curve for an offering. In other words, they accommodate..."

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:05:00 -0500

“Virtual goods elegantly fill up the demand curve for an offering. In other words, they accommodate customers who can happily spend hundreds or thousands of dollars (“Whales”, in Vegas parlance) without having to give up mainstream users (who can still be valuable as evangelists beyond the fact that they give the whales someone to play with).”

- Tony Wright on how to evaluate a paid iPhone app idea. via Buster Benson

I’d never thought of virtual goods in exactly this way, but it makes sense.

Chad Hagen crafted this illustration for an article in...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:10:26 -0500

Chad Hagen crafted this illustration for an article in today’s New York Times on “The Age of Big Data.” His nonsensical infographics are some of my favorites.

"Just like the white stripe down a skunk’s back and the winding, white train of a bride, many of..."

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:10:13 -0500

“Just like the white stripe down a skunk’s back and the winding, white train of a bride, many of Ruby’s parts of speech have visual cues to help you identify them. Punctuation and capitalization will help your brain to see bits of code and feel intense recognition. Your mind will frequently yell Hey, I know that guy!”

- why’s (poignant) guide to ruby (a classic)

I’d imagine this is true of most programming languages, but reaching this point with Ruby was a huge breakthrough for me. Intense recognition is one of the best feelings.

I’m in love with this music video my friends Sumul and...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:24:42 -0500

I’m in love with this music video my friends Sumul and Neil made for their band, Wildlife Control. Incredibly, though, it’s not actually a video at all: the entire thing is an all-HTML5 pixel art masterpiece, driven off the SoundCloud API.

Click through to the video of their single “Analog or Digital,” hit play, and prepare to be amazed.

"The only copy protection I need is the fact that tomorrow’s comic doesn’t exist yet and..."

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:55:08 -0500

“The only copy protection I need is the fact that tomorrow’s comic doesn’t exist yet and my brain’s the only place that bakes that cookie.”

- RStevens on Kickstarter explaining why he’s releasing his forthcoming Diesel Sweeties ebook DRM-free.

"Learning to program isn’t the hard part. The biggest challenge is figuring out how all the moving..."

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:07:07 -0500

““Learning to program isn’t the hard part. The biggest challenge is figuring out how all the moving parts of a web application fit together. There’s no book for that.””

- Kaitlyn Trigger in an article about Lovestagram, her first web app and her Valentine’s day gift to Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram and her boyfriend of 2.5 years!)

This has been my experience, completely. So excited for Kaitlyn…and pretty much in love with Lovestagram.

Crazy beautiful: macro photographs of soap & water, by Jane...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:41:51 -0500

Crazy beautiful: macro photographs of soap & water, by Jane Thomas. via photojojo

"Even in our weird information-saturated world, there’s so much we don’t, and can’t, know, even about..."

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:00:07 -0500

“Even in our weird information-saturated world, there’s so much we don’t, and can’t, know, even about something as mundane as a company. The writer M. F. K. Fisher said: “Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.” Every company, until it breaks (i.e. gets its email subpoenaed Enron-style, I guess) is that egg. Every family is that egg. Every person is that egg. And that’s a wonderful thing, because it means there are always mysteries, and more mysteries, and mysteries beyond.”

- The limits of knowledge « Snarkmarket

In the words of Robin Sloan.

"You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb..."

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:22:05 -0500

“You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, soliciting help, and helping others with what you learn (the best way to learn yourself).”

- The Technium: Techno Life Skills

Everything I believe. Rediscovered in the Snarkmarket archives.

The History of Today

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:17:00 -0500

In 2008, this essay was my answer to “What is your career vision and why is this choice meaningful to you?” I pulled it up today and marveled at how much it still means to me. My vision has shifted, but the undercurrents are still there.

July 1, 2008

I am a diary thief. Writing history means plundering the secrets of long-ago teenagers and authors and convicts, piecing together a picture of the extraordinary everyday. Historians treasure private thoughts—the ones scrawled in blue ballpoint, never meant for the outside world. They feel more authentic, less studied. As a student of history, I love to study them. But these thoughts, those ancient diaries, are so hard to find. Survival hinges on happenstance; fame helps, but is no guarantee. Thievery requires patience.

Diaries today are different. They occupy a disoriented cyberspace where private thoughts and public broadcast collide. When I sit at my computer—struggling to piece together the story of amateur magicians at the turn of the twentieth century, or Soviet department stores in the 1950s—I am always floored by the flood of information that rushes forward when I flip to my tiny browser window. The private is already public; thievery is unnecessary. The instant gratification is intoxicating. Here, today, I could piece together a thousand stories of what happened yesterday, across the globe—secret motivations, passionate reactions, quiet musings—all with a simple keyword search. Historians of the future would kill for what we can access this very moment. I know I would.

But what if I could become a historian of the future, today? People all over the world publish volumes about themselves, every second—on blogs, and Twitter, and forums, and Facebook. I don’t want to wait to write those stories. Moreover, I think those stories have a great deal to tell us about what people want, what they need; what they care about. The advantage of writing the history of today is that it’s not too late to do something about it. Whether that means developing products or entertainment or experiences that line up with the lives that people are already broadcasting, the profusion of opportunities is undeniable. I want to be at the vanguard of a new kind of market research: one that respects the stories people tell about themselves, responding to their needs and anticipating their desires. As a diary thief, I may be out of work. I don’t mind. Thievery was only ever a means to an end. Here, at the end, I want to build something new.

Letter to an Applicant

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:11:56 -0500

In late 2007 and early 2008, I wrote three blog posts about a then-new Harvard Business School admissions initiative called 2+2. In September 2008, I learned I’d been accepted into the first 2+2 cohort; this past September, my first semester at HBS commenced.

In the four years since that first blog post, I’ve received a steady stream of emails from students seeking guidance through the application process. In response to one of them, I sat down and wrote the letter below; it rang so true to me then (and still) that I’ve sent it to almost every person who’s written since. To come full circle, I wanted to share it here, too.

_________

It’s hard to say or even know what HBS is “looking for” in 2+2 candidates, because they’ve intentionally left it so open-ended. But here are some collected thoughts on what they might be looking for based on my experience with the students they’ve admitted so far.

In some environments—both corporate and academic—sheer “drive” is favored. In essence, this means that once you set a goal you usually accomplish it at almost any cost. This may even be true of Harvard Business School, to some degree. However, this mode is incredibly distant from my own experience.

The type of caring I’ve seen at HBS is much quieter and more generous. It does not lack momentum, but it is an odd combination of earnest and assured. The key is to be calm, confident, and striving all at once, all the while being generous with your ideas and unfailingly kind to those around you.

So let’s say this describes you, and let’s say that I’m right: that this character profile starts to get at the ineffable qualities HBS “looks for.” How do you even start to go about showing this kind of quiet caring in an application?

The application consists of two parts: the facts, and the narrative. It’s true that the facts should probably resemble those of other HBS students (admirable grades, engagement in activities outside of your classes, ambition and efficacy), but the criteria for that resemblance are far less strict and far less important than you might imagine. No, the most important thing you can do for yourself is not to work tirelessly to improve the facts—your scores, your grades, your activities and accomplishments—but, instead, to rest and think about how you came to be the person you are, and what kind of person you long to become.

I have come to believe that serious introspection is the single most important thing you can do for your chances of being admitted to HBS. If you already spend a good deal of time in calm introspection, you will have a head start; but it is not too late to begin. The key here is “calm”; anxious introspection will help little, and might even hurt.

What should you think about? It seems safe to start with figuring out what you care about. The best way I’ve found to think about this, actually, is by reading a book by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt called The Reasons of Love. The book, in fact, is all about the importance of what we care about. (Also worth reading: an essay of his by that very name.) A passage:

It is by caring about things that we infuse the world with importance. This provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it marks our interests and our goals. The importance that our caring creates for us defines the framework of standards and aims in terms of which we endeavor to conduct our lives.

It is important to know of the HBS Admissions Office that they are extremely experienced judges of character. Your accomplishments speak for themselves; you speak for your character. That is part of why the interview is so important, and why HBS insists that it be in person. And that is why introspection is a valuable way to spend your time.

The more calm and curious your introspection, and the more coherent the self-image that surfaces, the better you will be able to reconstitute that image out of thin air. That kind of integrated self-awareness is the ineffable quality that HBS seeks.

This may sound all too general, but I can assure you that it is more specific than you might suspect. The admissions office knows it when they see it; admitted students recognize it in each other. For a program like 2+2—so vague about who the ideal candidate might be, so wildly and almost nonsensically varied in the backgrounds of the students it admits—this is, I believe, the common denominator that makes the program cohere.

If you are interested in this program, industrious enough to seek it out, patient enough to endure its opacity and uncertainty, you are almost certainly ambitious. You are almost certainly accomplished. More importantly, you are almost certainly ambitious and accomplished enough.

So what makes the difference? What ineffable quality sets some people apart? As far as I know, it is: caring about something honorable, outside yourself, in such a way that you are impelled to take risks and apply sincere effort. It is knowing this about yourself, and being able to coherently conceive of and narrate your life through its lens.

Burrowing

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 01:28:00 -0500

I’m always worried that when the time comes to type, I won’t be able to summon the right incantation. I think this fear goes all the way back to being 8 years old and sitting down in front of my dad’s computer running MS-DOS, trying desperately to remember what words would bring Mario Teaches Typing onto the screen.

Today, intent on incrementally improving my programming skills, I decided to try just recording obstacles as they cropped up and then documenting the ways I got around them. This was good because it gave me an outlet for frustration while also encouraging me to verbalize exactly what was going wrong. And by putting the problem into words, promising search terms suddenly started materializing before my eyes. “I’ve already forked the project, so how to sync?” became “github fork out of sync,” which led me to GitHub’s Fork a Repo help page…which was exactly what I needed.

So, for posterity and perhaps your curiosity, here are two of the hurdles I ran into today and how I eventually got over them.

My plan for the afternoon was to poke around Erik’s Twitter Command-Line Interface project. After a few hours looking over his shoulder as he worked on it, I felt like I had a good grasp of its basic structure and capabilities—plus, it’s always more fun to poke around projects when you get the point.

What I’d forgotten was I’d already forked the project on GitHub in order to make a few copy-edits to the README. Okay, wait up, what do all the words in that sentence mean?

GitHub is a wonderful website geared toward “social coding.” On it, you can publicly post code you’ve written and solicit input and feedback from other people who’d like to use that code.
Forking according to GitHub: “At some point you may find yourself wanting to contribute to someone else’s project, or would like to use someone’s project as the starting point for your own. This is known as ‘forking.’”
A README file is kind of like the “about” page for a piece of software. On GitHub, the README automatically shows up on the project’s profile page. It’s a file in the project’s directory (or “folder”) like all the rest, and can therefore be forked.

When Erik asked in November if I’d be willing to copy-edit an early version of the README for the project, instead of just copy-pasting the words into an email and editing them from there, I forked the whole project and then made edits to the README file itself. Then, I submitted a pull request to Erik, which he was able to review and then automatically integrate (or “merge”) into his original version of the project. You can see the edits I suggested here.

What did this mean for me today? Well, step one in my original plan for the day was “fork the project so you can poke around and make changes to your heart’s content.” Except it was already forked, but also desperately out of date: my copy dated back to November, and Erik’s been steadily improving the project ever since—he’s committed changes to the project almost every day in December so far.

So the first hurdle I faced was: “pull in Erik’s latest changes so that you’re working on an up-to-date copy of the project.” This sent me down the path of posing the problem to myself, surfacing the keywords I needed, searching Google, and finding the right GitHub help page, Fork a Repo. There I learned that I would need to identify Erik’s original project as the parent of my forked version, fetch the changes he’d made, and then merge them into my fork.

Identify: git remote add upstream https://github.com/sferik/t.git
Fetch: git fetch upstream
Merge: git merge upstream/master

Those commands may look hopelessly mysterious or pleasantly familiar to you. Every one of them was news to me a few hours ago, but now I feel some affection toward the curt, finicky phrases because they so compactly helped me solve a seemingly formidable task.

My next hurdle felt more manageable. Playing around with the the Twitter Command-Line interface, I found what I thought were two bugs. I wanted to give Erik a heads-up about them using GitHub’s built-in issue tracker, but in order to document the bugs, I needed to include code snippets in the bug descriptions. For those code snippets to actually resemble code, I’d need to format them specially.

When you type descriptions into GitHub’s issue tracker, you’re writing in what appears to be a regular old text input box. Yet it has secret powers: the text field automatically understands and displays text formatted with GitHub-Flavored Markdown! According to John Gruber’s explanation of regular-old Markdown, Markdown is “a plain-text formatting syntax…the idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.” GitHub-Flavored Markdown adds some GitHub pizzazz to Gruber’s original project. But in both, the way to format code is the same: you surround the code snippet with backticks. (AKA grave accents, found on the same key as the tilde, right below the escape key.) So typing `t timeline sferik` in the GitHub issue tracker input field will display the text instead as t timeline sferik. It’s very handy.

Writing this post, I’ve realized that every sentence is a rabbit-hole. If you’re willing to take the plunge, you can excavate layer after layer of meaning, which brings its own kind of satisfaction. But if you try to stay above-ground, steadily progressing on the task at hand, you may reach your surface goal without understanding how you got there—short-circuiting the larger goal of learning. I’m grateful for this break between semesters, the chance to burrow in.

"We want the product to express the technology we’re using, so that people understand it…Even if they..."

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:08:00 -0500

“We want the product to express the technology we’re using, so that people understand it…Even if they only one-quarter understand it, at least they see that we’re doing something different that makes it work better, and perhaps gives them a bit of pleasure to see that and point it out to people.”

- Sir James Dyson in conversation with Wired, via Tim Carmody

Reading this helps me understand what I’ve always liked about Dyson as a company. Their vacuum cleaners and hand dryers are flashy, but in an honest, satisfying way.

Don’t miss the second page, where Dyson goes into the wacky battery-related hurdles standing between humanity and truly great robotic vacuum cleaners.

"When it becomes clear to me that something is going to be really hard work, there’s a voice..."

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:01:56 -0500

“When it becomes clear to me that something is going to be really hard work, there’s a voice inside my head that says, ‘You shouldn’t probably do this, because you probably *can’t* do this”—but there’s another, much louder voice that becomes bullying and belligerent and wants to prove that other voice wrong.”

- Daniel Radcliffe in the December 16, 2011 issue of Entertainment Weekly

"To me Pinterest is a game that I can customize and always win."

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:35:00 -0500

“To me Pinterest is a game that I can customize and always win.”

- Kristen Greeley in an interview with Arik Hanson

To satisfy his curiosity as to “what’s behind the Pinterest craze,” Arik Hanson found 15 power users and asked each of them 5 questions. The result is a useful public document that sidesteps speculation by going straight to the source.

I haven’t gotten into Pinterest, but whenever I feel the urge to dismiss something, it’s a signal to me that I need to dig deeper. This compendium of interviews helped me probe my own reactions to Pinterest by allowing me to compare and contrast with those of people who use and love it.

"What spooks me about algorithms as nature is precisely that they have no distortion, they have no..."

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:19:12 -0500

“What spooks me about algorithms as nature is precisely that they have no distortion, they have no affordance, there’s no purchase on the world they describe. Their illegible nature is, quite literally, a world without narrative. There’s only a beginning and an end.”

- Kevin Slavin, co-founder of game design shop Area/Code (acquired by Zynga) and Starling.tv, interviewed by Rob Walker

I had this interview in my Instapaper queue for a while, and finally got around to reading it on the flight from Boston to San Francisco. Before I knew it, I’d emailed myself five quotes! And so, I can definitely recommend reading the whole thing.

See also: Slavin’s TED talk, “How Algorithms Shape Our World”.

"Text as a medium is particularly dull when it comes to expressing emotions…Emoticons open the door a..."

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:31:10 -0500

“Text as a medium is particularly dull when it comes to expressing emotions…Emoticons open the door a little, but emoji opens it even further. They play the role that nonverbal communication, like hand gestures, does in conversation but on a cellphone.”

- Professor S. Shyam Sundar quoted by Jenna Wortham in her article on emoji published in the New York Times on December 6, 2011

I was so excited to see this article come out last week! Jenna and I had a fun conversation this summer about emoji. Erik and I seldom exchange text messages that don’t contain emoji. I also recorded a quick emoji-inspired song a few months ago. I basically love them.

"We’re quick to forget it, but the world is a classroom: everyone’s here trying to get better. The..."

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:57:47 -0500

“We’re quick to forget it, but the world is a classroom: everyone’s here trying to get better. The criticism isn’t for the critic, it’s an offering made out of goodwill for the one who made the work and the work’s audience. If that goodwill isn’t present, it undermines the gift of insight, even if the specifics of the criticism are correct.”

- Frank Chimero: The Wall