Don’t write angry, and other blogging tips from Chris Blattman.

Don’t let your job search depress you.

I want one.

I wrote software on my ZX Spectrum like Paul Wilson in this BBC article – the same as thousands of my generation. I’ve never really stopped, though today I’m more likely to be cannibalising someone else’s code in WordPress or Drupal than creating a game. Writing software makes sense to me (even though I can’t do it properly) – creating an app sounds like something someone with a funny little beard does on an iPhone. So to me, it’s great that schoolchildren might have an opportunity to get the same grounding I did – even if in reality the Raspberry Pi is ordered in its thousands by people in their late thirties who miss their ZX Spectrums.

The reason schoolchildren writing programs is a good thing is not that we raise an entire generation of programmers. It’s similar to the reason you learn other languages. By learning other languages, you develop a deeper appreciation for words and vocabulary, for the history of words and for the meaning behind them (at least, I hope you do). If you learn Latin, you learn the root of many European languages and have a toolkit for deducing the possible meaning of words you’ve never even heard before. In a similar way, understanding how to code gives you the ability to better understand how computers work, and when computers are in everything, it gives you basic technical literacy. Even beyond technical literacy, programming teaches you to be methodical. You do things in a set order. Run. De-bug. If something doesn’t work, you go back into the code, line by line. You pay attention to detail.

What interested me was that the hope expressed by the creators of Raspberry Pi that kids would start using it to write software – and that if ‘writing a program’ sounded too intimidating, then ‘creating an app’ was a much nicer way of putting it. Because it is amazing what a difference the vocabulary you use can make. Too often, simple technical concepts go over the head of many because the language used is, while maybe the most correct and efficient way of expressing something, intimidating or opaque.

Years ago working on a public sector Intranet, we discussed ways to get content authors to better describe their content with metadata. “But how will we get them to add key words to their stuff?”, we asked. “What if we called it tagging or something?”. “Nah, they’ll never go for it”. Now, people are tagging content left, right and centre. Hashtags on Twitter, tags on Delicious, tags everywhere. “They’ll never go for it”, indeed.

…or when you no longer need money.

Alain’s pasta with pesto: Eating time – 15 minutes. Preparation time: 5.2 days.

Your mum.

Taurus? You’re going to meet a talk, dark stranger.

Your friend is talking like a BBC period drama.

Alain’s Holistic Travel Agency is opening soon.

Glass half empty there, Alain.

Except I didn’t. I missed. But now I was committed, so I had to perform a sideways dance while I chased the coin that was now rolling away from me. “The bastard’s taunting me” I thought as I danced ever further sideways in the direction of a wall. But I couldn’t just back away now, or I would have looked like I was attempting to show the woman where her coin was through the medium of interpretive dance.

Finally, I stopped the coin. Happy, I picked it up and handed it to her. She smiled and said something that might have been “thank you” or might have been “you big dancing freak you”, I had no idea as I was wearing earphones with Pendulum turned up full.

Later today, I was in Tesco, and a man at the till had another purse explosion. The moral of this story is ‘don’t attempt to retrieve change while wearing gloves’, but anyway, it happened again. Once more, I flew in the direction of the coin.

I have today retrieved thirty pence for strangers.

The thing is, when you see a coin rolling along, or someone struggling with something, don’t you feel a twitch that tells you to pick up the coin, or an automatic urge to offer help? Isn’t it quite strong? Today, twice, I’ve done it without thinking. I do it all the time, and sometimes get the look of shock that you possibly only get from people who see a six foot two bearded man approaching them while they’re in a vulnerable situation.

In Tesco, no-one else bent over and I resisted the urge for a moment before giving in, but I’d like to know if anyone else felt the twitch. People seem to resist simple opportunities to help others, simply because they’re in a world of their own or they don’t want to engage. And that’s a little sad. It’s the same reason people don’t just say ‘hello’ in the street. It’s harder work not to be nice, surely.

Or maybe this is all bilge, and I just love chasing things.

What surprised me was, for the first time I could remember since having left school nearly 20 years ago, it took a short time to remember the names of many old schoolmates – if I could at all. This when some of the people I went to school with are still amongst my closest friends. Most people I wasn’t bothered about, some I really missed. I got to thinking about schoolmates, old friends I’ve lost contact with, friendships in general and what part social networks play in preserving friendships.

Relationships with my oldest friends have been maintained by email, phone, and face to face. The level of interaction I have with them on social networks is negligible. Some old friends crop up once in a while to send a message, using Facebook like email without having to remember my email address. Others appear once in a while but don’t say much. The social network appears to be irrelevant. It’s doing nothing other than adding another layer of ‘stuff’ to whatever it was we’ve been doing to keep in touch all along – and I’m guilty of using the occasional message on Facebook to substitute for telephone calls or meeting face to face.

Somehow, humanity managed without Facebook for, well, millennia. Here comes the old man: I remember writing letters. Actual letters. On paper.

Facebook, 1984 by Robert Penney

Facebook does preserve relationships. Problem is, it’s often with people you hardly know, or don’t need to know any more. After a while your friendships on Facebook resemble less and less what you need, want or even recognise in real life. Online social networks not only play a questionable role in preserving relationships that matter, they prolong relationships that don’t. So you have to cull, or sort friends into friends that are friends, friends that used to be friends who you still exchange a bi-yearly ‘Like’ with, friends who you met online who you’ve never actually met, and so on. It creates admin, when all that used to happen was you fell out of touch with people, and if they were that important, you renewed contact at some point. As smart as online social networks get, such as with Facebook’s smart lists, you’ll always be pulled back in to validate their guesses – because humans are weird and relationships can’t always be codified.

Facebook, it is suggested, is making us miserable, either by substituting precious real-life interaction with video chat or wall posts, or by shoving other people’s supposed happiness in our faces. Before Facebook, you’d see a successful couple you knew, smile and chat, part company for months and then have a good laugh about how ugly their baby was. Now, their ugly baby is their Facebook profile picture and you’re reading about how bloody happy they are every week.

A common message to see on Twitter or other networks is something like ‘Facebook is about the people you used to know. Twitter is about the people you want to know’. This suggests that Facebook’s only role is to preserve pre-existing relationships and Twitter’s is just to foster new ones. If Facebook was originally set up so that Mark Zuckerberg could stalk his ex-girlfriend then fine, Facebook’s about the people you used to know. But no. The basic problem is that social networks are all trying to find a way to structure what you’ve been doing all along, when what you’ve been doing all along wasn’t necessarily structured. What’s ridiculous is that you’re using this service to structure your social interactions and it’s trying to sell you stuff at the same time. Promoted messages, adverts and brands mingle with conversations about breast feeding and lunch. And new friendships are all channelled through social networks – the way we relate to other human beings controlled by tools written by software developers. We’re either waiting for the software to allow us to do things the way we want, or we’re changing the way we interact to suit the software.

Isn’t that a bit weird?