Angry Little Tree2020-12-18T19:01:08+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/Jeff Eatonbonsai@angrylittletree.comWell, then.2014-12-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/12/well-then<p>It’s been a hell of a year in a lot of ways, both good and bad. I’ve never liked retrospectives, and I promise I’ll steer clear of lists and reminiscing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this year, it’s this: one of the most important things I can do is find other people who care deeply and join voices with them.</p>
<p>When I started posting here on The Pastry Box a year ago, I’d fallen off the blogging train. I spill dozens of thousands of words each month for my work: client briefs, project audits, company communication, and technical articles all add up. But I’d let the other things, like writing about personal growth and social issues and ethical dilemmas and the things that move my heart as well as my head, languish. Being given the chance to participate here changed that, and it changed my year for the better.</p>
<p>Collaboration—whether it’s a group blog, an indie album, or a protest march—is about <em>all of us</em> doing something more than <em>any of us</em> could have managed individually. Contributing to The Pastry Box made me want to do better, because I was surrounded by people writing great things. At the same time, it meant that I didn’t have to carry the burden single-handedly. Most days, I could come here to read, listen, and learn from others.</p>
<p>This idea—the importance of finding people who care about things that matter, listening to them, and joining in—isn’t just about blogging. If there’s one lesson to take into 2015, that’s the one I choose.</p>
<p>Our world is full of exhausting and difficult challenges if we go at it alone. Find people you can support, and who can support you as you do the same. Tackle the big problems together.</p>
<p>Happy 2014.</p>
Whiplash2014-11-29T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/11/whiplash<p>Thanksgiving was pretty good this year. It was relaxing, full of excellent food, and conversation with family was pleasantly uneventful. Leftover pie was eaten, early Christmas gifts were ordered online, and lazy afternoon hours were whiled away with good books and naps. This is interesting, because not more than seventy-two hours ago, my family and I were shocked and outraged at the news that Darren Wilson, the St. Louis police officer who <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7283327/michael-brown-racist-stereotypes">shot and killed</a> a black 18-year old, would not be facing a trial.</p>
<p>It’s been a <a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/11/infographic_killed_by_the_cops.html">tough couple of years</a> for those of us who thought that racism was a remnant of the distant 1960s, who liked to think of ourselves as modern, open-minded, and “colorblind.” A black man shot and killed by police <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/24/surveillance-video-walmart-shooting-john-crawford-police">while shopping</a>. A 12-year old black boy <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/11/26/officials-release-video-names-in-fatal-police-shooting-of-12-year-old-cleveland-boy/">shot and killed by police</a> while playing with a BB gun. An black father of six <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/01/justice/new-york-choke-hold-death/">choked to death</a> for selling untaxed cigarettes. An unarmed black motorist <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/police-dash-cam-video-exonerates-nj-man-implicates-cops-article-1.1701763">beaten and framed</a> by police. Eight black women <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/09/05/oklahoma_city_sexual_abuse_case_black_women_allegedly_targeted_by_former.html">sexually assaulted by a police officer</a>.
The horrifying reality is that it’s easy to <em>lose count</em> of these stories.</p>
<p>These are not fantastic holiday conversations, but they are reality. Blacks in the United States are <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white">far more likely to be killed by police</a>. When their deaths are noticed by the media, the search for <a href="https://medium.com/culture-club/face-it-black-people-michael-brown-let-you-down-b3b4408cec82">“proof of sin”</a> kicks off immediately. These are not new developments in our country; our history of racism stretches from its early history to the present day. Beyond the obvious, embarassing stuff from the history books, our past and present are filled with <a href="http://www.psmag.com/blogs/news-blog/black-male-faces-3571/">subtle biases</a>, abuse by <a href="http://www.vox.com/michael-brown-shooting-ferguson-mo/2014/8/19/6031759/ferguson-history-riots-police-brutality-civil-rights">those in power</a>, and carefully-constructed <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">systems of discrimination</a>.</p>
<p>It’s those systems that are the most insidious: no matter what challenges I face and difficulties I must overcome in my life, I am a white man. I will never be subject to the same suspicions and assumptions and demands for justification that are so common—and sometimes deadly—for blacks in our nation. I can rest easy, knowing that the color of my skin will not associate me with the New Hampshire <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/19/us/new-hampshire-pumpkin-festival-riot/">Pumpkin Festival Riot</a>. If my white neighbors and I were to <a href="http://www.theroot.com/blogs/the_grapevine/2014/10/black_people_riot_over_injustice_white_people_riot_over_pumpkins_and_football.html">destroy our neighborhood</a>, we’d most likely be called “revelers” and the destruction characterized as “mischief.”</p>
<p>I can object to the evils of racism, but I must also face the truth: I benefit from systems designed to give me a buffer of trust and protection that black men and women in the United States do not enjoy. I live in a world where racism is often treated with less seriousness than my discomfort at being reminded of it. As Jon Stewart (a fellow white guy, naturally) said, “If you’re <a href="http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ufqeuz/race-off">tired of hearing about racism</a>, imagine how tired people are of experiencing it.”</p>
<p>And so, here I am. Eating thanksgiving pie, contemplating the future, and reflecting on the profound luxury of ignoring terrible things when they feel overwhelming. It’s easy for me to take comfort in the quick hits of outrage that spring up when a new injustice, a new horror, reaches social media or the nightly news. “I don’t support that! It’s terrible!” But days pass and as outrage gives way to exhaustion, the temptation to “move on” is strong. After all, I spoke out! I <em>Tweeted.</em></p>
<p>As we approach 2015 and plan for a fresh new year of study and achievement and creativity and connection, that’s the challenge for those of us who have the luxury of looking away. Every day cannot be a protest, but every day has opportunities to change ourselves and the world around us. It is up to us to educate ourselves, to listen to people whose experiences we are allowed and encouraged to ignore, and to respond with humilty and grace when we get it wrong. It is up to us to learn <a href="http://qz.com/250701/12-things-white-people-can-do-now-because-ferguson/">what we can do</a> in the time between the headlines.</p>
Building Beyond Our Means2014-10-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/10/building-beyond-our-means<h2 id="i">I.</h2>
<p>I work for a distributed company. We have no central office, our infrastructure is almost entirely digital, and we log a <em>lot</em> of time in Google Hangouts. There are lots of upsides to this approach, but the downside is familiar to anyone who’s ever worked from home for a week: staying in touch with distant co-workers and team members takes real work. When everyone is camped out in a home office or a coffee shop, you can’t count on casual walks down the hallway to reveal morale problems or frustration.</p>
<p>We have a lot of ways to keep those lines of communication open, from IRC to daily status updates to one-on-ones and more. But the “ambient mood” of the company is still tough to gauge without a lot of legwork. Even worse, the times when you most <em>need</em> that information are the crunch times that make the extra effort most difficult.</p>
<p>A few years back we started a skunkworks project to solve that problem. Using a couple of simple inputs (a mobile-optimized site and a bot listening in our IRC channel), we’d let everyone in the company record their mood on a scale from “Crappy” to “Awesome” whenever they liked. With the sharing-barrier reduced to a single button-press or a one-line shout in the company chat room, we figured, we’d get a lot more useful data. And given that data, we’d be able to expose a simple-but-effective “mood board” for the company’s directors.</p>
<p>Perhaps, we thought, we’d even be able to <em>anticipate</em> problems. If Frank’s mood always plummeted during migration projects, but Suzanne’s always skyrocketed, we could take it into account for future assignments. And if Edward’s mood began to steadily slide over time, we could check in to make sure he wasn’t stranded without a listening ear. Science! Statistics! Utopia!</p>
<p>An enterprising co-worker jumped in with another idea. Instead of requiring everyone to manually post a mood announcement, why not go the next step? Sentiment analysis of our existing IRC and Yammer streams could intuit the level of negativity, cheeriness, or depression inherent in their existing communication. Furious whiteboarding ensued, culminating in a proposed plugin architecture and some research assignments. It wouldn’t be perfect, obviously, but if we counted on people to generate their own updates, they might stay quiet instead of sharing when they were down. If the sentiment analysis angle worked, we thought, our tool might even be useful to <em>other companies</em> navigating the challenges of distributed teams.</p>
<p>The technical side of things was humming along nicely. One of our devs had a few days of slack between assignments and was building out the backend and evaluating natural language parsing libraries, a designer was throwing together working wireframes, and I was taking a quick refresher on basic statistics. One of our PMs started nailing down the functional spec, and conducted some research into possible markets and competitors.</p>
<p>And that’s when we killed it.</p>
<h2 id="ii">II.</h2>
<p>It turns out that there <em>was</em> a real market for those kinds of tools. Unfortunately, some of the use cases weren’t as cheerily benign as we’d imagined. It’s <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112204/pret-manger-when-corporations-enforce-happiness">already reality in the world of retail</a>, where adjectives like “engaged,” “friendly,” “helpful,” and “enthusiastic” are non-negotiable requirements for every customer interaction. Modern technology allows businesses to build the data driven, optimized endgame of Office Space’s infamous “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-74Jo85ji9Q">fifteen pieces of flare</a>.”</p>
<p>We took a stab at brainstorming ways to horror-proof the tool: scaling back the automatic monitoring of conversations, anonomyzing the data, and so on. At the end of the day, though, all we could say was that <em>we</em> wanted to use the tools <em>responsibly.</em> For the <em>good</em> of the team, and all of its members. If it was released as an open source project or a monetized product, we couldn’t deny that it would enable, well… soul-crushing dehumanization.</p>
<p>And so, we stopped working on it.</p>
<p>This sort of dilemma isn’t a new one. Open Source developers have grappled with the fact that <a href="http://archive09.linux.com/articles/56426">their creations can be weaponized</a>, and the fantastic potential of the social web also <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">facilitates troubling government surveilance</a>. Questions abound, and answers are few.</p>
<h2 id="iii">III.</h2>
<p>In the years since our skunkworks project was shelved, other startups have rolled out fully-developed tools that serve similar needs. They launched and found funding and integrated privacy controls and held webinars. They did the hard work of building and iterating and shipping and selling, and they deserve the rewards.</p>
<p>Telling this story isn’t an attempt to imply that <em>those</em> teams were immoral or unethical. We didn’t kill our mood-tracker because we felt that doing it right was <em>impossible</em>. We killed it because we knew we didn’t have the time or resources to do it responsibly. It was a skunkworks side project, something we started to scratch an itch and learn a new framework. Tackling the kinds of problems we unearthed would have stolen time and resources from our successful client work. And <em>that</em> would’ve made pulling the plug even harder if we couldn’t come up with a good solution. It seemed better, at the time, to make the call early and leave the problem to those who could dedicate their energies to it.</p>
<p>Tools and data may aspire to technopian neutrality, but it’s extremely difficult to draw <em>technical</em> lines around morally and ethically problematic <em>applications</em> of them. Those of us who cut our teeth on programming and web development in less hyper-connected times can have trouble remembering that. For many of us, these technologies are all about freedom, exploratory tinkering, the thrill of discovery and creation.</p>
<p>Those creations, though, don’t stay locked on the family computer or a 5.25” floppy the way they did in the old days. The tools we build and the prodcuts we create and the projects we work on are used by billions of people around the world. Together, we affect their lives whether we want to or not—whether we intend to or not. Facebook recently stumbled into a hornet’s nest when it revealed <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/04/privacy-watchdog-files-complaint-over-facebook-emotion-experiment">mood-altering experiments</a> it had conducted on its users, and smaller-scale <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-farrell/why-okcupids-experiments-_b_5655217.html">experiments by the OK Cupid dating site drew fire for similar reasons</a>.</p>
<p>I think both projects were terrible, but looking at my own experiences, I understand how easy it is to get the ball rolling. Often, the hardest part of preventing unethical projects isn’t waving a red flag. Rather, it’s realizing that we’re in over our heads—that we don’t have the resources to examine the issues thoroughly enough or spot the possible problems before the deadline arrives.</p>
<p>That capacity to grapple honestly with the ripple effects of our creations is difficult to quantify, but profoundly important. I like to think of it as a sort of ethical budget, and that metaphor can help me account for the ebb and flow of my own time and energy. I might be able to weigh the impact of a new “block user” button, for example, but this month I’m just too swamped to give updated privacy controls the attention they deserve.</p>
<p>I don’t have a crystal ball, and I’m no better than anyone else at predicting the problems my work can cause. I know how difficult it is to say “no” to compelling projects, or put the kibosh on demo-friendly features. Sometimes, though, it’s necessary. Pushing ahead, assuming someone else will sort it out after launch, is a way of blowing through that ethical budget. We owe it to ourselves, to our users, and to our world to stop living beyond our means.</p>
Generation Gapped2014-09-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/09/generation-gapped<p>When I stumbled into the world of web development in the mid 90s, “state of the art” meant table-based layouts, JPEG image maps, and the occasional CGI script. They were dark times, full of spacer GIFs and half-tested regular expressions.</p>
<p>CSS, better HTML standards, and the maturation of server and client side frameworks have all made life better, but there’s a lot that’s stayed the same. Saddest of all, the contentious divide between “developers” and “designers” is still a fact of life in many organizations. I’ve worked in marketing agencies and web development shops; played negotiator between PR departments and IT teams; and watched as weary PERL developers argued with frustrated Photoshop jockeys. It’s never pretty, and the fonts never, ever look quite right.</p>
<p>Like many others who build web sites in those early years, I learned to preach the gospel of collaboration. If developers studied the principles of UX, if print-savvy designers sunk their teeth into HTML, if everyone stretched a bit, we could overcome so many problems! Every year, more and more people nodded their heads in agreement—but the cultural divide still felt like a wide one.</p>
<p>Earlier this month, I had a chance to eavesdrop while a friend taught a class of MFA students about the value of cross-discipline communication. They were studying to become UX specialists, and the eminently practical topic that day was “working with web development shops.” I recalled the many frustrated negotiations I’d witnessed over the years, and was curious to see how open these students were to the realities of production web projects.</p>
<p>What I heard startled me: the divide I had spent years trying to bridge didn’t even seem to exist. They <em>wanted</em> to work closely with coders, and many of them straddled the line between design and development themselves. One scrappy designer wanted to talk about the value of better editorial tools for CMS projects: how willing, he asked, were real-world clients to invest time in that work? After class, I heard a cluster of students discussing the relative merits of PHP and Ruby while another asked for advice about a design internship.</p>
<p>There’s an old saying that “generals always fight the last war—especially if they won it.” In the years after World War I, French politicians and military leaders obsessed about the Maginot Line, a fortified wall of bunkers meant to keep the nation safe from German soldiers. They prepared for The Previous War: Round II, but failed to anticipate the mobile, fast-paced combat of WWII.</p>
<p>Listening to that room full of students wasn’t exactly a blitzkrieg moment for me, but it was definitely a shock. They were already true believers in a message that colleagues and I had struggled to communicate for years. And while there are still many projects and agencies where the development/design divide is a serious problem, this generation of cross-functional creatives seems to have moved beyond it. When they enter the working world they’ll have to deal with entrenched systems, but the skills and perspectives they’ve already developed will help pull those organizations out of deep ruts.</p>
<p>When the class finished up and assignments were distributed (via Dropbox, naturally), I shared a laugh with my friend about how different my expectations had been. In the day-to-day grind of enterprise project scoping and deadline-driven tweaks, it can be easy to forget that things change. We’ll probably never get rid of the crazy deadlines, and IE6 may never truly die, but for an old-school web nerd like me, it’s great to remember that even the most frustrating problems <em>can</em> get better.</p>
Parlez-vous de l'argent?2014-08-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/08/parlez-vous-de-largent<p>I think one of the toughest challenges for passionate developers, designers, and writers is learning to <em>speak business.</em></p>
<p>I don’t meant there’s an actual language barrier—although sometimes boardroom and managerial jargon can be daunting. What I mean is that most people who care about what they create spend a lot of time thinking about quality, craftsmanship, and The Right Way To Do Things™. It’s how we improve, it’s how we grow, and it’s a big part of the satisfaction in creating something.</p>
<p>The tough part comes when that care and dedication to craft collide with the cold reality of budgets, ROI, and opportunity cost. “It’s the right thing to do” and “this way is <em>better</em>” may be true, but when it comes time to cut the checks, few managers and clients are swayed by our high-minded artistic principles.</p>
<p>And so, we grow.</p>
<p>We figure out how to step back from the things that excite <em>us</em> and explain what those things mean for the people who have to pay for our time. We learn to communicate benefits rather than features, emphasize outcomes instead of processes, and practice tying it all to the bottom line. And it’s good.</p>
<p>Business, after all, is what keeps the bills paid. Figuring out how the things we make tie into its rules is an important growing-up moment, a critical part of navigating the modern world. It’s also an important part of empathy! When I ask someone else to pay for my work it’s important for me to see things through their eyes, to understand the pressures and constraints they’re working within, before pitching them on my Grand (expensive) Vision.</p>
<p>Of course, there’s a but.</p>
<p>The other night, I was talking to a close friend who’s been doggedly pursuing her dream of writing—and succeeding. She pitches and she produces and she edits and hones. She writes her fiction at night, covers pop culture news during the day, and she’s even learning how to make that tough business shift. She can weigh the ideas she’s developing by their commercial viability, their ability to generate traffic and drive the clicks and comments that editors know they need.</p>
<p>And it’s killing her.</p>
<p>“What if I can’t sell it?” she asks. “What if what I’m creating isn’t <em>worth</em> anything?”</p>
<p>The problem with the language of business and economics isn’t that it’s <em>bad</em>. The danger is that it’s so easy, once you’ve picked it up, to forget that there’s any other language at all. Once you learn to attach that hours-and-dollars cost to every activity and weigh it against the margins-and-profits payoff, well… the beauty and craftsmanship and the purpose and the hope that keeps us creating? It can look like pretty weak stuff indeed.</p>
<p>The matter-of-fact precision of economic language is even more compelling because it’s so pervasive in our culture. It’s hard to find an issue that isn’t decided (or at least justified) by an appeal to its apparent objectivity. But the worth of my friend’s work, the stuff she really cares about, isn’t measured in clickthroughs from Twitter or checks cut from a magazine’s razor-thin freelance budget. As compelling as they are, those numbers are not the <em>why</em> that makes what she does matter. They aren’t the <em>why</em> that makes <em>your</em> work matter.</p>
<p>Speak the language, learn the ropes, and don’t be afraid to sell the dollars-and-cents value of what you do. It’s how we pay the bills, and it’s a great skill to have. But don’t forget—don’t <em>ever</em> forget—that you’re only visiting that land of ledgers. Its language, its rules, its pressures and its values, are never the true measure of your worth and your work.</p>
Your Brain Hates You, and Other Hazards of Metrics2014-07-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/07/your-brain-hates-you<p>I love measuring things.</p>
<p>That’s not terribly special, of course. Human beings generally love knowing <em>how much that is</em> and <em>which one is more</em> and <em>am I faster</em> and fun stuff like that. We measure our economies, our jogging, our page loads, our friends, our clickthroughs, our sleep cycles, our faves and our carbon footprints… We invent buzzwords like “the quantified life” and “big data” to describe our relationships with those numbers and graphs and goals, and we build whole jobs and companies and industries around making them make sense.</p>
<p>Which is great, because measuring things helps us recognize problems and learn and improve and grow. Knowledge is power! Yay! Except, of course, when it isn’t.</p>
<p>The funny thing is that measuring something almost inevitably causes strange and unexpected stuff to happen. It’s not that measuring is bad, of course. The real problem is the human brain.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I wanted to go canoeing this week, but I realized I wouldn’t get any FitBit points.” <cite>—My co-worker, having a horrible realization</cite></p>
</blockquote>
<p>People-brains are fantastic organs full of great tricks, but they’re also littered with hard-wired shortcuts, biases, and ruts — pitfalls that can sabotage well-meaning metrics-driven approaches to problem solving.</p>
<h2 id="my-plan-wouldve-worked-if-it-wasnt-for-those-meddling-humans">My plan would’ve worked if it wasn’t for those meddling humans</h2>
<p>In 1924, the Western Electric Company wanted to figure out how to make their factory workers more productive. With the help of management experts from the Harvard Business School, they turned the Hawthorne Works plant in Cicero, Illinois <a href="http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/hawthorne/intro.html">into a giant A/B test</a>. Over the course of <em>nine years</em>, they repeatedly changed factory conditions and dutifully recording the results. It was a data lover’s dream come true!</p>
<p>In one particular test, they changed the lighting levels in the factory every week. Would bright lights keep everyone on their toes, or would dim lighting lead to more relaxed, focused workers? The answer was clear: Yes. Both. Or… no? Maybe neither?</p>
<p>Crap.</p>
<p>Factory output, it turns out, went up when they brightened the lights. It also stayed up when they dimmed them, and stayed up when they returned to normal. And then, when the experiment ended, factory output drifted back to normal. The same pattern played out in other experiments, as well.</p>
<p>The sad truth the Harvard and Western Electric researchers discovered came to be known as <a href="https://explorable.com/hawthorne-effect">The Hawthorne Effect</a>, a form of observation bias. Simply knowing that they’re being measured changes peoples’ behavior, skewing attempts to gather actionable data.</p>
<h2 id="oh-dont-worry--it-gets-worse">Oh, don’t worry — it gets worse.</h2>
<p>Looking into research on cognitive biases yields <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases">piles of well-researched pitfalls</a> that should give any decision maker pause.</p>
<p>Humans tend to rank information and events we can easily remember as more relevant than the less noteworthy stuff — it’s called the Availability Heuristic. The effect can cascade, too: if you spend all of your time reading about startups that make it big, you’ll find it easier to recall success stories, leading to rosier predictions even when they’re unmerited. This bias can also skew the value we place on easy-to-access stats like follows, comment counts, and the seductively simple default view in Google Analytics.</p>
<p>Trying to figure out how to measure something complicated? Be careful — “close enough” metrics rarely stay that way. <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/">Goodheart’s Law</a>, <a href="http://www.ethnography.com/index.php?s=Campbell%27s+Law">Campbell’s Law</a>, and a host of other nerdy postulates all describe the same principle: If you care about X, but can only measure Y, it doesn’t matter how closely related they seem — people will inevitably game the system by focusing on Y. Test scores as a measure of intelligence, gross sales as a measure of business health, and lines of code as a measure of developer productivity are all familiar examples.</p>
<h2 id="dont-hate-the-player">Don’t hate the player</h2>
<p>Excellent books like Eli Pariser’s <a href="http://www.thefilterbubble.com/">The Filter Bubble</a>, Clay Johnson’s <a href="http://www.informationdiet.com/">The Information Diet</a>, and David Boyle’s <a href="http://www.david-boyle.co.uk/books/tyranny.html">The Sum of Our Discontent</a> all explore the cultural effects of our fixation on metrics. And they generally agree that the dangers don’t lie in measurements, tests, metrics, or numbers <em>in and of themselves</em>.</p>
<p>Rather, it’s the danger of ignoring our own human hiccups and assuming that the data we gather and present can be trusted and understood without hard work and lots of humility.</p>
<p>Working with clients in the web world, that’s the kind of effort that separates tactics from strategy. Increasing the number of blog posts published on a web site, boosting ad impressions, or convincing more users to like the company Facebook page are all easy in isolation. Keeping a steady focus on <em>why</em> we’re doing those things and whether we’re accomplishing our broader goals, though — that’s what can keep us from chasing easy but deceptive measure of success.</p>
<h2 id="in-conclusion-my-klout-score-is-down">In conclusion, my Klout score is down</h2>
<p>Tricky or not, I still love measuring stuff. My first contribution to an open source project was a product ratings engine. I wrote a web crawler to compare the performance of KickStarter projects <em>for fun</em>! Prompted by a co-worker’s bad day, I designing a tool to track the emotional health of isolated remote workers. And these days, I’m elbows deep in mad-scientist plans to monitor my cats’ kibble intake with a RESTful API.</p>
<p>But when important decisions have to be made, I have to temper that natural enthusiasm. I ask people with different perspectives and experience to check my assumptions. I force myself to argue <em>against</em> my own data-driven conclusions, as honestly as I can. Most importantly, I try to ensure that the big-picture goals are crystal clear. We’re only human, after all, and outsmarting our own brains is a difficult prospect. Admitting our own biases and respecting the limits of our own understanding — those are the first steps to making better decisions.</p>
Seven Books That Changed My Life2014-06-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/06/books-that-changed-my-life<p>Both my wife and I love books — when we married, one of the first challenges was figuring out how to fit the dozens of boxes we’d accumulated into just <em>one</em> apartment.</p>
<p>Written words have had such an impact on both our lives that it’s hard not to see them as an essential fuel for living, like oxygen or Doritos. Thankfully, the rise of eBooks has eased our space crunch, and regular donations to the local library have thinned our shelves to make room for selected new arrivals.</p>
<p>There are a few, though, that I’ll never have the heart to part with — books that have changed how I see the world around me, how I understand my own life. Seven arbitrarily selected examples are presented here in no particular order; some are still my favorites, others feel as dated as my high school poetry, but all of them are part of who I am.</p>
<hr />
<h3 id="the-myth-of-certainty-by-daniel-taylor"><em>The Myth of Certainty</em>, by Daniel Taylor</h3>
<p>I grew up as an earnest, passionate kid in a fundamentalist religious community — a True Believer who learned apologetics and theology to spread the Truth. When I eventually questioned the unyielding principles I’d learned, the most difficult part was feeling trapped between unacceptable extremes. I could ignore my doubts to please fellow believers, or abandon everything to fit in with skeptics who acknowledged my questions. The Myth Of Certainty described a third way, one that was less comfortable but more honest, and helped shape my understanding of doubt, faith, and empathy.</p>
<h3 id="surely-youre-joking-mr-feynman-by-richard-feynman"><em>Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman</em>, by Richard Feynman</h3>
<p>Richard Feynman helped develop the atom bomb in the 1940s, and became one of the world’s foremost experts on quantum physics. Reading this collections of stories from his life, it’s easy to think that his days were a giant parade of practical jokes, recreational lock-picking, bongo-playing antics, and arguments with Albert Einstein. What stuck with me after the zany anecdotes? The universe is full of amazing things; discovering them and sharing them with others is one of life’s greatest pleasures.</p>
<h3 id="the-elements-of-style-by-william-strunk-and-eb-white"><em>The Elements of Style</em>, by William Strunk and E.B. White</h3>
<p>“Clarity, clarity, clarity!” That phrase echoed in my skull for years after reading this tiny little book of grammar, punctuation, and composition advice. It’s a classic, and the author’s passion for communicating in words comes through every syllable. When I wanted to throw everything I had at the page, it gave me clear and simple tools to pull my unruly words into line.</p>
<h3 id="the-beauty-myth-by-naomi-wolf"><em>The Beauty Myth</em>, by Naomi Wolf</h3>
<p>Naomi Wolf’s first book was also my first encounter with feminist writing, and its critique of modern society’s “beauty machine” was a shocking eye-opener for me. Although some of the book’s statistics on eating disorders have been criticized, its documentation of the relentless pressure to be beautiful is still compelling. It helped teach me to look for systems and structures that can hurt the people around me, even if <em>I’m</em> blissfully unaffected.</p>
<h3 id="purity-of-heart-is-to-will-one-thing-by-søren-kierkegaard"><em>Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing</em>, by Søren Kierkegaard</h3>
<p>I’m pretty sure I picked this one up at Borders because I was 21 and wanted to look really, really <em>profound</em>. I was out of my depth from the first page, but slowly, some important stuff sunk in. The importance of honestly assessing one’s own priorities and admitting them to others — of owning one’s own choices — hit me like a ton of bricks. Kierkegaard wasn’t exactly a <em>cheery</em> guy, but he changed how I understood faith, ethics, and social responsibility.</p>
<h3 id="the-sparrow-by-mary-doria-russell"><em>The Sparrow</em>, by Mary Doria Russell</h3>
<p>I love science fiction, and I’ve read my weight in pulp novels more than a few times over. This story of humanity’s first doomed encounter with an alien race has depth and complexity that puts other every other first-contact novel to shame. Mary Doria Russell’s experience as a cultural anthropologist informs its exploration of tragedy, the human need for meaning, and the desire for connection. It broke me of the adolescent belief that “real” science fiction is about technology, and I always keep a second copy to loan.</p>
<h3 id="a-pattern-language-by-christopher-alexander"><em>A Pattern Language</em>, by Christopher Alexander</h3>
<p>It’s impossible to learn a programming language these days without stumbling across <em>some</em> mention of “Design Patterns.” The idea of describing common approaches to architectural challenges isn’t unique to software developers, though. In the 1970s, architect Christopher Alexander used it to describe a new and more holistic way of approaching the design of rooms, buildings, neighborhoods, and even whole cities. Picking up his original book, rather than <em>just</em> reading about software Factories and Facades, was worth the effort. It helped me realize that meaningful systems, with carefully designed and complementary elements, could improve our work in all kinds of fields.</p>
<hr />
<p>These books aren’t necessarily the <em>best</em> writing in the world, or ones that every reader will care about. Other books have emerged as my favorites over the years, and even changed my feelings about the ones in this list. But they’re a part of me, and their spines on the shelf are a kind of time capsule.</p>
<p>What books have shaped and changed you? What stories and experiences would you have missed without them? Take the time to remember, and let others know about the writing that’s helped make you who you are. I know I’d love to hear about them — and I miiiight just have enough room on a shelf to fit a few more in…</p>
Listen or GTFO2014-05-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/05/listen-or-gtfo<p>It’s Memorial Day as I sit here with my laptop, polishing the last few paragraphs of a post about building presentations on short notice. It’s a fun little bit of technophillia, but here in the final stretch, I’m struck by a simple thought: <em>It doesn’t matter.</em></p>
<p>I’m a middle-class heterosexual white American guy in the world of open source web development. If someone at a conference, industry event, or networking event is holding the microphone, odds are they look an awful lot like me. My ideas, my perspectives, and my experiences are echoed over and over. When I do speak up, I can take it as a given that I’ll be listened to — even if I’m just speculating about something I have no expertise in.</p>
<p>It’s a good life.</p>
<hr />
<p>A couple of years ago, I was attending a large open source conference. I’d just finished delivering a presentation and I was on my way to participate in a panel discussion, but I had some time to kill. Confronted with the usual buffet of sessions, I picked the one that was closest: a small roundtable discussion on “Diversity” hosted by <a href="http://www.ashedryden.com/">an anime-haired lady</a> wearing a Drupal T-shirt.</p>
<p>I think of myself as a feminist, happy to speak out on whatever gender issue is hot on Twitter at the moment. I had some thoughts I was ready to share, and I was looking forward to showing support for a group of people I already believed in. Once I sat down, though, I saw lots of unfamiliar faces — women, minorities, and handicapped members of our community. People I’d never seen keynoting a camp, or featured on a conference schedule, or promoted in the usual circle of bloggers and tweeters and guest-posters I rubbed shoulders with.</p>
<p>Some of the frustrations they discussed were familiar to me: sexual harassment and misogyny was a big problem online, tech circles were unwelcoming to people of color, and the usual statistics about the white-boys-club. But some of the comments were unexpected and frustrating — they made it sound like <em>I</em> was part of the problem.</p>
<p>Sure, some white men. But not <em>all</em>, obviously. As I prepared to jump into the conversation — to help clarify that not all of us were determined to hog the spotlight, that we were excited to help — I did something uncharacteristic.</p>
<p>I shut the fuck up.</p>
<p>I shut the fuck up, and I <em>tried</em> to listen.</p>
<hr />
<p>Our industry, our culture, has a serious listening problem. Only recently has mainstream coding culture started internalizing the idea that listening to <em>users</em> rather than <em>fellow programmers</em> is important. Instead, too many of us prefer to start from first principles and reason out what some other person <em>really</em> needs. When the moment of truth arrives and our ironclad arguments <a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2597">collide with reality</a>, it’s easy enough to blame <a href="https://medium.com/eaton-elsewhere/b68307a1c8c4">the stupid people who just don’t <em>understand</em> what we build</a>.</p>
<p>Despite the best attempts of empathetic, insightful advocates, we still see regular culture clashes and grim power struggles when different disciplines are asked to find common ground.</p>
<p>In one code-centric open source community I participated in, a common lament was the lack of designers willing to contribute their time and experience. Of course, when designers and UX specialists <em>did</em> chime in, they were usually brushed aside. Who were <em>they</em> to criticize what we’d built with the best intentions? Why did they think <em>we</em> weren’t smart enough to build great experiences? If they thought they could do better, why didn’t <em>they</em> learn to program and fix it themselves? Why were they trying to <em>take over?</em></p>
<p>Defending ourselves is always easier than listening to difficult truths.</p>
<hr />
<p>Early this weekend, <a href="www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/24/elliot-rodgers-california-shooting-mental-health-misogyny">a twenty-two year old man murdered three men and three women</a>. According to the trail of online manifestos, message board posts, and chilling videos he left in his wake, his motivations were simple. He was unlucky in love, he resented the alpha males who hoarded more women than they deserved, and he <em>really</em> hated the women who didn’t give him the sexual attention he felt he deserved.</p>
<p>By his own account, he murdered innocent strangers to punish <em>womankind</em> for withholding his sexual birthright.</p>
<p>It’s a horrifying story, one that’s quickly sparked debates about gun control, mental health care infrastructure, and the deep roots of misogyny grown into our culture’s foundations. Even more horrifying is the response from the women I know: A complete and utter lack of surprise. This, many of them have said, is just the most recent and most visible example of the <a href="http://vampmissedith.tumblr.com/post/86760365640/when-i-was-a-freshman-my-sister-was-in-eighth">expectations and violent resentment</a> they’ve always endured.</p>
<p>In the days that followed the shooting, a Twitter hashtag — <a href="https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=YesAllWomen">#YesAllWomen</a> — became <a href="http://time.com/114043/yesallwomen-hashtag-santa-barbara-shooting/">an organic flashpoint for their stories</a>. It’s hard reading — the kind of stuff that makes you want to click away to kitten pictures. The kind of stuff that you want to argue away just to avoid processing the sadness of it. The kind of stuff that guys like me — guys who think we understand the world and are used to having the microphone — quickly respond to with a prickly correction: “Not ALL men are like that!”</p>
<p>God forbid those women forget to defend us. It’s a lot easier to complain about unfair generalizations than to look, long and hard, at the stories they share.</p>
<hr />
<p>Our world is full of <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">enormous structural problems</a> whose solutions seem impossible to imagine, let alone implement. Of course, it’s people like me — articulate, successful white dudes — who often have the luxury of treating these challenges like abstract thought exercises. They’re interesting problems to ponder when we’re not optimizing database performance or building new front-end frameworks.</p>
<p>I joke sometimes that I became a feminist because I enjoy arguing with <em>people who are wrong,</em> and misogynists and bigots are easy targets. It’s usually good for a laugh, but it’s hard to pretend that I have much on the line. When the argument is over, after all, things default back to a world that looks like me — a world that treats me as one of its own to be heard and acknowledged.</p>
<p>Perhaps, just maybe, it’s time for us to quiet down and listen to the people who have to live it.</p>
<p>We may not know all the answers, but we can stop pretending it’s someone else’s problem. We can listen.</p>
The Ballad of Boris and Ray2014-04-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/04/the-ballad-of-boris-and-ray<p>Back in 2000, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I worked for a software development shop that packed a secret weapon: a <em>methodology.</em> While other companies wrote mere code, we practiced Code Science™, a homegrown process cribbed from the hot new “Extreme Programming” movement. We had best practices and core principles and ten steps and lean documentation; we wrote tests first and we crafted user stories and we pair programmed. We explained to our customers how much <em>better</em> it was than the old way of doing things, and printed up impressive brochures about the new age of software development it would usher in.</p>
<p>No, seriously, we trademarked it.</p>
<p>In retrospect, of course, it’s clear we were swept up in the excitement of the early days of the Agile movement, and desperate to differentiate ourselves in the tough post-dotcom-crash market. Code Science™ <em>did</em> have some good ideas that helped our teams work through tricky challenges — we weren’t stupid after all, just full of marketing hubris. Despite our best intentions, circumstances eventually made it clear that a magical process couldn’t solve every problem.</p>
<hr />
<p>Boris and Ray were two hardcore coders who worked on my floor. They were both efficient, opinionated, and enthusiastic about their work. They were both assigned to a new project around the time that Code Science™ was being implemented across the entire company, which meant they’d be <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming">pair programming</a>.</em></p>
<p>For a week or two, the novelty of it kept them both on their best behavior: they were professionals, collaborating in realtime! It was a grand adventure! As the project progressed, however, they began to express… differences of opinion. Every task would turn into an epic battle as the two fought about code style, or tool choice, or loop structure, or pattern preference. They argued, everyone agreed, like an old married couple: first to win, then on principle, and eventually because <em>it’s simply what they did.</em></p>
<p>It seemed intractable, but against all odds they eventually settled down. A month into the experiment, they seemed to have worked out their differences: the office was quieter, code worked, and I mentioned to Boris that pair programming was a success after all.</p>
<p>“Oh, <em>hell</em>, no,” he replied, glaring over his mug of coffee. “Ray is insane.”</p>
<p>Ray, of course, insisted that Boris was crazy.</p>
<p>They had, despite their differences, figured out a system that worked. Every morning, Ray would come in bright and early at 6am, rewriting Boris’s code until it was to his liking. At noon, Boris would roll in. Like WWII soldiers eyeing each other over the trenches, they’d discuss the critical issues that needed to be completed. Ray would leave, and Boris would work until late in the evening — tearing out Ray’s code, writing his own, and declaring it Done. Every morning, the cycle would begin again.</p>
<p>Both Boris and Ray were great programmers, conscientious workers, and all around smart guys who knew their stuff. They’d worked — together, even! — on other successful projects. Meanwhile, there were <em>other</em> developers around the company having great success with pair programming. For whatever reason, though, Boris and Ray’s pairing just wasn’t meant to be.</p>
<p>There are quite a few lessons I <em>could’ve</em> taken away from that episode, but the one that stuck was simple: the amazing powers of magical project acceleration that we attributed to our Code Science™ methodology were oversold. While the systems we used to describe our work played a part in our successes and failures, the biggest factors were simpler. The people working the projects, their skills, and their ability to work effectively together were what made the difference. Tools that improved those factors helped us, and those that didn’t were just fluff. In a 2010 blog post titled <em><a href="http://brodzinski.com/2010/03/good-agile-wrong-waterfall.html">Agile Bullshit</a>,</em> Pawel Brodzinski summed it up simply: “Different approaches work or fail because of people, not because they are universally good or bad.”</p>
<hr />
<p>If you’re good at what you do, the day will eventually come when you’re asked to do something terrifying: <em>explain how you do it.</em><span style="line-height: 1.4;"> Whether you’re a sous chef or a software developer, it’s difficult to translate your own intuitive processes, the hunches and gut-checks you’ve learned to rely on, into systems that other people can use.</span></p>
<p>When that day arrives, it’s easy to panic: “Wait, I’m supposed to be Someone Who Talks Authoritatively About Stuff? I should have charts and diagrams and four-point systems and maybe even <em>acronyms,</em> or people will think I’m just making it all up!” Carefully defined best practices and impressively-illustrated processes definitely have their place, but the truth is, that’s not where the magic lives.</p>
<p>Document processes because they work for you and help others understand what’s going on. Capture “best practices” because they save you pain and frustration and time. Research what others have discovered because learning from their experiences is good. Share what you’ve figured out so others can benefit — and offer insights you might’ve missed.</p>
<p>And the next time you’re tempted to put on a show and pretend that you’ve invented Code Science™ or Quantum Hosting™ or some other crazy new recipe to solve all the problems, remember the story of Boris and Ray. Do great work, share what you’ve learned, and don’t sweat the trademarked, nine-step methodologies. The humble truths of your real-world perspectives are worth more than a bandolier of silver bullets.</p>
Squirrels Optional2014-03-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/03/squirrels-optional<p>As I write this, it’s a gorgeous, sunny day outside. That’s big news here in the midwest, where winter has been a grim, Hothlike spectacle of snow, ice, and sub-zero temperatures. Today, though, the ground is visible, the sun is out, and rowdy crowds of squirrels are scrambling over every available surface.</p>
<p>Of course, there’s no time to go out and enjoy it: I work in the world of web development and digital publishing. My company prides itself on work-life balance, but our industry is all about extra-curricular activities. There are new languages to learn on the weekends, side projects to work on in the evenings, and open source projects to contribute to in the margins.</p>
<p>I enjoy writing, so crafting articles (like this one!) appears on the activity list. I love photography, so a trip to the park is a chance to snap bokeh-filled pictures for my next presentation. If I want to take a break with a good book, it’s about content modeling or project management or business strategy or the fundamentals of graphic design or… well, you get the picture.</p>
<p>Talking to friends, I hear similar stories. Between the pressures of a fast-moving industry and a tech culture that loves to blend work with play, we could easily fill every minute of our lives with always-on ultra-productivity. It’s worse for those who really love the work they do: the all-consuming flood of work-ish side projects and research and conversations and learning can sneak up on you. If you don’t have a vocal partner or friend who’s willing to point it out, it’s easy look up, startled, and realize that you haven’t really <em>taken a break</em> for months.</p>
<p>This is a terrible thing.</p>
<p>The always-on lifestyle eventually grinds away the very productivity it’s meant to accelerate. Although some of us (particularly the young ones) can power through on coffee and cat-naps, the creative insights and fresh perspectives we need <em>require</em> disconnecting.</p>
<p>For me, disconnecting meant carving out time for a hobby that was <em>utterly</em> unrelated to my work and stepping back from a few projects I’d been involved in. I’d joined in because I was passionate about them, and they were all feathers in my professional cap, but there’s only so much time to go around. Sacrificing them meant leaving more of that time in the margins: time for family, time to relax, and time to recharge with things <em>outside</em> of the work I love. Sometimes, I have to grit my teeth and remind myself that the world won’t fall apart if my new code snippet remains incomplete for another day. Sometimes, my wife has to drag me from my desk for a hike around a nearby lake. And sometimes, to be fair, I have to pull her from her writing: the dangers of going all-in aren’t exclusive to the tech world.</p>
<p>No matter what form it takes, though, it’s worth it. Carve out the time to fill your metaphorical tank. Read a trashy novel even though Monday’s around the corner. Make some chili, because it’s delicious and you can play Threes while it cooks. And take the time to watch the squirrels while they’re tearing around the yard: those little imps are <em>hilarious.</em></p>
Dodging Cassandra2014-02-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/02/dodging-cassandra<p>“You’re all doomed.”</p>
<p>When my wife introduced me to the world of opera a few years ago, I assumed it’d be a peek into high culture, not a lesson in keeping technology projects on track. But as we sat through <em>Les Troyens</em> — The Trojans — I watched a familiar story unfold.</p>
<p>Cassandra is a familiar presence in Greek mythology. She can see the future, but spurning Apollo’s amorous advances earns her a curse: no matter how accurate her prophecies are, no one ever listens to her. <em>Les Troyens</em> finds her in the city of Troy in the final days of its brutal war with Greece. When the Greek soldiers surrounding the city mysteriously disappear, leaving a gigantic wooden horse behind, all of Troy celebrates.</p>
<p>Obviously, the end of a decade-long siege means that it’s time to break out the champagne! Cassandra warns them that it’s a deadly trap, announcing that they’ll all be killed… but of course, no one listens. They’re too busy feasting and admiring their new monument. Their Trojan Horse.</p>
<p>Spoiler warning, folks: <em>the horse is full of Greek soldiers.</em></p>
<h2 id="stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-before">Stop me if you’ve heard this before</h2>
<p>If you’ve ever been the skeptical person in the room during a new project’s first, joyous planning session, you probably know how Cassandra felt. You’re seeing bad omens, and your spidey-senses are tingling — but everyone else is smiling and saying, “Let’s crush this!”</p>
<p>The horse is full of crazy deadlines, and no one will listen.</p>
<p>Getting stuck in the role of the naysayer is never fun, especially in the very early stages of a project. Often, the warning signs you’re picking up are vague, and easy to dismiss. At those moments, it’s easy to lean back and turn the concerns into Cover-Your-Ass disclaimers. “Perhaps,” I sometimes think, “tacking an ‘assumptions’ section onto the project plan will shield me from the consequences of a disaster I fear is inevitable…”</p>
<p>As tempting as that can be, I try to remember Cassandra’s fate. She was right when she warned Troy that it was doomed, but <em>she lived there, too.</em> When disaster struck, she perished along with the rest of the city. If we really care about the projects we work on and the people we work with, there’s no joy in saying “I told you so.” The entire team suffers, and we’re right there with them.</p>
<h2 id="dodging-cassandras-curse">Dodging Cassandra’s curse</h2>
<p>In a mature team under ideal circumstances, gut checks <em>can</em> be enough to get a decision-maker’s attention, but there are always times when something more concrete is necessary. How can we overcome Cassandra’s curse, and turn our vague portents of doom into clear, unambiguous advice? There’s no magic bullet, but a handful of basic techniques can improve our chances.</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p><strong>Catalog the uncertainty.</strong> Is there a hard deadline, but a fuzzy and ill-defined list of required features? Is unfamiliar or immature technology required to make it happen? Does the team lack an unambiguous set of success criteria? Make a list, and map out those scary shadows. Sometimes, there <em>are</em> answers and they’ll assuage your fears. When there aren’t, though, it can help decision-makers realize they need to head back to the drawing board.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Compare the work to similar tasks and projects</strong>. If the early estimates for a large project feel too optimistic, it can be difficult to explain <em>why</em>. Whenever possible, find examples of similar projects or tasks from the past. Show how long <em>they</em> took, and if the estimates for <em>those</em> projects shared the same early optimism, point it out. As unpleasant as it is to keep time sheets and logs, they can be critical ammunition in the fight for sanity.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Identify deep dependencies, in technology and teams.</strong> Are you building a mobile app that relies on a third-party library… which relies on a fourth-party service… which relies on a fifth-party startup? Does one department control the infrastructure your project will need to launch, while a second is responsible for content and a third handles the development? The more external dependencies a project has, and the deeper those chains go, the more risk there is. There’s no way to avoid reliance on outside teams or tech, but mapping them out makes the risks clear.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Identify fuzzy authority roles.</strong> Few things are as depressing as ironing out a project’s requirements, building it to spec, and preparing for launch only to discover that your client wasn’t <em>really</em> in charge. The last-minute emergence of a VP with different aesthetic tastes, or ongoing conflict between two or three equal stakeholders, can sabotage an otherwise well-run project. If you hear talk of “running the plan past a few other people” before it can be approved, or it’s unclear who’s in charge of key decisions, don’t be shy. Get a list of people with veto power and ensure there’s a single buck-stops-here person for key decisions, or wave a red flag. </p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Time-box and prototype.</strong> Especially when new or unfamiliar technology is involved, accurately judging risks and sketching out timelines can be impossible. Carving out a small chunk of time for a prototype is critical. If the exercise reveals unanticipated challenges or problems, you have concrete evidence to offer rather than vague concerns.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="towards-a-happy-ending">Towards a happy ending</h2>
<p>The goal of these techniques is twofold. First, the work that goes into them can reveal <em>solutions</em> to the problems and clear answers to the troubling questions. Obviously, that’s the best outcome: successfully routing around danger rather than grumbling about it. If that isn’t possible, though, carefully articulating the concerns can make the pitfalls clear and unambiguous.</p>
<p>It’s an approach that goes beyond <em>avoiding blame</em> and puts important information in the hands of people who need it. It doesn’t always work, and we can’t always avoid the dangers, but it’s far better than the cynical alternative. </p>
<p>Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to look into the next trip to the opera. This time? I think we’ll try a <em>comedy</em>…</p>
Explain Bitcoin Like I’m Five2014-01-31T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/01/explain-bitcoin-like-im-five<p>Money is super important because it lets us save and buy and sell things easier. If I’m a farmer and all I have are chickens, I might be able to find a baker who will trade me bread in exchange for a chicken. But if he doesn’t want my chicken, I have to find someone with milk (or candy, or something the Baker wants). I’d have to trade my chicken for that thing, then trade that thing for the bread. It gets really complicated when different people want different things, and if I can’t work it all it, I’m stuck with my chickens.</p>
<p>That’s why “Money” is so popular. We’ve all agreed to use it, and to give it the same value. I can sell my chickens for $100 when people want chickens, then save it or use it to buy what I need – even if the grocery store wouldn’t have wanted my chickens.</p>
<p>Anything can be used as money if enough people agree to use it – because the value of money is in the agreement everyone has made, not the worth of the paper itself. The problem is making sure that people don’t just take a pen and some paper and “make” themselves new money without doing the work to earn it. That’s why banks and and governments are usually in charge of money: they make it very detailed, on special paper, and hard to copy, so that it’s easy to spot when someone has made their own fake money instead of working for it.</p>
<p>“Bitcoin” is a special kind of money that some people have agreed to use. Instead of being printed on paper or coins, it’s stored on computers in files, like music or movies. That makes it really easy to send to other people or receive from other people… but it has the same problem as paper money: How can we make sure that the “Bitcoin” someone has isn’t just a file they made without doing the work for it?</p>
<p>Bitcoin solves this in a weird way that works pretty well: Everyone who agrees to use Bitcoin also keeps track of everyone else’s transactions. When I give 5 Bitcoin to my friend, I tell all the other Bitcoin users about it and they all agree to recognize the transaction. If someone announces, “I’m rich! I have a million Bitcoin!” but there is no record of them receiving Bitcoin from anyone, all the people who use Bitcoin know they’re lying.</p>
<p>Double-checking those transactions takes a lot of complicated math – it even takes computers a long time to do it. (Computer graphics cards are particularly good at this kind of math, so people usually use them for it.) Even though it’s hard and takes time, it’s very important, because without all that double-checking, would be no way to know whose Bitcoin is “real.” So, when people do those calculations to double-check everyone else’s transactions, they get a little bit of Bitcoin to make it worth their time.</p>
<p>That means that people who want to get some Bitcoin can spend their time double-checking everyone else’s transactions, and be paid for that work in Bitcoin. They call that “mining,” because they spend their time calculating numbers and getting “coin” for it, sort of like gold miners digging in the ground.</p>
You are more than your mission2014-01-29T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/01/you-are-more-than-your-mission<p>Earlier this week, a piece that I wrote was published on The Pastry Box. It’s about the self-imposed and social pressures that can lead to <a href="https://the-pastry-box-project.net/jeff-eaton/2014-january-26">personal burnout and community dysfunction</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No mission, project, or community is big enough to sacrifice your health or well being; your responsibilities to yourself, your family, and your loved ones are just as important as a worthy cause or an investor’s profits. If a cause or a project can only survive by chewing you up, <em>it deserves to die</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/growing-up-goddy">Growing up in a religious community</a>, then working on the staff of a large church, was an interesting education for me. I learned about the complex dynamics of volunteer-dependent organizations, and I saw first-hand how social pressures can keep people grinding away at work that’s killing them. In a mission-based organization, there’s a real connection between how much you <em>do</em> and how much you <em>care</em>: workaholics are presumed to care more about the mission than those who stay at home, and labor can easily become a substitute for piety. It’s the <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10%3A38-42">Mary/Martha</a> thing writ large.</p>
<p>The shaming and scolding that evolves out of that (like a PBS pledge drive, but for work instead of money) is usually intended to spur folks on the sideline to action. Often, though, it’s heard loudest by the tender-hearted people who are already overloaded and overwhelmed. Not enough people to keep the soup kitchen open late? <em>You should work longer.</em> Too few helpers to set up chairs before the Sunday service? <em>If you really loved God, you’d be there…</em></p>
<p>When I started working in open source about a decade ago, I was struck by the similarities. Although the mission was different, the social dynamics and lionization of self-sacrificing super-volunteers was the same. It’s hard to balance passion for a mission or cause with a commitment to self-care, but it’s necessary. If we don’t do it for ourselves <em>and</em> encourage it in other community-members, we’re slowly destroying the people who care the most.</p>
while($issue)2014-01-27T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/01/while-issue<p>Has anyone else noticed the number of endless loops in the latest build of society? Going back to read the docs on previous builds, it looks like they’ve been around for quite a few releases. The value of <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">$issue</code> can vary, but if it’s in <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">array('patriarchy', 'sexism', 'privilege')</code>, the problem triggers pretty reliably.</p>
<div class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>while ($issue) {
print "Hey, $issue is important!";
print "You're being emotional! I refuse to discuss $issue.";
print "OK, I've calmed down. Let's talk about $issue.";
print "No one's angry about $issue; it's not important.";
}
while ($issue) {
print "I think $issue is terrible, and I'm going to say so.";
print "$issue isn't illegal; you have no right to say that!";
print "OK, I'll try to change the laws about $issue.";
print "Legislating morality is terrible and never works!";
}
while ($issue) {
print "$issue is immoral and wrong!";
print "$issue is just how people are. Too bad if it hurts you.";
print "OK, I'll work to change peoples' minds.";
print "This sucks, people hate me for supporting $issue now!";
}
while ($issue) {
print "$issue is a serious problem that needs attention.";
print "I don't think $issue is serious: show me examples!";
print "Here's an exhaustive list of times when...";
print "Why are you so obsessed with $issue?";
}
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>Has anyone else been able to reproduce this? Anyone know which subsystem I should log it against?</p>
You Matter More Than The Cause2014-01-26T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2014/01/you-matter-more-than-the-cause<p>A few years ago, I started thinking hard about the idea of “burnout.” It was no academic exercise: I was part of a high-profile Open Source community that was feeling the crunch, and the people I knew and cared about were suffering.</p>
<p>I say “community” instead of “project” or “job” because those words don’t do it justice. I belonged to a group of people that created a particular kind of product, and helped others get the most out of it. We had a charismatic founder who’d started the ball rolling, but within a few years it had outgrown him. His little backyard project accumulated hundreds of passionate contributors, a bunch of infrastructure, a few community conferences, and lofty long-term goals.</p>
<p>Many of us developed close friendships, and some built our work into lucrative careers. Thousands of volunteers worked to keep things running smoothly, and a growing number of people were paid to do it full time. But with more and more people noticing and benefitting from what the community did, the pressure ratcheted up… Which brings us back to the burnout.</p>
<hr />
<p>While the outside world could see the growth and the success, insiders increasingly felt like the wheels were coming off. The work kept growing faster than we could keep up, overworked co-workers were losing sleep, and previously-happy planning meetings turned combative. A number of our best volunteers left, swearing they’d never return. Resentment started to build, as some of the volunteers questioned why a lucky few were <em>paid</em> to work on the project. The paid staff countered that they were <em>on the hook</em> for their work, unlike those easy-come, easy-go volunteers.</p>
<p>At best, we celebrated the workaholic 110% people and held them up as examples for everyone else. At worst, we started to treat healthy boundaries as a kind of betrayal, pushing out the folks who couldn’t afford to burn the candle at both ends. Looming above it all was <em>The Mission</em>. All of us cared about doing great things and helping others, and without realizing it we’d become convinced that dialing it back meant abandoning our ideals.</p>
<p>Anyone who’s ever contributed to a successful open source project or worked for a rapidly growing startup is probably familiar with that story. The details may differ — “volunteers” might be “community moderators,” the product might be a service, and the grand mission might be an IPO — but these pressures build whenever we feel we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.</p>
<hr />
<p>The interesting part — to me, at least — is that my story isn’t <em>really</em> about an Open Source community at all. Instead of slinging code, I was part of a large Midwestern church. Instead of a prototypical Silicon Valley garage, it was founded in a suburban movie theater. And instead of a visionary CEO with a startup to flip, we had a pastor who wanted to help the less fortunate. The church drew on its huge pool of staff and volunteers to run soup kitchens, homeless shelters, free auto repair clinics for single moms, sports leagues for disabled kids, and… well, you get the picture.</p>
<p>Was my thematic bait-and-switch cheesy? Yes, but the pressure to <em>do good</em>, and to avoid disappointing the team, isn’t restricted to a religion, an ideology, or an industry. Whether you volunteer for a save-the-world nonprofit, play bass in a band, or burn the midnight oil to launch a web app, the same cycle of ratcheting demands, resentment, and burnout can be deadly.</p>
<p>I feel fortunate: Although it’s far from perfect, the particular community I was a part of invested a lot in building a healthier culture for its staff <em>and</em> its volunteers. The lessons it taught me about perspective, balance, and commitment have helped keep me sane through my second life in the tech industry.</p>
<hr />
<p>Each of us has two roles to play in preventing burnout and repairing dysfunctional, overloaded communities. To help the people we work with and build a healthy culture, we need to celebrate them for who they <em>are</em>, not just the work they <em>do</em>. That’s doubly true when encouraging their workahalic tendencies benefits us. Am I willing to help a fried colleague reduce their commitments, even if their work is a boon for my team? When someone steps back from intense involvement or sets healthy boundaries, do I treat it as a normal part of being human, or a failure and a betrayal? The fear of losing colleagues’ respect or friendship can keep a well-intentioned person trapped, long after they’ve hit rock bottom.</p>
<p>If you’re the one that’s being crushed, the next steps can feel even harder. You have to look out for yourself, and say “No” when it’s needed. No mission, project, or community is big enough to sacrifice your health or well being; your responsibilities to yourself, your family, and your loved ones are just as important as a worthy cause or an investor’s profits. If a cause or a project can only survive by chewing you up, <em>it deserves to die.</em> David Hansson of 37 Signals <a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics">doesn’t pull any punches in his advice to entrepreneurs who cultivate a culture of workaholics</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The good news is that communities, companies, and causes can change. If you’re on the edge of burnout, get support, scale back, and remind yourself that it’s OK. If you’re surviving but see others around you getting pulled under the waves, offer a helping hand and let them know: “It’s okay. You’re worth more than this work, and who you <em>are</em> is more than what you <em>do</em>.”</p>
Cognitive Science and Your Blog2013-12-24T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2013/12/cognitive-science-and-your-blog<p><em>This post was guest-written by <a href="https://twitter.com/James_Mathewson">James Mathewson</a> as part of Blog Secret Santa. There’s a list of all Secret Santa posts, including one written by me, on <a href="http://secretsanta.csworkflow.com/draws/2013/gifts">Santa’s list of 2013 gift posts</a>.</em></p>
<p>I had the great fortune to attend the <a href="http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2013/10/live-blogging-from-the-ibm-research-cognitive-systems-colloquium.html">Cognitive Colloquium</a> in early October of this year at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. It was one of those life-changing moments when you feel like you’re sitting on top of a mountain and you can see much more distant horizons. In my case, the horizon I saw involved using some of my mental energy to solve the grand problems of digital content using the methods of cognitive computing.</p>
<p>What are these methods? Well, at IBM, we describe <a href="http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/index.shtml">cognitive computing</a> as a cluster of practices that use machine learning, natural language processing and high-performance computing to change the way computers work and how humans work with them. Heady stuff, I know.</p>
<p>Before you abandon this post for more comfortable pursuits, please consider a ready example of this in Watson, the supercomputer that competed in Jeopardy! last year and beat the top champions the show had ever had. The IBM team taught Watson the rules of the game and he proceeded to improve his play through many months of live competition leading up to the televised show. He used natural language processing to understand the clues presented by the host, and devised likely questions for them. He used machine learning to get better and better at the game. He’s now being employed in medicine, marketing and several other domain-specific specialties, including our line of work.</p>
<p>Job 1 for my new mission was to read Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s thick book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0374275637/">Thinking Fast and Slow</a></em>. Kahneman was a keynote speaker at the Cognitive Colloquium. His talk triggered several new insights in me about the relationship between human psychology and content strategy. As I read the book (primarily on my train ride between my home in Beacon, NY and Grand Central station), I continue to solidify these insights. I can now articulate several of them. In the interests of space, I will cover one of them for the content strategists who are likely to read this post. If you’re still interested, please read on.</p>
<p>(If you’re interested in the complete set, look for my forthcoming book: <em>Outside-In Marketing: Using Big Data to Drive Your Content Marketing</em>. I also highly recommend reading Kahneman when you find yourself with a hundred hours or so of unstructured time.)</p>
<h3 id="the-central-framework-of-thinking-fast-and-slow">The central framework of <em>Thinking Fast and Slow</em></h3>
<p>The central thesis for Kahneman’s life’s work, spanning over forty years of research of practitioners in fields too numerous to list, is a kind of mental dualism. Our minds have two distinct systems, which Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2.</p>
<p>System 1 is the set of processes that happen automatically, in a flash. They are so automatic, we often can’t recall afterwards intending to do them. We just do them. Examples include the habits of driving, like putting on your turn signal prior to a turn. You don’t have to think about it, you just do it. Most of our lives and much of our communication is governed by System 1. We are faced with so much uncertainty in life and it all comes at us so fast, we need a system to make sense of it in the rough. Kahneman calls System 1 “a machine for jumping to conclusions,” because that is what it does. It judges things automatically before all the data are available.</p>
<p>System 2 is the logical and systematic part of our minds, which has been modeled by cognitive scientists since the discipline was conceived. Though it is accurate and precise, it is slow and lazy. There are times when we doubt the knee-jerk responses our System 1 provides. And these are the times we engage System 2 to analyze all the facts at hand and make a reasoned decision. But System 2 is so lazy, we don’t use it as much as the philosophers and other idealists like to believe. In his book, he documents decisions made by experts in a variety of fields based almost entirely on System 1 thinking, and laced with the biases that it uses to jump to conclusions.</p>
<p>Kahneman was the keynote speaker at the cognitive Colloquium because his framework serves as a new way to model human thinking. As he said, “If you want to build systems that think like humans, start with understanding how humans think.”</p>
<p>Computers have always been devices that needed to be right all the time, without fail. So of course we patterned them after System 2 thinking. The trouble is, it takes huge supercomputers to do somewhat ordinary human tasks, like scanning encyclopedic knowledge for a likely question that matches a cryptic answer. Watson takes up a decent sized room and consumes massive amounts of electricity. The machines of tomorrow need to get ever smaller and more efficient, approaching the efficiency of the human brain. To do that, we need to build systems that do much of their work like System 1, fast and imprecise. Only when accuracy is needed will they engage System 2.</p>
<h3 id="practice-how-do-users-interact-with-websites">Practice: How do users interact with websites?</h3>
<p>Beyond the implications of Kahneman’s work for cognitive computing, some of his work has more direct practical applications for content strategy. Indeed, his framework can be used to approximate how users consume websites. Consider this scenario:</p>
<p>Lizzy is a highly educated millennial who works as an editor in the publishing field. She searches for “structured mark-up” in Google and gets a ton of results. She scans the first search engine results page (SERP) and clicks the most likely link without really reading the results. When she lands on the page, she scans it to determine if it is worth the effort. She decides that it is, and begins reading the long-form content on the page.</p>
<p>What does Lizzy’s mental state look like? Well, she uses both System 1 and System 2 in the process of her information journey. System 1 is the primary mechanism of her scanning and clicking behavior. Scanning SERPs and clicking is so familiar to Lizzy, it’s like using your turn signals while driving. She doesn’t need to think about it. System 2 is what she uses to read and digest the content.</p>
<p>A whole UX discipline has grown out of the imperative, “Don’t make me think.” If you make Lizzy think when she lands on your page, you force her to engage System 2, which is slow and lazy. Not only is Lizzy in a hurry, she really doesn’t want to waste mental energy either. If you force her to think, she will jump to the conclusion that your page is not relevant before even engaging System 2, and she’ll bounce back to the search engine to try another result.</p>
<p>When Lizzy does find your page relevant, she is ready to engage System 2. This means providing enough data, case studies and other stuff to help her complete her information task. Once she engages System 2, she does not want to have to go back to the SERP again. Ideally, she can get everything she needs on your site. Once she engages System 2, long-form content is what she needs.</p>
<p>For the longest time, we have had a raging debate in our field of whether users read on the web. All kinds of studies showed that “users don’t read” on the web, they just scan. I have tried to replicate these studies in ibm.com with mixed results. After analyzing the results, I came to a conclusion that seems obvious after the fact: If you get the Lizzy use case right, users do read on the web. They’ll even download a longish whitepaper and read it on the web if it is relevant and compelling. But if you don’t get the Lizzy use case right, they bounce off your page before reading regardless of how closely related the content is to the query.</p>
<p>I have not done a complete analysis. Provisionally, the studies that suggest that users just scan on the web suffer from the fallacy of small samples. They happened to choose content that was not easy to scan as the basis for the studies. It forced users to do something they were not willing to do: To engage System 2 prior to deciding whether the content was worth their time and attention. Since these users never relented to engage System 2, they never “read” in those studies.</p>
<p>As pages improve and the body of evidence approaches critical mass, similar studies have come to different conclusions. Thanks to Kahneman, we now have a framework for understanding these studies. The inflection point between scanning and reading seems to be a System 1 process that determines whether or not a page is worth a user’s time and attention.</p>
<h3 id="theory-digital-content-relevance-works-like-typical-human-psychology">Theory: Digital content relevance works like typical human psychology</h3>
<p>Those of you who are familiar with my work know I have based much of it on <a href="http://people.bu.edu/bfraser/Relevance%20Theory%20Oriented/Sperber%20&%20Wilson%20-%20RT%20Revisited.pdf">Relevance Theory</a>, which is a kind of psychology of communication. It is the keystone of my book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Audience-Relevance-Search-Targeting-Audiences/dp/0137004206/">Audience, Relevance and Search, Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content</a>. The theory defines relevance as a sliding scale with two extent conditions, which I sketch below:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>The stronger the cognitive effect in the audience, the more relevant the linguistic artifact to that audience</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The more effort a linguistic artifact requires, the less relevant it is</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>A cognitive effect is just a change in the mind of the audience. When we learn or are influenced or make a decision, there is a corresponding cognitive effect. Most of these are small and incremental. Some are breakthroughs. All things considered, breakthroughs are more relevant than small changes to our attitudes. The actual theory is quite a bit more complex than this, but we can gloss over that complexity for the time being.</p>
<p>As I read Kahneman’s book for the first time, it struck me that Sperber and Wilson—the authors of Relevance Theory—were describing communication in terms of System 1 and System 2. They just hadn’t made that connection. When they talk about cognitive effects, they are talking about System 2. Relevance Theory is based on work by H.P. Grice that describes how we reason when we communicate. Because reasoning falls into System 2, cognitive effects are, by definition, System 2 processes.</p>
<p>The extent condition that is more interesting to me is the one about effort. It seems to me that determining whether a page is nominally relevant—that is, whether it is worth the effort or not—is a System 1 process. The content buried within an opaque UX could answer Lizzy’s questions exactly, but she will determine it is irrelevant in a flash if it lacks the visual cues System 1 requires—tight punchy headings, bolded keywords, etc., in short, all the things Google’s algorithm looks for.</p>
<p>The one correction I would make to Relevance Theory after reading Thinking Fast and Slow is to reverse the extent conditions. I would put the one about effort first, because on the web, a page is functionally irrelevant if it doesn’t convince System 1 to devote the effort. And if it requires too much effort for the time being, it loses relevance fast. Only after it is deemed worth the effort do users judge to what extent it is relevant. If the page helps Lizzy make a breakthrough about structured mark-up, it is highly relevant to her.</p>
<p>The blog medium prevents me from stating more. All I hoped to do is plant a few seeds in the minds of enterprising readers to take these thoughts further than I could in this medium. As I said, I will have a great deal more to say in my book when it comes out this year. In the meantime, if one reader had a mountain-top experience with this post, I feel it is doing its job.</p>
<p><em>James Mathewson is the program director for global search and content marketing at IBM.</em></p>
Intersectional content strategy2013-12-18T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2013/12/intersectional-content-strategy<p>There’s an interesting tug-of-war taking place in the content strategy world: the “Content Marketing” wave has washed through, and it’s bringing a lot of attention to the “infographics and traffic-drivers” side of the equation. A nontrivial part of that comes from SEO firms and specialists who’ve had to branch out as Google’s algorithmic tweaks made their work tougher.</p>
<p>Content can serve a bunch of different needs, not just one. It can be a primary product that directly or indirectly generates revenue; it can be the means by which an organization accomplishes its externally-funded mission; it can be a “pure marketing” mechanism used to draw attention or communicate brand messages; it can be a component of a separate service (like documentation or support materials). These conflicts aren’t new, by any means. If you’ve ever head someone talk about the differences between “MarComm” and “TechComm” — Marketing Communication and Technical Communication — you’ve seen these distinctions and the resulting conflicts in action.</p>
<p>Most companies need to hit a bunch of those points, not just one. Our client MSNBC, for example, has primary editorial content that is its core product. It also has marketing content that’s used to convince people to watch, to communicate branding and positioning in relation to competitors or other forms of entertainment, etc. It also has <em>a small quantity</em> of what could be considered classic TechComm materials: FAQs, terms of service pages, instructional information, etc. Many times, a single post or video or tweet or case study or radio broadcast can cover several of those bases at once. Social content that exists on a client’s site (say, user generated content) adds other interesting angles.</p>
<p>Ideally, all of these needs and the content being produced to fill them are coordinated with each other, united be a coherent vision and (dare I say it) strategy. That helps ensure there aren’t inconsistencies or conflicts between the messages, that measures of success are being applied appropriately, and that important needs aren’t being overlooked because they’re served by an underfunded department or team.</p>
<p>Some folks say that <em>everything</em> is marketing — that the experience of purchasing and using one product is the “sales pitch” for the next sale, in non-content terms. That feels like semantics to me: one could just as easily argue that marketing is really customer service or editorial content is really user support, and so on. Usually those kinds of arguments are less about providing useful insights or process improvements than they are about a CxO or consultant extending their reach in an organization by hoovering up other business units’ responsibilities.</p>
<p>Not to throw a curveball or anything, but we can learn a lot from feminism: it’s a movement and an academic discipline that’s spent a few lifetimes trying to change entrenched values that hurt everyone but are vigorously defended. In 2011 Flavia Dzodan wrote a blistering essay entitled <em><a href="http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/10/my-feminism-will-be-intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit/">My Feminism Will Be Intersectional, Or It Will Be Bullshit</a>.</em> If you haven’t read it and you’re not the type to get the vapors from feminist thought, go check it out right now. Soak in her critique of the silo’d, sectioned-off, blinded-to-the-needs-of-others approaches that can undercut real change.</p>
<p>There. Awesome.</p>
<p>Appropriating a movement like feminism to talk about content feels lame, but Flavia’s insights aren’t <em>restricted</em> to one movement. Good content strategy is intersectional, not a silo in and of itself, and it’s <em>certainly</em> not an entrenching maneuver by an existing silo like a marketing or communications department. The challenge for 2014 isn’t to get content strategy its own powerful spot on the org chart, although for some organizations an empowered champion may be necessary. Similarly, the challenge isn’t to position content strategy under the umbrella of an existing well-funded, well-respected department like Marketing or (in some agencies) Design.</p>
<p>Our challenge is to make sure that experts and stakeholders and people in the trenches all receive representation; to be sure that they’re sharing their insights, needs, and priorities; and to ensure that the decisions about an organization’s resources and attention take them all into account. That’s <em>hard</em> work, cutting across traditional lines of power and internal competition, but it’s important stuff.</p>
<p>Happy 2013, yo. Here’s wishing you an intersectional 2014, with all of the frustrations and rewards that come with it.</p>
Empathy and Perspective2013-05-09T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2013/05/empathy-and-perspective<p>This morning, Karen McGrane published <a href="http://the-pastry-box-project.net/karen-mcgrane/2013-may-9/">a fantastic essay about empathy and technology.</a> As technical professionals, we often deal with people who don’t <em>get it</em>, for various values of ‘get’ and ‘it.’ That’s not a bad thing: everybody has areas of expertise, <a href="http://www.elise.com/quotes/heinlein_-_specialization_is_for_insects">Heinlein be damned</a>, and helping each other out is part of the deal. I’ve written before about the importance of <a href="http://eaton.tumblr.com/post/33243075856/is-that-so-hard">understanding and recognizing others’ areas of expertise</a>, too.</p>
<p>Reading Karen’s column, though, I realized there’s another side of this ‘not being an asshole’ thing. Until you’ve experienced a blood-chilling “Oh God, I should understand this but I don’t” moment of your very own, it’s hard to understand the stress and worry that clients and students experience. Sometimes, the stressed out person isn’t even a client or a student: peers, mentors, and experts face those moments, too.</p>
<p>What really drove this home was Karen’s story about a presentation on mobile content that the two of us delivered at a 2009 conference. Both of us were interested in mobile at the time, but hadn’t had a chance to really sink our teeth into the problem on large projects.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Eaton was valiantly trying to explain to me how a CMS could support multi-channel publishing via an API, and I just wasn’t getting it. He used metaphors (“imagine the API is a straw sucking out the content”) and probably even resorted to hand puppets acting out a short play. I felt dumb, frustrated, out of my league.</p>
<p>And I had a flash of insight, one that transformed how I approach my work:</p>
<p>If I feel so clueless talking about content on mobile, think how everyone else must feel.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What she doesn’t mention is the flip side of that conversation: I, too, felt out of my league and was flummoxed by the complexity of the mobile shift we were talking about. During that epic brainstorming session, she turned the tables on me more than a few times. Her explanations of the challenges of effective content reuse, and its impact on the complexities of the editorial process, revealed that a lot of my technically convenient ideas didn’t account for The Real Problems.</p>
<p>Over the following weeks, months, and years, we learned a <em>lot</em> and had opportunities to help piles of clients through those disorienting (and terrifying) transitions. But at that moment, we were both trying to wrap our heads around complicated problems with no easy answers. It’s disorienting to realize that <em>she</em> felt just as out of the loop as I did.</p>
<p>In those moments — when I feel clueless in front of a colleague I respect or a client I need to dazzle — the temptation to put up a false front is the strongest. “Nod thoughtfully,” says my brain, “and chuckle knowingly to imply this is all old hat! Don’t let them know you’re in the dark.” Reading Karen’s story reminded me that all of us have those moments, and they’re nothing to be ashamed of. Rather than being embarassments to avoid, they can be bridges, opportunities, and reminders that we all have room to learn from each other.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Update: If you work in this tangly cluster of technologes – digital publishing, web design, CMS implementation, content strategy – it’s easy to overlook the value of the “soft skills” and emotional insights that play such an important role in what we do. <a href="2013.dareconf.com">The Dare Conference</a> is a great opportunity to recenter and learn from others. September 23-25th in London. A pile of smarty, hearty people. Check it out.</em></p>
Bowing to the God of Productivity2013-03-28T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2013/03/bowing-to-the-god-of-productivity<p>This week, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/28/us-retail-walmart-delivery-idUSBRE92R03820130328">Walmart talked to Reuters about one of its plans to reduce costs</a>: convince in-store customers to deliver its online orders to other customers.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tapping customers to deliver goods would put the world’s largest retailer squarely in middle of a new phenomenon sometimes known as “crowd-sourcing,” or the “sharing economy.”</p>
<p>A plethora of start-ups now help people make money by renting out a spare room, a car, or even a cocktail dress, and Wal-Mart would in effect be inviting people to rent out space in their vehicle and their willingness to deliver packages to others.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is that really “crowdsourcing?” Is it really the “sharing economy?” Or is it just a corporation doing what corporations do – trying to eliminate as much paid human labor as possible? Sticking trendy labels on the plan doesn’t change the facts: it would eliminate drivers and shipping facility workers, replacing them with customers willing to do the work for <em>store credit</em>.</p>
<p>As annoyed as I am at Evgeny Morozov’s blustery critiques of everything digital, he’s consistently right about one thing: companies love ideas like this because they reduce or externalize costs – period, full stop. The dividing line between good corporations and bad corporations generally boils down to a simple question of foresight. Some companies realize that trashing a local economy or paying its laborers slave wages will cost them money in the long term, while others prioritize the short-term boost that comes from cutting staff and squeezing the survivors.</p>
<h3 id="yeah-so-what">Yeah? So What?</h3>
<p>While the former is certainly preferrable to the latter, both companies are ultimately making economic decisions with economic goals in mind. This kind of thinking appeals to economists, and it’s also popular with technologists who build systems to replace inefficient workers. We measure their success at a national level with things like the ‘GDP’ and talk about ‘worker productivity,’ often forgetting that productivity is simply a measure of how much value we can extract from each person without hiring anyone else.</p>
<p>Even public services like libraries, postal service, and unemployment benefits are subjected to the same metrics. Canny defenders of a functioning society have learned how to defend these expenditures in purely economic terms. They talk about the <a href="http://mepconline.org/images/admin/spotedit/attach/0/Economic_Effects_of_Potential_Stimulus_Measures.pdf">accrued economic benefit of food stamps versus tax cuts</a> for the wealthy, for example; or the cost of a private education versus publicly subsidized classes for workers displaced by new technologies.</p>
<p>It’s easy to blame this shift on conservative opposition to social spending, or on the pernicous influence of greedy companies. Both are symptoms of an underlying problem that I’ve ranted about for years: as a society, we’ve settled on economics as the shared language of decision making. It’s all well and good for balancing the books, but at a macro-scale it’s a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity">Sapir-Whorf black hole</a> that leaves moral and ethical considerations out in the linguistic cold.</p>
<h3 id="thus-have-we-made-it">Thus Have We Made It</h3>
<p><a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1014027-mission/">The Mission is an excellent 1986 film starring Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro</a>. If you haven’t seen it, you should. Now. This post will be here when you get back.</p>
<p><em>Time Passes…</em></p>
<p>For those of you who didn’t just watch the movie, I’ll summarize. Set in the 17th century, it follows a tribe of South American natives caught in a power struggle between Spain and Portugal. A Papal emmissary, Altamirano, is given the task of visiting South America and deciding the fate of a Jesuit mission that lies in disputed territory. If the territory (and thus the mission) is abandoned to the Portugese, the tribe will be slaughtered or enslaved. The film ends with a sucker-punch decision: the mission is closed to keep the political negotiations on track, and the priests are called home. The tribe, the priests and the converts who stay behind against the Vatican’s orders are killed by Portuguese troops.</p>
<p>In the closing scene, Altamirano receives an account of his decision’s predictable consequences. He’s tormented by the outcome, and his personal assistant attempts to brush aside the guilt. “We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus,” says his assistant. After some thought, Altamirano replies: “No, Señor Hontar. <em>Thus have we made the world… thus have I made it.</em>”</p>
<p>The line is delivered with a long, fourth-wall-breaking stare. Altamirano makes eye contact with the audience and confesses: “Thus we have made the world; thus have I made it.”</p>
<h3 id="wait-what-about-walmart-again">Wait, What About Walmart Again?</h3>
<p>The same easy cop-out is often used when we discuss the dominant role that business and economics has in our society. We <em>must</em> optimize our nation’s efforts to achieve an ever-increasing GDP. We <em>must</em> accept an ever-outsourced workforce and an ever-reduced social safety net. We <em>must</em> cede core social services to private industry and the optimized mechinations of the free market, because that’s where <em>efficiency and profit</em> comes from.</p>
<p>But this, as Altamirano admitted, is not simply the way the world <em>is</em>. It’s is what <em>we’ve</em> made the world. The most important challenges we face have nothing to do with increasing our productivity or building more efficient engineering solutions. Instead, the task before us is fighting to reintroduce and preserve our society’s moral and ethical vocabulary.</p>
<p>This is not easy: in a pluralistic world, there’s no single religious text to appeal to. The problem is worth our energy, though: we need words to articulate principles beyond the pocketbook, or we’re doomed to an eternal downward spiral. Inefficiency may be costly, but the only way to eliminate it entirely is to eliminate <em>humans</em>.</p>
The Openwashing of Everything2013-03-16T00:00:00+00:00http://angrylittletree.com/2013/03/the-openwashing-of-everything<p>Does the oft-used word “Open” actually <em>mean</em> anything? In Saturday’s New York Times, writer Evgeny Morozov tosses <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/morozov-open-and-closed.html">a handful of rhetorical cherry bombs</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Openness” has become a dangerously vague term, with lots of sex appeal but barely any analytical content… This fascination with “openness” stems mostly from the success of open-source software, publicly accessible computer code that anyone is welcome to improve. But lately it has been applied to everything from politics to philanthropy; recent book titles include “The Open-Source Everything Manifesto” and “Radical Openness.” There’s even “OpenCola” — a true soda drink for the masses.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="jumping-into-the-wayback-machine">Jumping Into the Wayback Machine</h3>
<p>Morozov’s article starts strong. The Free Software movement <em>has</em> radically transformed the tech world since its principles were codified in the early 1980s, and somtimes it seems <em>everyone</em> is trying to ride its cultural slipstream. The lingustic fuzziness he refers to, though, is far from a new development.</p>
<p>In 1998, marketing-minded members of the free software crowd coined the “Open Source” label to serve as a business-friendly buffer for the movement’s radical principles. Dissenters, including the founder of the Free Software movement, <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html">objected that the friendly label emphasized just one of the movement’s principles at the expense of others</a>. The right to <em>view</em> source code, they insisted, couldn’t be separated from the right to use, modify, and redistribute it without cost. That debate left a linguistic rift between the Free Software and Open Source communities that exists to this day.</p>
<p>The quick explanation of Open Source that Morozov offers – “publicly accessible computer code that anyone is welcome to improve” – accurately summarizes <a href="http://opensource.org/osd">the technical definition of the term</a>. However, as the article continues it becomes clear that he’s unfamiliar with the movement’s philosophical underpinnings.</p>
<h3 id="getting-philosophical">Getting Philosophical</h3>
<p>I’m loathe to side with Richard Stallman about anything, but it seems that his fears were well-founded: “open” is just too vague a word, as Morozov’s confusion testifies:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Take the “openness” celebrated by the philosopher Karl Popper, who defined the “open society” as the apotheosis of liberal political values. This is not the same openness implied by open-source. <em>While Popper’s openness is primarily about politics and a free flow of ideas, open-source is about cooperation, innovation and efficiency — useful outcomes, but not in all situations.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here, Morozov confuses the <em>nature</em> of open source software with the reasons that many businesses and large enterprises adopt it. This is a bit nitpicky, but he’s the one who took the discussion into the realm of philosophy and political theory, so he should be able to keep up. Simply put, Free Software is defined by <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">four core freedoms</a> granted to any user of a program.</p>
<ul>
<li>Freedom Zero: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.</li>
<li>Freedom One: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.</li>
<li>Freedom Two: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.</li>
<li>Freedom Three: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.</li>
</ul>
<p>Because software is covered by copyright law, these freedoms are codified in explicit licensing agreements like the GPL, MIT, and Apache Licenses. Putting aside the issue of geek privilege and the assumption that every user is a programmer, these four freedoms are quite radical. Even the linguistically watered-down definition of <a href="http://opensource.org/osd">Open Source</a> shares this emphasis on individual freedom.</p>
<h3 id="missing-the-boat">Missing the Boat</h3>
<p>If all of this were just semantic quibbling, Morozov would be right to brush it aside. Recall his comment, though: “While Popper’s openness is primarily about politics and a free flow of ideas, open-source is about cooperation, innovation and efficiency.”</p>
<p>This statement should be baffling to anyone who’s worked with Free or Open Source software. The movement’s motivating philosophy is absolutely political, and unquestionably focused on the free flow of ideas. In fact, many commercial software companies fought against Open Source for years by characterizing it as a politically motivated “virus.”</p>
<p>Free Software’s four freedoms <em>have</em> often given rise to innovative, efficient software, and the Open Source community <em>does</em> encourages cooperation and collaboration. However, those happy benefits have <em>always</em> been secondary to the underlying freedoms codified in the movement’s explicit legal licenses.</p>
<p>At this point, I’d be willing to accept that Morozov was simply constrained by space and wasn’t able to delve into the nuances of nerd history. However, the column pushes on to describe the problems with “open government” and other movements that have adopted the hip “open” label.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of course, it’s important to involve citizens in solving problems. But who gets to decide which “particular problem” citizens tackle in the first place? And how does one delineate the contours of this “problem”? In open-source software, such decisions are often made by managers and clients. But in democratic politics, citizens both steer the ship (with some delegation) and do the rowing. In open-source politics, all they do is row.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s true that some open-source projects evolve hierarchies as they grow, and some traditional businesses pay their employees to work on open source. Returning to the four freedoms, though, Open Source is defined by the ability to use, modify, and share software for any reason without restriction.</p>
<p>The unruly reality of the Open Source ecosystem is that it’s full of developers who attack technical challenges and pursue hobby projects with reckless abandon. These developers set their own priorities and attract collaborators on the strength of their solutions rather than their authority to demand cooperation. Open Source software is no panacea for hard problems, but the picture Morozov paints is so muddy that it’s unrecognizable.</p>
<h3 id="making-morozovs-point">Making Morozov’s Point</h3>
<p>The remainder of the article focuses on needling boosters of the Open Government movement, and rightly so. <a href="http://plf.tumblr.com/post/460130176/sxswkeynotedisasterporn"><em>Simply</em> giving people access to reams of government spending data), procurement records, memos, and other administravia does not improve the world.</a> Finding evidence of corruption and inefficiency in mountains of raw data is no easy task, and it’s easy for unscrupulous public officials to avoid accountability while publishing XML feeds.</p>
<p>When needles <em>are</em> found in the haystacks, citizens still need effective tools to act on the information. The mechanisms for fine-grained policy change are still out of reach for most people: they need either money to pay lobbyists or time to become activists. This gap is a huge problem, and <a href="http://angrylittletree.com/2012/05/tragic-myopia-what-floss-advocates-are-missing.html">it corresponds to a serious Open Source issue I’ve written about before</a> – the disenfranchisement of non-programmers.</p>
<p>Of course, Open Source philosophy can’t be applied blindly to government and societal issues. The “make a copy and do your own thing” freedom works on some levels, but the analogy is incomplete in a physical world. There is no backup Earth to roll back to, and there is no “undo” command to erase the consequences of ethnic cleansing. For big, society-level problems, the opportunity costs and consequences of failure can make chaotic experimentation an unacceptable approach.</p>
<p>Ironically, the <em>reasoning</em> behind Morozov’s muddled charactierization of Open Source suggests that he’d be quite comfortable with software radicals like Richard Stallman. Healthy democracy demands the real ability to change the status quo when it’s unacceptable – not just a “look, don’t touch” window into government. If Open Government is too vauge, the answer isn’t to attack Open Source. Instead, we should demand that its proponents articulate a clear and unambiguous explanation of what “open” really means – and hold them to it.</p>