Month: February 2023

Sean Maguire Was Right

Sean Maguire Was Right

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Don Norman came to mind today, a not uncommon occurrance. I’ve mentioned him before, but not loudly enough. If you care at all about building great solutions, technical or otherwise, reading The Design of Everyday Things is a must. Here’s my favorite passage:

The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably. But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.

The notion of system error is quite profound, applicable to technology, organizations, governments, even entire civilizations. Leaders of all stripes do well to consider its explanatory power.

Just discovered that Don has a new book coming next month: Design For a Better World. Pre-ordered!

The Tie That Binds

The Tie That Binds

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Read these two articles yesterday. On the surface they’re about different topics, but there’s a common thread: both call out an aspect of technical work that is often ignored, especially by the less-experienced.

The first tale, Our Company Fired the Best Developer and Project Manager, reminds us that “Getting your tasks done is half of the job. The other half is how you do it.” I’d go even further and say getting your tasks done is only a quarter of your job. The rest is how you do them, when you do them by, and most importantly, ensuring you understand why those are your tasks in the first place, and if perhaps you should be doing other tasks instead. Don’t climb the ladder only to find you leaned it against the wrong wall.

Coding Won’t Exist In 5 Years is yet another ChatGPT article, whose crux is the following: “Programming is the process of solving problems using a computer. Writing code is just one aspect of this process. It’s a necessary part, but it’s not the whole picture.” Yes, learn to write code well, but be aware you’re more valuable as an editor than as a drafter, and that’s only going to get more true as AI gets better.

That Last 20%

That Last 20%

By | | Comments 0 Comment

I got an email this morning from a reader who asked if I had an email subscription feature on this blog. I didn’t then, but now I do! Want my writing to hit your inbox the moment I publish? Just add your email address into the widget at the top of the sidebar and hit subscribe. Easy!

You know what wasn’t easy? Trying to get that widget to match the rest of the site. At first it looked like this:

Gross. Luckily WordPress supports adding custom CSS. Unluckily, that means I had to fiddle with CSS, which is a special form of hell. I couldn’t get it perfect on all browsers, but it’s not bad now:

While I was at it, I made a few other visual tweaks to the site, primarily shrinking the masthead height, which has always bugged me. Here’s the final code snippet. Not the prettiest, especially with all those !important keywords (generally they’re a smell that your CSS is too complex), but it gets the job done.

.navbar {
    display: none;
}

.site-header {
    height: 300px;
    min-height: 300px;
}

.site-title::after {
    margin-top: 0.5em !important;
    margin: auto;
}

button.wp-block-button__link {
    height: 34px !important;
    margin-left: 0px !important;
    padding: 0px 5px !important;
    background: #fab526;
    font-weight: bold;
}

input#subscribe-field-1 {
    padding: 5px !important;
    border-bottom: 2px solid #ddd !important;
}

.search-field::placeholder {
    color: #B9B9B9;
}

If you happen to notice any weirdness on your device/browser of choice, do let me know, eh?

No Easy Answers

No Easy Answers

By | | Comments 0 Comment

I’ve been managing technical people for a while now, but when it comes to asking good questions and listening well, I’m always learning. One thing I’ve discovered is that questions needn’t be complex to be effective. Here’s three I use regularly:

How do you feel about that?

Giving someone space to express their emotions is usually a good place to start when beginning a conversation. This is doubly true in the workplace, where there’s a misperception that feelings have no place. But we’re all human, and our effectiveness is predicated on aligning our emotions to the task at hand.

What could you do about that?

Once a person feels safe describing how they feel about a situation, it’s time to explore options for how to move forward. The word could here is critical, it’s a word about possibilities. Usually with just a little nudge, people will be able to come up with a variety of potential solutions on their own.

What do you want to do about that?

Too often people are asked to consider all sorts of factors when weighing options, but never their own desires. And especially not just surface desires, but what they truly want based on their own complex (and often competing and contradictory) web of values. It’s a powerful question; simple to ask, but hard to answer truthfully. Though once it is, I’ve found one often has all the data at hand to make a high quality decision.

Irreduceable Complexity

Irreduceable Complexity

By | | Comments 0 Comment

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein

In any technical discussion, beware when someone says something is simple. Things are rarely as simple as their marketing materials claim, and there is a vast gulf between a quickly-constructed proof of concept and a production-ready solution.

Even concepts that might seem straightforward at first glance have considerable potential for edge cases and other gotchas. Consider the following as canonical examples:

A corollary to the above: there is no such thing as a “5 minute task” in technology. When you hear such a claim, mentally multiply by 10.