Category Archives: Nadyne

development, user experience

loaded words matter, so listen up

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John Welch pointed out an article from Justin Williams, an independent Mac/iOS developer, about how ‘Useless’ Is a Loaded Word.  Williams opens up with this:

Here is a tip for all the non-developers out there. When you email your favorite developer with a feature request or bug report never, ever, ever use the word useless to describe their product. Useless is kryptonite to developers and puts us on the defensive instantly.

I cannot disagree enough with this assertion.  Feedback is love.  Your user, or at least a potential user, took the time out of their day to write to you to tell you something that you could do that might help you win their time, their loyalty, and their money.  Feedback is a gift, a priceless gift.  The wrapping paper might be an unattractive shade of brown, but the gift inside is one that you should never ignore.

People use hyperbole.  They’re prone to using it when excited or upset.  People are most likely to offer feedback when they’re excited or upset.  As a result, you’re likely to that hyperbole in action when you receive unsolicited feedback.  Yes, they’re probably using loaded words.  But those loaded words matter.

When you get any piece of feedback, you’ve got to figure out what to do about it.  Marco Arment said this:

If you call my app “useless”, I stop reading right there and either hit Delete or keep scrolling.

Well, I suppose that’s one way to make your decision.  Making decisions about your applications based solely on an emotional response might not be the right way to go about it, but everyone gets to do their own thing.  Instead, I think you should step back a bit and try to determine what’s caused such a response.  It behooves you to do this for both positive hyperbole (“OMG YOUR APP IS THE BEST APP EVAR!!!!!!”) and negative hyperbole (“OMG YOUR APP KILLS USELESS KITTENS DEAD!!!!!!!”).  This isn’t to say that you’ll necessarily act on the feedback, but you do need to at least understand it.

Determining what gift is hidden behind that ugly brown wrapping paper is a hard-won skill.  It’s not about “developing a thicker skin”.  It’s about learning how to hear what someone is really saying, not just the words that are coming out of their mouth.  In fact, Williams himself says nearly the same thing in another post about edge cases:

Any developer worth his salt hears about [edge case] issues like this and their skin starts to crawl.

Yes!  That’s it, right there!  You hear someone describe an issue, and your skin crawls because you know that there’s something more going on than what they’re saying.  So you take the time to consider what their feedback indicates about your application, and you decide what to do about it.  Of course, Williams had said earlier in that post that his “nerd ego” had been boosted a bit, which makes it psychologically easier to try to tease apart the feedback to determine if there’s something to be done.

It’s tempting to only listen to the feedback that tells you what you want to hear, or is offered without any kind of (real or perceived) judgement.  Don’t just pay attention to what your nerd ego wants to hear.  Listen to it all.  Accept the love, accept the hate, and continue striving to make your apps better based on what you learn from both the lovers and the haters.

user experience, VMware

this is why I tweet

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I was asked recently why I’m on Twitter.  It’s all about serendipity.

The metaphor that I use to describe Twitter is that it’s a neverending cocktail party that’s full of people I like.  Just like a large cocktail party, there’s lots of different conversations going on at once.  You can participate in them, or not, as the mood strikes.  And, just like a cocktail party, the topics of the conversations vary widely.  There’s always someone talking politics, there’s always someone sharing something banal about their life, and there’s always someone talking shop.

Likewise, as at a cocktail party, it’s okay to leave to go get some fresh air.  I don’t think that anyone expects that you’ll read every single tweet.  I certainly don’t expect it, nor do I read everything.  I ignore Twitter with aplomb and have no guilt whatsoever.  After I’ve gotten my fresh air, I can come back into the cocktail party, and it will have continued on just fine without me.

Twitter is great for serendipity.  I’ve randomly learned that a friend is nearby, so we’ve taken advantage of the proximity to grab a coffee and catch up.  I’ve helped answer questions that I’ve noticed, helping someone else out.  I’ve had someone find me at a conference to thank me for my assistance.  It’s all good.

I had another example of that kind of serendipity late last week.  One of my VMware colleagues, who I haven’t yet met, tweeted that he was out in the field helping out with a vCloud Director installation.  This is perfect timing: I’m in the midst of some longitudinal research, and wanted to add a vCloud Director customer to that effort.  I sent off an email, and received a lightning-fast response from him.  He’s happy that someone in the company saw his tweet and reached out to him, I’m happy that it looks like I’m going to fill a need (and improve my research too!).

And this, this is why I tweet.  Yes, I admit, I’ve tweeted about cats, cocktails, and the coast.  I’ve also tweeted about projects I’m working on, like Horizon.  It all comes together in one big tweetstream that represents who I am, and hopefully will continue to create serendipity.

Nadyne

my first computer: “small black box of computing desire”

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I remember my first computer.  It was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (known as a ZX-81 overseas).  My dad bought it, and he and I learned about computers and programming together on it.

Last week, the BBC called it a small black box of computing desire1.  They observed that it “created a generation of software developers”, and I’m one of them.

I remember storing files on the cassette tape, as well as buying Frogger on cassette to play it on the computer.  There was the RAM pack that you had to put on the back of it to do anything beyond the 1-KB of onboard memory, which didn’t have a great connector and thus would fall off occasionally.  Magazines published source code, which wasn’t always entirely accurate, and which you had to type in.

All of these problems were surmountable, and they didn’t keep me from using it.  I learned quickly that you could only reuse a cassette tape a few times before it got too warped to save files.  The RAM pack problem was solved with a couple of well-placed rubber bands.  I got good at reading the magazine code and figuring out where they might have made a typo or a logical error.  There was also the machine’s propensity for overheating, which I solved by precariously balancing a glass of ice water on the top of the machine.  At least the keyboard was flat, so a spilled glass wouldn’t spell complete destruction.

I wonder how much different my life would be if we hadn’t picked up that computer.

  1. I can’t tell you how hard that made me laugh.  The “that’s what she said” jokes just make themselves sometimes ↩
Nadyne

why are spambots female?

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If my experience is any indication, Twitter has seen an uptick in spam lately. The Twitter spam that I see most frequently are keyword spam. The keyword that I’ve seen generate the most spam lately is “iPad”, although that’s obviously indicative of what I and my friends talk about.

I got a lot of iPad-spambot activity earlier this week.  At first, I was annoyed, since the pattern was easy to detect.  But then I noticed another pattern about the accounts themselves: of the 28 spam replies that I received, all but one of them had female names.

This is in stark contrast to the email spam sitting in my junk folder.  Looking at the first 50, only two have female names.  The rest are a mix of male names and company or product names (“Online Doctorate”, “Peak Performance”, etc).

Why do Twitter spambots apparently overwhelmingly choose female names?

Nadyne

5 ways to identify a program manager

With practice, you can identify a program manager in the wild.  This is a useful skill to have.

  1. They have a BlackBerry1in a belt holster.  They often use their BlackBerry while walking down the hall, which occasionally results in them walking into someone else or into the wall.  The former is annoying (especially when it’s you), the latter is entertaining.
  2. Every PowerPoint presentation that they touch instantly uses the corporate template.  It doesn’t matter the audience, it doesn’t matter the topic.  Somehow, just by a deck passing through their hands, the corporate template is applied, as if by magic.  As a corollary, they’re appalled when someone doesn’t use the corporate template, even if it’s just a presentation for an internal team of four people.
  3. They’re buzzword complaint in ways that mere mortals can’t dream of.  It’s no fun playing a game of buzzword bingo when during a PM’s presentation, because someone will win within the first five minutes2.
  4. Everything reduces to a feature set. User interface? Totally a feature. Bugs? Features in need of some love. Anything the customer says? Features-to-be. Anything that a competitor says? Features that aren’t nearly as good as our features.
  5. They will never ever commit to anything. Deadline? Won’t commit. Feature list? Won’t commit. Timeframe for fixing something? Won’t commit.

I really don’t want to know what a PM would write about how to identify a researcher …

  1. Maybe an iPhone instead, but the BlackBerry is still the winner here. ↩
  2. One day, I had a conversation with some co-workers about the worst PM-speak we’d heard. The winner was “decisioning” ↩
user experience

how the user experience of Angry Birds contributes to its success

I stumbled across an interesting article recently: Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience.  It’s a great discussion how all of its user experience components together have made it such a highly-successful game.

I especially find the discussion of response time to be relevant, not just for game design.  We often assume that response time should be as short as possible, but that’s not really true.  Response time in Angry Birds is used to help you learn how to play the game and correct errors.  I think that this line is the one that every software engineer should take to heart:

The bottom line on how Angry Birds manages response time: fast is good, clever is better.

Nadyne

snow in San Francisco?!

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 10 years, and thought that I was safe from the snow.  I’ve been mostly trying not to laugh too much at my East Coast friends who have had much more snow this season than is really necessary.  Now, the Bay Area is looking at getting its first snow at sea level in 35 years: Snowstorm picks up speed, bears down on the Bay Area.

When I lived in Atlanta, any hint of snow sent the locals racing out to the grocery store to pick up milk, bread, eggs, and Coke.  I wonder what Californians will think is necessary to weather the storm?

If you don’t hear from anyone in the state on Friday, know that we’re snowed in under a half-inch or so of snow and thus think that the end of the world is nigh.

books, Nadyne

girl power, woman power, and being one of the boys

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I’ve been thinking a lot about software engineering for women lately.  In that earlier blog post, I referenced Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, a long research report that hits home for me since I am a software engineer with a degree in mathematics.

I’ve also been reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein.  I’m not finished yet, but so far, it’s a walk through a lot of research about our culture and how we raise our little girls, as seen through the lens of Orenstein raising her own little girl.  In one passage, she references Packaging Girlhood by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown1, and says this about female identity for girls:

She can be “for the boys” — dress for them, perform sexually for them, play the supportive friend or girlfriend.  Or she can be “one of the boys,” an outspoken, feisty girl who hangs with the guys and doesn’t take shit.  The latter starts out as the kindergarten girl who is “independent and can think for herself.” … The trouble is, Brown and Lamb say, being “one of the boys” is as constricting as the other option, in part because it discourages friendship with other girls: a girl who is “one of the boys” separates herself from her female peers, puts them down, is ashamed or scornful of anything associated with femininity.

Reading that, I recognise my own childhood.  I was one of the boys, and I’ve never been particularly good at forming friendships with women.  Today, most of my friends are male.  I’ve always written that off to being an engineer.  Most of my professional relationships are with men, and professional relationships occasionally become friendships.  But it’s not as though there aren’t other women around.  Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to assume that it’s simply that I’m an engineer.

  1. Which has now been added to my to-read queue. ↩
Nadyne

5 words/phrases that I’d like to see banned

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These are the five words/phrases that I’m entirely sick of right now, and that I’m seeing too much in the tech press and in my Twitter list.

  1. “Curate” and its variants.  People, please.  Selecting a few things doesn’t mean that you’re curating anything.  You’re making a list, let’s not pretend that it’s anything more than that.  Skip the pretension.  See this list right here?  It’s not curated.  It’s me being cranky.
  2. “Epic”.  The Odyssey is an epic.  The Loma Prieta earthquake probably qualifies as epic.  The dinner you had last night? Not epic.  It might have been good, or even great.  Let’s reserve “epic” for something that truly is awe-inspiring instead of devaluing it by using it on that’s even slightly good (or slightly bad).
  3. “Fail”.  This is so very overused, especially when it’s all in caps.  And when combined with the previous entry, it makes me think that you just have no grasp of what a failure actually is.  Your boyfriend didn’t buy you flowers for Valentine’s Day?  Not FAIL.  Comcast missed their window for appearing at your apartment?  This is so expected that it can’t even remotely be considered a failure.
  4. “Revolutionary”.  Egypt? Revolutionary. Your new iPhone app? Not revolutionary.
  5. “FML”.  You forgot paper towels at Target?  Your kid is having a tantrum?  Barely worthy of an obscenity, let alone a repudiation of your entire life (unless you’ve got the saddest life ever).