At long last my article “Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism”: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions has been published in Osiris, the annual journal of the History of Science Society.   This piece has been a long time coming: the original workshop it was commissioned for was held in 2012, and the extensive process of peer review that makes Osiris issues so special stretched out over the past two years.

The focus of the special issue is on “scientific masculinities,” and my article explores the flip-side of the work I have been doing on the history of women in computing.  That is to say, my emphasis is on how male programmers constructed both a professional and a masculine identity for themselves.

From the abstract of the article:

Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, male computer experts were able to successfully transform the “routine and mechanical” (and therefore feminized) activity of computer programming into a highly valued, well-paying, and professionally respectable discipline. They did so by constructing for themselves a distinctively masculine identity in which individual artistic genius, personal eccentricity, antiauthoritarian behavior, and a characteristic “dislike of activities involving human interaction” were mobilized as sources of personal and professional authority. This article explores the history of masculine culture and practices in computer programming, with a particular focus on the role of university computer centers as key sites of cultural formation and dissemination.

The title of the article comes from a contemporary essay by Richard Brandon called “The Problem in Perspective” (the problem here being the pervasive “question of professionalism” in the computer industry, which is the subject of my first published academic article). The “programmer type,” according to Brandon, was  “excessively independent,” often to the point of mild paranoia. He was “often egocentric, slightly neurotic, and he borders upon a limited schizophrenia. The incidence of beards, sandals, and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity are notably greater among this demographic group.” Tales about programmers and their peculiarities “are legion,” Brandon argued, and “do not bear repeating here.”¹

Having just given a talk at the SXSW interactive festival, I can attest (anecdotally, at least) that beards are alive and well in programming culture.  And according to this research by the folks at Trestle Technology, which combines Github data with Microsoft facial recognition software, Swift developers are “beardy hipsters.”

Shortly after the publication of the new article, a friend discovered an extended quote from Brandon that also claimed the “two of the hippie leaders at Haight-Ashbury were computer programmers.”  It took me some time to track this claim down, but I finally found it in a chapter on “The Economics of Computer Programming” that Brandon published in a 1970 book On the Management of Computer Programmers.[2. George Weinwurm, editor.  On the Management of Computer Programmers (New York, Auerbach Publishers, 1970).

The association between computer culture and the counter culture has been much discussed (most sensibly and thoroughly by Fred Turner in his masterful From Counter-Culture to Cyberculture).   This quote by Brandon is an early and atypical reference to hippies and hackers, and my thanks to Dag Spicer at the Computer History Museum for bringing it to my attention.

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Hootsuite Founder Complains About Exodus of Gullible Tech Workers From Vancouver, Seeks Inexpensive Labor Elsewhere

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All is not well in the consumer ecosystem.

• HERE has severed the last link with its old owner in deciding to pull its app from Windows 10 rather than develop it again from scratch.
• This is a sign of the malaise that currently grips the Microsoft consumer ecosystem as users of that ecosystem have been in decline for some time with no reverse in sight.
• HERE was deeply integrated into Windows Phone 8.1 due to being owned by Nokia at the time.
• In order to get this to run on Windows 10, HERE implemented a workaround that would allow the Windows 8.1 app to run to Windows 10.
• However, that workaround will cease to function at the end of June and rather than redevelop from the ground up, HERE has decided to pull its support all together.
• Although the economics to cease development make sense, I suspect that the real reason behind this decision is Microsoft Maps.
• Microsoft Maps is Microsoft’s own implementation of the HERE map and it has two significant advantages over the HERE app for Windows.
  • First. It is installed at the factory.
  • This ensures that the app will perform better and consume less resources than anything that has been downloaded and installed.
  • Second. It is the default option on a Windows 10 device.
  • This means that links in other apps will open Microsoft Maps by default, giving it a big advantage when it comes to usage.
  • This is exactly the feature that has enabled Apple Maps to gain significant share of usage against Google Maps on iOS despite being an inferior product.
• Consequently, from HERE’s perspective, the economic return of re-writing its app for Windows 10 makes no sense and instead it will be concentrating on making its experience on iOS and Android better.
• For Microsoft, this yet another worrying sign of the deteriorating health of its consumer ecosystem.
• RFM believes that at this point in time only the experience on the smartphone and the tablet matter when it comes the user’s decision about where to live his Digital Life.
• Consoles and PCs where Microsoft has millions of users are still not important when it comes to this critical decision which is why this deterioration is particularly worrying.
• Microsoft is doing an excellent job of developing its Digital Work ecosystem with over 200m downloads of Office on Android and iOS but consumer is another matter entirely.
• This is why if Microsoft wishes to remain a player in the consumer ecosystem, it must reverse this trend but of this there is still no sign.
• Consequently, I see the possibility of Microsoft focusing on the Digital Work ecosystem and offering Digital Life services to entice these users to spend more time with Microsoft.
• Unfortunately, this typically works the other way round with Digital Life having an impact on defining Digital Work not the other way around.
• This means that Microsoft has to do something very different and very special in order to be able to buck that trend.
• Microsoft still has some time to act but with every quarter that passes it will become more and more difficult to mount a comeback.
• The good news is that Microsoft’s valuation does not demand any success in this arena.
• In fact, the consumer ecosystem could completely collapse and the shares would still be attractive.
• Consequently, I still like Microsoft as the momentum in Digital Work remains excellent with consumer being a free, long dated option.

 

It’s time for another Wearable Wednesday instalment, and this week we’re taking a brief look at a rather unusual concept in wearable tech, dubbed the Smart Dress. First announced late last year, the prototype was developed by Telefónica R&D, and can accurately capture information about surrounding environmental elements and analyse how it affects people’s emotions.

The Environment Dress collects a wide set of data, including temperature, infra-red and ultraviolet radiation, carbon monoxide and noise, then determines what environmental and behavioural patterns the wearer is experiencing. The dress then alerts the wearer of the potentially elevated presence, such as increased humidity and hence the likelihood of rain.

The wearable, created with open source hardware and software, is the winning project from “Next Things 2015 – Behaviour”, the Fourth Global Art and Technology Challenge, presented by Telefónica R&D and the LABoral Centre for Art and Industrial Creation. The challenge set out to foster cross-discipline collaboration between the artistic, creative and technology communities.

In the near future the ‘Environment Dress’ is expected to geo-locate and share data with users online for global accessibility. The creators are also working on a mobile application that will allow wearers to manage and personalise their parameters (lights, alarm systems, etc.).

The dress will also be able to indicate how the user is feeling at any given moment. Through machine learning it will continuously learn from the measurements it takes and associate those with the wearer’s emotions and moods. This means that in the future, the dress may be able to predict certain moods and associate them with changes occurring in the wearer’s environment such as changes in atmospheric pressure or increased noise.

The creators of the Environment Dress, María Castellanos and Alberto Valverde, are artists and researchers at the University of Vigo.

They spent six months developing the prototype in Gijón and Barcelona.

Between June and August last year they focused on the prototype’s artistic and design aspect at the production Centre at the LABoral Centre for Art and Industrial Creation.

Castellanos and Valverde have now moved to the Telefónica R&D Centre in Barcelona to further develop the software and data analysis systems.

The prototype ‘Environment Dress’ will be available in 2016.

At the same time, manufacturing instructions will also be published on the project’s web page allowing users to make their own bespoke, personalised outfits.

You can learn more about this fascinating technology on the Environment Dress website and their Facebook page.

Jellybooks is an analytics company that evaluates how people read book, in a similar fashion in how a company like Netflix evaluates how customers watch shows.

Here is how it works: the company gives free e-books to a group of readers, often before publication. Rather than asking readers to write a review, it tells them to click on a link embedded in the e-book that will upload all the information that the device has recorded. The information shows Jellybooks when people read and for how long, how far they get in a book and how quickly they read, among other details

The charts above show what percentage of readers finish chapters of books, with chapters on the x-axis. There’s a quick drop-off for the beginning parts of the book, but it’s like once people reach a certain point, they’re like, well, might as well finish it.

Although I suspect there’s some averaging or smoothing. After the drop, it looks really flat. Or is reading behavior really that predictable?

Tags: Jellybooks, New York Times, reading

I think this is one for the Analogy Library, I came across it on a radio documentary. I think.

At one point, in the fifties, the United States Air Force developed a plan to explode a nuclear device on the moon. Partly, and I bet this was post-rationalised cover, for scientific reasons. But mostly to boost US morale after the Soviets took the lead in the space race. The idea was that you'd be able to see the explosion on earth.

Obviously the Soviet Union had a similar plan.

A hospital in California is infected with ransomware, and forced to pay $17,000 to decrypt their own patient information. Ransomware ships with a legitimate Mac app and is remotely installed on people’s computers using the software’s auto-update mechanism. Remote administration tools are installed on people’s computers without their knowledge, and used to spy on them. Cars can be remotely controlled by hackers. Android malware steals people’s banking information. Since more and more information is stored online, identity theft is becoming easier, particularly because governmental and private databases containing personal information are regularly breached.

I could keep adding to this list, and literally never stop, because people are exploiting security problems in computer systems faster than I can type.

For the past 20 years, we’ve lived in a world where the Internet is ubiquitous, and more and more devices connect to it. At the same time, we’re still using computer systems, and an approach to security, that was largely designed for a threat model that did not include the Internet.

At the same time, computers, from the tiny smartphones in our pockets to huge data centers in far-away countries, contain more and more of our personal data.

It is to Apple’s great credit that, more than any other company, they have invested tremendous resources into making iOS an operating system that’s designed for a world in which the Internet exists.

All of this makes it particularly disheartening to see our own governments trying to undermine the work that goes into making us more secure. Not just with the lastest attacks on Apple, but also with previous actions (like the DMCA) that made security research harder, or even illegal, that targeted security researchers directly, and that made it much more difficult—sometimes impossible—for software companies to secure their products properly.

All of this doesn’t just have a direct negative impact on our security; it also has a chilling effect on future security research and development. Why should I invest any money into fixing security problems with my software, if it will just lead to trouble with the government?

We’re all vulnerable, since we’re still mostly using software designed for a pre-Internet era. There’s very little we can personally do to make ourselves more secure.

Instead of trying to fix this problem, our own governments are fighting to make us even less secure.

Clearly, this is not helping.

If you require a short url to link to this article, please use http://ignco.de/742

But wait, there's more!

Want to read more like this? Buy my book's second edition! Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web is now available DRM-free directly from The Pragmatic Programmers. Or you can get it on Amazon, where it's also available in Chinese and Japanese.

Talk about deficient urban design! As if the Nelson-to-the-bridge problems aren’t enough, the north end of the city’s once-upon-a-time-most-important street is a train wreck, to mix metaphors, at the point where it intersects the CPR railyards. Where’s the waterfront?

Christina De Marco, spokesperson for the volunteer Downtown Waterfront Working Group, submitted an update to PriceTags and the Straight, where you can read the full article. (Full disclosure, as they say: I have attended some of the DWWG meetings partly due to my concerns about impacts on heritage Waterfront Station and the entrance into Gastown.)

In 2009, the City of Vancouver endorsed the Central Waterfront Hub Framework—a boring name for an exciting vision for the downtown waterfront. One of the most innovative and insightful aspects of the hub framework was reconnecting Granville Street to the waterfront. This would open up the potential to develop the woefully underused lands north of Waterfront Station for an exciting mixed-use development with public spaces and greenways overlooking the harbour.

It would also provide the opportunity to link the east side and Gastown area to Coal Harbour via Canada Place—and the extension of Granville is necessary to achieve this. When the convention centre was being planned, similar thinking and proactive planning led to the bicycle and pedestrian connections from Coal Harbour to Burrard Landing.

The sketch shows a reconfiguration of Granville at Cordova, looking north – what it might become.

When council endorsed the Central Waterfront Hub Framework back in 2009, we are sure that it did not intend it to collect dust for years on end. Council realized the federal government would need to be actively involved, especially with significant land holdings owned by Port Metro Vancouver. With a change in federal government and its interest in sustainable, vibrant cities, transit, the environment, heritage, and culture, now is the opportune time to get going on implementing the hub framework and reconnecting the downtown to the waterfront.

The DWWG got a kick-start 15 months ago due to the Cadillac-Fairview proposal for a large tower on the east side of Waterfront Station, which would have overwhelmed the potential plaza (now a parking lot).

Does it take a controversial design/development proposal to galvanize opposition and begin a new planning process, or will the city revisit this in an orderly way under a new Director of Planning?

Should this sort of scene survive in Greenest City? By “this,” I mean the year-round heated outdoor patio in Vancouver, at 50 degrees north latitude, where outdoor sitting used to be a 5-month gig. Will the Green Police shut them down, or is “green” merely a metaphor for a particular kind of lifestyle?

These sour, no-fun thoughts were prompted by a chance meeting on the street with a neighbour who is renovating a century-old Grandview house and getting the full blast of new “Green” building-code requirements thrown at her. She has a thousand-square-foot house on a half lot – I’ll bet her heating and electricity bills are under $1,000 a year total – and yet the city is demanding she upgrade her walls to R-20, which she can’t do with the house’s vintage 2×4 framing.

Given that 4% of a house’s heat loss, typically, is through its walls (and 3% through single-glazed windows), her efforts will cost her a fortune, possibly doom the house, and save a piddling amount of energy year-over-year compared with the constant consumption of natural gas in cafés such as this one.

The city wants “Green,” which means in part to re-use and adapt rather than demolish, but has adopted a building code and enforces it in a way to make renovation onerous if not impossible. Is “the greenest building the one that’s already built” in Greenest City?

The issue was explored recently in “Reno vs. Demo: When is it easier to just start over?” by Bethany Lindsay in the Sun. The article was a depressing, realistic view of the myriad hoops the city makes renovators go through – whether it’s for ‘heritage’ or just upgrading.

Geoff Glave was one of the homeowners interviewed for the Sun story.

“There’s a lot of wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth over demolition of what I would consider perfectly fine houses in Vancouver,” Glave said. “I think if the city wanted to encourage renovation, they certainly could by making it a more cost-effective option than tearing the whole house down and sending everything to the landfill and starting from scratch.”

 

 

When we first launched our community management course back in 2011, we sent out a series of messages with advice and appeals to sign up.

I chased up many who expressed an interest but didn’t join to find out why.  Can you guess the main reason? Most people said they couldn’t afford to come to London for 12 weeks to take the program.

The program was completely online. We made this clear on the website and the brochure. Yet this message wasn’t getting through.

The next semester we made it clear the course was completely online, we updated the name, we detailed it on the landing page and in 5 to 6 emails we sent out that people could take the entire program in their spare time from home or during their working lunches.

I reached out to a group of people who clicked the link and didn’t sign up again. Same problem. People replied they liked the material but couldn’t afford to come to London for 12 weeks to take the program.

You might have experienced something similar. 4 years ago we took over the Virtual Community Summit which had been hosted for the previous 2 years in London. During the promotion, we began receiving complaints that we were charging too much for an online conference.

The venue, name, and date were all the same, but the message in the previous 2 years hadn’t gotten through.

It can feel frustrating to send out a message, follow up with the people that received it, and realise they didn’t really read it. During our recent AEM program, I reached out to a few people that clicked the signup link but didn’t complete the process to ask if they needed any support or had any questions about the program. The most common response was, what’s advanced engagement methods?

The sad truth is it’s very unlikely your message is cutting through the noise. Even if people receive it they probably don’t open it. Even if they open it, they probably don’t read all of it. Even if they read all of it, they probably don’t remember it.

In my inbox this morning I’ve got an important notification regarding Salesforce platform changes, new apartments available for viewings, and summaries from previous calls and meetings. And this is at 8am.

So what do you do?

A few thoughts

• Despite the tantalizingly large number of members, your actual reach (as in people who will open and read your messages) is agonizingly small. This is probably up to 30% of your total audience. Focus on those people, not the rest.

• The people most likely to perform the behavior are those who receive and open the message. I can think of only 1 person who signed up to our event/courses after realising they weren’t online/offline. The people who it appealed to made the effort to find out. The rest are looking for excuses not to do it.

Change the object to make big issues obvious. Our PillarSummit course became FeverBee’s ondemand program, the Virtual Community Summit became SPRINT London.

What makes an idea powerful? That’s a question I’ve been pondering for the last five years. Powerful ideas have to be right, new, and big. But they have to be simple, too — or at least simple to express. The realm of pure ideas is Darwinian. Some spread, some die. If you have an idea, you need … Continue reading The 4 qualities of powerful ideas →

The post The 4 qualities of powerful ideas appeared first on without bullshit.

Julia Freeland Fisher, EdSurge, Mar 19, 2016

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I have commented on numerous occasions that one of the main products elite universities sell is not high-quality learning (they're really no better than anyone else) but rather access to networks of power and influence. That's why we see the same names from the same schools show up over and over again in research and news reports - the people who run media are writing about their friends from Yale or wherever who run businesses or research. Poor students, meanwhile, even if given access to the same 'education', are locked out of this support network. So why does "the edtech market remains focused squarely on content delivery and assessment." This is a big part of what I'm trying to accomplish with personal learning. Not just tools that connect students to mentors, projects and coaching (though these help), but also, tools that connect them to each other. Support networks shouldn't just be something the elites have, they should be something everybody has.

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Lawrence Serewicz, Thoughts on management, Mar 19, 2016

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Though the focus of this article in on access to public archives, many of the same concerns apply to educational resources. The author considers the nature of openness, drawing for example from  Popper's work, and notes that it consists not only of the absence of barriers but also something like the ability to comprehend and use the resources. These constitute the basic types of threats to openness: first, archival, where "where threats to funding become a threat to limit access to archives"; second, societal, "when people no longer value or understand archives"; and third, resistance to openness "because of cultural reasons or for security reasons." Only the first of these is treated in any detail, in an extended 'Part 2', but I think the overall framework is of value. Image: Open Society. See the  complete set of presentations from the Threats to Openness conference.

[Link] [Comment]

George Kroner, edutechnica, Mar 19, 2016

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There's a bit of a sense in which I feel this is a post from ten years ago, but I am faced with the inescapable fact that learning management systems (LMSs) haven't really changed in that time. And they've been emplying the same disjointed design all that time:

• learning tools separated from learning content
• links everywhere with several clicks before actually reaching learning material
• new tools just added to the bottom of ever-increasing dropdowns

The author recommends Open Learning XML, which is the 'markup language' edX provides for course authoring (note that i see no sign of this in the OpenEdX tools I'm using). It "prompts the course author to  think holistically about how the course design fits together and how  the courseware operates as a whole instead of considering each piece separately." This is indeed a better approach. It's also something  FutureLearn does particularly well.

vs

[Link] [Comment]

• Read more about Glh: Disrupting the Hotel Model with APIs

So it’s been a little over a year since GitHub fired me.

I initially made a vague tweet about leaving the company, and then a few weeks later I wrote Fired, which made it pretty clear that leaving the company was involuntary.

The reaction to that post was pretty interesting. It hit 100,000 page views within the first few days after publishing, spurred 389 comments on Hacker News, and indeed, is currently the 131st most-upvoted story on Hacker News of all time.

Let me just say one thing first: it’s pretty goddamn weird to have so many people interested in discussing one of your biggest professional failures. There were a few hard-hitting Real Professional Journalists out there launching some bombs from the 90 yard line, too:

If an employer has decided to fire you, then you’ve not only failed at your job, you’ve failed as a human being.

and

Why does everyone feel compelled to live their life in the public? Shut up and sit down! You ain’t special, dear..

and

Who is the dude?

You and me both, buddy. I ask myself that every day.

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The vast majority of the comments were truly lovely, though, as well as the hundreds of emails I got over the subsequent days. Over and over again it became obvious at how commonplace getting fired and getting laid off is. Everyone seemingly has a story about something they fucked up, or about someone that fucked them up. This is not a rare occurrence, and yet no one ever talks about it publicly.

As I stumbled through the rest of 2015, though, something that bothered me at the onset crept forward more and more: the post, much like the initial vague tweet, didn’t say anything. That was purposeful, of course; I was still processing what the whole thing meant to me, and what it could mean.

I’ve spent the last year constantly thinking about it over and over and over. I’ve also talked to hundreds and hundreds of people about the experience and about their experiences, ranging from the relatively unknown developer getting axed to executives getting pushed out of Fortune 500 companies.

It bothers me no one really talks about this. We come up with euphemisms, like “funemployment!” and “finding my next journey!”, while all the while ignoring the real pains associated with getting forced out of a company. And christ, there’s a lot of real pain that can happen.

How can we start fixing these problems if we can’t even talk about them?

I spoke this past week at Bath Ruby 2016, in Bath, England. The talk was about my experiences leaving GitHub, as well as the experiences of so many of the people I’ve talked to and studied over the last year. You can follow along with the slide deck if you’d like, or wait for the full video of the talk to come out in the coming weeks.

I also wanted to write a companion piece as well. There’s just a lot that can’t get shoehorned into a time-limited talk. That’s what you’re reading right now. So curl up by the fire, print out this entire thing onto like a bajillion pages of dead tree pulp, and prepare to read a masterpiece about firing people. Once you realize that you’re stuck with this drivel, you can toss the pages onto the fire and start reading this on your iPad instead.

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The advice people most readily give out on this topic today is:

“Fire fast”, they say! You have to fire fast because we’re moving really fuckin’ fast and we don’t have no time to deal with no shitty people draggin’ us down! Move fast and break people! Eat a big fat one, we’re going to the fuckin’ MOOOOOOOOON!

What the shit does that even mean, fire fast? Should I fire people four minutes after I hire them? That’ll show ‘em!

What about after a mistake? Should we fire people as retribution? Do people get second chances?

When we fire people, how do we handle things like continuity of insurance? Or details like taxes, stock, and follow-along communication? How do we handle security concerns when someone leaves an organization?

There’s a lot of advice that’s needed beyond fire fast. “Move fast and break people” doesn’t make any goddamn sense to me.

I’ve heard a lot of funny stories from people in the last year. From the cloud host employee who accidentally uploaded a pirated TV show to company servers and got immediately fired his second week on the job (“oops!” he remarked in hindsight) to the Apple employee who liked my initial post but “per company policy I’m not allowed to talk about why your post may or may not be relevant to me”.

I’ve also heard a lot of sad stories too. From someone whose board pushed them out of their own startup, but was forced to say they resigned for the sake of appearance:

There aren’t adjectives to explain the feeling when your baby tells you it doesn’t want/need you any more.

We might ask: why should we even care about this? They are ex-employees, after all. To quote from the seminal 1999 treatise on corporate technology management/worker relations, Office Space:

The answer, of course, is: we should care about all this because we’re human beings, dammit. How we treat employees, past and present, is a reflection on the company itself. Great companies care deeply about the relationship they maintain with everyone who has contributed to the success of the company.

This is kind of a dreary subject, but don’t worry too much: I’m going to aspire to make this piece as funny and as light-hearted as I can. It’s also going to be pretty long, but that’s okay, sometimes long things are worth it. (Haha dick joke, see? See what I’m doing here? God these jokes are going to doom us all.)

One last thing before we can finally ditch from these long-winded introductory sections: what you’re going to be reading is primarily my narrative, with support from many, many other stories hung off of the broader points.

Listen: I’m not super keen on doing this. I don’t particularly want to make this all about me, or about my experiences getting fired or quitting from any of my previous places of employment. This is a particularly depressing aspect in my life, and even a year later I’m still trying to cope with as much depression as anyone can really reasonably deal with.

But I don’t know how to talk about this in the abstract. The specifics are really where all the important details are. You need the specifics to understand the pain.

As such, this primarily comes at the problem from a specific perspective: an American living in San Francisco for a California-based tech startup.

When I initially wrote my first public “I’m fired!” post, some of you in more-civilized places with strong employee-friendly laws like Germany or France were aghast: who did I murder to get fired from my job? How many babies did I microwave to get to that point? Am I on a watchlist for even asking you that question?

California, though, is an at-will state. Employees can be fired for pretty much any reason. If your boss doesn’t like the color of shoes you’re wearing that day, BOOM! Fired. If they don’t like how you break down oxygen using your lungs in order to power your feeble human body, BOOM! Fired. Totally cool. As long as they’re not discriminating against federally-protected classes — religion, race, gender, disability, etc. — they’re in the clear.

Not all of you are working for companies like this. That’s okay — really, that’s great! — because I still think this touches on a lot of really broad points relevant to everyone. As I was building this talk out, I ended up noticing a ton of crossover with generally leaving a company, be it intentionally, unintentionally, on friendly terms, and on hostile terms. Chances are you’re not going to be at your company forever, so a lot of this is going to be helpful for you to start thinking about now, even if you ultimately don’t leave until years in the future.

Beyond that, I tried to target three different perspectives throughout all this, and I’ll call them out in separately-colored sections as well:

Got it? Okay, let’s get into the thick of things.

I’m Zach Holman. I was number nine at GitHub, and was there between 2010 and 2015. I saw it grow to 250 employees (they’ve since doubled in size and have grown to 500 in the last year).

I’m kind of at the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to leaving a company, which can be helpful for others for the purposes of taking lessons away from an experience. It had been a company I had truly grown to love, and in many ways I had been the face of GitHub, as I did a lot of talks and blog posts that mentioned my experiences there. More than once I had been confusingly introduced as a founder or CEO of the company. That, in part, was how I ultimately was able to sneak into the Andreessen Horowitz corporate apartments and stayed there rent-free for sixteen months. I currently have twelve monogrammed a16z robes in my collection, and possibly was involved in mistakenly giving the greenlight to a Zenefits employee who came by asking if they could get an additional key to the stairwell for a… meeting.

Fast forward to summer of 2014: I had been the top committer to the main github/github repository for the last two years, I had just led the team that shipped one of the last major changes to the site, and around that time I had had a mid-year performance review with my manager that was pretty glowing and had resulted in me receiving one of the largest refresh grants they had given during that review period.

This feels a little self-congratulatory to write now, of course, but I’ll lend you a quick reminder: I did get fired nonetheless, ha. The point I’m trying to put across with all this babble is that on the surface, I was objectively one of the last employees one might think to get fired in the subsequent six months. But everyone’s really at risk: unless you own the company, the company owns you.

Around the start of the fall, though, I had started feeling pretty burnt out. I had started to realize that I hadn’t taken a vacation in five years. Sure, I’d been out of town, and I’d even ostensibly taken time off to have some “vacations”, but in hindsight they were really anything but: I’d still be checking email, I’d still be checking every single @github mention on Twitter, and I’d still dip into chat from time to time. Mentally, I would still be in the game. That’s a mistake I’ll never make again, because though I had handled it well for years — and even truly enjoyed it — it really does grind you down over time. Reading virtually every mention of your company’s name on Twitter for five straight years is exhausting.

By the time November came around, I was looking for a new long-term project to take on. I took a week offsite with three other long-tenured GitHubbers and we started to tackle a very large new product, but I think we were all pretty well burnt out by then. By the end of the week it was clear to me how fried I was; brainstorming should not have been that difficult.

I chatted with the CEO at this point about things. He’s always been pretty cognizant of the need for a good work/life balance, and encouraged taking an open-ended sabbatical away from work for awhile.

My preference would be for you to stay at GitHub […] When you came back would be totally up to you

By February, my manager had sent me an email with the following:

Before agreeing to your return […] we need to chat through some things

At this point things were turning a tad surprising. By February, the first time I received an email from my manager about all this, I hadn’t been involved with the company at all for two months through my sabbatical, and I hadn’t even talked to my manager in four months, ever since she had decided that 1:1s weren’t really valuable between her and me. This was well and fine with me, since I had been assigned to a bit of a catch-all team where none of its members worked together on anything, and I was pretty comfortable moving around the organization and working with others in any case.

I was in Colorado at the time, but agreed to meet up and have a video chat about things. When I jumped on the call, I noticed that — surprise! — someone from HR was on the call as well.

Turns out, HR doesn’t normally join calls for fun. Really, I’m not sure anyone joins video chats for fun. So this should have the first thing that tickled my spidey-sense, but I kinda just tucked it in the back of my mind since I didn’t really have time to consider things much while the call was going on.

At this point, I was feeling pretty good about life again; the time off had left me feeling pretty stoked about building things again, and I had a long list of a dozen things I was planning on shipping in my first month back on the job. The call turned fairly confrontational off the bat, though; my manager kept asking how I felt, I said I felt pretty great and wanted to get to work, but that didn’t seem to really to be the correct answer. Things took a turn south and we went back-and-forth about things. This led to her calling me an asshole twice (in front of HR, again, who didn’t seem to mind).

In hindsight, yeah, I was probably a bit of an asshole; I tend to clam up during bits of confrontation that I hadn’t thought through ahead of time, and most of my responses were pretty terse in the affirmative rather than offering a ton of detail about my thoughts.

After the conversation had ended on a fairly poor note, I thought things through some more and found it pretty weird to be in a position with a superior who was outwardly fairly hostile to me, and I made my first major mistake: I talked to HR.

I was on really good terms with the head of HR, so the next day I sent an email to her making my third written formal request in the prior six months or so to be moved off of my team and onto another team. I had some thoughts on where I’d rather see myself, but really, any other team at that point I would have been happy with; I had pretty close working relationships with all of the rest of the managers at the company. On top of that, the team I was currently on didn’t have any association with each other, so I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal to switch to another arbitrary team.

The head of HR was really great, and found the whole situation to be a bit baffling. We started talking about which teams might make sense, and I asked around to a couple people as to whether they would be happy with a new refugee (they were all thumbs-up on the idea). She agreed to talk to some of the higher-ups about things, and we’d probably arrange a sit-down in person when I came back in a few days to SF to sort out the details.

At this point, I finished up my trip and flew back to San Francisco. It was time to chat in person.

I was fired before I entered the room.

You’re not going to be happy here. We need to move you out of the company.

That was the first thing that was said to me in the meeting between me, the CEO, and the head of HR. Not even sure I had finished sitting down, but I only needed a glance at the faces to know what was in the pipeline for this meeting.

You’re not going to be happy here is a bullshit phrase, of course, but not one that I have a lot of problems with in hindsight. My happiness has no impact on the company — my output does — but I think it was a helpful euphemism, at least.

I’m still not fully certain why I got the axe; it was never made explicit to me. I asked other managers and those on the highest level of leadership, and everyone seemed be as confused as I was.

My best guess is that it’s Tall Poppy Syndrome, a phrase I was unfamiliar with until an Aussie told me about it. (Everything worthwhile in life I’ve learned from an Australian, basically.) The tallest poppy gets cut first.

With that, I don’t mean that I’m particularly talented or anything like that; I mean that I was the most obvious advocate internally for certain viewpoints, given how I’ve talked externally about how the old GitHub worked. In Japanese the phrase apparently translates to The tallest nail gets the hammer, which I think works better for this particular situation, heh. I had on occasion mentioned internally my misgivings about the lack of movement happening on any product development, and additionally the increasing unhappiness of many employees due to some internal policy changes and company growth.

Improving the product and keeping people happy are pretty important in my eyes, but I had declined earlier requests to move towards the management side of things, though, so primarily I was fairly heads-down on building stuff at that point rather than leading the charge for a lot of change internally. So maybe it was something else entirely; I’m not sure. I’m left with a lot of guesses.

So, I was fired. I walked out of the room, got briefly locked inside the office stairwell, and then walked to grab my stuff.

What next?

It’s a tough question. At this point I was kind of on auto-pilot, with the notion of being fired not really settling out in my mind yet.

I went to where my stuff was and started chatting with my closer friends. (I wasn’t escorted out of the building or any of that silliness.)

I started seeing friendly faces walk by and say hi, since in many cases I hadn’t seen or talked to most of my coworkers in months, having never come back in an official capacity from my sabbatical. I immediately took to walking up to them, giving them a long, deeply uncomfortable and lingering hug, and then whispering in their ear: it was very nice working with you. also I just got fired. It was a pretty good troll given such short notice, all things considered. We all had a good laugh, and then people stuck around so they could watch me do it to someone else. By the end I had a good dozen or so people around chatting and avoiding work. A+++ time, would do again.

lol jesus just realized what I typed, god no, I’d probably avoid getting fired the next time, I mean. I’m just pretty dope at trolling is all I’m sayin’.

Eventually I walked out of the office and starting heading towards tacos, where I was planning on drinking way too many margaritas with a dear friend who was still at the company (for the time being). Please note: tacos tend to solve all problems. By this point, the remote workers had all heard the news, so my phone started blowing up with text messages. I was still feeling pretty good about life, so I took this selfie and started sending it to people in lieu of going into a ton of detail with each person about my mental state.

In prepping this talk, I took a look at this selfie for the first time in quite a number of months and noticed I was wearing earbuds. Clearly I was listening to something as I strutted out of the office. Luckily I scrobble my music to Last.fm, so I can go back and look. So that’s how I found out what I was listening to:

On My Own, as sung by Eponine in the award-winning musical Les Misérables. Shit you not. It’s like I’m some emo fourteen-year-old just discovering their first breakup or something. Nice work, Holman.

Shortly thereafter, I tweeted the aforementioned tweet:

Again, it’s pretty vague and didn’t address whether I had quit or I’d been fired. I was pretty far away from processing things. I think being evasive made some sense at the time.

I’ve been journaling every few days pretty regularly for a few years now, and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. I definitely wrote a really long entry for myself that day. I went back and took a look while I was preparing this talk, and this section jumped out at me:

The weird part is how much this is about me. This is happening to me right now. I didn’t really expect it to feel so intimate, a kind of whoa, this is my experience right now and nobody else’s.

In hindsight, yeah, that’s absolutely one of the stronger feelings I still feel from everything. When you think about it, most of the experiences you have in life are shared with others: join a new job, share it with your new coworkers. Get married, share it with your new partner and your friends and family. Best I can tell, getting fired and dying are one of the few burdens that are yours and yours alone. I didn’t really anticipate what that would feel like ahead of time.

By later in the night, I was feeling pretty down. It was definitely a roller coaster of a day: text messages, tweets, margaritas, financial advisors, lawyers, introspective walks in the park. I didn’t necessarily think I’d be flying high for the rest of my life, but it didn’t really make the crash all that easier, either. And that experience has really matched my last year, really: some decent highs, some pretty dangerous lows. Five years being that deeply intertwined in a company is toeing a line, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.

Good god, it really takes an awful amount of work in order to leave work.

There’s a number of immediate concerns you need to deal with:

• Who owns your physical hardware? Is your computer owned by the company? Your phone? Any other devices? Do you need to wipe any devices, or pull personal data off of any of them?
• Do you have any outstanding expenses to deal with? I had a conference to Australia in a few subsequent weeks that I had to deal with. I had told them that GitHub would pay for my expenses to attend, but I hadn’t booked that trip yet. Luckily it was no problem for GitHub to pick up the tab (I was still representing the company there, somewhat awkwardly), but it was still something else I needed to remember to handle right away.
• How’s your healthcare situation, if you’re unfortunate enough to live in a country where healthcare Is A Thing. In the US, COBRA exists to help provide continuity of health insurance between jobs, and it should cover you during any gaps in your coverage. It was one more thing to have to worry about, although admittedly I was pleasantly surprised at how (relatively) easy using COBRA was; I was expecting to jump through some really horrible hoops.

The next thing to consider is severance pay. Each company tends to handle things differently here, and at least in the US, there’s not necessarily a good standard of what to expect in terms of post-termination terms and compensation.

There’s a lot of potential minefields involved in dealing with the separation agreement needed to agree upon severance, though.

Unfortunately I can’t go into much detail here other than say that we reached an equitable agreement, but it did take a considerable amount of time to get to that point.

One of the major general concerns when a worker leaves an American-based startup is the treatment of their stock options. A large part of equity compensation takes place in the form of ISOs, which offer favorable tax treatments in the long term.

Unfortunately, vested unexercised ISOs are capped at 90 days post-employment by law, meaning that they disappear in a puff of smoke once you reach that limit. This poses a problem in today’s anti-IPO startups who simultaneously reject secondary sales, which limit all of the options available for an employee to exercise their stock (the implications of which for an early employee might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that they don’t have, excluding the corresponding tax hit as well).

Another possibility that’s quickly gaining steam lately is to convert those ISOs to NSOs at the 90 day mark and extend the option window to something longer like seven or ten years instead of a blistering 90 days. In my mind, companies who haven’t switched to a longer 90 day window are actively stealing from their employees; the employees have worked hard to vest their options over a period of years, but because of their participation in the company’s success they’re now unable to exercise their options.

I’ve talked a lot about this in greater length in my aptly-titled post, Fuck Your 90 Day Exercise Window, as well as started a listing of employee-friendly companies with extended exercise windows. Suffice to say, this is a pretty important aspect to me and was a big topic in the discussions surrounding my separation agreement.

I had been talking to various officials in leadership for a few months hammering out the details and had been under the impression that we had reached an agreement, but I was surprised to find out that wasn’t the case. I was informed 28 hours before my 90 day window closed that the agreement I had thought I had didn’t exist; it was then that I realized I had 28 hours to either come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars that I didn’t have to save half of my stock, or I could sign the agreement as-is and avoid losing half of my already-diminished stake. I opted to sign.

All things considered, though, we did reach an agreement and I was officially free and clear of the company.

That brings us to the last few months and up to the present. I’ve spent the last year or so trying to sort out my life and my resulting depression. Shit sucks. Professionally I’ve done some consulting and private talks here and there, which have been tepidly interesting. I’ve also served in a formal advisory role to three startups, which I’ve really come to enjoy; after being so heads-down on a single problem for the last five years, it’s nice to get a fair amount of depth in multiple new problem spaces, some of which are new to me.

But I still haven’t found the next thing I’m really interested in, which just feeds into the whole cycle some more. For better or worse, that’ll be changing pretty quickly, since I’m pretty broke after working part-time and living in San Francisco for so long. Even though I helped move a company’s valuation almost two billion dollars, I haven’t made a dime from the company outside of making a pretty below-to-average salary. That’s after six years.

Think on that, kids, when you’re busting your ass day and night to strike it rich with your startup dreams.

One of the very bright points from all of this is the self-organized GitHub alumni network. Xubbers, we call ourselves. We have a private Facebook group and a private Slack room to talk about things. It’s really about 60% therapy, 20% shooting the shit just like the old days, and 20% networking and supporting each other as we move forward in our new careers apart.

I can’t underline how much I’ve appreciated this group. In the past I’ve kept in contact with coworkers from previous points of employment, but I hadn’t worked somewhere with enough former employees to necessarily warrant a full alumni group.

Highly recommend pulling a group like this together for your own company. On a long enough timescale, you’re all going to join our ranks anyway. Unless you die first. Then we’ll mount your head on the wall like in a private hunter’s club or something. “The one that almost got away”, we’ll call it.

In some sense, I think alumni really continue the culture of the company, independent of what changes may or may not befall the company itself.

One of my favorite stories about all this lately is from Parse. Unfortunately, the circumstances around it aren’t super happy: after being acquired by Facebook, Parse ultimately was killed off last month.

The Parse alumni, though, got together last month to give their beloved company a proper send-off:

No funeral would be complete, though, without a cake. (I’m stretching the metaphor here, but that’s okay, just roll with it.) Parse’s take on the cake involved an upside-down Facebook “like” button, complete with blood:

The most important part of a company is the lasting mark they leave on the world. That mark is almost always the people. Chances are, your people aren’t going to be at your company forever. You want them to move on and do great things. You want them to carry with them the best parts of your culture on to new challenges, new companies, and new approaches.

Once you see that happening, then you can be satisfied with the job you’ve done.

It’s not your company. If you don’t own the company, the company owns you.

That’s really been a hard lesson for me. I was pretty wrapped up in working there. It’s a broader concept, really, shoved down our throats in the tech industry. Work long hours and move fast. Here, try on this company hoodie. Have this catered lunch so you don’t have to go out into the real world. This is your new home. The industry is replete with this stuff.

One of my friends took an interesting perspective:

I always try to leave on a high note. Because once you’re there, you’re never going to hit that peak again.

What she was getting at is that I think you’ll know. You’ll know the difference between doing far and away your best work, and doing work that is still good, but just nominally better than what you’ve been doing. Once you catch yourself adjusting to that incremental progression… maybe it’s time to leave, to change things up. Just thought that was interesting.

One of my favorite conversations I’ve had recently was with Ron Johnson. Ron was in charge of rolling out the Apple Store: everything from the Genius Bar to the physical setup to how the staff operated. He eventually left Apple and became the CEO at JC Penny, one of the large stalwart department stores in the United States. Depending on who you ask, he either revolutionized what department stores could be but ran out of time to see the changes bear fruit, or seriously jeopardized JC Penny’s relationship with its customers by putting them through some new changes.

In either case, there had been some discussions internally and he had agreed to resign. A few days later, the board went ahead and very publicly fired him instead.

We chatted about this, and he said something that I really think helped clarify my opinion on everything:

There’s nothing wrong with moving along… regardless of whether it is self-driven or company-driven. Maybe we need new language… right now it’s either we resign or get fired.

Maybe there’s a third concept which is “next”.

Maybe we should simply recognize it’s time for next.

I like that sentiment.

Firing people is a normal function in a healthy, growing company. The company you start at might end up very distinctly different by the time you leave it. Or you might be the one who does the changing. Life’s too nuanced to make these blanket assumptions when we hear about someone getting fired.

Talk about it. If not publicly, then talk openly with your friends and family about things. I don’t know much, but I do know we can’t start fixing and improving this process if we continue to push the discussions to dark alleyways of our minds.

When I finished this talk in the UK last week, I was kind of nervous about how many in the audience could really identify with aspects that I was describing. Shortly after the conference finished up we went to the conference after-party and I was showered with story after story of bad experiences, good experiences, and just overall experiences, from people who hadn’t really been able to talk frankly about these topics before. It was pretty humbling. So many people have stories.

Thanks for reading my story.

What’s next?

In an earlier post, Implementing Slack Slash Commands Using Amazon Lambda Functions – Getting Started, I avoided the use of an encrypted Slack token to identify the provenance of an incoming request in favour of the plaintext version to try to simplify the “getting started with AWS Lambda functions” aspect of that recipe. In this post, I’ll describe how to to step up to the mark and use the encrypted token.

To begin with, you’ll need to create an AWS encryption key. The method is described here but I’ll walk you though it…

The is generated from the IAM console – select the Encyrption Keys element from the left hand sidebar, and then make sure you select the correct AWS region (that is, the region that the Lambda function is defined in) before creating the key:

Check again that you’re in the correct region, and then give your key an alias (I used slackslashtest):

You then need to set various permissions for potential users of the encryption key. I avoided giving anyone administrative permissions:

but I did give usage permissions to the role I’d defined to execute my Lambda function:

Once you’ve assigned the roles and defined the encryption key, you should be able to see it from the IAM Encryption Keys console listing:

Select the encryption key and make a copy of the ARN that identifies it:

You now need to add the ARN for this encryption key to a policy that defines what the role used to execute the Lambda function can do. From the IAM console, select Roles and then the role you’re interested in:

Create a new role policy for that role:

You can use the policy generator tool to create the policy:

Select the AWS Key Management Service, and then select the Decrypt action. This will allow the role to use the decrypt method for the specified encryption key:

Add the ARN for your encryption key (the one you copied above) and select Add Statement to add the decrypt action on the specified encryption key to the newly created role policy.

You can now generate and review the policy – you may want to give it a sensible name:

So… we’ve now created a key, with the alias slackslashtest, and given the role that executes the Lambda function permission to access it as part of the encryption key definition; we’ve then declared access to the Decrypt method via the role policy definition.

Now we need to use the encryption key to encrypt our Slack token. You can do this using the Amazon CLI (Command Line Interface). To do this, you first need to install the AWS CLI on your computer. (I think I did this on a Mac using Homebrew? I’m not sure if there’s an online console way of doing the encryption?)

Once the AWS CLI is installed, you need to configure it. To do this, you need to get some more keys. From the IAM console, select Users and then your user. You now need to Create Access Key.

Creating an access key is fraught with risk – you get one opportunity to look at the key values, and one opportunity to download the credentials, and that’s it! So make a note of the values…

You’re now going to use these access keys to set up the AWS CLI on your computer (you should only need to do this once). After ensuring that the AWS CLI is installed, (enter the command aws on the command line and see if it takes!), run the command aws configure and provide your access key credentials. Also make sure you select the region you want to work in.

Having configured the CLI with permission to talk to the AWS servers, you can now use it to encrypt the Slack token. Run the command:

aws kms encrypt --key-id alias/YOUR_KEY_ALIAS --plaintext "YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN"

using approriate values for the AWS encryption key alias (mine was slackslashtest) and Slack token. This calls the key encryption service and uses the specified encryption key, via its alias, to encrypt the plaintext string.

The CiphertextBlob is the encrypted version of the token. In your AWS Lambda function definition, you can use this value as the encrypted expected token from Slack that checks the provenance of whoever’s made a request to the Lambda function:

Comment out – or better, delete! – the original plaintext version of the Slack token that we used as a shortcut previously, and save the Lambda function.

Now when you call the Lambda function from Slack, via the slash function, it should run as before, only this time the Slack token lookup is made against an encrypted, rather than plaintext, version of it on the AWS side.

In the final post of this short series, I’ll describe how to write a simple test event to test the Lambda function.

Last week, over a thousand designers braved the Nordic winter and met in Helsinki’s Finlandia Hall. They had come together for Interaction 16, an annual event about what is happening in design and technology.

I was keen to tag along. While I’m very far from a trained designer, I’m definitely design curious. That’s because I’m increasingly aware of how many of the open source projects and participatory events could benefit from what designers bring to the table. And especially in emerging fields like the Internet of Things, design’s attitudes and skillsets will play a powerful role.

What is interaction design?

Firstly, I was keen to understand some fundamentals. There are different kinds of design: product design, service design, user experience design, industrial design, systems design, and on and on. What, pray tell, is interaction design?

I asked Sami Niemelä, one of the co-chairs together with Peter, to give me his take:

“Design is a mindset. And interaction is about behavior. Interaction design is an approach to making things that understands the experiences and behaviors around them.”

Sami also recommended checking out these notable folks:

• The Mother of All Demos by Douglas Engelbart. This is where many people say that interaction design as a discipline began.
• Xerox Park and their invention of graphical user interfaces, WYSIWYG text editor, ethernet and more.
• Gillian Crampton Smith founded a masters program in computer-related design MA at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. It was a very influential degree program. Gillian has gone on to found the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, which in turn helped shape the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID).
• Alan Cooper who pioneered the use of personas and pioneered many user experience practices.
• Donald Norman who argued for how emotions play a crucial role in our ability to understand the world and learn things.
• IDEO a design agency who advocates the use of human-centered design. They’re teaching a free online course that the Mozilla Berlin office and other Mozillians are currently taking.

What I gather from all that is:

The role of the designer is to listen to people. They ask “Why? And what if?” Then they translate these observations and conversations into usable and delightful experiences. Designers understand that this is an iterative process. So they continually check in and listen to people as they interact with products and services, making adjustments along the way.

The Entanglement.

After Sami helped me get the fundamentals, I was ready to dive into the event. It opened with Marko Ahtisaari, introducing us to Finnish culture: their love of silence and nature…and of heavy metal.

Marko cited some important guidelines for design today:

• From Enlightenment to Entanglement. We’re becoming increasingly entangled in our machines. During the Enlightenment, we probed and reconstituted our political institutions. It was a struggle to give these new institutions the power to act on our behalf. Now as we build smarter machines, we’re facing a similar uneasiness when handing over power to computers. What happens when machines make decisions on our behalf?
• Systems over objects. The ability to manufacture smart machines is no longer something that only large industry can do. Individuals and small organizations are gaining production capabilities to make entire intelligent systems. This calls for supply chains and ecosystems more transparent and accessible, if we want to foster innovation from smaller players.
• Participation over user-centric. These new intelligent systems don’t have a center, so there’s no center to put a user. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of complex, adaptive systems. The role of the designer will be more facilitative–more like a conductor than a producer.
• Emergence over authority / control. Lastly, we’ll co-design with artificial intelligence. The studio will be a symbiosis of human and machine, so we’ll want to figure out what humans do best and what’s best done by machines.

These trends are explored in more depth in a new publication by MIT Press, the Journal of Design and Science.

The myth of the single perspective

The ethnographer Tricia Wang delivered an eloquent critique of our search for The Truth in visual representations.

The West has a long history of seeing the truth as a single, stable thing. Tricia builds an argument that spans the invention of single point perspective in Renaissance paintings through to the advent of modern mirrors and on to Big Data and Virtual Reality. She demonstrates that we regularly confuse visual representation with reality. We see the world through our technology, and we believe its The Truth.

The brilliance of her talk was connecting this theory with contemporary examples, which give a fresh perspective on diversity & inclusion.

For example, Google Photos royally messed up when it trained its phototagging algorithm. It falsely identified some people of color as “gorillas.” In another example, Nikon cameras falsely interpreted the eye shapes of many Asian users. The cameras suggested that people in the photo had blinked when their eyes were actually open.

Tricia called these mishaps perspective collision. It’s when the perspective of the designer or creator of the technology clashes with the perspectives of users.

It’s related to the Malkovich Bias, the notion that everyone users technology the way you do.

To counteract these collisions and biases, Tricia advocated for Thick Data. She sees Think Data as a complement to Big Data. It’s qualitative instead of quantitative. It bundles stories and ethnographic data into insights that can be used when creating technology. Thick Data can bring balance to our quantification bias, meaning that we overly value things that can be measured.

Think Data enables designers to go beyond their single perspective. Similar to what Marko suggested, the designer is a facilitator. They guide the inputs from a range of perspectives. They’ll change their practice from ”explicit design —> generative design” and spend ”less time conceiving solutions —> more time guiding input.”

Conversation as user interface

Another fantastic talk was from Alper Çuğun. He gave an overview of conversational user interfaces. It was based on his own experience making mobile games that use conversations and messaging as the main mechanic. He also shared an analysis of the tools out there to make conversational UIs and a prediction of where the scene is heading.

In particular, I was struck by how conversations, like the messaging apps we’re all familiar with on our phones, can lower the barrier to people using technology. It now feels very natural to text back and forth with friends. When machines can text with us, that might give us a sense of accessibility and agency in our interaction with them.

Speculative design

Simone Rebaudengo and Nicolas Nola rocked the house with an introduction to their speculative design practice. Their collective Automato Farm makes “real fictional products for real fictional people.” Their products are everyday objects that enable you to experience a near future. And blog trolls hate them.

See for example:

• The Teacher of Algorithms. Down a twisted Shanghai alley, the teacher of algorithms trains smart things to behave.
• Ethical autonomous vehicles. Three algorithms solving unsolvable car crashes from autonomous vehicles.
• Politics of Power. Multi-plugs with manufactured ideologies.

With these speculative objects, Simone can probe our assumptions about what “smart” means. Typically, smart is defined as “sensing + computing + acting”. Yet Simone asks: do objects know what’s best when they sense our environment? When they compute, what ideology are they propagating? When objects act, are they really set up to make good decisions for us?

I love this approach. By building something that people can experience, we get to learn about the consequences of a technology. Speculation becomes experiential and interactive. These objects become a physical touchstone for deeper discussions and questions about ethics, opportunity, literacy, agency and more.

Designing for privacy

A strong trend at Interaction 16 was the focus on better design for online privacy. There were a series of talks looking at how to facilitate better user experiences so that people have the knowledge and ability to control their personal data.

As we move through the world exuding personal data, like a virtual version of Charlie Brown’s Pig Pen, technology could better inform us of what data is being collected, how it is being used, and how we can take action to modify that if we wish. Furthermore, many of the practitioners in this series advocated for technology makers to offer an opinion — set strong defaults that are in the user’s interest, and give them the knowledge and the skills to modify them.

These conversations were quite salient and offered a bridge between the interaction design community at #IXD16 and the concurrent Internet Freedom Festival in Barcelona. We definitely need more people contributing to the user experience and interaction design of privacy tools.

More good stuff

Other sessions I enjoyed were:

• Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino on why designers need to get involved in IoT. A great call-to-arms for designers to be in the room with technologists making IoT products. And some cool anecdotes from early Arduino days.
• Kate Darling on Robot Ethics. And why our interactions with robots is more about human empathy and interactions with other humans. Plus the dangers of very convincing robots to get more personal data out of you.
• Boris Anthony on Practical Abstractions. Tools for exploring concepts and ideas, including a spectrum for asking more powerful questions.

Closure experiences

Lastly, I was struck by the thesis of Joe Macleod. He’s spent the last few years thinking about what he calls “closure experiences.” He argues that we spend so much time beginning things–be it a purchase, an experience, a relationship, etc.–and not on ending them in a thoughtful, healthy way.

We jump from beginning to beginning, because it’s a thrill to start something new. Endings remind us of death. However, endings are inevitable. And it’s therefore worthwhile to think about how to end things in a satisfactory way.

Well, no event would end properly without a round of karaoke. So I’m glad Interaction 16 closed out with a massive singalong.

Photos: Designer be kerning, Finlandia Hall, Selfie With the Co-Chairs, Tricia Wang at Interaction 16, Happy fruity co-chair Sami by The Waving Cat available under CC BY-NC-SA. Lordi-04-0x by Alterna2 available under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. “POLITICS OF POWER” by Simone Rebaudengo.

The CyanogenMod team today announced the first ‘M’ release of CyanogenMod 13, which is based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. The latest version of the custom ROM brings quite a lot of new enhancements, which you can read more about in this article. Continue reading →

In Praise of Impractical Movements | Dissent Magazine:

tnelms:

gleemie:

I think these stories about social movements building power, shifting frames, and creating pressure are crucial to teach. But I need to educate myself too, since you learn only a tiny bit about social movement building in science studies and even less in hci/informatics.

Among my favorite concepts in this vein is Kathi Weeks’ idea of the “utopian demand” in The Problem of Work. (Welcome back @gleemie!)

Movements win by changing the political weather, turning demands considered unrealistic into ones that can no longer be ignored. 

Great prose from Mark Engler and Paul Engler.

stoweboyd:

more deep less shallow;
more writing less busy;
more walking less flying;
more music less noise;
more garden less food;
more laughs less sighs;
more ups less downs;
more coming less going;
more you less me;
more less less more.

A cancer survivor in Germany, @ralfschwartz, wants to use the lines of my 2016 poem as the sections of a website dedicated to helping people get bone marrow transplants. The lines will also appear on tshirts. And I am going to get some. Yay.

I’ve written a great deal about the out-migration of users from the overly plowed territory of social collaboration technologies. In Understanding The Failed Promise Of Social Collaboration, I wrote

Work — in the basic sense of getting things done, not the place we go to do it — is a combination of focused individual activity, focused joint activity (working together with others in real time), and cooperative and coordinative activities (working asynchronously with others on framing and planning of work, like chatting online about deadlines and features in a product development cycle). Social collaboration tools overemphasize the last of these three categories of work, and de-emphasize — or ignore — the first two. The reason? Perhaps one reason is that the last category is the province of old school managers: those who were charged with managing others.

My sincere belief is that we are seeing a shift from social collaboration tools toward alternatives — like work chat — where the first two categories of work are supported and the last category — overseeing others’ progress and managing what others do — is significantly de-emphasized. We are moving to smaller social scale, starting with the individual, and then on to small cooperative groups, or sets.

Just as we are seeing a shift toward chat in the ‘consumer’ web, the same is going on in the workplace, and we are seeing the continuing displacement of social collaboration exactly where work chat’s value proposition is strongest: focused joint activity on work in small teams (or ‘sets’ as I spelled out in The Rise of Work Chat Anti-Hype). 

So this is one megatrend: the widespread adoption of tools based on the chat design metaphor across the board in personal and work life. Chat is the new normal for communication, displacing both email and social collaboration tools. 

Adoption of a technology at this scale has led in the past to the Internet Giants paying serious attention. What is missing in the Giant’s stacks – if central to contemporary use – rapidly becomes infrastructure. 

We’ve seen that with email – now provided mostly by Microsoft, Apple, and Google –  and most other competitors wiped out. Today we’re seeing that trend with distributed core (or what is called file sync-and-share), which started as a tool – like Dropbox, or the dozens of other startups scrambling to offer a virtual distributed file system – but is really a patch to the operating system, which is why Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are baking it into their stacks. 

We’re seeing the same with so-called ‘productivity’ tools (Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Apple’s Pages/Number/Keynote), which are now part of the baseline operating environment those companies offer, and which have killed off most small fry competitors.

So, applying the inexorable logic of infrastructurization (yes, I went there), the Giants will roll out a spectrum of chat solutions integrated with other elements of their infrastructures. 

Arguably, Apple and Microsoft might think that their current messaging tools – Messages and Skype – fit that slot, but they don’t for business purposes (for a long list of reasons). Skype’s really for calls and meetings – real-time conversations – although chat is built in. 

I expect to see versions of iOS, OS X, and Android where the user experience is increasingly chat oriented, with text and voice approaches. This is something like what I do on iOS when I ask Siri to set an alarm or open Shazam. But imagine if the default iOS or OS X screen was Messages-like chat rather than the Mac finder or iPhone apps. Siri should just be another being I am communicating with via chat.

Google tried to get social a dozen times, it seems, and Orkut, Wave, and Google+ just never got very far. Hangouts – spun out of Google+ – is doing much better, partly because it’s integrated with Gmail. For reasons that totally escape me, Google has not yet built in Hangouts into Google Drive, which would be the natural place for supporting discussion about work. More to follow there, I bet, and some AI there, too.

Microsoft’s Groups – baked into Office 365 – is leaning in the social collaboration direction, so they’ll need something else. But Cortana is a step in that direction.

Facebook is the first Giant to build its infrastructure without a dedicated hardware section of their stack ( which is where Microsoft is headed, too, as the Windows monopoly unwinds). Facebook for Work is potentially the biggest new challenge that social collaboration vendors face, right behind Slack*.

Watch Out For That Wave

The tsunami is about to hit. The water has pulled back from the shore, and the massive wave is about to wash over the land. And the social collaboration vendors are headed for the hills, hoping to find a niche where they can survive the damage. 

So we will see the broad promises of social collaboration scaled back. Instead of ‘transforming your company’ we’ll see ‘become more connected to your customers’ as some vendors shrink their ambition into customer community outreach. Or more of a focus on discovery and management of talent across corporations, or during mergers. And less of an emphasis on the work of small teams – focused joint activity – and instead trying to meet the needs of HR staff or managers.

And the core capabilities for people communicating, sharing structured and unstructured information at their desks or on mobile, those capabilities will be provided by the Giants, and soon. 

---

* Sub-question: Will Slack become a Giant, or be acquired by one? Any of the existing Giants would be smart to buy it, with Microsoft and Google having the most obvious motivations. (But I wouldn’t rule out Amazon from anything, these days.) What happens to Slack if and when the Giants all roll out something intended to match it?

Michael Geller flagged on FB this piece from ArchDaily, exploring the desire for novelty, the egos of ‘starchitects,’ local context and the grab-bag of other issues in this era where technology has made almost anything buildable. My almost-random excerpts from it are:

“STOP confusing architecture and art,” demanded Patrik Schumacher, Zaha Hadid’s partner, on social media in 2014: “Architects are in charge of the FORM of the built environment, not its content… Architecture is NOT ART although FORM is our specific contribution to the evolution of world society. We need to understand how new forms can make a difference for the progress of world civilization.”

and …

The Spectator recently called Hadid “the champion of an architecture that was more about personal ‘vision’ than public utility.” Fast Company has called Frank Gehry, certainly the world’s most famous architect, “the avatar of architectural self-expression,” and Gehry himself staunchly defends “the validity of self-expression” as “a basic value.” This year, the Architectural Review declared that both architects’ recent projects “arrogantly flaunt their refusal to defer to local context … announcing instead that the supposed right to ego-expression of a starchitect trounces all such decencies.”

Coincidentally, a review essay by Ingrid Rowland on Gehry, always referred to as “Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry” on the CBC, appeared in the New York Review of Books to coincide with a newly published hagiography … uh, biography, and an exhibition at the LA County Museum of Art (which closes on the 20th if you happen to be passing through). As a rare unlocked article on the site, it is worth reading both for the writer’s insights as well as for the slagging of a major cultural figure.

Referring, of course, to the Guggenheim Bilbao, she argues that it reflects a spirit of place:

In the case of Bilbao, he saw the dramatic promise of the site itself, a forested gorge that suddenly widens into an estuary making its serpentine way to the sea. Nineteenth-century Bilbao was laid out in regular blocks on the flood plain left by this bend in the Nervión River, to serve a burgeoning steel industry and a major port. Across the water, the maze of medieval Bilbao, a stop on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela, huddled on a smaller sandbar beneath the limestone cliffs. Photographs of Gehry’s Guggenheim building rarely take in these natural surroundings, focusing instead on the tawny curves of the structure, clad in a combination of limestone and titanium panels. But Gehry himself was evidently looking at the view. The museum’s complex profile echoes the complexity of the hills around it, while its reflective façade takes on the colors of Bilbao’s perpetually changing sky.

… which reminds me of a quote from D.H. Lawrence: “All true art rises from a specific soil and flickers with a sense of place.” Later in the review, she comments on the evolution of his buildings and the art-for-art’s-sake thinking going into them, corroborating the comment flagged above from the ArchDaily piece:

When it first opened, Gehry’s Disney Hall, with its stainless steel cladding, was so bright that the flashy exterior blinded the neighbors. It had to be darkened. Buildings that scream for attention can be fun, provocative, even inspirational, but they are not the stuff that most architecture can be made of.

Closer to home, the rendering above appeared on an FB post by Patrick Condon, chair of Urban Design at SALA, UBC (the source of the image was Derek Lee). This looks like “Son of Icepick,” the radical tower proposed by Cadillac-Fairview for a site adjoining, and overhanging, historic Waterfront Station, but I may be wrong. His thoughts on ‘weird’ architecture are worth quoting in full:

I am moved to write a bit more on this topic so indulge me. All around the world we are seeing more and more proposals for “interesting” and “iconic” buildings. In and of itself this would seem like a good thing I guess. Our city has been lauded as a beautiful city lacking in distinctive architecture. So I guess we do need more “interesting” buildings.

What then is it about these twisty buildings like the ones shown, and the ones that are even more cartoonish like the “gherkin” and the “shard” in London, and the transgressive ones (meaning they look normal but with a twist) like the “Jenga Tower” proposed for Georgia. I am not the only one in the city who feels discomforted by these new proposals. We are many. What is it that troubles me? Perhaps it is that I expected more meaning from an “icon” than such shallow references. I would have hoped that they would have been more in the tradition of the Marine building on Burrard, which somehow exemplifies the maritime aspirations of our city perched on the edge of the Pacific. Or perhaps I wish they were more like the more more recent Woodward’s project, which somehow makes its social aspirations into a narrative that can be read as you move to and around the building. Iconic yes but not a one liner, or more to the point not a “one worder”.

I think what troubles people in our city about these twisty, transgressive, and cartoonish buildings is their very lack of real meaning, and how their paper thin narrative (or total absence of narrative) seems so appealing to the .01 percent market. What seems discomforting and depressing about it is the billboard quality that these buildings have, as if their very purpose was to be large enough, but shallow enough, to communicate across the oceans to the far corners of the planet saying “me too!”. That is truly disturbing, particularly in the context of a time when our friends to the south seem to be committing political suicide over the issue of cultural inequality, with Trump’s advocates on the right blaming their inability to succeed on foreign looking “muslims who hate us” (in my view without justification) and Bernie Sanders’s advocates blaming their inability to succeed ( in my view with ample justification) on a “rigged economy” operated by and for the .01 percenters.

These cartoonish and transgressive iconic buildings have come, I think, to symbolize the rapid separation of the .01 percenters from the rest of culture. Viewed in this light these buildings seem to be more than simply “interesting” but culturally corrosive. They are public reminders of the futility of civic participation for the other 99.9 percent, and represent the ascension of a sort of oligarchy of wealth unknown during our lifetimes.

I think this is particularly painful for Vancouverites. Certainly we had our gentry for many generations, ensconced in Dunbar or Kerrisdale or Shaughnessy. But they generally had the sense of noblesse oblige that comes of having to confront your less fortunate fellows on the streets of the city. But this new form of city signals a different kind of gentry, one not tied to civic space but more the inhabitants of a largely separate reality. A space of penthouse views and limo rides to the first class lounge at YVR.

Am I exaggerating? I think not. The anger felt by many during our last civic election, and the mayor’s odd public apology just before the guillotine fell, seems to me to signal a collapse that, while milder than what is going on in the states right now, is at least a distant relative of the same inequality driven phenomenon.

If I am right about this it will make it extremely difficult for us to shepherd this next new and unfamiliar stage in our cities growth. These issues cut deeply but are extremely hard to articulate in the context of what seems to be a simple design question about the next “interesting” building proposed for what were once our streets.

Is he exaggerating? Should we embrace this kind of “look at me” shouty architecture in Dullsville or are we just fine with our boxy stuff?

 

Nature heralds AlphaGo's arrival courtesy of the American Go Association

In Why AlphaGo Matters, Ben Kamphaus writes:

AlphaGo recognises strong board positions by first recognizing visual features in the board. It's connecting movements to shapes it detects. Now, we can't see inside AlphaGo unless DeepMind decides they want to share some of the visualizations of its intermediate representations. I hope they do, as I bet they'd offer a lot of insight into both the game of Go and how AlphaGo specifically is reasoning about it.

I'm not sure seeing visualizations of AlphaGo's intermediate representations would offer much insight into either the game of Go or how AlphaGo reasons about it, but I would love to find out.

One of the things that drew me to AI when I was in high school and college was the idea that computer programs might be able to help us understand the world better. At the most prosaic level, I though this might happen in what we had to learn in order to write an intelligent program, and in how we structured the code that we wrote. At a more interesting level, I thought that we might have a new kind of intelligence with which to interact, and this interaction would help us to learn more about the domain of the program's expertise.

Alas, computer chess advanced mostly by making computers that were even faster at applying the sort of knowledge we already have. In other domains, neural networks and then statistical approaches led to machines capable of competent or expert performance, but their advances were opaque. The programs might shed light on how to engineer systems, but the systems themselves didn't have much to say to us about their domains of expertise or competence.

Intelligent programs, but no conversation. Even when we play thousands of games against a chess computer, the opponent seems otherworldly, with no new principles emerging. Perhaps new principles are there, but we cannot see them. Unfortunately, chess computers cannot explain their reasoning to us; they cannot teach us. The result is much less interesting to me than my original dreams for AI.

Perhaps we are reaching a point now where programs such as AlphaGo can display the sort of holistic, integrated intelligence that enables them to teach us something about the game -- even if only by playing games with us. If it turns out that neural nets, which are essentially black boxes to us, are the only way to achieve AI that can work with us at a cognitive level, I will be chagrined. And most pleasantly surprised.

Investors are increasingly seeking firms with long-term growth strategies, rather than ones focused on managing short-term earnings to boost the stock price. This, in turn, is triggering a shift in the perceived role of the CFO — from bean counters to planters of seed corn.

No one has done more to spotlight the contrast than Laurence Fink, the CEO of BlackRock. As head of the world’s largest asset manager, with $4.6 trillion in holdings, Fink in February sent a letter to the CEOs of all S&P 500 companies that essentially cut the Gordian knot of short-termism. Companies have been paying sharply higher dividends and buying back their shares much more aggressively, he says, in order to please people like him. Fink is essentially saying: Stop it! Invest more of that capital in growing the company. Do away with the game of quarterly earnings guidance, and instead articulate to investors your “strategic framework for long-term value creation.”

Backing this up is another group of asset managers who have committed $2 billion to invest in a newly created S&P Long-Term Value Index, a subset of companies doing things right. “We are trying to use the index to change corporate behavior,” said Mark Wiseman, chief executive of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the lead investor in the initiative. Wiseman has helped start Focusing Capital on the Long Term, a new institute that also counts Barclays and Unilever as founding members.

Redefining the CFO role

For CEOs, creating and communicating long-term growth strategy is easier said than done. After all, it’s the CFO who typically sets expectations about growth to investors and then allocates resources to ensure their organizations deliver. CFOs know exactly the role that their company plays in their investors’ portfolios. So if the organization is going to invest in longer-term growth, this could increase the stock’s beta — both in downside risk and upside reward.

That’s why the CFO needs to take charge of telling that growth story to investors while clearly communicating the higher beta. Knowing how to frame and tell this story is critical for a CFO wishing to manage the natural tension between inspiring and scaring investors.

Some leadership teams have served as guiding examples of how to overturn short-termism and reorient their enterprise. In 2010, when Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, began articulating a strategy to invest billions to transform from a health insurance company to a health care company, analysts grumbled. “If you don’t like our strategy,” he told them. “Then get out of our stock.” Many did. But the shareholders who left were replaced by ones who believed in the long-term strategy.

Read the rest of the article at HBR.org here

Glenn Peoples, reporting for Billboard:

Dubset Media Holdings has announced a partnership that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previous been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues. Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service.

Dubset is a digital distributor that delivers content to digital music services. But unlike other digital distributors, Dubset will use a proprietary technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or long-form DJ mix file, identify recordings inside the file, and properly pay both record labels and music publishers.

Remixes and mashups are a huge part of what my girlfriend and I listen to on a daily basis (she's a dancer, and she often needs remixes for her choreographies; she usually finds them on YouTube and SoundCloud). This is a nice differentiator for Apple Music, though the article suggests more streaming services will follow.

Kevin Nguyen @knguyen
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