Smarterware

Please Do Learn How to Propose Better Solutions

2012-05-15T10:59:56-07:00

In a post entitled Please Don't Learn How to Code, software developer Jeff Atwood argues that the "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten out of control, and that most people don't need to learn how to code.

I mostly disagree with Atwood's premise and land on Benjamin Stein's side of the argument. Coding teaches you analytical thinking skills, logic workflows, and debugging like no other activity can, and you can apply those skills to lots of situations beyond actually building production apps.

But Atwood hit one nail right on the head that I can't stress enough to people who want to make digital tools:

[Coding] puts the method before the problem. Before you go rushing out to learn to code, figure out what your problem actually is. Do you even have a problem? Can you explain it to others in a way they can understand? Have you researched the problem, and its possible solutions, deeply? Does coding solve that problem? Are you sure?

I often get email from people who "have a great idea for an app" or newcomers who want to contribute to ThinkUp but aren't programmers. These people are convinced the first thing they have to do is learn how to write code. It isn't.

The world of software development needs more people who know how to define better solutions than the ones we have now.

See, when I ask these people to describe their great app idea, they never have wireframes or mockups, and usually can only explain it in the vaguest terms. When I ask newcomers what they want to change or add to ThinkUp, they often can't tell me—they just want to be a part of the community. (Nothing wrong with that, but code isn't the only way to contribute. It's not even the primary way.)

Software development is not code. It's solving problems. Before you learn how to code, learn how to propose better solutions. You are most likely already qualified to do this.

A few years back I took a weekend-long intensive course on shooting and producing video journalism. In the first hour of the first day, our instructor said, "What makes great television? If you love watching TV, you already know."

The same principle applies here. If you love, use, and think about technology, you already have a good idea of what's possible, and what elements make up a user interface. You know when to expect a text field and when you should get a dropdown. You understand the difference between saving a file locally and saving it to the cloud. You know the apps you love the most and what about them makes them special.

This is what you need to know to start designing new solutions.

If you aspire to build an app, the first thing you should do is define the problem, your idea for the solution, your target user base. Do your research. Know all the existing solutions out there, and exactly how your spec is different and better. Choose a platform, and start mocking up screens. Get in deep. Agonize over what words appear on the button labels, what the user success, information, and error messages should read, every single thing that could go wrong in the process of using the app and how it will recover, what your one-sentence description will be when your app appears in a store somewhere. Arguably, defining great specifications is a more important part of creating digital tools than writing the code itself.

If you want to build a new app, or contribute to an existing one, you don't have to learn how to code first. But please do learn how to propose better solutions.

Inclusive Tech Companies Win the Talent War

2012-05-10T14:18:03-07:00

Originally published on CNN.com.

Startups are fighting a war for talent in Silicon Valley, and the companies that actively welcome men and women are going to win it. Smart companies don't recruit "brogrammers."

The term "brogrammer" is a joke, of course. Male software engineers don't actually pop their collars, wear sunglasses and lift weights while writing code, and share hot tubs with bikini-clad women. But the joke is funny (to some people) because it reflects a certain truth about a community that excludes great talent in favor of frat house fun.

The tech industry's testosterone level can make the thickest-skinned women consider a different career. But the rise of the "brogrammer" joke and its ensuing backlash has some benefits: it helps talented women choose worthy employers, it gives a name and faces to a problem that plagues the industry, and it publicly shames some of the most sexist offenders.

Where the Women Are

In 1999, Google's Marissa Mayer almost didn't take the job at the all-male startup because there were more women at another firm who'd made her an offer. If Mayer had just graduated from college today with offers from two equally compelling startups—one all-male and one not—it's clear which path she would choose.

If you write software for a living and you're located in Silicon Valley, you have your pick of employment options at an array of tech startups. (Yes, even in this economy.) When a recruiter's pickup line is "Wanna bro down and crush some code?"—like Klout's was—you get a sense of what that company's looking for. If you're a woman, it's not you.

That's pretty sad, but it's not all bad. As a woman and a software developer, crossing Klout off the list of places where I might work helps me narrow my options. I'd rather find out an employer glorifies young dudes before I take the position than after.

That's one small way "brogrammer" culture is actually useful. It's a red flag to women engineers, product developers, designers, project managers, marketers, business development, and PR specialists. It says, "This company is not where you want to work."

Conversely, companies who assemble inclusive teams are more likely to snag great hires of all stripes. Tech startups founded by women are few and far between, but they're highly attractive to female and male candidates who don't want to join a boys' club. Established companies with executives who are vocal about women's issues, like Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, also have an advantage. (Sandberg's TED talk is one of my all-time favorite career advice presentations for women.)

Rehabilitation via Humiliation

The Valley's "brogrammer" problem has received a good bit of attention recently, with a focus on some of the worst public offenders. I find sexism in 2012 corporate America appalling, but I'm also an optimist. The folks perpetuating this culture are probably not overt misogynists. Most of the time, they simply don't know any better.

The path to enlightenment is sometimes paved with public shaming.

Path's Matt Van Horn "feels terrible" about sexist comments he made during a conference presentation that caused disgusted attendees get up and leave. Geeklist began a women in technology committee after mishandling the retraction of a promotional video that featured a scantily-clad female dancer.

Cynics would argue that apologies don't resolve the underlying problem. But humiliation is an effective behavior modifier. I don't think these people will make these mistakes again. The bonus: Onlookers have real-life examples of what not to do at their companies.

The tech industry has always been male-dominated. But the perception of those men has changed. Media no longer casts the billionaire geeks of Silicon Valley as awkward nerds who can't get a date. Instead, they're superheroes, the protagonist in epic movies and biographies. A new generation of young people from all walks of life aspire to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. They'll want to work for the most attractive companies—the ones who built welcoming, diverse teams.

"Brogrammer" culture is exclusionary and problematic. It celebrates frat house values, youth over experience, and men over women. In the war for hiring great talent, the companies who exacerbate this problem instead of work to solve it will lose. That's a good thing.

How to Tell if Your Tech Salary is Fair

2012-05-08T09:18:08-07:00

Link: How to Tell if Your Tech Salary is Fair

Most people have no idea what the market rate or prevailing wage is for their profession and career level, much less where they fall on the pay scale.I’m tired of fluffy unvetted career advice, so I’ve sourced and linked to ten ways you can determine what other people with your job are paid.

“Gangbang Interviews” and “Bikini Shots”: Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem

2012-04-27T08:35:22-07:00

Link: “Gangbang Interviews” and “Bikini Shots”: Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem

"Want to bro down and crush code?" No.

Minimizations Women Say

2012-04-25T16:48:15-07:00

The Shit Girls Say meme blew up because all of us vaguely recognize the college-age woman who says those things. The meme is also highly annoying because it implies "girls" are airheads.

I prefer a more constructive commentary on female speaking habits, which is why I loved a recent podcast interview with Tara Mohr, a women's leadership expert. Mohr describes little ways in which women unconsciously discount or minimize what they have to say, by overusing words like "just" and "actually," making declarative statements sound like questions, and by talking too quickly to avoid interruption.

~~I excerpted the best 8 minutes of Mohr's interview from the original 50-minute episode of the Jillian Michaels podcast and embedded it here for quick listening.~~ The interview is now on YouTube, and every woman should hear it.

The bit is essentially a summary of Mohr's article, Public Speaking Tips For Women. But I found the audio version to be very effective because you can hear examples of pitfalls to avoid. Now, I'm off to banish "Does that make sense?" from my conversational habits.

Update: Related bit on speaking with authority:

Kevin Kelly on What You Don’t Have To Do

2012-04-24T16:33:15-07:00

As you educate yourself about your own talent and ambitions, you graduate from doing a task right to doing the right task. It takes some experience to realize that a lot of work is better left undone. It might be busywork that is performed out of habit, or it might be work that is heading in the wrong direction. Working smart means making sure you are spending your time on jobs that are effective and that actually need to be done.

via End Malaria Day

Ze Frank’s Invocation for Beginnings

2012-04-09T13:35:20-07:00

A must-watch for anyone afraid to start something new, "stuck in a terrible place between 0 and 1." I especially love the very last two lines as they relate to getting things done.

What You Want To Do Is Who You Are

2012-04-09T09:13:56-07:00

On modern social networks, the question of the moment is What are you doing? (or perhaps more provocatively, What's on your mind?). To me, a more interesting question is What do you want to do?. The desire to do anything beyond eat, find warmth, sleep, and mate is what makes us human. Your goals and aspirations, the steps you're taking to achieve them, plus everything you've done to get you where you are right now is the essence of who you are. This is why I've been fixated on todo list making for over six years.

Identify Yourself

People (in the U.S. at least) often define themselves by stuff they consume and brands and appearances: the clothes you wear, your hair style, the type of phone you use, the car you drive, the television shows you watch. In career-minded groups, your status depends on what kind of job you have, what rung of the corporate ladder you've reached, what companies you've worked at. In creative circles, things are a little better: what you've made counts for more than suits or titles or salaries.

Still, I wish there was an easy way to define yourself by what you're trying to accomplish, without being That Guy With An Elevator Pitch. The people who want to get to know you for real will go past the surface stuff and ask. What do you want to do? Where are you in the process? These questions all get down to what you care about, what projects you've decided are worth pursuing, and what the stepping stones are to get there. Your todo lists, and at higher levels, your project list and life list say more about you than the movie you saw last weekend.

Plotting the Map

I live by my todo list. The hardest work of my day is updating that list, making the most important decisions of my life—what stuff is worthy of my time and effort. What's the most important thing to tackle next (prioritize). What tasks seemed important at a different time, but just aren't now (delete). Where/when/with what I'm most likely to get a task done (context). What tasks move along a project, and what projects aren't well-represented.

Living by a todo list sounds austere and uncompromising. Where's the serendipity? You might ask. The accidental creative discoveries? Living and working online means that I'm constantly clicking links, reading articles, finding videos and apps and tweets and blogs and whole new networks that inspire and delight and queue up in my to-read list (another kind of todo list) and remind me that there aren't enough hours in the day. For me, and I suspect anyone whose reading this blog post right now, increasing the chances of discovering new stuff to explore isn't what we need to ship. It's to focus and do.

Think of your todo list as less of a list, and more of a map. It's a map of where you are now that points you in the direction of where you want to be in the next few days or weeks. Your done list is the route you've taken in the past few days or weeks. Your projects list is the next few months or years, and so on. Dissatisfaction is the difference between where you are and where you want to be, and your lists are the map plotting the route ahead.

In a similar vein, on a recent episode of his Back to Work podcast, Merlin Mann was at his best discussing work as a "platform." In short, work on the projects that you love, and they'll lead you to your next destination, even if it's not obvious where they're taking you. (Start listening at 30:27 to skip a bunch of chitter-chatter.)

When You Don't Know What You Want to Do

People ask me for career advice on a regular basis. Usually they listen to my show, or read a piece I wrote on Lifehacker, or use one of my apps, or worked with me on an open source project. The situation is always pretty similar. They're just getting started in their career or they're in transition, they love technology, and they want to do something cool in tech. They ask, What should I do? I ask, What do you want to do? Most of the time they don't know (obviously, since they're asking me).

Not knowing what you want to do is a scary place everyone's been in at one time or another. Working toward a particular thing gives you purpose, and when you don't have that, it can feel like you're drifting, directionless, while the rest of the world is speeding by. When you're in this place, try to minimize the insecurity about not knowing what you want. Take comfort in the fact that many people are speeding toward a place they don't really care about because they didn't fully think it through. Commit to taking the time to find the right direction for you.

In times like this, you go into trial-and-error exploration mode, or as Merlin put it, start "hunting and gathering." If you know you want to work in tech (for example) and don't know where to start, look at the stuff that turns you on, figure out what you like about it, and try it out. If you want to make an app, start learning how to code or design that app. If you want to blog, set one up and write. Casting about is part of the process, and everyone's been there. Just don't let panic about where your next job's going to be keep you from fully exploring what you like and figuring out what you want to do.

To Get It Done, Write It Down (Someplace You Control and Take With You)

Beyond sleeping, eating, showering, getting dressed, and running from the building if there's a fire or earthquake, if I don't write something down, I simply don't do it. I live by my todo list. Its byproduct, my done list, is a very personal log of my life. I believe in data ownership and portability, so I've been using apps I built to write these lists in plain text since 2006.

Today I've got three new releases in the Todo.txt universe to share:

Todo.txt Touch for iOS now archives completed tasks to done.txt. This is a tremedous step in the evolution of this app, because it means you can use it standalone, without having to archive tasks using the CLI or a text editor back at your computer. (We're working on adding this feature to Todo.txt Touch for Android now.)
The Todo.txt CLI's new release now supports Tab autocompletion for contexts and projects, pulled from both todo.txt and done.txt. To use it, while entering a task, type @<Tab> or +<Tab> to see all the autocompletion suggestions based on your existing tasks.
The Todo.txt project web site, todotxt.com, has been completely redesigned. Finally the web site fully explains the project, and includes a list of community-built apps which have sprung up around it. I'm personally making a commitment to design in my projects, and this redesign is my first attempt at that. Doing the image work for the new site was a challenge for someone who sucks at Photoshop (me)—and it could be better, but it doesn't completely stink. I used the fantastic Bootstrap framework to lay out the site, which is fully responsive and looks good on any screen from phone to tablet to computer.

I hope you'll check those out, and that they (or any tools for writing things down) will help you answer the question What do I want to do? early and more often.

ThinkUp Reboot (and a Special Request)

2012-03-26T12:25:47-07:00

I've got some exciting news on the ThinkUp front. Our team is rebooting the project's non-profit funding organization Expert Labs into a commercial entity. Anil and I are co-founding the new ThinkUp company, and Andy and Clay will advise us. Our goal remains the same: to help users get more meaning out of their social network interactions. We plan to evolve ThinkUp above and beyond the current open source app to include an easy-to-use product with mainstream appeal. Update: To be clear, the existing ThinkUp application will remain open source.

As we get started, we need your help. One initial avenue of funding we're pursuing is via the Knight Foundation's News Challenge, a prestigious, international media contest which awards grants to its winners. The competition is fierce, and the applications are numerous. Our News Challenge application lays out details of our plans. If you've got a Tumblr account, please like (and even reblog!) our application to increase our chances. Just click on the heart next to the post. Thanks.

In the meantime, work on ThinkUp continues apace. Today's release includes gorgeous new charts and graphs, an web-based application upgrader, and lots of bugfixes. In the coming weeks, new features like Foursquare support and Facebook domain stats will be ready to test.

I'm deeply grateful to the AAAS and The MacArthur Foundation for funding Expert Labs over the past two years. Looking forward, I'm very excited to focus on the ThinkUp product and make it more useful, accessible, and meaningful. This is gonna be a fun ride.

Narrow the Gapp: Code as Activism

2012-03-12T11:07:33-07:00

A couple of weeks ago on an episode of TWiG, I argued that code is one of the best kinds of activism. Time to put my money where my mouth is. My new project, Narrow the Gapp, is a single-serving web site which displays the pay gap between men and women on average across over 100 occupations in the United States.

The purpose of Narrow the Gapp is twofold. First, it highlights and personalizes the problem of the gender pay gap in brief talking points that are easy to share on social media networks. Second, it promotes The Department of Labor's Equal Pay App Challenge, a call to developers to build apps that address the pay gap using government data. I had the privilege to help the White House's Equal Pay Task Force plan this challenge, so while I can't submit an entry myself, I wanted to do what I could to promote it. April 17th is Equal Pay Day, so I look forward to seeing more pay gap-focused apps help men and women demand fair pay during the job offer and performance review process.

Thanks to everyone who has tweeted, shared, pinned, blogged, and +1ed pages from Narrow the Gapp, and in many cases, braved misogynist trolls in the process. Thanks also to the blogs who covered the launch of the site:

Narrow the Gap: ending income inequality for women [Boing Boing]
88 cents for the same job [MetaFilter]
Does it piss you off that women get paid less than men for the same work? Check out this site. [The Next Web]
Gina Trapani Launches “Narrow The Gap,” An Online Tool Highlighting Pay Inequity [The Jane Dough]

Thanks to Anil Dash, Adam Pash, Andy Baio, and Kevin Purdy for their suggestions while I built Narrow the Gapp. Narrow The Gapp's source code is available on GitHub. Please copy and repurpose it.