my name is jason denizac & I Kill Badness
a blog about life, the internet & Experience Design
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LeaderShape Needs You!
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07/28/2010 — 01 PM
Professionals, entrepreneurs, and visionaries of Boise, this is your call to serve. On August 16th, over 50 of Boise State’s best and brightest student leaders will be taking part in LeaderShape (more on that in a minute), and we need to find 3 or 4 inspiring leaders from the community willing to share their knowledge in a brief 1 hour session. Don’t have a talk prepared? No problem! The format is more of a casual round table, sharing your wealth of experiences and anecdotes from your personal journey. This is a great chance to interact with some of the brightest, nicest, and most interesting college students you’ll ever meet. I know this is short notice, but Boise has the absolute BEST tight-knit community of amazing people. If you’re interested, shoot me an email: jason at denizac dot org
Writing out my vision for Tomorrow’s Headlines
LeaderShape is a national leadership training program to help young people lead with integrity. I had a chance to participate in one of their national sessions last week in Boston, and it was a fantastic experience. During the course of the week, the program helped me define my personal vision and life’s mission, challenging my notion of what is and isn’t possible. Of course, all of this personal development takes place in a group context, with ample opportunity to practice sharing your vision with others.
One highlight of the week was an activity called “Tomorrow’s Headlines.” Starting with nothing but flip chart paper and smelly markers, we were asked to envision what the world would look like if our visions were realized. My headline was “Universal Higher Ed Bill Passes,” and the article below spelled out the gory details. Then we taped these to the wall of the dining room. Seeing the 60 other visions, created by other students in the room, and expressed in such a concrete, matter-of-fact journalistic style, was incredibly empowering.
For our guest speakers panel (the same which I’m hoping you, dear reader, can be a part of), we split off into smaller groups of about 20. I got to chat with Irene Fernando, the 24-year-old co-founder and co-executive director of Students Today, Leaders Forever, a non-profit which organizes service oriented road trips for college students. She shared what it was like starting the organization as a student without any experience, and some of the practical hurdles they were able to overcome. She’s two years older than I am. They’ve lead over 8,000 students on over 100,000 hours of volunteering. Seeing that someone like her could be so successful as a student / social entrepreneur made everything that we were talking about for the rest of the week that much more real. You could see students starting to make the connections between these grandiose abstract visions we came up with and the actual work on the ground to make them happen.
So, the specifics: LeaderShape is an immersive, retreat-style experience, run by a national program and sponsored by BSU. We’ll be holding it at the beautiful Living Waters Ranch in Challis, Idaho - about a 3 hour drive north. We’d ask our guest leaders to join us for dinner on Monday, August 16. Of course we’ll provide luxurious accommodations for the evening. It may be a bit of a trek out to the middle of Idaho, but this truly is an incredible opportunity to connect with bright and eager minds - and maybe snag a good intern or two!
If you know the perfect person for this, please forward the invitation. Thank you!
Google Apps ATOM Feed for Email Notification
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06/17/2010 — 12 PM
I’ve been using the excellent Omnimo 2 theme for Rainmeter on my desktop. However, the gmail notifier was designed for standard @gmail.com accounts. I use Google Apps and have a custom domain email address.
The notifier works by checking an ATOM feed of your inbox, using username-in-URL notation, like https://user:pass@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom. Searching around for how to adapt this to Google Apps accounts was fruitless, so I’m posting this.
Turns out the answer is as easy as using your full email address as the username. However, since ‘@’ is a special character in URLs, you must URL encode it as %40. Thus, the full URL will be https://user%40domain.com:pass@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom.
If you’re using Omnimo’s configuration, just enter ‘user%40domain.com’ as the username and it should work fine.
Now to work on getting back to Inbox Zero.
Startup Weekend: 6 Tips from the Trenches
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11/20/2009 — 08 AM
I participated in the first Idaho Startup Weekend last weekend in Boise. Going into it, I had seen some of the youtube videos, read through the website, but I still wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Here’s the guide I wish I’d had.
1. Be Scrappy
It might be a no-brainer, but one weekend is a ridiculously short amount of time. Whatever best-practice methodology or design patterns or service architectures you use in your day job, chances are they weren’t designed with Startup Weekend in mind. You’ll be working with a team with widely varying backgrounds and technical abilities, and it’s just not worth the time to get everyone up to speed on your favorite buzz word. Get in the mindset of actually building something as quickly as you can. The code over the weekend is a prototype, a proof of concept. There’s the old software engineering truism, ‘build two to throw one away.’ If you product goes anywhere after the weekend, chances are you’ll be starting over from scratch with the codebase. So don’t fret, just build.
2. Be Snappy
The weekend moves fast, and accelerates as it goes. You want to spend your time building, so get all of the basics out of the way before you leave on Friday. That means have a general product and rough feature list, decide on a name, and register your domain names. Get all of the group consensus stuff out of the way fast, so that everyone can do what they do best.
3. Ubiquitous Capture
All weekend long, you’ll be refining the idea you went in with. My main takeaway is that rapid prototyping, and being forced to talk about your product all weekend, is a pretty amazing form of ideation. Fans of GTD already know this one: ubiquitous capture. You don’t have time to act on all your ideas, or even to properly evaluate if they suck or not. You don’t want this to distract you from building - see number 1. So, ubiquitous capture. Write everything down. Get it out of your head. In the case of my group, we used Google Wave to pretty good effect. By the end of the weekend, we decided to have a go of it, with a pretty solid understanding of our core product and a huge backlog of potential features.
4. Divide & Conquer
As soon as you get into your group, do a quick skills inventory. Discover what everyone’s good at - and what they’re most productive at - and try to keep everyone in that role all weekend. Personally, I can hack around a bit in server-side code, but I’m certainly not very fluent, nor productive. However, we did have several other team members who were quite skilled in that area. Rather than having them waste time setting up their development environments, we had them go to work immediately. They were able to break away and draw arcane looking systems diagrams while I got them set up with the basics, like source control, ftp, and installing server software. I wasn’t able to start working on the front-end code until late Saturday, but the rest of my team was more productive for it.
5. Control Scope… Ruthlessly
The weekend is a constant triage between what features are most important, and which can you actually build in the course of the weekend. Speed matters. Keep a master list. Don’t be afraid to cut and run. If you find yourself spinning your wheels on a feature, or -worse yet- spending time on Google researching how to build something- cut it from the scope. Seriously: you don’t have time right now, so skip it and move on to the next thing. Keep cutting things every few hours, working towards the drop-dead ship date of 6pm Sunday.
Also, keep in mind that it’s a demo - you can mock up whatever you need to.
6. Take a walk outside
The atmosphere in Startup Weekend is amazing - a swarm of people hacking away in the LCD glow, powered by adrenaline, caffeine, alcohol, and pure determination. But you can always take a break if you need to. By Saturday night, my team was up against a wall. We’d made some progress on the back end, but we still weren’t even sure what we would demo, let alone many of the business details. So we walked to the closest, smokiest bar we could find and - removed from computers - were able to bond and talk about our product. I referred to our bar excursion on Twitter as doing “market research.” The bar tweeted me back, “Don’t research and drive.”
Bonus tip: reach out
At the end of the day, Startup Weekend was an amazing experience. Reach out beyond the walls of the room, through twitter, through email. Recruit your friends to help over the Internet. Capitalize on the buzz to launch your product. There will be media attention (at least in Boise, Idaho), so make the most of it.
I hope you all have an amazing time this weekend! Please reach out to me on twitter, @jdenizac.
The singularity inches closer
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11/19/2009 — 11 AM
Follow-up to my Ignite Boise presentation “The Secret Life of Big-Ass Numbers” (video’s coming soon, promise!):
The Singularity is Coming - http://www.smartplanet.com/business/blog/business-brains/the-singularity-draws-closer-what-happens-when-computers-are-smarter-than-humans/3309/ /via @gregharley
I need to get a proper “sideblog” in place for these quick one-off updates. Until then, thank you for your attention! Safe guard it. It’s your most valuable resource.
Ignite Boise Preso
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11/12/2009 — 12 AM
Welcome to everyone from Ignite Boise. My slides are up now on Slide Share, and I’ll add a link to the video as soon as it’s available.
I talked about the Secret History of Big Ass Numbers. I’ll find some more articles to link to here in the next few days, so check back. For now:
Articles
Corresponding with slides/citations.
“Total US Net Worth”
“Household net worth sinks $11.2 trillion” CNN Money, Mar 12, 2009
“Zimbabwe Hyperinflation”
“ZIMBABWE: Inflation at 6.5 quindecillion novemdecillion percent” UN IRIN, Jan 21, 2009
“Bandwidth Revolution”
“Hyperconnectivity and the Approaching Zettabyte Era” CISCO, Jun 9, 2009
OK, so I rounded up to 700 exabytes/year for the sake of flair, and because 667 is a mouthful.
“Every waking moment”
In my talk, I give the following stat:
667 Exabytes/year is enough to transmit a dvd-quality video stream
of every waking moment
of every person in in California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho
with enough left over to accommodate all the Internet traffic from 2004.
I calculated this with data from the Cisco report, above, and the lovely Wolfram Alpha. I’ll add exact calculations when I update this post. Also, I got the amount of 2004 internet traffic (15.2 exabytes/year) from the wikipedia article “Internet Traffic”, which cites another Cisco study, the Visual Networking Index.
“Download your brain”
This is a fascinating area called transhumanism, which served as inspiration for this talk, even if I couldn’t explore it in any great depth. The graph I used on the penultimate slide is from “When will computer hardware match the human brain?” by Hans Moravec, dating all the way to 1997.
Books
Additionally, I’d reccomend two books, both available as free ebooks.
“Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom” by Cory Doctorow - imagines a post-scarcity and post-mortal society. All basic needs are met, and when accidents happen, people can have their backed-up memories restored to a new clone. The scarcity then is in attention and reputation, mediated through “whuffie”.
“Free: The future of a radical price” by Chris Andersen - Free is about shifting revenue streams, and the increasing sophistication of business models built around a zero-marginal-cost product, ie one made of bits, not atoms. This book has many critics, but I’ll be the first to say “they just don’t get it.”
Update: looks like “Free” is no longer free. Go find it in a library. Or buy it.
Thank you for your attention
And thanks to everyone for coming out and supporting Ignite Boise. You all are rockstars. If anyone is interested in continuing any conversations from Ignite Boise, please get in touch with me.
HTML 5: It’s still a work in progress
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09/30/2009 — 09 PM
This past July, Shane McCarron of the now-defunct XHTML 2 working group, penned a diatribe calling the Web’s governing body an ignorant slut.
Today, Microsoft (a member of the HTML 5 working group) submitted a proposal which would restore XML-like extensibility to HTML 5. I like this option.
It’s been fascinating to watch the uptake of interest in HTML 5 in the designer / front-end community in the past 9 months, thanks in large part to decent working-draft support and forward compatibility in many modern browsers - and of course the frustration we’ve all felt at one point or another at the status quo. Being a front-end developer can be a challenging and unpredictable experience. It’s been said we operate in one of the harshest and least forgiving platforms. HTML 5, the in-progress next version of the language used to describe documents on the Web, is set to change all that. And for the most part, that’s a good thing.
There are, however, those who think it’s going down the wrong path. Rather than being customizable and extensible like its uncle XHTML, it started with the goal of codifying the design patterns which people were actually using and which browser vendors were actually implementing. This decision, while laudable for its pragmatism, has been panned for being short sighted and not semantic.
HTML is in a complex situation. There are millions of authors worldwide, and dozens of implementations. With the widely-predicted impending watershed in mobile usage, and new rounds of browser wars (even as IE6 continues to suck air in legacy corporate networks), developing for the Web is becoming less, not more, predictable. Broader in-language support for common web page elements, such as <article> and <header> can only help encourage meaningful markup at the browser level. At the same time, Microsoft’s proposed extensibility will ease the adoption of open standards such as MathML, as well as microformats like hCard.
Ultimately, what I like about the HTML 5 draft is probably what Shane McCarron hates: it is opinionated. It has a certain expectation of how pages should be structured. It acknowledges that, going forward, pages represent a lens, rather than raw data. For rich, structured access to complex data, things like RESTful APIs - and yes, XML, or some of the various JSON-with-schema proposals - will be the way to go. The days of flat-file HTML “documents” are over. These days, data is stored on its own and converted into HTML only when requested by a site visitor. Besides, if you’re relying HTML pagescraping for data, you’re doing it wrong.
¡Viva HTML 5!
Fanatical Attention to Critical Path User Experience
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06/27/2009 — 07 PM
Some call it eating your own dogfood.
How many developers have to actually use the products they make? All of them should, if just to develop empathy for their end users.
People-Centric design is hard
Computational capabilities are growing tremendously. Thanks to Moore’s Ubiquitously-Cited Law, this year’s iPhone is probably more powerful than my 3 year old laptop. As consumers today, we have access to more processing ability than we know what to do with.
Unfortunately, information system design is lightyears behind. And perhaps it makes sense: hardware (if you forgive my complete ignorance of the feats of engineering that go into the little silicone and gold pieces) is straightforward, mathematical. By contrast, the problem of making computers useful to people is a devilish and crucial one.
Making systems that run quickly and reliably is arguably very important, but it’s my position that more attention is needed in designing for people.
Make products to help people
And by that I don’t mean sales people. Adding features just for the sake of going on a product spec sheet is a terrible idea. Will feature X be useful to people who use my application? Will feature X be implemented in a way that adds value without getting in the way of the true purpose of the application?
In this day and age with exponentially increasing information overload and a continuous stream of demands and distractions, will my product ultimately improve the workflow, productivity, and happiness of my user? If the answer to any of these is ‘no’, then you, my fellow developer, are doing it wrong.
Kill Badness above all
And now, a moment of Zen. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”, said Michaelangelo. By removing the bad parts, he realized the potential beauty of the stone. Essentially and necessarily, he worked reductively.
The very vocabulary of software development speaks to a different world view: adding features, adding capability, adding speed - always adding. I think Michaelangelo was on to something, however. Every system has extra parts it would be better off without. This application would be really wonderful, but…
My mission is to identify these offending pieces and stop them in their tracks. In a way, it’s about software design as a champion for the common man.
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