Beautiful Interfaces

This is something I’ve started doing to help me work on careerish stuff. I’ve been doing it for a couple of months now, and it works pretty well, as proven by the existence of this blog among other things.

The first column lists things I want to accomplish by the end of the current month. (I rewrite the chart every month.)

The second column lists things I want to accomplish by the end of the current year.

The third column lists things I want to accomplish by Dec. 31, 2012 (roughly three years from now).

The rows going across are money, talk, code, and learning.

Money is mainly my plan for how much I need to save each month to get to a place where I can support myself for a year without working. (I may not actually not-work for a year, but I’d like to have the option to just go travel around the world if I choose to.) There’s also a secondary goal there around getting a new car, which I need to do this year.

Talk is everything I try to do to “make a name for myself” – blogging, writing articles, and eventually conference speaking. One of these items is always a specific goal for how many blog posts I want to make that month. I’ve been at 6; this month I went down to 4 because I’m feeling unwordly. This is how I make myself blog.

Code is obvious, it’s about things that I want to make and do. Longer-term, it’s about building up both my portfolio and my freelance network.

Learning tends to be shorter-term, and usually includes things that I want to read or watch that aren’t just “for me”. Mostly this is technical stuff, although this month I have a work-related book up there as well.

I picked these four categories because they seem like the main areas that I need to work on in order to advance my career.

The hardest part was getting that 3-year column down. This past fall I went away for a long weekend and hiked part of the Appalachian Trail (for real, not Mark Sanford-style) and did a lot of thinking and writing, and that’s when I came up with a better idea of where I wanted to be in three years. Once I knew that, figuring out what I needed to do to get there was relatively easy.

Another tablet drawing for my last post of the year.

I think I learned a lot this year about what I’m interested in, and what I want to do — I won’t say with my life, but I’ll say with the next 5 years or so. I don’t think I’m able to look further ahead than that.

It’s been a fairly decent year for making stuff. My goal at the beginning of the year was to build and launch 2 web apps, and I actually exceeded that by several. I even have some things from my day job to show!

In chronological order:

1. Whatti — This was the first web app that I ever designed and built from scratch. And you can tell, because it honestly kind of sucks. (I hesitate to even link to it, honestly.)

However, in the course of making it I got to learn jQuery, which is just about the best thing EVAR, and the CodeIgniter framework, which means that I could now more easily move into Rails or any other Rails-type MVC framework. I also learned a lot about password security and building a logon system, and about how not to design a homepage. And I have forgotten more about the date/time functions in PHP now than I ever really wanted to know.

This project is basically abandoned now, but I am still interested in the idea of this site, which is providing personal analytical information about your habits and progress toward goals. At some point I would like to throw everything here away and do a complete redesign: visually, functionally, architecturally, and of the code. I would like to make it simpler, more focused, and more visually appealing; and I would also like to switch over to the Kohana framework. This will be a project for sometime next year when I am bored.

2. EventHitch — This was my first site with co-conspirators Dennis Becton and Mike Nagle, who had been working on the site about a year before they asked me to join them as a designer and front-end developer. The site hasn’t gotten a lot of attention lately, because we decided that it was too broadly-focused and decided to pursue more of a niche strategy. But I got to play with Google Maps and work on my design skills some more.

3. BandHitch — This was our first niche site, focusing on local music. It is basically a re-skinned version of EventHitch. I want to change the header because I think it looks bad, and a few things need to be fixed CSS-wise. I like how the background effect came out, though.

4. This blog — which sort of counts, I guess? I didn’t build the theme from scratch, but I took a plain one and customized it a lot.

5. The Truth About Costs interactive graphic
The Truth About Risk interactive graphic
(both from the excellent Investing Truths series)

Finally some things from my day job! Exciting!

I did not design either of these graphics, but I built the Costs one and about half of the Risk one (the table and line chart views, and the sliders). They were both done using Flex 3. I hope to do a lot more work in this realm in the upcoming year, moving into the information design side of things as well as more Flex development. (More about that in my next post.)

6. Towniverse — This is the second of our 2 sites that are under active development, along with BandHitch. This one I pretty much got to design and build from scratch, which was a lot of fun. There was some semi-intricate javascript involved, which was nice to play with, especially getting it to work in IE. I’m actually fairly proud of the interaction design on this one; I think it’s fairly smooth and intuitive. (I hope!)

The current plan is to add more features (ability to invite friends out to a restaurant, integrating our events feed and placing weekly events on the map) and then to expand to other locations, focusing on smallish towns in the Philadelphia area. We are also moving to a faster server (possibly Amazon) since the current guys are painfully slow.

Well, that’s pretty much what I did this year. In part II, I’ll talk a little bit about what I learned, and what my plans are for 2010.

How much specialization is too much specialization? And how much of a generalist can a person really be, and still be effective? This question comes up for me a lot, because I tend to be a generalist in an organization that encourages specialization and separation of roles.

On the one hand, specializing in one technology / programming language / skill allows you to gain a depth of knowledge and experience that you can’t really fake. Some have argued that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something; if you practice a skill for 30 solid hours a week, that equates to about 7 years. After 7 years of working with a skill, I have to imagine that you know pretty much everything there is to know about it, and your intuition has got to be pretty solid on any question or problem that comes on.

On the other hand… technology and practices change so rapidly, and you have to flow with the river or you’ll be swept away. If being a generalist means that you have the ability to rapidly teach yourself new skills, and the willingness to learn as you go without hand-holding, then arguably generalists are better prepared to deal with the changes that inevitably happen. Also, like I discussed in my post on designing and developing, being able to cross between fields allows you to make connections that might not otherwise be made.

Perhaps it could be seen as a risk/reward tradeoff.

Specializing is like investing in stocks, with more risk and a potentially higher reward. Specialists have an easier time getting hired — their resumes fit the traditional ‘check the box’ model — and they quite possibly get paid more for their expertise. On the other hand, they run a high risk of their skills becoming obsolete, or at least less valuable over time.

Being a generalist is like investing in bonds, with a slower payoff but much less risk. Generalists have a harder time making people understand what they do, and may have a harder time demonstrating their worth to prospective employers. But they will always be able to adapt when the technology or the environment changes, and figure out how to make themselves useful in some way.

And perhaps there’s a happy medium of sorts, where it’s possible to keep learning and using one central skill, while always having a rotating cast of new things at the periphery. It may take longer to become an expert this way, but like a balanced portfolio, it seems to offer the best mix of reduced risk and potential reward.

For myself, the nature of my current job is very general. I have to be able to pick up whatever tool is best to convey the idea at hand, whether that be css/javascript or Flex or Flash or PHP or JSP, or whatever the next thing will be. (And I have to be able to adopt the design mindset as well, which has its own set of skills that aren’t as easily defined.)

I would say that css/javascript is really my core expertise, if anything is. I’ve been doing a lot with Flex the past few months, but it’s really all in the data visualization space; I don’t know anything about Flex app development outside of that. I dip into Flash when necessary, and usually get confused because it’s different from Flex. I know enough PHP to get things done, but I don’t really have a depth of experience, and I still have to refer to the docs a lot.

So this line of thinking implies that, no matter how much my job comes to involve other things, I should make sure that I am still keeping up with my css/javascript skills and following new developments with those technologies. Because at some point in my life, I’m going to have to label myself again, so I need to have at least one language where I can call myself an “x developer” and feel entitled to the phrase.

I am very cynical, except for when I’m not.

The trick is in maintaining a healthy balance between cynicism and idealism. You need cynicism for protection, and idealism for an energy source.

Too much cynicism will crush your idealism, and then you’ll become dead inside.

Too much idealism will make you too fragile, and then you fall apart.

Keep balancing.

I’ve missed several posts, but I have a good excuse. I’ve been on vacation in Bermuda, and here’s a picture to prove it:

Bermuda is an island full of rich people, with a strange mix of British/Caribbean culture. But I really enjoyed visiting there, got to swim and snorkel, and I didn’t even get sunburnt that badly.

Every fall, I get really introverted for a couple of weeks. There’s something about the time of year — when it’s suddenly dark a lot earlier, and you have to put on a jacket to go outside, and the trees are starting to go bare — that makes me feel inclined to stay home and avoid being around people in large groups.

This usually passes by mid-November, and I go back to being a more balanced, sociable introvert in time for the holidays. But this week I find myself taking it slow, feeling sleepy a lot, and not getting as much done overall. (Unfortunately that’s a problem, because next week I’ve got a conference presentation to prepare, a website to release, and a vacation to plan.)

It’s got me thinking, though, about how our society in general is designed to completely ignore the seasons. Most people work in buildings that are climate-controlled and artificially lit; it’s possible for many people to get from home to the garage to the car to work without once having to set foot on the actual ground.

There are good reasons for this, of course; being cold and wet sucks, and office cultures demand a style of dress that doesn’t really work for spending time outside. But I wonder if we aren’t losing something important at the same time.

The seasons determine every single thing that happens in the ‘natural world’. They used to determine pretty much every single thing about human life as well, but in the past 100 years we’ve gotten to the point where outwardly they don’t make much difference at all in people’s day-to-day routines.

On the one hand this totally rocks for us, because being warm and well-fed beats being cold and hungry any day. On the other hand, just because we’ve conquered the seasons outwardly, doesn’t mean that we’ve conquered them inwardly as well. Could the year-round, unchanging demands of modern life actually be detrimental to us, when they conflict with some deeper, inherited rhythms and needs that do cause us to change with the seasons? Could people actually be worse off because we are expected to have the same range of moods, same levels of energy and creativity, year round? Or because we expect ourselves to be so?

I wonder if we could somehow arrive at a happy medium, a way to design our buildings and cities and schedules and lives such that they gracefully acknowledge the changing seasons, while continuing to modulate the worst extremes?

For a long time I agonized over whether I was “really” a designer or “really” a developer. First I wanted to be a developer, then I wanted to be a designer, then I was a designer who wanted to be a developer, and then a developer with an interest in design.

At this point, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is completely possible to do both — just not at the same time.

Differences

Design mind and developer mind are like two different lenses or frames. They hold different concerns, have different sets of tools, and can be very different ways of seeing the world.

Design tends to be holistic, looking at all facets and angles of a thing and trying to make them harmonize. Development tends to be analytical, breaking down a problem into smaller and smaller steps that can be individually tackled and solved.

Many types of design are quite spatial, concerned with relationships between objects within a field of view. Development is often more temporal; it is concerned with changing relationships between objects over time, and with passing information through a series of transformational steps.

Design is always about ‘what’: what is the right thing to build, what does the client want, what is the pleasing solution to the problem at hand. Development is more about ‘how’: how to create a capability, and make it flexible and fast and robust and concise.

Both are important, and both are quite difficult, and both can be so rewarding when you get something right.

(Of course, these are all generalizations, with plenty of counterexamples to be found.)

Doing Both

I think the key to successfully doing both is building up your ability to switch between the two. To look at a problem as a designer, as a developer, and as a designer again. To know how to switch perspectives, and when.

Doing this can be jarring. Things that design mind really really wants might prove frustrating or impossible to actually build. Developer mind might want to do things in a logical way that compromises design mind’s vision. In fact, all of the conflicts that occur between designers and developers come up, inside of your own head! But the trick is just to keep doing it, and to focus on creating something beautiful.

When I’m working on a project where I’m doing both roles, I keep separate to-do lists for development and design. I’ll tend to work through one list at a time, perhaps design in the morning and develop after lunch. I might need to match my surroundings to my task, get away from my computer and my desk, and go someplace where design mind can make itself heard. (There are some great suggestions about how to do this in the book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.)

It’s definitely not for everyone. You do trade away some depth for breadth, and maintaining the different skillsets can take up a lot of time. Employers may not ‘get’ you; it can be hard to find a role that exercises both minds, in a heavily specialized world. And your job title is guaranteed to always be wrong.

On the other hand, you get to have a foot in two fascinating worlds; you get to translate between two important domains; and you get to have conversations with two completely different sets of awesome folks. And sometimes, if it all works out, you might find that there’s a huge strength in being in-between, and that it lets you really impact your world.

“Designevelopers” of the world, unite!

(Here’s an example from the world of automobile design.)

Today I am writing from a place of discouragement. 

I am discouraged because I realized today that I’ve been working at my current place of employment for more than 3 years now, and in that time, I have created not one single thing that another person is actually using.  And that’s not likely to change in the foreseeable future. But that that’s my motivation, that’s what it’s all about for me: creating awesome stuff for other people to use.

Money is important, but it isn’t motivation.  Writing reports and making PowerPoint slides may be “important” for one hour, but then they are forgotten; that’s not motivation either.  Even simply having great coworkers isn’t enough.  The reason why I do what I do is because I love creating awesome stuff for other people to use.

Let’s repeat that again, for emphasis. The reason why I do what I do is because I love creating awesome stuff for other people to use.

But my intention with this post is not to whine, but to consider. 

Is it possible to be in a bureaucracy but not of it?  Is it possible to be part of an organization that is slow and inflexible, yet not become deadened by it?  Is it possible to retain your motivation, your hunger, your desire to be the best that you can possibly be — your desire to create — after years of watching everything you do, every piece of work that you’ve poured all of your brain and heart and energy into, vanish into the ether and disappear?

In a bureaucracy no one owns anything; everything belongs to everyone, or to no one.  Is it possible, then, to still own the things that are in front of you, to take pride in the work of your own hands — and then to let go of it once it leaves your grasp, and turns into something unrecognizable?

Is is possible to remain detached enough to avoid falling into frustration and discouragement, yet engaged enough to continue to strive for excellence in everything that you do?

I sure hope so.  It might require the stubbornness of a mule and the enlightenment of a Buddhist monk, but I really hope that it is possible.  Because there are a whole lot of bureaucracies in this world, and a whole lot of broken systems to deal with.

If the only two choices are to give up or to leave, there’s no hope of changing any of that for the better.