Jessica Olien in Slate:
The study shows that if you have the sneaking suspicion you might not belong, the act of being rejected confirms your interpretation. The effect can liberate creative people from the need to fit in and allow them to pursue their interests.
This is supposed to be a brief explanation of how odd (yet awesome) it feels to have a “making of” post written about the redesign of Rands in Repose and while that is awesome, I want to talk about your people again.
I met Alex King many years ago when I was actively using his Tasks Pro software. He dropped by for lunch at Apple during which we debated productivity software. I remember disagreeing with him about something fundamental and he held his ground, we agreed to disagree. During this lively disagreement, I decided that Alex was my people.
Your people are your people because while you may not always agree, you are comfortably on the same frequency. Because of this frequency alignment, you invest in them instinctively because while people look at you like you’re crazy, they do not. You answer their emails quickly. You arrange drinks when they are in town – always. They are your people and in a world chock full of people, your people are uniquely yours.
I’m proud of the redesign. I loved working with Crowd Favorite. More importantly, I appreciated the reminder of the value of my people.
I.M. Wright writes:
Real products require real teamwork. Nothing substantial exists in isolation. Teamwork only happens when teams discuss together, design together, and deliver together. Specific, narrowly scoped parts can be done with individual flow, but that can’t be the primary thrust of the effort.
Much wisdom in this piece about the care and feeding of flow in a team environment. Hits on a recent theme I’ve been considering regarding optimal space set-up. I think the best working set-up is one that adapts to what you need when you need it.
Each night for a 1000 nights, Ray Bradbury is asking you to read three things:
Bradbury’s goal – to make you the collector of metaphor. He provides a familiar and unfamiliar set of content for each of his exercises all which represent a far better night than the time you’re (I’m) wasting on Candy Crush.
Design firm Ideo has cultivated an image of being the creative minds behind the idea. As a consultancy, their job is to not take credit for the ideas, but rather design such ideas for other companies. This makes their iPhone video application a beautiful mystery.
Spark is a gorgeous and well-defined video iOS application that fulfills the first rule of great design: get the hell out of the way so I can get to the task at hand. Spark eschews the current fad of making all images and videos insta-square and embraces the 16:9 aspect ratio. On top of this, Spark provides the best real-time filter selection I’ve seen. With a flip of your finger, you slide the different Spark filters on top of your video while it loops.
I’m not doing a lot with video other than occasional experiments, but I keep firing up Spark because it’s one of the rare applications where the designers gave themselves room to experiment. Yes, they are clearly influenced by current flat design and thin typography trends, but the application’s attention to the details is novel.
There’s a tremendous feeling of freedom when you abandon the shackles of a specific location.
Remote is a fact of life in software engineering. We don’t have enough engineers + demand is incredibly high = engineers can dictate terms about where they want to live.
The author really wants remote to work and, in my opinion, is going to make remote work and that’s a fine thing, but how do we quantify the productive gain or loss in a remote situation? Yes, there are fewer interruptions and you can work at your own pace, but how does casual socialization improve your work? In that moment when you’re stumped in the office, how do you quantify the value created by walking to the kitchen to get a cup a coffee where you find Frank who is lingering and happens to randomly have the precise answer to your problem?
There are many notable projects that are completely distributed – it does work – but at what cost? Other than Yahoo, who has evaluated remote workers and decided this isn’t going to work?
This is the problem with open-office layouts: It assumes that everyone’s time belongs to everyone else. It doesn’t. We are here to work together, sure, but most of the time, we actually work alone. That’s what work is: It is a vacillation between collaboration and solitary exploration. One isn’t useful without the other. When we are working in a group–literally when we sit around a table brainstorming, or when we are having a conversation–we don’t pretend we’re alone. That would just be weird and awkward. So when we’re alone, let’s not pretend we’re in a group.
Having been in this industry for multiple decades, I can say with confidence that the current open office mania is a fad. At Borland, we built an office for every single engineer. At Netscape, it was open space – same with the start-up you’ve never heard. At Apple, it depended on your building and the available space, but in general managers had offices with a door. At the current gig, it’s a mix with the open space religion gaining steam. Again.
As an easily distractible person, I believe the company is getting higher value out of me when there are less distractions. It doesn’t matter if I had headphones on, I am compulsively aware of what is going on around me – there’s this little voice narrating everything. This doesn’t mean I need an office all the time. I need a office when I’m having a private conversation which is a lot of the time in my current role. I need an office when I need to think hard which isn’t as often as I’d like.
Still, some of my favorite moments of the day is when I stumble on serendipity – when I’m sitting in a big open space and a random conversation from a random person alerts me to a random piece of data I would have never discovered ensconced in my office behind a door.
It’s not cost or space efficient, but I think the answer to the question “Open space or office door?” is “Both.” Everyone should have equal access to productive silence and serendipitous chaos.
Sticking with our Keynote theme for the week, Andy has solid and usable advice for building your non-boring slide deck. One thing I would add is to create a test slide at the beginning of your deck which contains the following:
Something like this:
The reason for this slide is so that when you’re doing that inevitable run through of your deck, you can easily answer the questions:
UPDATE: Here’s an awesome fork by Tim Brown in Keynote.
SECOND UPDATE: Here’s the current version that I’m using which is used in the screenshot above. You’ll likely receive a font warning when you open this and that’s the point.
In posing a real threat to Facebook, Snapchat proved that it may have that one elusive thing that no money can buy: the ability to change how people behave, to become central to their relationships with one another, to re-architect human contact, to be masters of the human domain.
Best analysis of Snapchat’s rejection of the Facebook bid that I’ve seen.
As I mentioned in the launch post, there are now two RSS feeds for Rands. One feed contains every single post that I throw up here which includes a new type I called Excerpts – you’re reading an Excerpt right now. I’m still getting a feel for these posts, but my intent is they will:
If you’re reading this in a RSS-reader, you are already subscribed to Everything. Welcome. If you’d like to remove Excerpts from your content, you can subscribe to the Long Form feed.