no, really

There is a practice in the automotive world that is pretty well known to the non-car-obsessed person on the street: concept cars. Every day a group of creative out-of-the-box thinkers is working on a car that a) is designed for 20 years down the line, b) will likely never be produced or sold, c) probably will require a tow truck to move it (not designed to drive), and d) has a slew of totally bizarre and that’ll-never-work toys built in. We’re talking 20-foot long 20 inches tall, made of 90% crystal clear aluminum and 10% Kevlar, has headlights that blink like eyeballs, seven tires, and a collapsible bicycle that fits in the trunk. Totally impractical.

These little expensive useless toys are the cornerstone of the automotive industry. A few times a year, at the really important car shows, every automaker drags out their latest concept, sticks it on a rotating platform with wacky lighting and Carmen Electra’s hot twin sister wearing a napkin and some dental floss, and says “look what we can do with $20 million!” It’s the Miss America pageant of the car world.

Automakers give the “paper” designers all the latitude they could dream of to draw pictures of a beautiful car. Then they give their R&D people lots of caffeine and a new server to render their CAD drawings so they can make current equipment better, and invent the rest. And right on down the line, they encourage their concept workers to go crazy with their work; to make the fastest, coolest, flashiest, shineyist, sexyist car on the planet.

Nearly all of what goes into a concept car is piled in the ash heap each year, but from those embers the designers and the engineers get fantastic ideas for next year’s vehicles. They get feedback from journalists and enthusiasts. They realize that they can make that crazy idea work, so they build it.

I love this institution. It’s a piece of my childhood mind that I still have to this day. When I check out those concept cars in person, I think back to all the concept cars I experienced since I was little. My imagination clicks on, and suddenly I’m there, in the driver’s seat, pushing all the buttons and shifting it in gear, and rounding the curve at top speed. On more than one occasion, I think I’ve drooled.

Then I got to thinking: why doesn’t this exist in software? I mean, it kind of exists in the form of betas, but by the time something gets to beta or even alpha stage, it’s far beyond the “concept car” stage. Unlike a beta, a concept car is never meant to be built – that’s not the point. Google has Google Labs, but even that is more of an incubator of betas than a showcase of concepts.

Who is out there dreaming up the next big idea in design? Or the next AJAX? Where’s the big show where Google and Yahoo! and eBay and AOL bring their (semi-functional) concept sites to show off their amazing designers and brilliant engineers? This could be a practice that everyone can get in on. Any product that is meant to last more than one cycle needs to have this concept phase. We need to take our dreams of what’s next and make them a reality in earnest.

I guess maybe the reason this doesn’t exist yet is because the software (specifically web) industry is still working on getting their version of the internal combustion engine working right without breaking down. It took Ford a while before he could start getting creative with his horseless wagons. But then again, maybe it’s time to start pushing ahead instead of trailing behind. If for no other reason than it’s fun.

Sorry for the previous long one. Here’s compensation:

FIRE!

I’ve been working on this one for a while, and I knew it was going to be a biggie, but… If I went a little overboard, let me know. Also, feel free to splash some cold water on my face if you think I’m being stupid, that’s what talking’s all about!

A couple weeks ago, I took the time to watch the State of the State address given by the newly inaugurated Eliott Spitzer. I haven’t been a big follower of his in the past, but from what I do know, he was the “ethics is black-and-white” watchdog of Wall St. while he was Attorney General.

Two of the big themes that I was interested to hear in his speech were “Spending Requires Accountability” and “the Innovation Economy.”

Spending Requires Accountability

This is a pretty important theme these days. With all the news of accounting scandals, and embezzlement from schools, everyone is going to have a bit of spendthrift on their brains. Grab any old schmuck off the street and ask them how they feel about school taxes, and you’ll get an earful. What Spitzer repeated throughout his speech was “I want to give more to education, but I want to make schools accountable for that money.” He doesn’t propose signing lots of big checks to underprivileged schools and walking away, he wants to give them what they need to do well, and then require that they prove it was a worthwhile expense.

Yes, I am aware there is a lot of contention to this concept because schools and likely teachers will have lots more work to do to show that the funds are being put to good use. But when it comes to compensation, what’s a better measure than performance? Surely he doesn’t put forth A Modest Proposal to deal with the schools that don’t meet their goals. But in the meantime, how better to squeeze out the embezzlers than to make them work for every penny? Government money isn’t free money, people – it was earned on the backs of hard working citizens.

Innovation Economy
Key to Spitzer’s plans for education is the idea that students need to be trained and prepared to compete in the new economy – the information economy. Just speaking English isn’t enough these days, it helps if you speak Java and SQL too. For years people have been complaining about how outsourcing will make it impossible for skilled workers to get jobs in the US, and now, Spitzer is proposing a solution. Instead of complaining, or making it harder for companies to do business with overseas firms, why don’t you make your own workforce better? And how do we do that? Education!

By getting the right programs in schools, and bringing technology into the classroom, these kids will have the opportunity to really learn something that they can use in their life. By being skilled with all facets of high-tech, a graduate can be competitive in almost any field – science, English, mathematics, arts… And when these kids grow up and graduate from the similarly well-equipped state college, they will have excellent skills, get good jobs, and be able to afford to live here and contribute back to the local economy!

(more…)

For some weird reason, this weekend my brain started drawing a diagram of functions on the web. I think it had to do with contemplating the full usefulness of tools like Weebly that let you make a quick and dirty site. I know that to a lot of people “Content is King,” but the king surely isn’t the whole kingdom. So I started wondering how things play out functionally on the web:

What I found is that there seem to be four major functional areas.

• Content
• Transactions
• Communication
• Networking

Content is content. There is text, images, photos, videos, data… the kind of stuff that goes in and stays. It’s the stuff that you C(reate)R(ead)U(pdate)D(elete) from time-to-time. Within content, there are two kinds: Flat and Relational. Flat is stuff like articles or photos that are of value on their own, or in one-dimensional groups. Relational is stuff that is strongly categorized, hierarchical or inter-related, like a product catalog for light bulbs. Somewhere in between those two you get meta-data, which is the stuff that gives those flat pieces of content some dimension. It helps them relate to eachother, but not in the strong integrity of a database.

Transactions are when stuff is exchanged. Online banking is pretty much a matter of shifting money from here to there. yes, there is relational data in there, but the data itself is used for shifting money (or value, or whatever) back and forth, and isn’t of much value on its own.

Communication is the digitization of what we’ve done for thousands of years. The media we use are pretty few in this arena, and little by little they’re becoming more cross-functional like Skype or gtalk. The webmail I refer to means any in-site asynchronous threaded dialog. In some cases, this is public discussion like a forum, in others it’s private messaging. By alternative, the uni-directional asynchronous communication is comments – either to blogs or to MySpace pages, or what have you.

The newcomer to the game is Networking. It’s pretty simple and straightforward, but it’s what’s given the Web it’s little “2.0″ when it comes to functionality. There are sites out there that are either all-purpose, wide-open, no-limits networking (like MySpace or Friendster), and there are the sites at the other end of the spectrum: very narrow and focused, even walled off (aSmallWorld). What MySpace has done in this arena moreso than anyone else is embrace content. Instead of just saying “yeah, she’s my friend,” it lets users express their individuality through content – videos, photos, blogs, music, … – with little limit. Maybe that’s why they’re the big one .

So, where’s Google in all this? They did something smart. They built a second-level on to this diagram. They said “Let’s organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They started out by making it possible to get at anything in the Content bubble. Now they’ve tip-toed into every piece of this diagram. Communications – check. Transactions – check. Content – check. Networking – er, um – check. No wonder they’re worth Goo-gillions. Yahoo’s working on the same thing, albeit a little behind. Others have carved out little niches, like Indeed with job listings and this new Wikipedia search engine.

Is this everything? Absolutely not. This is just version 0.1, off the top of my head. Why’d I do it? So I could sleep at night. What is this good for? It’s a lot easier to take over the world if you have a map.

For the last month, I’ve been patiently awaiting the latest gmail feature: POP Mail Fetcher . Now I’m getting impatient.

Where’s my pony??!

I’m not exactly sure who recommended it, but there is a book Go Big or Go Home that’s a how-to for growing a startup. It’s pretty popular, actually, and heralded as instructional rather than anecdotal.

Just the title of the book is something that I need to tell myself pretty regularly. It’s against my nature to be loud and big and pushy and all that stuff that the phrase implies. But I’ve learned from experience that anytime I’ve pushed myself and “gone big” with something, the net result has been positive.

It’s a little like gambling. If you bring a sock full of nickles to the casino and play a few slots, you’re almost certainly not going home with the jackpot. But, if you save up some bucks, and spend a few hundred playing blackjack, it’ll last longer, and if you leave the casino up 4%, you can at least afford to buy a decent dinner (and have gotten a slew of free drinks, and a compped stay, and some vouchers for a show).

Same thing with vacation or going out on the town. Whenever we’ve gone out, we go big, and have a blast. We come home with exactly what you would want out of a fun weekend or trip: lots of stories that’ll last forever.

Same thing goes with the stuff I’m working on in the house. I don’t have tens of thousands laying around in cash to throw at this stuff, so I have to chip at it a little at a time. But, I have to seek the best. The paint is top-notch, the trim isn’t cheap, the dimmers aren’t your average slidey-jobbies, and last weekend, in a dual-purpose trip to Boston, I acquired $3500 worth of kitchen and bath fixtures from a friend that are the pinnacle of top-of-the-line (and paid less than cost ). It’s a bit of a stretch right now, but it’s worth it in the end. I end up with stuff that’ll make me happy, and when I go to sell this house, it’ll be one of those “wow” moments for a prospective buyer that might just seal the deal.

Pulling all this back to my professional life, as I said before, it’s been tough for me to “go big” naturally. I tend to be rather conservative and cautious in the way I do things. It’s my nature to be safe and well-planned with serious matters like development. In the past few years, I have learned that playing it safe gets you nowhere. There is little advantage to being conservative or cautious when working on a project or making a choice. It’s the big and brazen moves that get you somewhere and get you noticed (if that’s what you’re looking for).

That’s all very abstract and vague. In a veiled way, I’m illustrating my experience (think pointillism) _outside_ of development. The choices I made in the not-so-recent past tended to be safe and cautious and grounded in pragmatism. All in all, they weren’t bad choices at all. In the past year+, I’ve made some big choices. Bought a house, left my safe job, spent money on renovations, done some travel. All of it has been rewarding, and I wouldn’t do it differently. Stopping to look back and wonder if I could have done it better is good, but second guessing my choices would be bad.

When it comes to development, here’s how it applies: think big. It’s naiive to think that whatever you’re working on right now will always stay the way it is. If that one thing never changes, it’s a bad thing. It means a) nobody uses it and b) nobody cares about it. By the same token, doing something half-assed only means you’re going to have to do it again. In some cases where time-to-market is the biggest issue, that can be overlooked, but for the most part, sacrificing quality is the last thing that should be done when a project is no longer operating in ideal conditions.

In a profession that is as based in logic and mathematics as this, there are some good measurable ways of evaluating the quality of what you’ve done. It’s traffic scalability, it’s adaptability when needs change, it’s the ability to add new features, and often it’s adherence to standards. There is a similarly important and large portion of development that’s aesthetic and subjective, which, to a certain degree, can also be evaluated. Is it appropriate, is it stylistically up-to-date, is it usable.

Whenever I’ve approached a new and unsolved problem, I strive to not only do my personal best, but to have it stack up. I relish the challenge of not only doing what’s asked, but at the very least doing it up to standards. We’re talking database normalization, W3C/508/etc compliance, browser compatibility.

It’s important to me that what I produce is of the highest quality I can muster. Otherwise, I’m just another one of those web hacks out there makin a buck off of people who don’t know better. I’m better than that, and I hope it shows.

I’m working on a couple posts that are pretty in-depth.

Having heard well the suggestions of some bloggers I avidly read, I’m doing my best to just talk and not “present” or “preach” in my posts, and it feels good. But sometimes you just have something to say.

While busily painting my trim one evening last week, I had plenty of time to meditate on some relevant world/political topics, and I’ve been composing my thoughts, so be prepared!

Until Nokia calls me back I had to find something that would keep me happy in the meantime. I’ve been really amazed by Samsung’s products lately, and impressed by their corporate stance on the brand: they want to be like BMW. And I like BMWs. Therefore, via the transitive property…

So I poked around to find the “best” and the “coolest” that Samsung had to offer. Applying my need for a decent camera, a candybar style and such, I hunted down the one I wanted, and acquired it: SGH-X820

I did this because I figure… if I don’t change my plan, I don’t really need a PDA thingy. I can still do most of what I need with this phone, and still – going over data and sms limits of my plan, it’ll be cheaper than switching.

Having spent the weekend in Boston with my new phone, I’m VERY pleased. It works just the way I want it to all the time, and it’s sexy as hell. I mean… thinner than a SLVR, and *not* a Motorola? Nokia: watch out!