Credit: vaxzine

Unlike the other men and women I work with, I have no computer languages under my belt. When semantics comes up in a meeting, I follow along based on the experience I have: most notably, French, German and some Spanish. So I’ve always been curious. Is learning a computer language similar to learning a foreign language? Or is it closer to math?

I decided to find out. This fall I enrolled in a HTML/CSS class for women with the Meet-up group Girl Develop It. Always the eager student, I loved it from the beginning. The familiar classroom dynamic, a teacher who asked us to introduce ourselves, the fresh text file ready for class notes. I am a sucker for school.

The first evening went well. I wrote enough HTML to scratch out a short page about my cats (cliche!). But it wasn’t until we were thrown into CSS during the second class that something clicked.

“Now type color:red;” the teacher instructed. I watched the text change on my new site. Half the room required the teacher’s assistance, so the women at our table set out into the great unknown ourselves.

“What if we typed color:blue; right after the red one?” someone asked. “Which one will it listen to?”

We tried it. The answer was not what we expected.

“Wait, how does it know all these colors?” someone else asked. “Let’s try to stump it.” We tried indigo, turquoise, puke-green. Some worked, others didn’t. Either way, it was fun.

We discovered borders and played with bold. Sometimes our guesses didn’t work. Puke-green, for those of you who don’t know, doesn’t work in CSS (at least not in plain English). Walls appeared in the mental blueprint of this language, limitations that set down guidelines as we played.

In the midst of all this trial and error, I suddenly felt the click. I understood just enough to ask the right questions. Having landing on a foreign planet, I was starting to explore the space around me, using logic to make educated guesses about how the language worked.

And that, my friends, is exactly what’s fun about learning foreign languages. We learn just enough to start making great guesses… and then we learn some more. The French student learns that “mère” means mother and “père” means father. “Grand-mère” means grandmother. Suddenly the student can make a great guess for grandfather. She can even guess at terms like great-grandfather (though that’s a bit trickier). It’s play with words, a type of scientific experiment. What works? What doesn’t? And how do I get from here to there?

I had assumed that learning a programming language was going to require the same muscles I’d used in math class in High School, muscles that have long since atrophied. But I was so pleased to find that HTML/CSS fell into the same rhythm as my foreign languages had. Sure, there’s vocab to remember. Sure, you’re going to get the grammar wrong. But given time and experience, I don’t think it’s too high a barrier to jump.

It’s easy to fall into the right brain/ left brain trap at work. Some of us have backgrounds in the humanities and others have been coding since Elementary School. But the spirit of coding – the spirit of inventing and playing and discovering – reminds me that we have similar outlooks. Developers, designers, strategists, no matter. As technologists, we are adventurers and explorers in whatever language we please.

If you have ever played Call of Duty with a bunch of dudes, you’ll know that it’s no fun being the weakest player. At best, you will be politely asked to relinquish the controller. At worst, you will quickly find yourself sporting an invisible Cone of Shame—in addition to being asked to relinquish the controller. So you can imagine my silent dread when a bunch of dudes at Arc90 recruited me to play on the company Xbox. Not only was I way out of practice, these guys were stressed from a long week of work, and potentially… dangerous. Nevertheless, I agreed. And I went on to play the worst game of my life. But to my surprise, this bunch of dudes actually kept me playing, round after round.

Tolerance despite lack of skill is almost unheard of, not just in team-based console games but in nearly all aspects of life. Starting from that first gym class—in which the smallest kid was picked last—social cues throughout our lives reinforce the idea that only the good ones get to be in the game. So we go for those advanced degrees, honing our skills in a safe environment in order to be good enough to play.

But time and again, personal experience has taught me that one of the best ways to learn is to just start running around on the playing field. In other words, to learn on the job. It’s true that this can be stressful and scary. You can feel like you are surviving each day by just a hair. But it is a whole lot less scary when the team you work with encourages you to keep playing, no matter what your skill level. In fact, there seems to be a cherished tradition at Arc90 of everyone chipping in to evolve visual designers into badass designer-developer hybrids.

One of the first things I learned about Arc90 was how supportive the environment here is for on-the-job learning. Don’t know how version control works? Ask Stefan. Never heard of a Javascript closure? Get Tyler to help. Need an introduction to HTTP headers? Tom will literally stay until 8 PM to make sure you know everything there is to know about them, and then some. Despite tight release deadlines, everyone gives their time to help each other.

I experienced this kind of generosity first-hand this summer. Embarking on a Design Internship in June, I expected to Design stuff: comps, wireframes, icons and the like. Those I can (and did) do, but my team then handed me a task that required lots of front-end programming: to build an idea submission bookmarklet for one of Arc’s main products, Kindling.

Admittedly, I was worried at first. Visions of internship horrors danced through my head. What if I hit a wall? What if I ask dumb questions? Can I even bother these smart, busy people with the amount of dumb questions required for me to build this thing? Needless to say, the fears went unfounded. What actually transpired was that, with the tireless mentorship of Team Arc, I actually implemented a working software component and, in the process, picked up Javascript in less than 3 months.

So, how does one come by a team that is so open to letting everyone play? Start by hiring really friendly people who are insatiably curious about their trade: these are the people who will never stop learning, improving, and helping others do the same. Dedicate company time for the free exchange of ideas, techniques and feedback: Arc90 holds regular Design and Code Reviews where all are invited to swap critiques on each other’s work in a laid-back, informal setting. But most important of all, create an environment that responds to lack of knowledge with encouragement rather than disdain. Places where judgement is held in check, where the “show me what you’ve got” attitude is nonexistent, are the best places for learning. And of course, it’s helpful to have a culture of mutual trust and good humor.

For all the tech companies out there, here is something to consider: perhaps more important than workforce conversion and ROI is how your team supports learning within itself. After all, the only constant in technology is change. Because of this, creating a good team is not just about hiring people with all the right skills already under their belt, as the need for those skills may change. That’s a starting place, but afterwards, it’s all about crafting a team culture that supports letting one another play—no matter what their skill set and experience level—and tossing out those Cones of Shame.

“Tina possesses that which makes a great designer: a fervent desire to learn all that she can, combined with the skill to put it to use.” —Joseph Lifrieri, Designer

In the past ten years, technology has found its wheelhouse: connecting us socially. A perfect storm materialized: the Internet, mobile devices and our overwhelming desire to connect with one another converged to create apps and experiences that connect us with one another. From Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, we do things online mainly for the purpose of sharing them with others.

In the midst of all the social app hubbub, we haven’t bothered to consider the potential for technology to serve the other needs of the human condition. Yes, we are social animals and the motivator to connect, share, validate and be validated is incredibly strong, but we’ve got other needs as well. It’s high time we aim the mighty tech cannon at the other emotional and psychological needs that make us tick.

So without further ado, we bring you three brand new royalty-free application ideas that speak to the rest of the human condition. These prototypes are the product of a collaboration with the Arc90 Lab, beer and waking up at 3am with a killer idea that isn’t so killer the following morning.

We hope they’ll cast a new light on what technology can do to make us happier.

Vincetagram

The immensely popular photo-sharing app Instagram does an admirable job of making it easy to share photographs on your mobile phone.

It’s worth asking why Instagram is such a breakout success? It’s by no means the first photo sharing app. It’s popularity is partly due to the vintage feel it applies to photos. The edges are frayed and the colors are saturated in that old-style Polaroid sort of way. It brings the charm of analog to an overly digitized world. Most importantly, a photo taken just minutes ago is instantly imbued with a sense of history and nostalgia. It’s as if you stumbled on it in an old shoe box.

If Instagram can create the illusion of history and nostalgia with photos, why not take it a step further. Why not bring along a friend that you’ve known since junior high school from 20 years ago? Introducing Vincetagram:

Vincetagram takes simulated nostalgia to a whole new level. Not only will your pictures be enhanced with an impromptu visit from your old (albeit imaginary) friend, but your entire online life can be enriched. Vincetagram Free users get a new friend and follower on Twitter and Facebook as well as the occasional “Hey buddy!” SMS. Vincetagram Premium users receive weekly emails from Vince with a heartwarming “just wanted to see how you were doing…”

Appathy

All day every day, we get positive pings. Jim “friended” you. Suzzy “favorited” your tweet. Reggie “followed” you. We’re awash in positive reinforcement. The result is a constantly diminishing ability to appreciate good news. What if there was a tool that pings you when your online activity conjures up little more than indifference and apathy from others? Wouldn’t the occasional “friending” mean so much more? That tool is Appathy.

The goal of Appathy is straightforward: rekindle our appreciation of all those positive pings by surrounding them with the inanity of life’s typical interactions. With its groundbreaking ClearDisinterest(tm) technology, Appathy senses and captures the seemingly un-capturable: the unimpressed gaze, the rolled eyes, the brief moment of disdain. Your Humdrum Dashboard provides a birds-eye view of all those passed-over opportunities for connection and social interaction. It’ll even visualize your friends’ “dead zones”: the hours in the day when they’re most likely to ignore you.

The result is subtle but striking: the winks and pats on the back are far fewer and far between. When you do get that “follow” or “friend” request, it will mean so much more.

GetaGrip

While technology promised us convenience and productivity, its relentless advance seems to only put us further under water. From your never-ending email inbox to the unread count in your feed reader, the march of tech is always one step ahead of you. What we need is an app that pauses the insanity and reminds you of what’s really important: your mortality.

GetaGrip senses when you’re drowning in information overload and pauses everything. That endless stream of tweets, feeds and messages fades away. In its place GetaGrip reveals a jarring dose of reality. How long before others are noticing your protruding gut or receding hairline? How many retirement homes and funeral parlors are within a five mile radius of you? In a brief moment, your entire life (online and off) is snapped back into perspective.

The app also includes a database of over 3,000 disasters from history. Each day you’ll be notified with a reminder that no matter how shitty your day is going, history reveals that someone had a far shittier day than you.

Stepping Back

These prototypes may appear unconventional at first glance but the needs they address are anything but. Hopefully the technology innovators among us will view this article as a lens towards the future. The app store category list of tomorrow shouldn’t just be about games and productivity tools. We need to think more broadly about how $.99 apps can help boost our confidence or help us get over a bad breakup.

We have the technology. We can rebuild us.

The Percona Live conference was held this past Wednesday in New York, and I had the chance to attend. Percona is one of the most respected and largest MySQL consulting firms in the world, whose work I’ve been following for years on their blog. They even have their own version of MySQL with a large number of additions that are folded into later versions of MySQL by Oracle, and their own backup tool – xtrabackup. Now with the background out of the way, on to the talks:

• Ideeli – a deal a day website that ‘DDoSes themselves every day at noon’. They went into some detail about their EC2/EBS setup, namely the best practices when working with EBS volumes, planning for high availability by making use of Amazon’s different Availability Zones, and some interesting tweaks to use for large MySQL instances running on EC2.
• Baron Schwartz from Percona – a great demonstration of how you can use tcpdump, Maatkit and gnuplot to do non-intrusive monitoring and find problems with locked up queries before they start to cause you real problems. He also showed how you can make a real plan for scaling, at the same time proving why linear scalability is almost always impossible.
• Zmanda – open source backup software that allows you to do point in time MySQL backups via a variety of methods, i.e. a full backup via LVM/ZFS/EBS snapshot and then append replays from binary logging. Definitely cool stuff.
• Facebook – the closing keynote was from one of Facebook’s DB performance team members who spoke about their gigantic MySQL setup, how they deal with sharding and remote references and all sorts of crazy stuff that you only know about once you’ve run the world’s largest MySQL cluster. They actually run two instances of MySQL on single machines as they’re no longer IO bound due to their work with flashcache. It gave me a lot of ideas on how we can deal with expansion in the future.

There’s no amount of reading manuals and whitepapers that can replace real world experience, and hearing community members explain how they’ve overcome various obstacles and emergencies can really help you think about how you’re managing your environment. Thanks again to Percona for organizing as well as all the speakers for making their presentations.

Months ago, we thought out loud about a whole new approach to the audience/presenter dynamic. Back then, we couldn’t help but cast a light on how the presentation experience had fundamentally changed:

People aren’t only sporadically ignoring you. They’re reporting out to the world their observations about what you’re saying. All the while, they’re reading up on what others are tweeting about what you’re saying while you’re saying it. And hundreds or thousands of their followers learn about these judgements in real-time as well. Your audience has become entranced not by you, but by the meta-activity around you. You, the presenter, are no longer the center of attention. You’re more like a backdrop. You’re the talking head on cable news, but it’s the ticker that streams below you that steals our attention.

Our answer to the swirl of chatter that taunts a presentation isn’t to reprimand or even try to contain it, but rather to embrace it. And so, on Sunday, March 13 at SXSW, we’ll be introducing our latest lab experiment: Donahue.

Designed and built by Arc90 and the talented minds at Behavior Design, Donahue seeks to bring all that chatter forward to create an entirely new type of presentation experience that unfolds in real-time as the presenters join the fray and the fray nudges its way onto the stage. It’s part commentary on the state of attention and interaction and part app debut. We hope you’ll join our own Tim Meaney and Behavior Design’s Chris Fahey for what we think will be a memorable event at SXSW.

The Readability blog is momentarily inaccessible right now due to heavy load. Here’s a reprint of our open letter to Apple.

Dear Apple:

It’s your friends from Readability. Remember us? You put our technology into your Safari browser last year. We’re writing this open letter because – well – we’re a little upset right now.

Last Friday, you notified us that our Readability iOS application was rejected. In explaining the rejection, you pointed us to 11.2 in the App Store Review Guidelines:

11.2 Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected.

We’re obviously disappointed by this decision, and surprised by the broad language. By including “functionality, or services,” it’s clear that you intend to pursue any subscription-based apps, not merely those of services serving up content. Readability’s model is unique in that 70% of our service fees go directly to writers and publishers. If we implemented In App purchasing, your 30% cut drastically undermines a key premise of how Readability works.

Before we cool down and come to our senses, we might as well share how we’re feeling right now: we believe that your new policy smacks of greed. Subscription apps like ours represent a tiny sliver of app sales that represent a tiny sliver of your revenue. You’ve achieved much of your success in hardware sales by cultivating an incredibly impressive app ecosystem. Every iPad or iPhone TV ad puts the apps developed by companies like ours front and center. It was a healthy and mutually beneficial dynamic: apps like ours get exposure and you get to show the world how these apps make your hardware shine. That’s why we’re a bit baffled here.

To be clear, we believe you have every right to push forward such a policy. In our view, it’s your hardware and your channel and you can put forth any policy you like. But to impose this course on any web service or web application that delivers any value outside of iOS will only discourage smaller ventures like ours to invest in iOS apps for our services. As far as Readability is concerned, our response is fairly straight-forward: go the other way… towards the web.

Since we re-launched, we’ve already seen a significant amount of usage across a wide range of browsers, operating systems and devices via the Readability web interface – for both mobile and desktop. Looking ahead, we plan to redouble our efforts to deliver the best possible reading app using the latest best-of-breed web technology.

The new Readability is fueled by the free-form nature of the web. Just as content pumps through the web’s piping, apps like ours thrive as nodes on the web – unencumbered by levies or barriers imposed by others. As we said months ago: “for us, the web is the right bet.”

Still, we’re always looking to give readers the best possible reading experience and a native iOS client would help us do that. We hope you’ll change your mind. If you do, we’d be happy to resubmit the Readability iOS app.
Regards,

The Readability Team

P.S. We’d we be glad to deliver Readability for iOS – with in-app purchasing – if you’d carve out 70% from your 30% fee and share it with writers and publishers, just as we do.

For over a decade the Internet has been my playground. I’ve joined hundreds of communities, browsed an infinite number of websites, and enjoyed hours upon hours of music and video. In this time I’ve also used a number of devices to access the web, including my laptop, smartphone and game console. My XBOX 360 in particular has not only become my go-to box for Internet gaming, but also for streaming movies, television, and music.

In November my console was updated to include ESPN3. To my surprise, much of the content was unavailable, despite being an XBOX Live customer with a broadband Internet connection. As it turns out, Time Warner Cable had disabled much of my access to this feature, on a device purchased independently of their services, because I didn’t pay for a cable package that included ESPN3. I was angered and frustrated that my ISP had blocked features of a product they did not sell or control.

Around the same time, a new gadget called the Fascinate was released – a smartphone running Google’s open Android platform. The reviews came in and everyone was shocked to find that Verizon had locked the search engine to Bing, with no way to change it. Anyone who bought a Fascinate could search Google with their desktop – why not their phone? For an ‘open’ platform, it was frustrating to see how much choice it gave wireless ISPs, but took away from consumers.

Now, I make a living designing and developing websites. The food on my plate depends on an open Internet, where people can access whatever they want, however they want. And I love the Internet. While it’s not without its faults, I appreciate being able to listen to music on Grooveshark, Last.fm, Pandora, or Hype Machine. But it’s not only that – I love choice. I can search with Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. I can watch videos on Hulu, YouTube, or Vimeo. I can even create a new website and become the next Twitter or Facebook. And it’s all because I pay one monthly fee for general Internet access. That’s the power of the web – information and innovation without limitation.

I created TheOpenInter.net to depict a time in the future when ISPs control the Internet and all data is not downloaded equally. While creating the site’s design, I had the idea to bundle Netflix and Hulu as a package ISPs required you to buy. Halfway through development, I questioned the reality of my portrayal. Was I too far off-base? Then to my surprise a Wired article titled “Mobile Carriers Dream of Charging per Page” showed almost the exact same scenario. While there is no documentation within the article to prove wireless carriers have any current plans to implement a similar pricing structure, the fact that evidence exists to suggest its consideration is frightening.

So, why is network neutrality important? Why should ISPs treat all data the same? The web, more significantly the wireless web, is the next great frontier. If you think that an Internet service provider would never block access to Netflix, or remove Google Maps from your phone if it meant a higher monthly payment, then you live in a fantasy world. They’ve been testing the waters for years.

Think about this: back in 2003, I never thought my bank would carelessly manage their assets and put our economy at risk. But I guess we couldn’t have seen that coming, right?

Yesterday, Rich described our plans for a new Arc90 Lab experiment supporting our proposed talk at SXSW 2011, Toss The Projector: Redefining the Presenter/Audience Dynamic. He writes, “[m]aybe what we need to do is reboot the presenter-audience dynamic entirely” and then describes our vision for a tool that can accompany the presenter on stage and turn the distracted audience into an essential participant of the presentation. The structure of this talk is very Luigi Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author, where we plan to take advantage of the fact that the audience only half paying attention to us and use this as a narrative device to reinforce our message. But that trick will only get us so far, the presentation has to have content, a point of view, a take-away.

Theater of the theater. Or something.

Can I have your attention for a moment?

So what will be the content of this proposed talk? I’ve been thinking about (in)attention a lot lately. If you’re anything like me, you might have noticed a change in yourself over the past few years. I’m finding it harder and harder to pay attention to a single thing, to be fully in the moment, to be present.

I’m starting to worry that this is a plague affecting most of us. From sitting in someone’s office attempting to have a conversation with them as they tick away on their Blackberry, to checking your iPhone when playing at home with the kids, to an inability to read long form text, this plague has many symptoms.

This topic blew up into A CONVERSATION with the release of Nick Carr’s excellent book, The Shallows. For those of you that weren’t paying attention, Carr masterfully crafted an argument that our brains are changing, that they’re literally being rewired, as a result of our increasingly shallow interactions with the computer. Multi-tasking, now a requirement for success in the modern world, does in fact come with a cost. The Wall Street Journal held a side-by-side “debate” between Carr and Clay Shirky, where Carr offered:

When we’re constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

What we seem to be sacrificing in all our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The Web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion.

I’ll have you out of here in no time…

I was surprised by the reaction against Carr’s thesis. To me it’s so plainly obvious that this is the case that it almost goes without saying. Much like our shift away from written text to electronic (have you even tried to hand-write a full page of script lately? I simply cannot do it.), the brain optimizes for its environment. And the environment that is increasingly in demand from us is the ability to shift from item to item with no notice. The modern world rewards quicker thought, and quicker thought isn’t free.

Pay attention to how you work, I’m sure you bounce around from emails, to interrupting IMs, to flying around on the Web following links and skimming headlines and articles. How much deep thinking and deep reading do you do anymore? How often to do you listen to an album all the way through? OK, how about a single song?

Just a minute of your time, it’s all I’ll need…

And have you been to a conference lately? The audience is only half paying attention, at best. Sometimes I feel like people are in attendance to get one quote to tweet to prove that they were there, either as social currency or for their coworkers and bosses back home. Get the tweet, then get back to whatever it is that you’re more interested in. Perhaps that’s cynical, but certainly there are very few people actually present at the average conference talk.

But then again, very few people are actually present at the average meeting.

And increasingly, people are not even present when interacting with their spouses:

Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

Or most damaging of all, people are even finding it difficult to be present while interacting with their kids.

Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying how parental use of technology affects children and young adults. After five years and 300 interviews, she has found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread. Her findings will be published in “Alone Together” early next year by Basic Books. In her studies, Dr. Turkle said, “Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.”

And finally, I wonder about the next generation. Our brains are being rewired to optimize for the modern world, their brains are starting out wired this way.

Checking in at the park

We’re finished, carry on.

Alain de Botton recently wrote that “[o]ne of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is how we can relearn to concentrate”, but that is the state of affairs that we’ll explore at our talk. Both through the content and delivery of the presentation, we hope to open up an important conversation about attention in the modern world. If you agree that this is an issue worth discussing, there are at least two paths forward. First, perhaps by being aware of this trend in ourselves, we can each take steps towards being more present and mindful in our actions. This brings to mind the most important book I’ve read in my life, Emotional Intelligence, which taught me that you can learn to control and respond to a situation more effectively by being aware of your emotional state. Awareness is half the battle. But there’s another way forward – much like this structure of this talk, perhaps new patterns can be used to bridge this gap. In fact the culprit, technology, might show us a way forward.

It should be fun, we hope you join us.