24 Season ... 7?
| Props to Sophia for finding me the Jack Bauer quotes at 24 wikia. It's a curse to be reminded how long we've been waiting for Season 7, but great to find out that a two-hour Season 7 prequel, 24: Exile, will air in the US later this year on November 23rd. Hmmm ... time to break out the 1-6 box set again and go sleepless for a week. That will be the longest week of my life;-) |
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Heroku - Ruby in the Sky with Diamonds
I've been using Heroku since I heard about it on the Ruby on Rails podcast. It offers a hosted Rails development environment (all web-based), with instant deployment ... essentially you are running your dev, test and production environments 'in the cloud'. Heroku themselves use Amazon S3 I think.
It's worth checking out, even if you are not specifically interested in rails. A great example of how to operate 'up in the clouds'.
A couple of key things I've learned/noted in working with heroku..
Disabling the heroku toolbar
You probably don't want the heroku toolbar appearing for public users of your application (and I found it had some issues with IE). Disabling the toolbar is done by creating a file config/heroku.yml:
toolbar_collaborators: true
toolbar_public: false
request_timeout: 10
(picked this tip up from the mailing list)
Running with Rails 2.1
Rails 2.0.2 is the default, and 2.1 support took a while to arrive. It's here now. Simply update your config/environment.rb file to specify..
RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.1'
Distributed Version Control
Version control using git is rolled into heroku. And if you want to develop locally, there's a heroku gem that simplifies setting up your local clone. Once git and the heroku gem are installed, a typical session goes like this:
heroku create myapp
heroku clone myapp
cd myapp
ruby script/server
[..work locally for a while..]
git add .
git commit -m "some changes made locally"
git push
[..work on the server for a while and commit..]
git pull
Postscript Aug-09: heroku have since split their services in two: herokugarden.com, which includes the online, web-based editor, and heroku.com which is intended for high-performance production deployment (with no online editing)
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What Customers Really Want
| I was involved in a conference last week that left me painfully aware of the missing "voice of the customer". However it did bring to mind a great book I recently read - What Customers Really Want  by Scott McKain.Not to be confused with the product management text What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services  by Anthony Ulwick. Completely forgettable in my view, and arguably dangerous in the wrong hands ... particularly when it gets into the dangers of having customers actually involved in the process!.. well perhaps one good thing about "What the Customer Wants" is that when picking it out at the library I discovered "What the Customer Really Wants" only a shelf away. I still can't find "What the Customer Really ReallyWants". Back to "What the Customer Really Wants": in the first few pages I was skeptical, expecting the book to be yet another meaningless management ra-ra piece. Luckily Scott managed to catch my attention before too long and it soon became clear that the book is a gem. Scott McKain talks from the perspective of real experience, and his no-bullshit, folksy plain talk is a welcome relief from the "gurus". Importantly though, it is not just about experience, but also the fact that McKain has distilled and can share valuable insights as a result of that experience. Most are in the "bleeding obvious - but why haven't I thought of that before?" category. Even the book's organisation is refreshingly to the point. Six main chapters covering six key disconnects..
"Continuous improvement is the enemy of innovation". That got my attention. It's an interesting point of view: Kaizen - constant change - has its role. But innovation is anything but about being constant - its about seeking the dramatic step change. The problem is that most of us cannot cope with being completely focused on incremental change AND at the same time the search for shattering innovation. The customer is not always right .. but they are always the customer! |
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Designing the Obvious, the Moment, Not Thinking and how bad design can make you physically ill
I had a violent adverse reaction to the design vomit that is soshiok.sg
I could go on, but it just makes me choke. Best medicine: jump to hungrygowhere, who got there first and have done a vastly better job on the web site. The other essential part of my recovery was to go back and luxuriate in the clarity of thought epitomised by Robert Hoekman's two books on design:
These are two books I think every web designer and, yes, every developer should read. Or have on a bookshelf in easy reach. Designing the Moment is the one I find myself returning to. It takes a case study/cookbook approach and nuts out many of the issues in contemporary UI design. It's not an encyclopedia or complete reference - you will need to go elsewhere for that. But it does get you in the groove (in a "teach a man to fish.." kind of way). Even if my immediate design challenge is not directly addressed, it is great for getting in the right frame of mind for cutting through all the confusion and honing in on my core issues and purpose. It also contains the single best argument for using "sign in" rather than "login", and some great discussion of form alignment considerations. Designing the Obvious is the first book, and contains the full discussion of Hoekman's philosophy of the obvious. You could probably get a web design job on the basis of studying this book alone! My only slight qualm is that while it presented a methodology and process for requirements analysis for example, it doesn't really give you a glimpse of other established practices and advice on how to harmonize in a larger and more diverse team situation. This may sound like sacrilege, but I find these books even better than Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think  . Krug's book is great in its own right, but I feel that Hoekman has taken the art one step further. I'm sure he would agree with Isaac Newton:If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.. But there's no doubt Don't Make Me Think has some great advice. Some of my favourites:
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