Programmer’s Paradox

Designing for the Social Web is a recently published book written by Joshua Porter, the man behind the the design blog and website Bokardo.  I’ve been reading Bokardo for a while now, and so when Designing for the Social Web became available, I picked up a copy for myself.

The book has to be one of the best designed books I’ve seen, which immediately lends credibility to Joshua’s message.  There is judicious use of white space which makes the book easy on the eyes.  Colors are used effectively to draw attention to important points and tying it all together are a wealth of screenshots, which clearly illustrate the concepts Joshua writes about.

The book starts out simply enough by outlining how the web has become more social as it has aged.  It then progresses from there through several topics that will likely seem obvious to anyone immersed in the web, such as the need for businesses on the web to have authentic conversations with their users and the various hurdles one can encounter when signing up on a website.  However, while it’s easy to write off the content as obvious, the real benefit of the book is that it investigates and brings to the fore underlying assumptions.  It’s easy to forget something that seems obvious, so it is invaluable to have a source that points out the mundane and forces designers to consider all the implications of their actions.

The book really shines in the final few chapters.  Joshua examines how to design features for sharing content and he does an excellent job of breaking the sharing process into individual steps.  Sometimes I think those who design web applications fail to examine each small piece of a design and as a result the design fails.

In the final chapter Joshua explains the funnel analysis process for examining how a web application is performing.  As Joshua notes in the book, this analysis process greatly resembles the scientific method and that this was no accident.  Too often designs are based on feel and not enough on actual numbers.  While some of both are needed, I think a move towards a more scientific process would be a good thing, and I appreciates Joshua’s efforts to move the discipline in that direction.

The book does end abruptly with the final chapter.  A short summation would have been welcome, but this is a minor quibble.  Perhaps the greatest testament to this book is that while reading it I started applying the techniques discussed to my current project and instantly saw ways to make it better.

I recommend Designing for the Social Web for all web designers and even for web programmers like myself.  It shows all the small parts to consider in a design and how carefully paying attention to each can lead to a better design.  You’re guaranteed to pick up on something you’ve overlooked in the past.

You can order the book on Amazon here.

I’m currently using Thrift at work.  It’s a convenient way to shuttle data across different services and to invoke remote procedure calls.  I like it because of how lightweight it is, so I don’t have to wrestle with code for a kitchen when all I need is a faucet.

The one downside to Thrift at the moment is that it has very little documentation.  Everything I’ve learned has been through trial and error or by watching other developers at work.  If I get a chance I hope to provide a sample Thrift implementation, using Python, along with documentation.

Until then, Stuart has provided a nice overview of Thrift’s features by comparing it to Google’s recently released Protocol Buffers.  If you’re interested in either, read Stuart’s article.

The man I consider the best technical blogger on the Internet laid down his pen today, giving up blogging.  Raganwald said goodbye.

I wish him all the best.  Now comes the hard part: finding other bloggers to replace him in my RSS reader.  I glanced through my reader today and realized that Raganwald was the only blogger I had in my reader who consistently updated with strong technical, code focused posts.  That is depressing.

I need recommendations of bloggers to follow who can fill this void.  Please post any you have in the comments.  I’ll let you know if I come across any one who looks promising.

If you’re reading this post, I’d like to thank you for sticking around.  I’ve been gone from this blog for much longer than I anticipated and I semi-apologize for that.  While I didn’t intend to abandon writing, other events in my life were more important and as a result this blog got the boot while those other events took precedence.

Now that I have some free time again, I’m going to kick things off with a series of small posts, and then I’ll try to get to writing some longer and more insight posts on topics I’ve been meaning to write about.  Some topics I plan to address include a post on management and Twitter, several posts on the No Fluff Just Stuff tech conference, and a post on the meaning of trust in the work place.  I’m also planning to try and write more technically oriented posts that I have in the past, as I’m currently doing work in Python and plan on learning Ruby.

Thanks for sticking around.

I just spent this past weekend at the No Fluff Just Stuff conference, the Raleigh edition.  It was a very enlightening experience.  While it is a Java focused conference, it is still a great event to learn a lot, even if you aren’t a Java heavy developer, like myself.  I think I speak for a lot of attendees when I say that the dynamic languages were subversively co-opting the conference.  There was a lot of Ruby, JRuby, and Groovy talk, with Grails thrown in for good measure.  There was even an Erlang talk!

It is a small conference that is generally very technical in nature.  I highly recommend it.  Speakers such as Neal Ford, Ken Sipe, and Venkat make it very much worth while.

On another note, don’t expect any more updates for a couple of weeks, due to events in my life.  I’ll try to blog a series on what I learned at NFJS once I have the time and everything has calmed down.