Saturday, September 27, 2008
Django 1.0
Would you look at that. Django has released the 1.0 at the beginning of the month. Congratulations to them and their community!
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Mini Book Reviews
It's a wonder how much one gets read when one has two weeks of absolutely nothing to do – except of just lying under the sun, having the sea sloshing at your feet, and sipping on the Mai tai, blended in a carved-out pineapple, listening to tropical birds twittering around and feeling the gentle breeze in the stubbly hair I have.
Oh, right. The books.
Starting with the most off-topic book of the bunch: How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie.
The title of this book is misleading. You are probably thinking that this book is about manipulating and hoaxing people into doing stuff they wouldn't normally do, and that would a wrong way to describe it. The "win friends" part should be read as "avoid pissing anyone off", and "influencing people" is more like "getting people seeing stuff your way". On the other hand, perhaps the book's title wouldn't be as marketable if it were "How to Avoid Pissing Anyone Off and Getting People Seeing Stuff Your Way". The book presents itself to be a lifestyle manual more than a book, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. This doesn't, by any means, mean that the book couldn't be read just for the entertainment, which I did. But I'll probably re-read it some day soon.
The book's main point seems to be that if you present yourself and your intentions in a positive way, be it criticism or praise, you will get more out of other people. It relies heavily on how the individual thinks in everyday situations, what I'd like to call practical psychology. People will think better of you, you probably will make more friends, and you are able to give constructive criticism to people, without them maybe even knowing you are criticizing them of anything.
There are literally dozens of pointers and one or two real-life (or so they are claimed to be) situations where these pointers have been applied, and described what really happened in those situations. These pointers are nothing magic and pretty forehead-slap-obvious, once you read about them. One of the on-going themes in the book is "be hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise," almost to the point of it being a mantra. The only gotcha is, that you can't fake it. I mean, even if you have the ability to fake it, it doesn't count. You really need to truly mean it, sincerely. Faking praises is just synonymous to ass-kissing.
Much of the book makes perfect common sense. If you are polite, people will like you more than if you were an asshole about stuff. If you smile, people are less hostile against you. If you excuse yourself, people tend to excuse you. Etc. One thing that I thought about is that this book does not guard you from assholes, and almost assumes that people you interact with are civilized or even half decent human beings. If you say to your busy waiter in a busy restaurant "Excuse me. I hate to disturb you, seeing you are busy and all, but my soup is cold, and I wonder if you could heat it up for me" and instead of her being sorry for the mishap and returning promptly with the heated soup, she would just say "fuck you, sit the fuck down, eat your damn soup, you fucking whiner", there's nothing the book does for you.
And herein lies the twist. I'm sure that this book has exactly the effect as Carnegie thought it having in countries like, say, the US. But I live in Finland. Let me explain: I worked as a clerk in a computer hardware retail store, so I have seen my share of customers. As we sold, shall we say, high end hardware, when it comes to people buying computer hardware, our customer base was certainly more pleasant to deal with than the average. But still, when the occasional foreign customer walked into the store, the day was saved. No exceptions. Every single foreign customer more pleasant to deal with, than the best of our Finnish customers.
So, my point is, Finns (and, therefore, undoubtedly people from other cultures as well) might not understand the minute details of the messages given as per the book the way Carnegie has thought about it. I can easily think that if I was "hearty in my approbation" and especially if i was "lavish in my praise", people here would think I would condescend to them, patronize them. If people are nice to you for no apparent reason around here, they get suspicious. "What do you mean 'I look handsome today'? I was ugly yesterday, huh?"
The book is still interesting, and I find practical psychology very interesting. I just need to figure out how to apply it in a culture inherently hostile towards friendliness. Recommended read, if you want to become that much of a better person, while getting personal gain out of it too.
Next book (less off-topic): Don't Make Me Think
by Steve Krug.
While the previous book was originally written in 1937 and hasn't aged a bit, this book was originally written just before the dotcom bubble burst. While I read the second edition, published in 2005, much of the contents are from the original web1.0 era, with only three chapters compressed into one, and a few additional chapters. All examples are almost 10 years old, so the book looks outdated. But it only looks that.
The examples might be 10 years old, and while indeed current websites might be more interesting to dissect apart, it is not necessary. The point of this book doesn't rely on the newest web memes. Also unlike the former book, Don't Make Me Think is very easy to describe in only few words: It's a book for designing web sites and has one main message: don't make the user think. Everything should be stupid-obvious on your website. It's all about optimizing the user experience, avoiding to frustrate your visitor during the very short attention span she has. And the majority of it makes perfect sense.
There is a reason why Google is a perfect landing page for any browser. It's the same reason why iPods are dominating the PMP market. Everything you put into your website should be there for a specific reason, serving a specific purpose. Everything that looks clickable, should be clickable. Everything that's clickable, should look clickable. If the visitor wants to find the manual, you should be wise enough to provide the manual easily, and not try to sell "super deal discounts". And so on.
This is a must-book for all and every one that has anything to do with putting stuff up on the web. Hell, even if you don't buy the book, just remember "don't make me think", implement that in your site, and you are better off than many megacorporations' sites *cough*HP*cough*.
Naturally, this book should not either be taken as the holy bible. This is just one person's opinions. Sure, he has made a living out of usability testing websites, and he knows his stuff, but he still is just one person with an opinion. For example, I disagree that in a web store, each and every item should belong in exactly one category. If a product could belong in several categories, you should pick one of them, and stick with it, he implies. I, for one, think arbitrary tags are great, which, almost by definition, make items pop up in several contexts.
Then there's a more fundamental thing. It's not something I precisely disagree with, but I feel it needs to be said. This book advocates using web conventions. And I, too, think that web conventions are something that need to be taken into account. But the book also outright discourages you to go out and experiment with your design. Now, this book is all about making the site as effortless to use as possible, so I do understand where he's coming from, and it makes prefect sense; people know how to use the scrollbar, so don't force them in using Ctrl-Shift-Backspace-3-A to scroll down the page. I get that, and he has a point. But this, at the same time, makes the book uninteresting, perhaps even useless, for those people who want to do the bleeding edge, want to make the new GMail ("for godssakes, people expect the whole page to refresh when they open a new mail!") or Google Maps ("the users will never figure out that you can actually drag on a canvas. Use the traditional directional arrow navigation buttons instead").
The book will give you a complete tour around the safe comfort zone of proven site elements. If you follow the book precisely, I'm sure you will produce a website that works very well, is pleasant to use, and keeps the visitor's interest. But you probably won't get to introduce the next web convention, either.
The third book, another management book: Managing Humans
by Michael Lopp, aka. Rands.
Out of the three management books I've read (Joel on Software
, Peopleware
and this one), I must confess, this is the best of them.
Peopleware was very informative, credible and authoritative, but utterly useless for me as a non-manager. Joel on Software got me to understand the workings of a manager, what they do, how to interact with them, what to expect of them, and other more down-to-earth aspects of managers. Managing Humans is even more so.
As Joel on Software, Managing Humans is a compilation of articles from a blog. I haven't followed Rands in Repose so much that I could say whether everything is out of the blog, or if there is original text included too. But that doesn't matter. The book is excellently written, and there's really only one part that gives away the fact, that not everything is written for that book specifically.
Lopp has the ability to write as if the reader was his best friend. While you know he knows his stuff, and you respect his experience, he cuts the corporate bullshit, and tells how things really are, in a way no-one else would dare to confess to be thinking. He knows that most people don't actually enjoy meetings. He recognizes the existence of managementese, a modification of the language that sounds like real talk, but is nigh to unintelligible, and also feels ashamed of himself whenever he uses it.
He can play both sides of the board at the same time. First he describes a scenario in general, and then he goes inside each person's head present in that fictious setting. I stared in awe, when he described the Nerd in the Cave, a perfect description of my working environment, my mindset while at the computer and myself. He points out the (now) obvious existence of Incrementalists & Completionists (completionist here, hello!). I could go on and on.
If you work in a company, develop software, have a boss you want to understand, have a team to understand, or want to understand how you behave yourself, this is the book to have a look at. I guarantee that you will find yourself inside in more variants than you previously thought possible. And don't be scared, even this book is a management book. It's only partly so, and there's a whole chapter on being a normal employee. After all, managers all have managers of their own, and in the end of the day, we all come to work and leave work (sooner and later, probably respectively).
As a quick bonus, I'm in the progress of reading Made to Stick
by Chip and Dan Heath.
I'm not going to give even a micro review about this book, as I haven't yet completed it, and more because I started reading on it too long ago to remember detailed points about it. But, all in all, it's a book about how to make your points more memorable; if you have something to say, how to make people remember it better and longer.
This, too, has to do with practical psychology, and relates to both How To Win Friends and Don't Make Me Think. These three books actually overlap each other in some certain ways, and say the same things with different words and examples. For example, one statement that all three books make is the fact that your target audience (be it your friend, your website visitor or presentation listener) does not really care about what you care. They care about what they care. They are not interested in what you are interested in. They interest themselves in their own interests.
Anyhow: A book that I can recommend to anyone who makes a pitch, a presentation or gives any kind of information that you want people to remember even after the immediate moment they heard it.
I could've done separate posts for each book. But I couldn't be bothered.
Oh, and nothing new in the lightern front. It's still in a standstill. Our wedding preparations are all behind us, we're back from our honeymoon, but we now have an apartment that needs a monthful-and-then-some of fixing.
Oh, right. The books.
Starting with the most off-topic book of the bunch: How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie.The title of this book is misleading. You are probably thinking that this book is about manipulating and hoaxing people into doing stuff they wouldn't normally do, and that would a wrong way to describe it. The "win friends" part should be read as "avoid pissing anyone off", and "influencing people" is more like "getting people seeing stuff your way". On the other hand, perhaps the book's title wouldn't be as marketable if it were "How to Avoid Pissing Anyone Off and Getting People Seeing Stuff Your Way". The book presents itself to be a lifestyle manual more than a book, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. This doesn't, by any means, mean that the book couldn't be read just for the entertainment, which I did. But I'll probably re-read it some day soon.
The book's main point seems to be that if you present yourself and your intentions in a positive way, be it criticism or praise, you will get more out of other people. It relies heavily on how the individual thinks in everyday situations, what I'd like to call practical psychology. People will think better of you, you probably will make more friends, and you are able to give constructive criticism to people, without them maybe even knowing you are criticizing them of anything.
There are literally dozens of pointers and one or two real-life (or so they are claimed to be) situations where these pointers have been applied, and described what really happened in those situations. These pointers are nothing magic and pretty forehead-slap-obvious, once you read about them. One of the on-going themes in the book is "be hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise," almost to the point of it being a mantra. The only gotcha is, that you can't fake it. I mean, even if you have the ability to fake it, it doesn't count. You really need to truly mean it, sincerely. Faking praises is just synonymous to ass-kissing.
Much of the book makes perfect common sense. If you are polite, people will like you more than if you were an asshole about stuff. If you smile, people are less hostile against you. If you excuse yourself, people tend to excuse you. Etc. One thing that I thought about is that this book does not guard you from assholes, and almost assumes that people you interact with are civilized or even half decent human beings. If you say to your busy waiter in a busy restaurant "Excuse me. I hate to disturb you, seeing you are busy and all, but my soup is cold, and I wonder if you could heat it up for me" and instead of her being sorry for the mishap and returning promptly with the heated soup, she would just say "fuck you, sit the fuck down, eat your damn soup, you fucking whiner", there's nothing the book does for you.
And herein lies the twist. I'm sure that this book has exactly the effect as Carnegie thought it having in countries like, say, the US. But I live in Finland. Let me explain: I worked as a clerk in a computer hardware retail store, so I have seen my share of customers. As we sold, shall we say, high end hardware, when it comes to people buying computer hardware, our customer base was certainly more pleasant to deal with than the average. But still, when the occasional foreign customer walked into the store, the day was saved. No exceptions. Every single foreign customer more pleasant to deal with, than the best of our Finnish customers.
So, my point is, Finns (and, therefore, undoubtedly people from other cultures as well) might not understand the minute details of the messages given as per the book the way Carnegie has thought about it. I can easily think that if I was "hearty in my approbation" and especially if i was "lavish in my praise", people here would think I would condescend to them, patronize them. If people are nice to you for no apparent reason around here, they get suspicious. "What do you mean 'I look handsome today'? I was ugly yesterday, huh?"
The book is still interesting, and I find practical psychology very interesting. I just need to figure out how to apply it in a culture inherently hostile towards friendliness. Recommended read, if you want to become that much of a better person, while getting personal gain out of it too.
Next book (less off-topic): Don't Make Me Think
by Steve Krug.While the previous book was originally written in 1937 and hasn't aged a bit, this book was originally written just before the dotcom bubble burst. While I read the second edition, published in 2005, much of the contents are from the original web1.0 era, with only three chapters compressed into one, and a few additional chapters. All examples are almost 10 years old, so the book looks outdated. But it only looks that.
The examples might be 10 years old, and while indeed current websites might be more interesting to dissect apart, it is not necessary. The point of this book doesn't rely on the newest web memes. Also unlike the former book, Don't Make Me Think is very easy to describe in only few words: It's a book for designing web sites and has one main message: don't make the user think. Everything should be stupid-obvious on your website. It's all about optimizing the user experience, avoiding to frustrate your visitor during the very short attention span she has. And the majority of it makes perfect sense.
There is a reason why Google is a perfect landing page for any browser. It's the same reason why iPods are dominating the PMP market. Everything you put into your website should be there for a specific reason, serving a specific purpose. Everything that looks clickable, should be clickable. Everything that's clickable, should look clickable. If the visitor wants to find the manual, you should be wise enough to provide the manual easily, and not try to sell "super deal discounts". And so on.
This is a must-book for all and every one that has anything to do with putting stuff up on the web. Hell, even if you don't buy the book, just remember "don't make me think", implement that in your site, and you are better off than many megacorporations' sites *cough*HP*cough*.
Naturally, this book should not either be taken as the holy bible. This is just one person's opinions. Sure, he has made a living out of usability testing websites, and he knows his stuff, but he still is just one person with an opinion. For example, I disagree that in a web store, each and every item should belong in exactly one category. If a product could belong in several categories, you should pick one of them, and stick with it, he implies. I, for one, think arbitrary tags are great, which, almost by definition, make items pop up in several contexts.
Then there's a more fundamental thing. It's not something I precisely disagree with, but I feel it needs to be said. This book advocates using web conventions. And I, too, think that web conventions are something that need to be taken into account. But the book also outright discourages you to go out and experiment with your design. Now, this book is all about making the site as effortless to use as possible, so I do understand where he's coming from, and it makes prefect sense; people know how to use the scrollbar, so don't force them in using Ctrl-Shift-Backspace-3-A to scroll down the page. I get that, and he has a point. But this, at the same time, makes the book uninteresting, perhaps even useless, for those people who want to do the bleeding edge, want to make the new GMail ("for godssakes, people expect the whole page to refresh when they open a new mail!") or Google Maps ("the users will never figure out that you can actually drag on a canvas. Use the traditional directional arrow navigation buttons instead").
The book will give you a complete tour around the safe comfort zone of proven site elements. If you follow the book precisely, I'm sure you will produce a website that works very well, is pleasant to use, and keeps the visitor's interest. But you probably won't get to introduce the next web convention, either.
The third book, another management book: Managing Humans
by Michael Lopp, aka. Rands.Out of the three management books I've read (Joel on Software
, Peopleware and this one), I must confess, this is the best of them.Peopleware was very informative, credible and authoritative, but utterly useless for me as a non-manager. Joel on Software got me to understand the workings of a manager, what they do, how to interact with them, what to expect of them, and other more down-to-earth aspects of managers. Managing Humans is even more so.
As Joel on Software, Managing Humans is a compilation of articles from a blog. I haven't followed Rands in Repose so much that I could say whether everything is out of the blog, or if there is original text included too. But that doesn't matter. The book is excellently written, and there's really only one part that gives away the fact, that not everything is written for that book specifically.
Lopp has the ability to write as if the reader was his best friend. While you know he knows his stuff, and you respect his experience, he cuts the corporate bullshit, and tells how things really are, in a way no-one else would dare to confess to be thinking. He knows that most people don't actually enjoy meetings. He recognizes the existence of managementese, a modification of the language that sounds like real talk, but is nigh to unintelligible, and also feels ashamed of himself whenever he uses it.
He can play both sides of the board at the same time. First he describes a scenario in general, and then he goes inside each person's head present in that fictious setting. I stared in awe, when he described the Nerd in the Cave, a perfect description of my working environment, my mindset while at the computer and myself. He points out the (now) obvious existence of Incrementalists & Completionists (completionist here, hello!). I could go on and on.
If you work in a company, develop software, have a boss you want to understand, have a team to understand, or want to understand how you behave yourself, this is the book to have a look at. I guarantee that you will find yourself inside in more variants than you previously thought possible. And don't be scared, even this book is a management book. It's only partly so, and there's a whole chapter on being a normal employee. After all, managers all have managers of their own, and in the end of the day, we all come to work and leave work (sooner and later, probably respectively).
As a quick bonus, I'm in the progress of reading Made to Stick
by Chip and Dan Heath.I'm not going to give even a micro review about this book, as I haven't yet completed it, and more because I started reading on it too long ago to remember detailed points about it. But, all in all, it's a book about how to make your points more memorable; if you have something to say, how to make people remember it better and longer.
This, too, has to do with practical psychology, and relates to both How To Win Friends and Don't Make Me Think. These three books actually overlap each other in some certain ways, and say the same things with different words and examples. For example, one statement that all three books make is the fact that your target audience (be it your friend, your website visitor or presentation listener) does not really care about what you care. They care about what they care. They are not interested in what you are interested in. They interest themselves in their own interests.
Anyhow: A book that I can recommend to anyone who makes a pitch, a presentation or gives any kind of information that you want people to remember even after the immediate moment they heard it.
I could've done separate posts for each book. But I couldn't be bothered.
Oh, and nothing new in the lightern front. It's still in a standstill. Our wedding preparations are all behind us, we're back from our honeymoon, but we now have an apartment that needs a monthful-and-then-some of fixing.
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