Thursday, April 26, 2012
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I can certainly appreciate the need to ship products and provide value to your customers, but often this is at odds with doing quality work. Sometimes that quality is never, ever seen by the customer. All they see is a shiny interface and it does what it is expected to do. But peel back the facade and look at the inner workings of the software and it is just plain ugly. In my experience this is often the case because of a rushed schedule or poor technical design--and in many cases a combination of the two. But these two problems share a common issue: 'Just get it working.'
This attitude is very, very dangerous. You may get away with passing all the functional tests and you may provide value. But for the follow up changes that are made, you exponentially increase the complexity and chance of messing something up. Because the follow-on projects will invariable have the same approach, making even the smallest changes to the code become drawn out and costly affairs. This is a terrible way to develop software.
The balancing act is very precarious: developers need good requirement from their business partners, as well as an understood vision of the product itself. On the other hand, developers need to be skillful in their craft to interpret those requirements and vision to create a solution that solves the business problem at hand in a timely manner. It takes great effort and execution from both sides.
But any time those words 'just get it working' are uttered ought to be a tell that something is very seriously wrong.
Sunday, April 08, 2012
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A
retweet of a video landed in my Twitter feed this evening and while it was extremely hilarious, it was also very thought provoking:
It's very campy, and was intended to be, but what gets me is that doing a nice, high quality parody like this would have been very difficult to pull off when the Titanic originally debuted 15 years ago. But even worse, how would have its creators distributed it? The commoditization of technology has not only allowed people to produce some really interesting (let alone convincing!) content, but it has created a channel through which it can really gain an audience. There was a time when there was no YouTube, no Twitter, no Facebook to allow something like this to really garner an audience.
In sum: as an audience we are not only consumers of the media at our disposal, we're increasingly the creators of it, too. And I think that is awesome.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
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Today someone asked me a very curious quesiton: "Is computer science still worth going into?" This was asked within the context of choosing between computer engineering (think electrical engineering) and computer science. Whithout pause, this person then proceeded to ask me if I felt secure in my field.
Without hesitation I responded that software development will be in strong demand for a long time to come. But I am not so blind to the future that this couldn't change, either. I told him that given my educational and entrpreneural background, I felt confident that I could completely change my career and find a way to deliver value and make a living, no matter what I ended up doing.
Economics 101: Given that we are creatures of insaitiable demand, opportunity abounds for people to provide value in the economic system. In this situation, being able to 'pivot' and 'adapt' sound like buzzwords for a startup, but they are even more applicable for individuals seeking to eek out a living. In all of the history of the Earth, there hasn't been a time like the one we live in where so much opportunity exists. With the advent of things like the Internet, there is vast amounts of information and opportunity for learning and networking. It amazes me how in this country we limit our ways of thinking and growing, allowing others in competing countries to outmanuver and outsmart us with the very tools we crafted here in the United States. For those that are troubled by rising gas prices, social upheaval, and the 1-percenters, know this: you are born in an age where there are so few excuses not to excel, not to find a way to provide value, and make it in this world. It is not easy, it is not painless, and it does require hard work.
If there was one piece of advice I could give to those wondering about their future and what they should study: Don't frame your life in terms of what your career is (or is not), but rather cultivate a mindset of arming yourself with the tools you have at your disposable for the purposes of creating value. Ultimately, that's what the economic system wants: value. This inherently means that you will be constantly learning, always. Fickle creatures, we are: Our tastes and desires as individuals and in the aggregate are constantly shifting, meaning the ways and means of delivering value will change as well. Success in this world doesn't necessarily depend on what you're doing right now, but what you're working yourself up to do in the future.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
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I'm in the hard-core development phase of a new project that I hope to have finished in the next couple of weeks, but sometimes you have to take a break from the technical side and experiment with enriching the application. Animation are one of the ways in which you can take an app and really put some serious polish on it. Below are a series of demos that will be incorporated into my project:
Flock of Birds:
This animation includes several elements, a flock of birds, that get triggered when you tap on them, or when you tap on the power lines:
Butterfly:
This animation is a little more complex because it involves animating the butterfly's wings in a flapping motion. The complixity increases when you tap on it and it 'flies' to a random location on the screen, while dodging and weaving along the way:
Subtle Effects Using Clouds:
Not all animations have to be flashy or attention grabbing. Adding a subtle animation effect can greatly enhance a scene, especially when users stumble upon them and 'discover' them:
Monday, February 06, 2012
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Late last month I buckled down and produced a set of training material on iOS. Enjoy! (BTW, I recorded them in HD, so make sure you go fullscreen to get the best effect!)