Archives for September 2015

Going to a conference? Don’t waste your time

September 28, 2015 Leave a Comment

If I could go back in time I would have ample opportunity to fix some mistakes (but I would be scared to do so, else who knows what butterfly side effects there would be!) One general change I would make is how I spend time before, during, and after a conference that I went to.

I wasted a lot of time at conferences. It isn’t that they were a waste of time at all, but I could have gotten a lot more out of them if I handled things differently.

The biggest mistake I would make is how I thought of a “talk”. I would often sit there and take notes. Maybe I would blog about the talk. If you asked me anything about those talks today though, have I retained much? I doubt it.

I think you should look at these talks as inspiration to explore. I would now focus on really listening, and taking the odd note on topics that I want to go deeper on later. Later on I would then elaborate on these notes, create some tasks to explore, and maybe put some questions and answers into my spaced repetition system for anything that I actually want to retain and consolidate from short term to durable long term memory.

As you weed through the content, when there is something of interest expect to really put in some time to dig!

The same can be said for time outside of the presentations. The hallway track has always been an important one for me at conferences as I learn so much for talking to other practitioners about the craft. There is so much value in going deep on a topic and comparing experiences. Once again though, when something potentially fruitful comes about, make sure to note it and revisit later to go deep on.

Present to retain

I have given a few presentations in my time (in the thousands at this point) and I feel a bit bad about them now. Some of the high level “keynote” style ones with Ben were very much in the “inspiration” style. I am proud of some of those, especially one talk that we both knew so well that we had a period of delivery where a randomizer would BEEP, and the person who hadn’t been talking had to instantly take over, even if mid sentence. It kept us on our toes, made each talk different, and I hope was a bit of fun for the crowd?

I am cheesed off about the talks where I went deep and was trying to really get a lot of concepts across. I wish that I would have structured these differently, to help the group be set to retain. For example, I would get more questions going before the content was delivered to get them thinking, and I would make sure that everyone got to walk away with a series of questions. We vilify “tests” these days as they have been so abused as assessment tools, but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water and ignore how amazing they are as learning tools.

On the coding side I should have not just handed out questions, but also unit tests that are all red allowing you to work through them to turn as many green as possible. I have often dreamed about creating a ton of these for popular open source frameworks. I always enjoy finding unit tests as they can be great examples of how to use an API, since that is what they are often doing!

Beyond

Conferences and presentations are just the beginning. I now think about all of the articles, books, and podcasts that I have consumed but didn’t put the effort in to retain information that I cared too. The research that has been done on learning over the last twenty years makes past truth into myths. Although we are stuck with a paradox where the hard work of real learning doesn’t feel like you are learning as well as the easy work of your short term memory kicking into gear, we have efficient systems that beat rote repetition. I have been excited to see these work, and at least feel good that my kids won’t have to go through brute force time sinks that I did.

As I look at my calendar and see an upcoming conference, I hope to heed my own advice this time around. I will spend some time before hand on what I hope to get out of it: What topics do I want to explore and why? Who do I want to see? And after the fact I will add any knowledge any further investigations into my system to keep building for life long learning.

Have you explored any new learning strategies recently?

The Principles of Cross Platform Development

September 21, 2015 Leave a Comment

When you said “hybrid” a couple years back, most engineers would assume you were talking about “using a WebView in your native mobile app, maybe with PhoneGap”.

Fast forward to today and you see attention on a whole swath of solutions that try to deal with the fact that our customers want to use our experiences on a variety of platforms, and this is only exploding. Gone are the days where Windows, or The Web Browser, were near-monopoly’s. Now we not only have multiple operating systems, these operating systems come to us from very different types of computing platforms and interfaces: hand held, laptop, desktop, tv, watch, anything-that-talks-to-a-network. That bar for software quality has also been raised, especially on the user experience side, but we have finite resources for product development; hence the desire to get leverage from engineering (as well as design and other areas).

You can quickly start a religious war on the topic, with the two extremes being “everything must be native!” on the one side, and “leverage all the codez!” on the other. In practice there is a huge spectrum of leverage, and you can try to get it in a large variety of ways (e.g. “I will write everything in JavaScript and have it magically run anywhere!”)

I have seen people make choices based too much on bias and looking at the wrong level of abstraction to make the decision, so I have tried to define the principles of cross platform development.

Always Understand The Platforms

There are a legion of Web developers, many of whom would love to keep hacking on Web technology and ignore that iOS and Android stuff. There are managers who see their legions and want to choose solutions that can use them productively. It is smart to get people engaged and productive, but it is wrong to ignore the platform affordances, which will lead you to a destiny of a poor product for your users.

If you are developing a product for iOS, the team should have a deep understanding of the platform and its capabilities. Once you understand the platform, your users, and your products you can marry them all together for the best experience possible.

Don’t build the same experience for mobile and desktop

It isn’t enough to make your desktop web site “responsive”, throw some display:none on your Web app, and walk away for a beer. The mobile experience may be very different than your desktop one. When building out the mobile applications for Walmart we focused much more on the in-store use cases. No one walks into the store with their laptop after all. This meant that the mobile applications were vastly different to the mobile website, which was more focused on eCommerce. This doesn’t mean we weren’t able to get leverage, we were (some parts of the mobile app, the eCommerce parts, mirror nicely!)

The User Experience has to be responsive

If a WebView isn’t up to snuff then I don’t care how many web developers you have, you shouldn’t be using the WebView for the main UI of the application. This normally means that the view layer should render natively, as that is what gives you the right level of responsiveness. This doesn’t mean that you can’t power the view tier in a leveraged manner though. You could have certain logic in JavaScript that powers a native UI. React Native does this very well in the React world, but there are many more ways to do this too.

Your architecture should be flexible and future proof

Where is the escape hatch? What if that one piece of the UI isn’t fast enough, is there a way to get closer to the metal? How hard is it to drop down to that level to make it happen? Putting a native component into a WebView isn’t easy for example.

If iOS X comes out and has some crazy new functionality can you easily incorporate that into your application? Is there a nice abstraction to be able to do this? E.g. <MyComponent> does the right thing, but a very different thing on iOS, Android, and Web.

Be able to test as much as you can

When talking to an ex-Facebooker recently he claimed that the reason why Facebook took off to the races was deltoid, their multi-varient testing platform. This enabled a huge number of experiments to be run concurrently, which has huge changes throughout the product and organization. You can go from hypothesis to data and back again quickly. Rather than argue forever about a feature, just get it out there and see. The Web platform is fantastic at allowing these tests, so what is your strategy for running them on mobile? The app that you ship in the app store is a platform to run your experiences. That platform should have a configuration system, A/B testing system, and a great analytics system that all work together as a three legged stool.

Pragmatic Productivity

Who will be building and maintaining this application?

You can’t blindly do an analysis without looking at the staff, and potential staff, who will be working on the applications. Even if the current shape of the team isn’t the right balance (e.g. a ton of Web talent but less mobile talent) that doesn’t mean that you should fully discount a set of solutions though. You need a plan, which can include outside talent, training, and pairing up resources.

Chances are you will have some people who deeply know the domain at hand, and others that deeply know a platform. If you can get them working well together you can set yourself up for a great future. You don’t want a fantastic native experience that offers a ridiculous subset of features, and you don’t want every feature served up without a thought of the platform.

This also shows that a small team of top notch developers working on a rather small problem may correctly choose a very different engineering approach compared to a hugely complex service with a very large team. There is a good chance that the large team could use a platform that supports multiple ways to integrate with the main app (if there is one).

Tooling: React and RoboVM

Along with the people, you have the tooling and entire development process to look at. Recently I have been looking at two interesting choices to get some leverage. React Native has finally shown up with Android support (still early I know) and a lot of excitement. It is a great choice that trades off Web knowledge with view tier performance. You still need to know how iOS handles layout, and the services and capabilities available to you (as with Android), and that is a good thing! React is also being used as a general view on top of various bindings (such as Quip’s approach on top of shared C++).

RoboVM offers something very differently, but also gives you great leverage without giving up on the platform capabilities. Although you write your code using Java, the view code is split up for iOS and Android. On Android you are just writing a Plain Old Android App, and on iOS you are going through RoboVM. This means that your [Objective kindaRemindsYouOf:C] is Java-like instead (again: you need to know how iOS works!). Some will poo poo this: “I don’t like Java!”, or “Ugh if I am doing iOS I just want to write in Objective-C or Swift!” Well, you can actually do that. You can share the Java business logic code and call into it from your iOS application, so you can choose how far you want to go (escape hatch++). If you have a fantastic Android developer, they can jump and be up to speed pretty quickly (aside from learning iOS which isn’t trivial) and then they can have one IDE open that is working across the entire codebase of both apps and shared code.

Google Inbox uses another strategy where Java offers shared code, using GWT to get to the Web and j2objc to get to iOS. Everyone is hybridizing in different ways in an effort to get some code leverage!

There are trade offs everywhere you look. If you feel like you are getting away with a solution that has no trade offs maybe take another peak. The good news is, just as there isn’t a silver bullet, there also isn’t One True Way. Some times you need to make a decision and charge ahead.

What are the core principles that you look for?

Maybe we should teach cooking before coding?

September 17, 2015 Leave a Comment

There is a strong push to get computer science into schools. We need engineers, stat. Computing is a growing industry and we expect it to continue to grow. Doesn’t it make sense to get kids into coding as soon as possible?

I love the vision, and I have been teaching computing in various forms to my own kids. I think that we have a long way to go on the implementations though, and I am keen to see what systems we will put in place for these kids.

Knowing computer science is a great skill to invest in, as are the side effects around creativity and empowerment when you make something. The best teaching doesn’t silo a topic, but rather brings a context and tie in a variety of learning. This strengthens the understanding and allows multiple avenues to trigger each other.

How about cooking?

What if there is something else that has similar side effects and is also very practical? A skill that everyone will hopefully use in their life (unless we seed that role to delivery services and cooking professionals…. which I hope isn’t the future!)?

Cooking is a great example that is a fantastic learning tool. I was talking to a neighborhood friend who had just had a fantastic experience with his daughter taking a class. He explained the positives:

The kids can be treated as full adults from day one
They use the same tools (“wooah we get to use knives and fire!”)
The “hello world” project does something useful. You can eat it!
The feedback is clear (does it taste and/or look good?)
You can start doing quickly, and can gain knowledge over time
You work in a team, with a concrete outcome
You can teach adjacent topics easily (“Why do we put salt in the water? Oh! that changes the boiling point….”)
God forbid we teach nutrition to our youth!
It is incredibly hands on, with all senses being used (great for learning!)
You can be really proud of your work
You make a meal at home and you are a hero!
You can run experiments easily
You can add your own personality
There is a fantastic learning curve where you can progress but each step of the way is useful
Everyone has a lab at home (the kitchen).

We do need more engineers and I understand why leading VCs, entrepreneurs, and CEOs of tech companies in New York were pushing for this. I long for a revolution in the education system that offers a step change in learning experience.

For loops?

We need to iterate quickly on what we actually teach our kids, and what tools do we use. I cringe a little when I see the basics of loops and conditionals. Is that the best way to go about this?

I have had the best success when someone wants to make something, and they what they learn is a necessary evil to get that thing done. Having my 9 year old sit down and go through basic programming was OK, but get him talking about the mod that he could make for Minecraft and his eyes lit up!

“Wait, I could do that??”

Video games are probably a pretty darn good vector for this (one of many). Unreal engine has tools that keep getting easier. There are various research projects out there such as Kodu and Project Spark from Microsoft.

Building a rich curriculum is really tough, and anyone who is working away on that has my utmost respect.

Before I write my next bit of code though, I should probably make myself a meal. Unfortunately though, I never had “home economics” in my school. At this point, I wish I could swap some of my other classes for these!