My good friends at HiiDef just launched a new app that has been in beta for awhile, Flavors.me. This is an excellent tool that has a great, simple, and usable design.

What’s the value preposition of Flavors.me? It’s to unify your various “online identities” into a single, dynamic, automatically-updated, and elegant website.

What do I mean by that? OK — so, like most people on the web, you spread public information about yourself in multiple places. You might run one or two blogs (personal and work?). You might have a Facebook account, a Twitter account. You may share your favorite books at GoodReads, your favorite movies at Netflix, and your favorite music on Last.fm.

Flavors.me lets you take all that information and put it together in a single website to serve as your “online identity”. All your publicly shared information, aggregated in one place, and displayed beautifully.

I’ve been running a Flavors.me site for some time that you can see here: http://flavors.me/pixelmonkey

Now, that’s the end product. All the content gets pulled dynamically from your various online feeds. The real magic with Flavors.me is how easy it is to get there. You can drastically change the look and feel of this site using a dynamic, “WYSIWYG” interface. You can do one or two clicks to add a service, reorder it, rename it. Another couple of clicks and you change font sizes, colors, and even the overall layout.

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I recently re-read Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts. I have been writing more and more JavaScript lately, especially object-oriented JavaScript plugging into existing frameworks. Re-reading the book has definitely been a useful exercise — I think when I first read it approximately 6 months ago, I didn’t fully understand it. But now, I do.

I also found it very interesting to hear Crockford wax poetic about the virtue of simplicity in all forms of software design. The following passage concludes the book.

When I started thinking about this[...], I wanted to take the subset idea further, to show how to take an existing [product] and make significant improvements to it by making no changes except to exclude the low-value features.

We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to consumers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce than designs that assemble long lists of features.

Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. The more features there are, the more likely one will develop problems or will interact badly with another. In software systems, there is a storage cost, which was becoming negligible, but in mobile applications is becoming significant again. There are ascending performance costs because Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to batteries.

Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual, increasing training costs. Features that offer value to a minority of users impose a cost on all users. So, in designing products[...], we want to get the core features—the good parts—right because that is where we create most of the value.

We all find the good parts in the products that we use. We value simplicity, and when simplicity isn’t offered to us, we make it ourselves. My microwave oven has tons of features, but the only ones I use are cook and the clock. And setting the clock is a struggle. We cope with the complexity of feature-driven design by finding and sticking with the good parts.

It would be nice if products[...] were designed to have only good parts.

I removed direct references to the main subject of Crockford’s discussion — namely, the JavaScript language itself. The truth is, this advice is much more valuable for the design of all software products. Perhaps one day someone will write the much needed book, Startups: The Good Parts.

I’ll start off this post with a somewhat controversial claim: I invented Dropbox.

I’ll show why this claim doesn’t matter later, but for now, I’ll assure you that it’s true.

How many of you out there use Dropbox? If you don’t, you should — it’s an excellent tool. In its free version, it provides you with 2GB of storage “in the cloud”, using a new kind of folder called a “Dropbox”. What distinguishes a Dropbox from other folders on your computer? The following:

• Every file put in your Dropbox is automatically (and securely) uploaded to Dropbox’s servers, ensuring you have an offsite backup of all data therein.
• Multiple computers can gain access to a Dropbox, ensuring files are automatically synchronized across computers without having to use complication version control systems.
• All files in your Dropbox are versioned, ensuring you can always recover an older version of a file in case you accidentally overwrite a good version.

Dropbox is supported on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and now even has mobile applications, as well. Further, I have a special place in my heart for this service because I started using it almost 2 years ago, and it has acted as a file sharing and project management tool for my own startup’s internal operations at Parse.ly. I was therefore more than ecstatic to discover that this excellent tool and its smart founders had also made it through all of the hurdles necessary to get an early-stage company the financing it needs: they’ve raised over $7 million in financing and have over 3 million users.

But there is another reason I absolutely love Dropbox: because it was my idea. I invented it.

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I recently did some web design work in collaboration with a graphic designer. She introduced me to what has become my latest favorite piece of CSS code: 960.gs.

960.gs is a CSS grid framework, similar in spirit to Blueprint CSS and YUI Grid. However, 960.gs is at once more minimalist than these approaches, and more thorough.

The author has a detailed blog post explaining his motivations for working on 960.gs, so I won’t rehash each of those. Instead, I’ll just dive into what I liked about it.

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A few days ago, I got a call from my girlfriend, Olivia. I was so deep in working on my startup, Parse.ly, that I hadn’t checked my bank account statements in several weeks. We just went into private beta last Thursday, after DreamIt Demo Day. She noticed some suspicious charges, and so I looked into them. Indeed, it looked like I had been a victim of fraud: there were three charges that clearly was not me.

I immediately called Chase Customer Service. In order to confirm the details about my account, the representative needed me to identify the fraudulent charges, but also identify charges that were actually valid. For this latter bit, I needed to identify the time/place of a specific transaction. This card was mostly used for online auto bill payments, so this turned out to be impossible for any of my last 20 valid payments. Yet the customer service rep insisted that I name a time and place. I told her, “The time and place was whenever the server for this system decided to automatically bill my account. I don’t know where their server is, I don’t know what time their cron jobs run.”

“Cron jobs?” she said.

Right, I had been hanging around techies at DreamIt Ventures for too long. “Listen, the transaction didn’t take place physically, it took place digitally. I can identify one transaction, which is about a month old, where I actually used the card in-person to buy something.” She finally understood and let me move on.

Burak from Trendsta said he felt bad for me, for how patient I had to be with this person. But that was the least of it. This little technical misunderstanding was nothing compared to what followed.

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I attended PyCon 2009 this year, which was a whole lot of fun. Quite a few people have asked me which talks I liked, so I decided to put together my “top 5 talks” list, in ranked order:

1. A Whirlwind Excursion through Writing a C Extension. This talk by Ned Batchelder (author of coverage.py and cog) shows that you can write a Python C extension module in under 20 minutes. This is my top talk because I never thought that my skills in C would be so directly useful in writing Python applications. Considering how damn easy it is to write a basic C extension module, I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason I ever write C code again is to implement some Python functions or types in C. Truly the best of both worlds!
2. Reinteract: a better way to interact with Python. Owen Taylor (of GNOME/GTK+ fame) has spent some time over the last few months building a better Python shell. Specifically, it’s a lightweight shell that is meant to be a prototyping or “worksheet” environment a la Matlab, Mathematica, or Maple. Except, you’re running and re-evaluating Python code. It even supports things like in-line graph plotting, but I’ve already used it to experiment with Python web services API. Any Python programmer who has been frustrated with IPython before should check out Reinteract.
3. Easy AI with Python. This talk might have gotten the #1 slot for most interesting, but not the #1 slot overall because it seems like this talk has been given at a lot of conferences (not just PyCon) over the last few years. This talk introduces some complex AI topics in a very short time frame, and in a very intuitive way. For me, the neural networks example with Jets and Sharks was particularly impressive. Raymond Hettinger is a great presenter, and if you have some time you should definitely check out his recipes on ActiveState’s Python Cookbook and his How-to Guide for Descriptors.
4. Abstraction as Leverage. A talk by one of my favorite Python authors, Alex Martelli (who wrote the best book on Python on the market, Python in a Nutshell), this talk isn’t so much about Python as it is about software engineering overall. But it’s thought-provoking as his talks usually are.
5. Class Decorators: Radically Simple. The presenter is the author of the Class Decorators PEP, Jack Diederich. If you like decorators and you are curious about metaclasses, you’ll love class decorators.

Feel free to share your favorites!

I am teaching a technical course on the popular and ubiquitous version control system, Subversion, this Monday. I thought it might be fun to give my class a little “extra credit” reading from the O’Reilly book, Beautiful Code. In it, one of the original authors of Subversion, Karl Fogel, shares what he considers to be the most beautiful internal design within the codebase: the SVN delta editor. Though this API is not directly used in doing Subversion development, I thought it might be cool for students to have a deeper understanding of the thought that went into SVN’s codebase. But when trying to print up some copies of the chapter for the class, I got more than I bargained for…

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I just got back from San Francisco. This wasn’t my first time to the west coast, but it was my first time to Northern California. Overall, I had an amazing time.
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There is an article on eWeek I encountered via del.icio.us called “The Dilbertization of IT.” Though it says a lot of stuff most IT workers already know (that in many places, the “creative” work is being de-emphasized while “firefighting” or “maintainence” is emphasized), the more important thing to point out is the cause of this Dilbertization. I found an insightful comment which points to some of them.

Dilbert’s pointy-headed managers are everywhere. In my current Fortune 100 company, virtually none of the managers with any authority have ANY IT development background. They manage entirely by cost and project plan – ignoring any and all input from those developers who actually have a successful track record.

I can’t say this is true in my team, at my company, but I have certainly heard it from a lot of my IT friends. Also, I have an acquaintence who is an IT Project Manager who thinks that development is “easy work” and that most software developers are just “lazy”, which is why projects end up behind schedule. I think many innumerate IT managers share this opinion, and this can lead to problems, low morale, and resentment.

Metacity (the window manager for GNOME) has this annoying and ugly minimize animation that looks like a bunch of cascading rectangles flying at your taskbar. I’ve always hated it, but dealt with it for awhile.

Today, I did some digging on the Metacity bugzilla to see if it was fixed, and found this bug.

Over the course of 3.5 years, this bug has sat on the bugzilla, and still isn’t satisfactorily resolved. There is now a reduced_resources flag in gconf, but this flag only disables the minimize animation at the expense of forcing you to use an ugly wireframe window dragging animation. (Complete, utter insanity.)

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