Scott Porad

I just gave someone admin privileges to one of our Cheezburger systems.  Whenever I grant someone admin privileges to one system or another, I always give them this little speech:

You’ve been given the power, now keep these two things in mind:

1.  Play nicely with others.

2.  Think before you type.

We all have admin privileges in our own lives, so in general, I think these are just good words to live by.

P.S.  I can’t take credit for this speech: it was a given to me by a sys admin named Trey Valenta way back in the olden times.

I spent most of Friday and Saturday at Gnomedex 9.0–the most recent version of Chris Pirillo’s conference about the intersection of technology and humanity.  In my view, there are two reasons to attend an industry conference, regardless of industry:

1. To gain some practical skills or information.  For example, attending a training or sales conference.
2. To develop relationships with industry peers.

Without a doubt, Gnomedex is #2.  There were many excellent sessions, but what I value most from the experience is the people I met, and the exchange of ideas.

I’ve come to understand in a more personal way the age-old axiom that “it’s not what you know, but who you know”.  At a certain point, business is not a meritocracy–there are lots of smart people with good ideas.  It’s the relationships you have, and the ability to enlist others to support you, that separates the good ideas from the successful ideas.

Most companies don’t encourage their employees to attend industry conferences.  I would encourage you to make an effort to do so, even if you have to pay your own way.  The connections made at events like Gnomedex are worth every penny of the price of admission.

The line below is a lesson one of my mentors taught me long ago:

Software is simply a reflection of the people and processes that created it.

If you make a version 1.0 that does not satisfy customers, then don’t throw it out and start working on version 1.0′ because the same people and processes are going to end up with the same product.  Instead, re-engineer your processes and get your people in the right place, then iterate to version 1.1.

In other words, if you have a machine that makes widgets, why would you expect the new widgets to be different if you don’t rewire the guts of the machine?

I disagree with Steve Gillmor’s recent essay, Rest in Peace, RSS, that declares RSS is dead.  There, I said it.

Now, it’s scary to say that because Steve Gillmor is a legendary tech journalist whom I respect tremendously.  For me to even assume that I know 1/10th of what Steve Gillmore knows in his pinky finger is audacious.  Nonetheless, I think he misses the mark.

To summarize, Steve says that he’s completely abandoned his RSS Reader (Google Reader) and now gets his information entirely from Twitter.  In short, this is the money line:

Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content.

Well, yes, that is correct: Twitter is currently the best early warning system for new content.  Once upon a time, RSS played that role, but Twitter is faster at getting it out there now.

However, in my view, to say that RSS is dead is misunderstanding the inherent value of RSS.  First, with RSS I don’t miss anything because it’s all there in my reader.  With Twitter, if a tweet with a link to a blog post flows by while I’m out of town, then I’ve missed it.  Second, Twitter doesn’t push actual content, it pushes headlines and sound-bites.

In my mind, here’s the analogy: Twitter is to RSS as the newspaper is to news magazines.  In other words, Twitter is to RSS as The New York Times is to The New Yorker.[1] I subscribe to both (seriously), but value them for different reasons.  I will miss a story or two (or two hundred!) unless I read the NYT religiously every day, and the stories will become dated.  On the other hand, I pretty much catch every story in The New Yorker and they are far less perishable.

All that being said, Steve is right that RSS is no longer the early warning system for new content.  However, that doesn’t mean you should abandon RSS–not all content is about immediacy.

RSS and Twitter are just tools for consuming information, and what’s important is to use those tools appropriately.  In fact, I think you will be making a mistake if you do abandon RSS because there is plenty of great information that is just as valuable tomorrow as it was today.

You should sign up for my RSS feed which you can do by clicking here.  Subscribing to my RSS feed will save you time by pushing my blog directly to you, and ensure that you don’t miss anything important.

[1] – Perhaps a more apt analogy would be that Twitter is to RSS as network TV evening news is to The New Yorker

Below is a recently popular video from Google that interviews people in Times Square.  The interviewer asks a variety of very simple questions about the Internet and receives corresponding variety of very, very wrong answers in repsonse.  For example, “What is a browser?”  Among people who work with the web and computers, the typical response is to think, “gee, what a bunch of idiots”.

But, I think that’s missing the point: never underestimate how much you know.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you work with the Internet professionally and understanding the notion of a “browser” is less than Internet 101 to you.  But, you have to remember that compared to the average bear, you’re at least five standard deviations away in understanding of the Internet.

I am reminded of a conversation we were having in the office a few weeks ago.  Under discussion was the design of a new image gallery, and the debate was over whether or not each picture needed a link that said “select” beneath it.  One side said that it’s obvious that you need to simply click a picture to select it, and seeing 25 “select” links on the page looks bad.   The other side replied that even though it looks less streamline, we can’t overestimate our users, so we need a clear call to action.

I sided with the later group, and I call this the “lead a horse to water” school of web design.  For most users, you need to put the action right in their face in order for them to see it.  Especially, for broadly based consumer sites, where the user is far less skilled than you, as an Internet Professional, can imagine.

That’s not a knock on users.  I love users; they feed my family.  Rather, it’s a compliment to you: the detail and minutiae that you have in the dirt under your the fingernail on your pinky finger is greater than the casual web user has in their whole lifetimes.  I’m not saying they’re dumb, just that you’re very experienced.

Just how much you know is something very important to keep in mind when designing your product.  Remember that, and you’ll go a long way.

In my yard there are two beautiful, tall pine trees that drop what seem to be an infinite number of pine cones.  So, on Saturday I headed out with my 7-year-old son to rake them and, in the process, learned some things about web and software development.

The first thing to know is that we moved to this house last summer from a postage stamp sized yard in the city.  Until now my son didn’t have experience raking anything more than about 10 square feet of lawn.  As he got going with enthusiasm, he basically just was just moving the cones around, sloshing them to-and-fro.  It was clear that he needed a little coaching.

Lesson #1: The Master Pile

First, I explained to him that we needed to make one big pile…The Master Pile.  We would rake all the pine cones into this pile, then we’d pick up the pile and put it into the yard waste bin.  The point of this lesson was that we needed a plan as a foundation for our project.  The same thing goes for any web or software project—you need a plan, a roadmap, a guide.

This bit of guidance worked well because it directed his efforts in one direction, but there were still issues.  He was raking a little bit here, a little bit there, but it didn’t seem like anything was actually getting done.

Lesson #2: The Clean Area

After he mastered The Master Pile, I explained to pick one small section, no bigger than 3 or 4 feet square, and get that area completely raked until it was clean of pine cones.  That would be The Clean Area.

Once he did that, which only took a few moments, I asked if it felt good to see that there was one part of the yard complete.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Okay, well, now pick another few feet next to it and make it bigger.  Keep on trying to make your Clean Area bigger and bigger.”

The lesson here was that when working on a project, you need to feel progress through small successes.  Success feels good, so set yourself up to have lots of it, even if they’re small.  When you’re having success, you’ll be having fun and want to keep on going.  Success is a drug, it’s addictive, so organize your project to get the biggest high possible.

But, it was still a big job.  Just because we had a plan, and we were having little successes along the way, doesn’t mean that it didn’t feel overwhelming still.  There were easily over a thousand pine cones.  How would we ever get this job done?!

Lesson #3: Focus on Progress

Building on the notion that success begets success, I had to relieve the overwhelming burden of what seemed like endless raking.  To do this, I worked at framing the project in positive a positive way.

“Dad, we’re never going to finish this.  Look at how many are left!”

“Oh, sure we are.  Look at how big our Clean Area is.  Instead of thinking about how much raking we have left, focus instead on how big our Clean Area has become.  Don’t think about what’s left.  Think about making the Clean Area as big as possible and we’ll be done in no time.”

The lesson here is obvious: focus on your success and progress, instead of the mountain ahead.  In the software or web development world, this means actually keeping a list somewhere of all the things that have been accomplished.

This is, in fact, how we do it on my team: we have an entire wall devoted to listing out all the things we’ve achieved and it just keeps on getting bigger and bigger and bigger to the point where it now dwarfs the list of stuff that we need to do.

All that said, I had never planned on having our yard raking job turn into a learning experience this weekend, but it did which made the job even more fun.  As they say, “once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right”.

James Avery at InfoZerk recently interviewed me for a podcast on Coder’s Life.  We talk mostly about technology, but if you’re interested in how we do things at I Can Has Cheezburger? then you will enjoy it.

The audio is embedded below, the podcast can be downloaded directly from by clicking this link.

[audio http://media.libsyn.com/media/coderslifepodcast/CodersLife-Episode1-ICHC.mp3]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download