Sliding Down

As some of you may have heard, Yahoo! will acquire Tumblr for a reported $1.1 billion. Neither Yahoo! or Tumblr have said anything official, but come Monday I’m sure we’ll hear something from them.

What I want to talk about, though, is the (young) Internet reportedly freaking out that Yahoo! has bought Tumblr. I think Wil Wheaton summed up the Internet’s sentiment the best:

I really hope Yahoo doesn’t fuck up Tumblr like it’s fucked up… well, every single thing it’s ever touched in the history of the universe.

Look, I get that Wil and everyone else throwing a fit is upset at the news because Yahoo! has historically not been a great social leader. They’ve come out with a lot of cool technology but none of it has been social in nature besides Yahoo Fantasy Sports (and Flickr, which they bought in 2005). In general, they haven’t done anything that would merit praise.

What people forget, though, is that Marissa Mayer is now calling the shots.

I think Hank Green had a pretty level-headed view of the whole thing. Reading his post was the first time I thought, “Hmm, maybe Yahoo! is a bad fit for Tumblr.” After that I realized that the brand “Yahoo!” isn’t what I’m resting my faith in, it’s Marissa Mayer. And since I know she used to be a Googler, this makes total sense to me.

A company is only as good as the people who are running it. We saw a bit of that realization when Steve Jobs passed away and Tim Cook took over, a guy we’re not totally confident in. But then you still have folks like Jony Ive who are also part of that company (and now in charge of software!) so you see why the company is still doing pretty well without Jobs. Companies with strong culture also do well, as long as the culture helps lend to their success (see IBM or Intel).

Also, running companies like Tumblr is hard, especially when you focus on users and product instead of monetization. It’s a free service so something will eventually have to be paid by the users — cash, personal information, ads, or sometimes a combination of all three. We’ve seen Google pull off ads reasonably well on its own services (as well as YouTube). While ads are not preferred, this is what happens with the “things are free on the Internet” model of doing business.

And even though Hank gives points to users on “when to abandon ship”, users won’t need those points. If they stop liking Tumblr and can find an alternative or live without it, then they will. Nothing’s locking them in.

What’s really driving this whole post, though, is my annoyance at the number of people complaining about things they don’t like about products they do not fully understand. Do you remember what it was like before Tumblr? Before Twitter, before Facebook, before Google? If you make the comparisons then to what’s going on now, you should hopefully come away with a few things. One is that hey, what’s out now is way better than what was out then, and two is that yes, we’ve sunk a crap-ton of money, time and smart people into improving those products and services.

Software is hard. Pushing things forward is hard. I’m really sick of hearing complaints about technology when the complainers don’t have anything useful to add to the conversation on advancing these technologies and making them better.

I’m spending the time right now to go through LinkedIn and add more people I know. Part of it is procrastination — from what, I’m not exactly sure — but the other part is to connect with a bunch of people I may even only kinda sorta know.

Recently I’ve been engaging in many exercises where I challenge the self-check of caring how I appear. Part of that is my mohawk experiment (photos currently on Facebook!) but it also involves simple things like sending a bunch of LinkedIn invites to people who may not remember me or don’t think it’s worth knowing me.

And that’s really not so bad, is it?

The goofy thing is that in order to even press the “Connect” button, I need to first evaluate whether I want to connect or not. Sometimes I worry so much about how I appear, I forget that I’m make the judgment call first.

Or maybe that’s it: I’m trying to make the judgment call first. I want control of my world. After all, that’s what wearing a mohawk up on the ‘L’ during the morning commute means: I live by my own rules. Even if those rules aren’t totally “real”, I still get a say in building that illusion.

It’s not an exact science, and I’m only starting to really internalize that. I grew up trying to put everything I knew into clean, distinct boxes. Now that I’ve spent a good portion of my life working as and under managers, dealing with insurance and cable companies, and working on teams ranging from super nerd to bug trainer, I’ve realized something important: life is organic.

Obviously that’s a true statement, but you know what I mean. It’s not a clear hierarchy or something you can map to a blueprint. In order to solve the really interesting, really challenging problems, you have to get creative, messy, and creatively messy.

I’m busybusybusy but there’s still some cool news to share. A new blogging platform called Ghost is being developed, something I’m excited to use and excited to develop for. In the past I really wanted to write a new blogging platform, something very similar to Ghost. Since they’ve already got the resources to go ahead and do it, I don’t feel the need to pursue that particular project anymore. :)

Schedule for the next few days is hectic. I’ll go ahead and give it to you like it’s an AIM profile and date myself in the process.

paramore / the great gatsby / american beer classic / mother’s day

I spent most of today working on #143 — my aforementioned “secret coding project” — and I can’t help but compare today’s work to a video game I tried to put out at the end of January for #1GAM. Here’s how today is different from back then:

There is no impending deadline
For #1GAM I tried to do my game as part of a game jam that ended that weekend. When I was trying to write the first level, I had no idea what I was doing and avoided doing it by spending way too much time on the start screen. Today for #143 I spent a lot of time on the landing page too, but not to avoid work. I’m using it to nail down how I want to brand my app, because ultimately that will be the voice I use to drive the project to completion.

I’m working with familiar technologies
I started #143 using Node.js and Express — great tools and fun to learn about, but not my bread and butter. A couple nights ago I switched over to Ruby on Rails and things have been phenomenal. I’m focused way more on creating a minimum viable product so I can dog-food right away.

Doing what I want to do, not what I should do
#1GAM was about putting out a game a month, a plan I adopted because I thought it would be a good idea and start me in the right direction. Turns out it wasn’t a good idea even though it could be good for others. What I need to succeed in the game industry isn’t a bunch of small games I have no passion for. What I need is a tool that can help me develop my ideas, keep me honest in my execution, and assure me that I am tracking the big picture.

So there, I guess you have it. :) In writing this blog post I was able to come up with my product goals for #143. Once it’s shiny enough to share, I’ll be sure to do a write-up. Until then I’ll keep coding away!

“Did your clippers break?”

Some assholes in a car just yelled that at me as I was crossing the street. Reminds me of an incident not too long ago in Champaign when someone yelled at me,

“Sweet beard, faggot!”

I try not to care too much about how I look, but these kinds of things still get to me, even if I know they “shouldn’t”. None of my family or friends or co-workers take pot-shots at how I look. I hold the same level of respect for them as well.

Maybe I’m unhappy because I realize there are still a lot of assholes in the world. I think it also scares me a bit because I’m putting myself out there and, because I look different, a bunch of strangers are ruffling their feathers at me.

Then again, I think that’s why I put myself out there in the first place. If I can’t be okay with just looking like I’m different, how I can I be comfortable being different? I’m training myself to get used to the idea of others not always agreeing with what I do, and teaching myself that you can’t appease everyone, including the assholes.

Edit: I talked with my sister and she brought up a good point: these strangers are taking shots at my character and identity, whereas any teasing I incur from folks I know is about visual preference, not any slight against who I am.

I also realized I’m trying care less about what others think of me. I already spend a tremendous amount of energy worrying and I want to bring that down, even if it’s through these “brute force” methods.

For all you non-software folks out there, release notes are the thing that describes what changed when you update software. You may have noticed them when you update apps on your iPhone, or if you play World of Warcraft you might know them as patch notes. Either way, it’s good to have them because it gives you a clear picture of what to expect when you next use that software.

The thing is, release notes can be hard to generate. Developing software isn’t linear; a developer could be working on a feature for months and it won’t make it into a release until it’s merged into master and pushed. So right off the bat, you can’t depend on the linearity of when tasks in your project management tool actually gets completed. You’d need to track their whereabouts (merged into master, staging, production, etc.) after completion.

So then you go over to source control and think you can generate release notes off of the commits that have happened between release. This… sort of works. It takes into account the non-linear nature of programming, but if you try to do it by hand (because you underestimated the problem) you find that it’s hard to follow which commits actually make it in, even if the commit is dated a month before the release it’ll go into. The other major problem is that commits are often too granular for release notes; what you really want are the features that spurred those code changes, which often come from your project management tools (ah yes, a circle).

After seeing these two things, your only other real approach is to have a good process of planning and updating when features are supposed to go into releases. If the planned release is wrong you’re supposed to bump it into a different release. If you’ve got multiple environments, it’s a good idea to generate release notes for each environment, even if it doesn’t seem like you’ll need the documentation (e.g. something internal). In reality you will need the documentation because it’s a good summary and it’ll help you when you’re summarizing multiple releases into release notes, most likely because you push production less frequently than you push your staging environment(s).

The “real” solution to all of this is having someone care about release notes, usually a product owner or a client. Having a product owner who’s internal is nicer because they’ll have a better idea of the kind of quality they’re looking for in release notes. In either case, if the matter is pressed enough then a process should emerge that makes generating release notes as painless as possible.