Category Archives: Developer stuff

Developer stuff, Entrepreneurship, Modern European Thought

Themes for Study and Learning in March

Well, February flew by “study and learning”-wise.  Hmm.  I’ve heard and repeated many times that the perception of time is logarithmic: proportional to how much time has passed for one.  So a month now — and especially a shortie like February — is nothing like a month when I was 8.  Sigh.

Anyhow, here were the themes for February, with my self-assessment:

  1. Continue with Fascism and Totalitarianism.  Hopefully Arendt will become available soon at the library (or I may just have to spring for it).  Open to other suggestions.  Progress: Not much.  I gave up on the original Arendt and purchased “The Portable Hannah Arendt” at some point in Feb.  I read most of the Preface, but still have to get to Ms. Arendt.  See below, carried forward.
  2. PowerPoint innards.  I have a scheme to code a web app which will check your PowerPoint deck for “5 common Intelligent Pitching flaws” per my work on Intelligent Pitching over the last couple of years.  See back posts for more.  Progress: I read two days about ppt innards, and made some progress with “deliberate practice” on the python open-source ppt parsing lib (grok-ing all the makefile commands, for example).  To be continued, but not in March
  3. Poker.  I’m in a regular poker game but not getting any better at it.  Time to buckle down and do some reading and deliberate practice.  Progress: I started “Education of a Poker Player”, by Herbert Yardley.  Read the first chapter, which was all about “tells”.  Great stuff, and great for serious poker, but doesn’t help me with my group, where we play whatever game the dealer wants and they’re usually glitzy and whacky, so tells don’t help much.

And, looking forward for March:

  1. Continue with Fascism and Totalitarianism.  Will be helpful to an essay I’m trying to write this month, as well as inherently useful.
  2. Read about Intellectual Property.  I have to teach the topic at the end of month, and I’ve always — as a self-respecting software guy — kind of hated and dissed the subject.  Time to know more.
  3. Read about plot and suspense.  I’m trying to get better at this in my own writing through “deliberate practice”, so I’ll be actively researching the topic as well.

Comments always welcome.

Deep Work, Developer stuff, Intelligent Pitching, Lifehacking, Modern European Thought, Personal Information Management

Themes for study and learning in February

The themes I wanted to work on  for January were:

  1. Continue with Presence and Deep Work.   I got a lot of reading done on this and some good work in January.  Going forward I’ll be experimenting with strategy and tactics for increasing my Deep Work time (and my presence with respect to Deep Work and, really, everything).
  2. Fascism and Totalitarianism.   Didn’t get far with this, since I wanted to start with Hanna Arendt and (surprise surprise!) it’s in great demand at my libary, so I haven’t risen to the top of the queue.  I’ll continue this thread in February
  3. The Body.   4HB was a bit disappointing on second reading.  Tim Ferriss is a great showman and he has all kinds of cool hacks, but for my Body scheme I’m moving forward with more classic approaches: Weight Watchers, YAYOG (You Are Your Own Gym), and the “Younger Next Year” approach to working (back) up to fitness. 

Themes for February

  1. Continue with Fascism and Totalitarianism.  Hopefully Arendt will become available soon at the library (or I may just have to spring for it).  Open to other suggestions
  2. PowerPoint innards.  I have a scheme to code a web app which will check your PowerPoint deck for “5 common Intelligent Pitching flaws” per my work on Intelligent Pitching over the last couple of years.  See back posts for more.
  3. Poker.  I’m in a regular poker game but not getting any better at it.  Time to buckle down and do some reading and deliberate practice.

Welcome your thoughts…

Developer stuff

“Paper Prototyping” and UI/UX brainstorming

2 Comments

I’m beginning to think about how to think about the UI/UX for a couple of projects.

First of all, I’m pretty rusty at this sort of thing, since I haven’t designed an interface for anything in maybe 5 years, and that was an API.  A “real” interface which non-techie humans are supposed to interact with: I haven’t done one of those in… 25 years??  (Can it be?)

So I’m browsing about for techniques to make my maunderings a little more systematic.  And I ran across “Paper Prototyping”.

The ref came from an older book, “Micro ISV”, an instruction manual for building a small one- or single-digit-person software shop (apparently the Micro-ISV movement is already dead, so maybe this reading is moot in any case.)

But the book recommended a technique called “paper prototyping” as a scheme for gen-ing up a UI.  Needless to say, I bought the book.

…And found out it’s an interesting low-cost way to specify a UI, but it’s not a one-person tool.  It’s a tool for interacting with users.

You sit down with the users and use hand-drawn screens instead of a simulation.  You can “operate” the UI by having multiple screens, “highlighting” things when a user pushes a button, etc.

I’m not sure if it’s interesting for a techie who could wireframe the UI with almost less work (and maybe, given some of our paltry drawing powers, with more of a sense of how it would look), but it’s something I would like to try at some point.

But it’s not an answer for how to guide one’s own thinking about the UI.

I hate use cases, because they’re usually too low-level.  You get sucked into the details of the case before you even get started on the coverage of the case.

So maybe my “tool” is to scribble ideas and show them to people whose opinion on the app at hand I trust.  In other words, a very low-fidelity form of paper prototyping.

Your thoughts?