Two different ways to run development, Exposure to customers or not

I had a good time in Bend, Oregon this week because in addition to Great Skiing, Good Friends, Lots of Breweries I visited the HQ for a software company.  I had two hours reviewing their technology and what our technology was, the players in the market, and various opportunities.  When I went in to the meeting I didn’t want to spend time showing software for a variety of reasons.  Then it hit me, the first time someone uses a software service is huge insight to be shared and learned from.  If I am the only one in the room with the user, then I am the weak link to get the developers to understand.  My ability to communicate the issues, perspectives, questions is  limited.  Even if the whole meeting was video recorded, the inability of developers to drill in to an area ask more questions, etc.

I made the mistake of sharing this idea that Developers need to get out talk to customers more with an executive who had a meeting with Bill Gates (over 15 years ago when it was probably not the right time to bring this up). I was in the meeting, there were only 4 of us, and this idea went no where.  Bill’s response was something like “That’s what we have program managers for.  Their job is to talk to customers.”   Which makes sense from one perspective, and if program managers are perfect communicators of customers intent and developers have perfect listening skills.  Yeh, the world is not perfect.

Clearly, something in our process had broken— the desire for quality had gone well beyond rationality. But because of the way production unfolded , our people had to work on scenes without knowing the context for them— so they overbuilt them just to be safe. To make things worse, our standards of excellence are extremely high, leading them...

Catmull, Ed; Wallace, Amy (2014-04-08). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Kindle Locations 3041-3043). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

So there are basically two different views on Developers.  Should you have the developers talk to customers (some, not all) or should you leave the job of customer interaction to others and pass on specifications to developers?

I guess in depends on your goals.  If you want to make the safe choice, then it is probably best to have developers focus on writing code and leave the job of interfacing with customers to teams who have done this in the past.  On the other hand, if you are looking to build something innovative and disruptive, and you want to discover things that others have missed then having your development team interacting with customers can be a strategy to get something different created.

it appears to be a safe choice, and the desire to be safe— to succeed with minimal risk— can infect not just individuals but also entire companies. If we sense that our structures are rigid, inflexible, or bureaucratic, we must bust them open— without destroying ourselves in the process.

Catmull, Ed; Wallace, Amy (2014-04-08). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Kindle Locations 2991-2993). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Modern History of Typography Told by the Best - Matthew Carter at TED 2014

TED released Matthew Carter’s “My Life in Typefaces” from Mar 2014 Vancouver, and it is a pleasure to see an old friend get up at TED and talk about Typography.  I was curious what Matthew would present as it has been years since we have chatted.

Matthew starts out explaining how important type is.

Type is something we consume in enormous quantities. In much of the world, it's completely inescapable. But few consumers are concerned to know where a particular typeface came from or when or who designed it, if, indeed, there was any human agency involved in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize out of the software ether.

But I do have to be concerned with those things. It's my job. I'm one of the tiny handful of people who gets badly bent out of shape by the bad spacing of the T and the E that you see there. I've got to take that slide off. I can't stand it. Nor can Chris. There. Good.

This last sentence is where Matthew is looking at the horrible kerning between the T and E in this slide.

This bad spacing is what drives type people nuts.  I used to be a type person.  And, as I went through this video which is quite popular with over 190,000 views from Ted, iTunes, and Youtube in two days, I was curious what Matthew was going to talk about in 16 minutes.

         

What is the point of Matthew’s Talk?  The connection between technology and design, and his point was 18 years ago was the change to screen fonts.  At the 10:33 mark is where Matthew talks about what he did with Microsoft.

10:33You know, engineers are very smart, and despite occasional frustrations because I'm less smart, I've always enjoyed working with them and learning from them. Apropos, in the mid-'90s, I started talking to Microsoft about screen fonts. Up to that point, all the fonts on screen had been adapted from previously existing printing fonts, of course. But Microsoft foresaw correctly the movement, the stampede towards electronic communication, to reading and writing onscreen with the printed output as being sort of secondary in importance. 

FYI - when Matthew says Microsoft, I was the renegade who pissed off the type group by focusing on fonts for the screen when 90% of the group was focused on  the historical typefaces from lead forms.  I worked with Matthew when I was at Apple and when I came up the idea for Verdana at Microsoft without question there was only one guy I would go to to get Verdana designed.  Matthew Carter is the best and his Ted Talk does a great job of telling the story of how typography has changed.

14:49Well, it's been 18 years now since Verdana and Georgia were released. Microsoft were absolutely right, it took a good 10 years, but screen displays now do have improved spatial resolution, and very much improved photometric resolution thanks to anti-aliasing and so on. So now that their mission is accomplished, has that meant the demise of the screen fonts that I designed for courser displays back then? Will they outlive the now-obsolete screens and the flood of new web fonts coming on to the market? Or have they established their own sort of evolutionary niche that is independent of technology?In other words, have they been absorbed into the typographic mainstream? I'm not sure, but they've had a good run so far. Hey, 18 is a good age for anything with present-day rates of attrition, so I'm not complaining.

My wife had never heard this story.  I’ve told it so many times I couldn’t believe I hadn’t told her.  She finished by saying “it is another project, where you don’t credit for.” My response was “that’s what happens when you work at a big company. You do the right thing.  Don’t play the politics right, and you don’t get the credit.  That’s OK. I have so many more better ideas that I’ll get the benefits of given we own the company we are developing the ideas for."

The politics behind Verdana were complicated.  I wrote a post back in 2009 on it.

7/26/1994 Later in the afternoon, Dave Ohara called, with Matthew Carter and Tom Stephens in the room, to talk about the Verdana face. Matthew said that he was sad to read my note the other day, but found out soon after that we would still get a chance to work together on the Verdana face.

So, let’s start off when the first time I got in trouble for Verdana. One afternoon, my Microsoft general manager Steve Shaiman came looking for me, and he yelled “what the hell did you do?” What? BillG (Bill Gates email alias, back then we called people by their email alias, I was DaveO) thinks we should be doing fonts for screen and Pan-European typefaces.

A peak into how Google Designs its Data Centers, can you see the hidden?

DatacenterDynamics has a post on DLB Associates, a company who has designed Google's Data Centers.

IN SEARCH OF GOOGLE'S DATA CENTER DESIGNER

The engineer and his company behind the design of Google's data centers

5 August 2013 by Ambrose McNevin - DatacenterDynamics

 

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Don Beaty began his engineering career working on large water treatment plants. After graduating as an electrical engineer he spent his early career as a staffer before setting up set up DLB Associates in 1980 “with no money”.

DLB Associates for quite a while has had a case study up on its web site on Google Data Centers.

Google Data Center Campuses, Worldwide

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DLB has designed and managed the construction of Google’s global data center campus program from its very inception in 2004. During that time, the program has continuously redefined the data center industry and remained way ahead of the curve.

...

Joe Kava, Ben Treynor and Urs Hoelzle of Google with our president, Don Beaty, addressing the staff at DLB Headquarters

Put your mindset in a "Sherlock Holmes" mode and you can see things that are not evident to the novice.  With two pieces of data it is easier to see things.

5 Golden Rules of Plane Design that could work for Data Centers

BBC has a post on the 5 Golden Rules of Plane Design.

Classic aircraft: Five golden rules for enduring design

ByStephen Dowling

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Best of British

The Supermarine Spitfire was designed to protect Britain from aerial attack; it later served from aircraft carriers and nearly broke the sound barrier. (Copyright: Getty Images)

When I read the 5 rules, 4 rules looked like good ones for data centers.

Rule one: Be adaptable and flexible

Rule two: Be easy to fly (operate and use)

Rule three: Be resilient

Rule four – Be easy to maintain (YES!!!!!)

Rule five – Be easy on the eye

The fifth rule "Be easy on the eye" may seem like it doesn't fit, but some of the best data centers are good looking in the details.  Some of the worse are kind of ugly and causes discomfort looking at.

Why a choice of no investors can create a better solution, constraints drive tough decisions

GigaOm has a great post to get people thinking that not having investors in your startup is a an option many should consider.

Who needs investors! Why many startups should bootstrap instead

by Andrew Gazdecki, Guest Contributor

MAY. 25, 2013 - 12:00 PM PDT

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photo: docent/Shutterstock

SUMMARY:

Many of today’s startups are obsessed with figuring out the best way to score investors. But for many companies bootstrapping it might result in a better product and a healthier business in the long run.

One of the benefits mentioned in this post is "limits set useful boundaries"

Some of the best data centers embrace their constraints.  Those data centers who spent the most money are rarely the most beautiful.

Many people have an illusion that great design come from no constraints.  Google and Apple have billions of dollars to create new services.  But, think about some of the most innovative ideas are being created by start-ups.  Here is a talk that illustrates the specific point of the beauty of design with constraints. 

Faruk Ateş

Constraints, or “things that limit freedom,” sound like a pretty bad thing. But in this talk I will explain not just that constraints are a good thing, but that they are beautiful—and important for great design, great software, and great products.