Using my iPad Pro as my Primary Computing Device: Day 1

On Saturday, I sent my MacBook Pro in to get its keyboard repaired. Because my Hackintosh died late last year and I decided to keep things simple, I will be without a computer for two weeks for the first time in my professional life.

Boo hoo, right?

Ten or even five years ago, this would have been a big problem, but in this age of advanced mobile devices, it should be okay, at least in theory. I have a first-generation iPad Pro 9.7 with keyboard and Pencil, and I enjoy it very much. I use it a lot for sketching (via Paper) and writing (via Bear and Ulysses). Because my iPad does not let me multitask as easily as on my laptop, I’m able to focus more, which is great for reflecting and writing. Everything syncs to the cloud instantaneously, meaning I can access this data on my laptop immediately.

The iPad has limitations that make it difficult for me to replace my laptop entirely. For example, G Suite does not play that well with the iPad. I can’t ALT-TAB between different documents, the mobile versions of the app have limited functionality, and I haven’t figured out how to easily use the desktop versions of the app via Chrome.

It’s all good… until you no longer have access to your laptop. I timed my repair (which will take 1-2 weeks) to when I figured it would be least inconvenient, and I’m making a go of using my iPad as my primary computing device in the meantime. Here’s what I’m learning so far:

  • My bag is much lighter!
  • Writing blog posts via the WordPress app works quite well!
  • I can’t easily print from my iPad to my 2011 Brother printer. Exploring options now.
  • I’m not sure how well conferencing via Zoom will work. At minimum, I usually take notes while I’m on Zoom, and I often use its more advanced features, such as screen-sharing and breakout groups. I’m not planning on doing the latter on any upcoming calls, but it’s a good opportunity just to see if any of this is possible.

We’ll see how this all goes.

On Blogging and Maintenance (and my Website Refresh)

I updated my website look-and-feel for the first time since 2010, which is when I migrated it from Blosxom (!) to WordPress. The overall architecture is the same. I just wanted to update the theme to something more modern — responsive on mobile, more photography-friendly, support for the latest WordPress features including the new Gutenberg editor, etc.

I built the new theme on top of CoBlocks, which saved me a ton of time, gave me a bunch of things for free, and will hopefully future-proof me a little bit better than last time. (My previous homegrown theme lasted over eight years, so it did well all things considered.)

Still, the update took a long time. I had to get clear about what I wanted and research the available themes. I had to experiment with different themes to see which ones worked best. I had to brush up on CSS and the wonders of responsive design so I could create a homepage that looked more or less how I wanted it. I had to go down many ratholes, because that’s just what I do.

My impetus for all of this was that I missed blogging, and I want to do more of it this year. Updating the site was akin to buying a new outfit — not strictly necessary, but feels pretty fresh.

What do I miss about blogging? Becoming less dumb by chewing on half-baked ideas and having others help bake them further.

When I first started in 2003, blogging was like exchanging letters out in the open. The act of writing things down (especially in public) forced me to slow down, reflect, and crystallize my thinking in whatever state it happened to be at the time. The act of curating links helped reinforce the lessons learned from others (and myself), while also giving me a chance to acknowledge them publicly. Doing this out in the open meant anyone could jump in, which helped me get out of my silo and discover wonderful new voices. All of this helped make the web a more useful, humane place.

I’ve done pretty well over the years, but the tenor of it all gradually changed. Social media has cannibalized a lot of people’s attention (including my own). Because it’s not a slow medium, the nature of how I engage with others (not just where I engage with them) has changed. It’s more frequent, but it’s also more shallow. That’s actually a nice complement when I have a face-to-face relationship with people, but it’s not generative otherwise.

Last year, I only wrote five posts on this blog, my fewest ever. It wasn’t for lack of material, and it wasn’t even because I didn’t have enough time. I did lots of journaling and drawing, I just did most of it in private.

Some of it was social media backlash. I was on social media a lot for my 365 photo project in 2015, and while the experience was overall positive, I think it burned me out on sharing so much of myself. I’ve been much less active on social media — and on the Internet generally — since.

Some of it was an unexpected professional side effect, one I’m actively trying to counter. Most of my current colleagues don’t blog, and when they do, it’s rarely half-baked. (I have lots more to say about this, which I’ll probably share on Faster Than 20 in the near future.) This had the effect of lowering the bar for me, which is not what I want. I want to raise the bar for others.

Because of how I blogged when I first got started, I have about eight years of archives of a lot of my early thinking about collaboration. It’s so valuable for me to be able both to mine and to share this with others. Unfortunately, that’s not true of a lot of what I’ve been working on and thinking about for the past eight years.

I want to re-adjust. I’m inspire by my friends, especially Alex Schroeder, who have kept it up consistently over the years. I want to think out loud a lot more, especially about my work, while also still sharing the occasional personal tidbits. I’ve worked hard to balance my life so that I have more reflection time, and I want to make better use of this time by sharing more. I’d also love to experiment more with mining and making what I’ve already written more visible.

I’m sure the experience won’t be the same as it was in the early days, but I’m going to keep at it. I’ll continue to share what I write on Twitter and maybe Facebook, but the better way to track is to subscribe to my feed via your favorite feed reader (I use Feedly) or via email below. As always, I welcome comments below (or on social media), but I’d especially encourage you to try commenting the old-fashioned blogger way — by responding in your own blog with a link to the original source. Either way, would love to hear from folks!

Three Simple Hacks for Making Delightful Virtual Spaces

This is Katie Krummeck. She’s the Community Experience Coordinator at Stanford’s d.school. What exactly does that mean? It means a lot of things, but you can get a tiny taste by reading her sign, which sits on her desk on the first floor of the building.

I am in love with the space at the d.school, which — not surprisingly — is beautiful and functional. But Katie’s sign might be my favorite thing there. Why? Because it’s low-tech, it does what it’s supposed to do, and it adds a touch of humanity (among many) to the space. If you’re wandering around the lobby, lost or looking for something, you will eventually run into Katie and her sign, and you will not only know immediately that she can help you, but that she is happy to help you. It’s the difference between a functional space and a delightful, inviting space.

Creating delightful, inviting spaces is simple, but not easy. Unfortunately, we often make it unnecessarily complicated. I don’t expect most workspaces to have wide open, reconfigurable spaces with natural light on two sides and moveable whitewalls and furniture. But why can’t all workspaces have signs like this? How many actually do?

Here are three of my favorite, low-tech hacks in the same spirit as Katie’s sign for making virtual interactions more human and delightful.

Welcoming People to Online Forums

This is one of the oldest, most powerful tricks for making even the crappiest online forums inviting. When people post for the first time, respond to their post, and welcome them. It’s simple, requires no training, and it works with all tools, including face-to-face.

Distributing a (Silly) Printed Team Picture for Conference Calls

Our intuitions about video are largely wrong, and the technical costs and inconvenience are still quite high. (Think about the 15 minutes that we often waste at the beginning of each call, because someone can’t get the tool working.)

Here’s a trick I learned from Marcia Conner. Take a photo of the team, preferably a silly one, and distributed printed copies to everyone to post on their walls during conference calls. It’s cheap, it’s just as good (if not better) at creating a sense of connection and fun, and it works with both synchronous and asynchronous tools.

Theme Your Online Tools

Groupaya was a virtual company, even though we all lived in San Francisco. We took advantage of our physical proximity by coworking twice a week, but we wanted a way to stay connected virtually as well. We tried Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, Google Plus, and Status.net. None of them ever got any traction.

Then we tried WordPress with P2, a hack whose features paled in comparison to the other tools. But one thing we could easily do was re-theme it. So I spent about 20 minutes making the background orange — the same color as Kristin Cobble’s beautiful kitchen, where we often worked — and choosing and cropping a meaningful, delightful photograph to serve as the header image.

That was the difference that made the difference. It rapidly succeeded where the other tools had failed. Our usage numbers only told part of the story. Everyone simply loved using the tool.

Kristin's Kitchen

Web Site Redesigned!

My personal web site has been badly in need of a refresher for years now. I played with elements of a redesign a few years ago, but the bigger challenge was migrating the content, and the longer I waited, the more technical debt I accumulated. This was a problem, as I’m a notorious yak shaver.

Well, I finally did it. Welcome to the new eekim.com!

Not all of the data is migrated to the new design, but the gist of it is all here. Thank you, WordPress and MediaWiki. You’ve made my life much easier.

The background image is from my trip to Kano, Nigeria in 2008.

Peering Out Over Kano

I stole elements of the design from many places, including Zak Greant’s blog, which I enjoy quite a bit.

Sadly, the Purple Numbers are gone. So is the blog/Wiki integration via Link As You Think. I hope they (or something with equivalent functionality) make their return soon.

Let me know how you like the new site!

Open Source Mergers and the Circle of UNIX

Lloyd Budd wrote a post today entitled, “GPL Encourages Collaboration,” that was highly serendipitous and that triggered a flood of thoughts, some of which I’ll try to capture here. Earlier today, I was rereading an interview I did with Sunir Shah a few months back for a paper I’m writing, and I latched onto a point that Sunir made about the proliferation of Wiki communities:    (MHR)

I see so many people start their own Wikis. They go to these other Wikis that are disorganized. They don’t feel like jumping in and learning everything because everything’s in different places, and they are not coherent. So they start their own.    (MHS)

There are now thousands of public Wikis, and they are all balkanized, because no one wants to collaborate. I understand that. It’s human nature. You collaborate within your group, but you don’t collaborate outside of that group.    (MHT)

On the one hand, I encourage the proliferation of Wikis, because if you disagree with someone, you should be able to do your own thing. On the other hand, true collaboration is showing a willingness to actually pull these communities together, a willingness to subsume your immediate need to be a true leader, build relationships, and pull people together.    (MHU)

Sunir’s insight is an important one. The existence of a commons isn’t in itself enough to guarantee collaboration. Ultimately, collaboration is intentional. You have to want to collaborate with others, and you have to be proactive about it. And it only takes two for starters.    (MHV)

That said, if you want to encourage collaboration, you have to start by eliminating as many barriers as possible. The first barriers are Shared Understanding and Shared Language. In the Open Source community, both of these have been indoctrinated in the form of Open Source licenses. The main reason for the effectiveness of these licenses as vehicles for Shared Understanding is Richard Stallman.    (MHW)

When RMS originally wrote the GPL, he embedded the philosophy behind the terms in the license itself. It was not simply a legal document, but an essay on the principles underlying software freedom. Regardless of how you feel about the GPL or RMS, these remain the fundamental principles behind why Open Source works, and more importantly, why collaboration is so rampant in Open Source communities.    (MHX)

However, as Sunir notes, this isn’t enough to guarantee collaboration. We see a lot of redundancy in Open Source, just as we see lots of redundancy in Wiki communities. And that’s okay. There are sometimes good reasons for this redundancy, and it’s healthy to facilitate it. But eventually, you want convergence also.    (MHY)

This is the crux of Lloyd’s post. He writes, “Forking is good, but not as good as merging.”    (MHZ)

Lloyd also cites a few examples (WordPress, gcc) and asks for others. There are tons of good ones, but my favorite is a bit obscure: UNIX.    (MI0)

That’s right, UNIX. Yes, the history of UNIX is fraught with ugliness, some of which still continues today. But it’s also one of the greatest examples of Open Source forking and merging. This is important, because it’s also the birthplace of the modern Open Source movement.    (MI1)

Here’s the quick summary. UNIX came from AT&T labs, and the original license terms were ambiguous (a massive understatement if there ever was one) for a number of reasons, the main one being that most people weren’t thinking about software as IP at the time. Stallman, of course, was one of the exceptions, and in 1984, he started the GNU project, whose goal was to reimplement UNIX under the GPL.    (MI2)

A few years earlier at UC Berkeley, Bill Joy had taken a different approach. He simply forked AT&T UNIX into what is now known as BSD UNIX. The new code eventually was distributed under the BSD license, which essentially allowed anyone to do whatever they wanted with the code, as long as they gave credit to BSD and didn’t sue anybody. This led to many, many new forks, especially proprietary ones from Sun (cofounded by Joy), IBM, DEC, SGI, and many, many others.    (MI3)

With the advent of the 386 in the late 1980s came a number of PC forks, including 386BSD (which begat FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD), BSDI, SCO, and MINIX (which begat Linux). At this point, most versions of UNIX were also borrowing heavily from the GNU project.    (MI4)

By the late 1990s, we started seeing massive convergence. IBM, Sun, DEC (now HP), SGI, and SCO (yes, SCO) all switched over to Linux, and started merging some of their proprietary capabilities into the Linux kernel. Apple moved to FreeBSD.    (MI5)

What the heck happened? You could attribute this phenomenon to market consolidation, but that would only be telling part of the story. Market forces indeed played a strong role, just as they a play a strong role in anything that involves… well, markets. But the important points are these. The ability to fork UNIX into both proprietary and free versions allowed the market to innovate rapidly, and that innovation was critical to both the success of UNIX and to the growth of the industry as a whole. However, the existence of a free version of UNIX was critical in enabling the consolidation of all of these different UNIXes, even if they weren’t necessarily formal mergers. Why were all of these competing companies willing to throw their hat into the Linux ring? Because of the Open Source license, which protected companies from their competitors hijaacking the commons and using their own code against them.    (MI6)

Ironically, the story of UNIX is also one of the reasons I believe that the GPL’s terms are unnecessary for the proliferation of software freedom. The BSD license enabled proprietary forks, which arguably enabled innovation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. In fact, it’s still enabling this today; look at Mac OS X. In the end, however, culture won out; these same proprietary companies are all supporting Open Source software, not because they had to (although they do now), but because they wanted to. Empowerment is stronger than enforcement when it comes to communities and collaboration.    (MI7)

I can’t resist one more small rant, a teaser if you will. Most Web 2.0 companies seem to have learned the superficial lessons of Open Source, but they’ve missed the main point. The argument that Open APIs obviate the need for Open Source completely ignores what history has taught us over and over again. One of these days, I’ll blog about this.    (MI8)