Topical songs make the world go ’round
A couple of songs that have been bouncing around in my head for a few months. I finally recorded them so I could get them out of there and start thinking about something else for a change.
Grand tour of the POPOs, day 4
Site 52 seems to aspire to be a grand plaza comprising four public spaces that face each other around the intersection of Howard and 2d St. (just down 2nd from Site 51). Only three of them are there, sadly. All three are done up in squarish black stone designs that give off a sort of macho artsiness, like the navy pin-striped furniture in a bachelor pad.
The fourth is still an open-air parking lot and doesn’t show any signs of joining its counterparts any time soon.
The northeast corner has a pleasant collection of umbrella’d tables and some trees just tall enough to give an effective shade. We hung out there for a while and watched the light change as the sun bounced off buildings and the trees broke it up. Most relaxing.
The northwest corner is more severe, as befits the anteroom of the building that houses the Black Rock investment firm, which basically runs the world right now. There are tank barriers around the
perimeter artfully designed to look like tank barriers, and a forbidding Moebius-like sculpture doubtless intended to evoke the incomprehensibility of modern finance, or something.
The southwest corner shares the elegant black rock motif but gives more space to its trees than to walking or sitting space. It is dominated by a Specialties restaurant that contains an Intelligentsia
coffee kiosk, a nice surprise for coffee snobs weary of the long lines at Blue Bottle. Intelligentsia appears to be following a Starbucks-like model, with settings controlled by someone other than
the barista and not a lot of information available behind the bar. But the coffee is passable, certainly far superior to any Starbucks I’ve been at lately.
Day 3 of the great POPO tour
I’ve fallen behind on my reports. Here come a few, rapid-fire, to catch up.
Our fortunes improved with site 53, which is a pleasant enough little courtyard outside the building at 235 2d St. that houses CBS Interactive. There are spiffy brushed-aluminum tables and chairs. At this time of year there is shade along the east side after about noon, thanks to a tall hedge that our hosts thoughtfully provided.
We skipped site 54 (we’re doing this backwards) pending further research. The list has it as “Marriott courtyard,” but I’ve been all around there and haven’t seen anything resembling the description. The map doesn’t help. I suspect they list is referring to a different location, perhaps near the Courtyard Marriott? Stay tuned.
Site 51, just down the street at the corner of 2nd and Mission, is even more impressive. It was clearly designed by someone familiar with San Francisco weather. It is completely enclosed in glass, so you can hang out there in faux-outdoors ease throughout the year. There is a reasonably interesting 20-foot tall sculpture on the ground floor, and some large ficus trees to complete the al fresco effect. You can go upstairs and hang out on a mezzanine level with a nice view of the skyline from an unaccustomed angle. The tables and chairs are the same brushed aluminum that graces site 52.
The great POPO tour, day 2
The second site on our tour of publicly-owned, privately-operated spaces in San Francisco was another disappointment. The whole open area attached to 303 2d St. is fenced off for construction. We had to peer over the fence and try to figure out what the features might look like when finished. It looked like there would be some smallish circles of vegetation and probably a fountain or two.
(This is the list of sites we plan to visit. We’re taking them in reverse order; this was site No. 55.)
To assuage our despair, we went over to the nearby South Park area and did some yuppie-watching from a table outside a sandwich shop. We felt much better after having a bite to eat. Then: excitement! While we walked back to John’s subway stop we were stopped — right at the site of last week’s disappointment, No. 56, as it happened — by police clearing the way for some dignitary or other.
Day one of the great POPO tour
Since I started working in downtown San Francisco, I’ve talked John into helping me with a project I’ve been idly imagining for years: visit every one of the sites on this list of “publicly owned, privately operated” spaces. I thought we’d start from the end of the list and work down, just because.
Today I took an exploratory look at 611 Folsom. It’s as bad as the pamphlet says. Windswept, scraggly trees spaced far apart; big pointless flat areas paved with pale reddish brick. Plenty of seating on the brick benches, at full-on lunchtime, because only a few people were depression-proof enough to hang around. I’ve seen smoking rooms at airports that looked friendlier.
Here’s John modeling the way the surrounding buildings loom over the site, making you think of Mordor, or Wall St. He’s struggling to keep up his cheer in the face of these enormous masses of gloom bearing down on him from behind.
One thing that could save it: with all that heavy built-in furniture, it might have made a convenient skateboarding location. Skaters bring a certain something to a neighborhood, and they’re fun to watch on your lunch break, like the break dancers and drummers who entertain in the subway. But the authorities have killed off that possibility by installing those nasty little steel blades all over every surface. They don’t just repel skaters, of course: they repel anybody who doesn’t like nasty little steel blades.
Upside: Mehfil Indian restaurant, just across Folsom street, has a quick, cheap and tasty to-go menu. I had the meatballs in yogurt gravy and a mango lassi. Most satisfying.
Next time: Marathon Plaza, aka (I think) 303 2nd St. Plaza.
How you use the 1st person says something about who you are.
One thing I noticed when I started working in software was the odd ways people use the first person. A support guy on the phone once said to me, “Go ahead and uninstall us, then run the installer again.” (Support people are required to start every sentence with “Go ahead and.”) He meant, of course, “Uninstall my software,” but working with his software had so influenced his outlook that it had been able to dragoon his first person for its own purposes.
On a project I was writing for in the late 90s, there were several teams, each of them developing code that would do some work on the data and pass it off to the code created by some other team. The team leads quickly got into the habit of saying things like “I parse it and pass it to Gerry, and then she crunches it and gives it to Terry.” Gerry wasn’t crunching anything herself, but she had identified so thoroughly with the code her team was writing that it felt like she was.
It’s not just software, of course. When I moved to California I met a lot of people who spent a lot of time in cars. Where I would have said “I parked the car down the block,” a Californian would say “I’m down the block.” The person was not down the block, the car was, but everybody seemed to understand. I’ve been in California so long, I talk the same way now.
Until recently I was writing a lot about a complex and rather precarious installer. In frustration, I caught myself putting questions to the developers like this: “Are we seriously telling the user to run that script manually, twice?” As soon as I noticed that I tried to get back to phrasing it like, “Are you seriously telling me I have to…?” Putting myself rhetorically in the position of the user helped me stay focused on the point of the writing, but even more than that, it helped keep these developers focused on making sense, rather than just getting through the processing.
A bit further into the maelstrom
I’ve been resisting micro-blogging until now, but I just set up a thingy to automatically copy the subject lines of blog posts into tweets, just for the hell of it. So now I’m tweeting. This is its maiden voyage right here.
How is agile software writing different from traditional software writing?
Before agile, I worked mostly from functional specs. That was frustrating. In real life, requirements shift to reflect the changing priorities of the powerful, and functionality follows, in complex ways. The only way to write about it reliably is to try to understand how power works in your organization, and then dive into the day-to-day development process.
The trick, for me, has been to develop a feel for how much rework is optimal. When you are a part of a scrum team and you understand what the people in control of the organization want to do with it, you can learn to sense how likely it is that code will be backed out, or that a feature won’t be recognizable in its ultimate form, and you can use that sense to gauge how much thought and drafting time you should put into a given user story at a given time. You have to accept that some text will have to be discarded, because you thought it would be needed and it wasn’t, and that some text will have to be created right up against deadline because you didn’t see the need for it until the last minute.
In the early stages there is inevitably some wasted work. But if you can stick with this approach over the life of a project, you can end up working far more efficiently, on the average, than you ever did the old way. (That’s not a trivial “if.” Even the most committedly agile manager will at some point give in to the temptation to ask for a “doc outline,” or a “doc freeze,” or some other artifact from the old days.)
The ironic thing is how much this resembles the way we’ve always worked, minus the pretense. When I told myself I was working from a functional spec, I was always really working with one eye on the spec and one eye on the real development that was happening, which sometimes followed the spec and sometimes led it. I saw some good specs, but I never did encounter one that I could put through the classic semantic-reversal exercise that in theory could have auto-generated the help content and put us all out of jobs.
Eric Quezada
Dear Ixchel,
Your mother asked us to tell you about what Eric meant to us personally.
To me, Eric was infinite creativity combined with unbending principle. He was the embodiment of the happy warrior, slogging it out in endless meetings and marches and picket lines and having a blast the whole time. His enthusiasm was contagious.
In difficult moments, when we weren’t winning, he gave me the sense that we really were, even if we couldn’t see it right now.
I especially remember his delight at having a little child. He knew your presence would change everything, and he was very happy about that.
With my best wishes,
Ted Kuster
“Summer” in San Francisco
In honor of the nicest time of year in our fair city — not the four weeks between September 15 and October, which is when 100 percent of the nice weather takes place, but the fraction of that period when the hipsters embark on their annual migration. To the tune of “Summertime.”
Burning Man, and the parking is easy
Not an artist to be seen around here
Coffee’s scarce, and Valencia’s a ghost town
And all the bikes on the street have gears
One of these mornings you’re gonna rise up singing
You’ll spread your wings, and you’ll pack your van
But until that morning, it’s gonna be a bit crowded
And we’ll all just park wherever we can
Cloud vs. traditional software writing
What’s the difference between writing for cloud software and writing for traditional software?
Time frame: Web app development tends to work on a faster cycle than packaged software. You can’t ship a new book with every release. You learn to work incrementally. Your work is always ready to go, but never fully finished.
Structure: I’m not sure the long-form narrative approach was ever really that good for users, but in web apps it is intolerable. SaaS forces you to finally break with the book-on-a-screen model and prioritize getting the right bit of info into view at the right time, without regard to where the reader came from or where they are going. Kicking the habit of saying “above,” “below,” “before” or “after” has surprisingly profound consequences for how you develop and package information.
Audience: The first thing I did in SaaS was to move the help content out to an open site on the web, where Google could see it and potential users could stumble across it. Tech docs have always been part of selling a product, and with web apps you can’t avoid it. Also: on web app teams, developers have even less bandwidth to review docs, so you learn to get feedback other ways, especially by leveraging real-life users.
“Leverage:” There’s a word that hasn’t been around that long, as a verb at least. In Marx’s time they used the word “exploit” for almost exactly the same idea. During the 20th century, “exploit” moved closer in tone to words like “oppress” or “cheat,” and “leverage” has pretty much taken its place as a more or less neutral word for using someone or something to get something done. A lot of casual readers read “exploit” the 20-century way, and not the way Marx used it. Marx was no fan of mistreating people, but when he talked about exploitation he was really just talking about how a company can leverage the work of an employee to make money. If a pro basketball player earns a million dollars during a year when he enables his employer to earn 20 million dollars, he’s more exploited — more effectively leveraged — than a farmhand who gets paid 20,000 a year and enables his boss to make 50,000, even though the farmhand undoubtedly gets treated a lot worse.
Libertarians
Libertarian thinking is not famous for its rigor, but I don’t think enough people really appreciate how incoherent it really is. If anybody ever took it seriously (which I’m not sure anyone does, especially libertarians), it would inescapably achieve the opposite of what it claims to intend.
(By “libertarian” here I mean the kind of ideology in which social relations, rights and obligations are held to arise fundamentally from the property relation. Which is problematic in itself, of course, but let’s accept that there are numbers of people for whom this makes some kind of intuitive sense.)
Everyone in any social system has to accept certain boundaries to their individual moral agency, called rules, laws, customs, traditions, expectations. The whole point of rules is to supersede individual choices, to restrict the range of possible individual choices. The tradeoff is that then you get a basis for living together, in some way, without having to fight to the death over every little thing.
The ground rules of capitalism, derived as they are from the property relation, require us to maximize profit (or, more commonly, our share of profit, i.e. wages). Everything we do is subordinated to that. It determines where we live, how we live, with whom we live, everything we do.
Have you noticed how common it is to hear people in business say “it’s out of my hands,” or “I had no choice?” We had to fire you all and move the firm to Tennessee, because costs are lower there, and we have to maximize profits. I know you need this job, but I have no choice, it’s for the good of the company.
The choices people make when they do business are moral choices. They affect the health and happiness of people. Capitalism requires us to imagine that the power to define those moral decisions rests with an abstract entity called “the market.” To participate, we have to give up our personal moral decision-making power and accept that someone else calls the shots. My boss, the CFO, supply and demand, the economy, whatever.
Employees too give up their moral agency when they accept capitalism. I work for a company that sells software to the Pentagon. I have no doubt that some aspect of our software is used for developing things like guidance systems for drone aircraft and other moral horrors. But doing this work is the only way I can meet my obligations to my family, to pay for a home and buy groceries. I have no choice, I regularly tell myself. I’ve given up a core piece of my individual moral agency to… to whom? Nobody in particular. A vast mass of total strangers whose moral choices have nothing to do with me. Sound familiar?
What capitalism actually does is to remove the power of moral decision from the individual and hand it over to the collective. What could possibly be more collective than a “market” – that is, is the sum total of decisions made by strangers?
Only No. 10?
Tech writing (my beloved profession) barely makes it on the top ten list of most rewarding careers.
Santana speaks for me
Bowie
Here is the most monumental pop music criticism site I have ever seen. It’s going to take me years to read all this stuff.
STC convention!
I’m going to the national tech writers’ convention in Sacramento next month. I’ve been to a couple of these and they’re always fun and interesting. I only go to the ones that are held in cities where I know someone I can stay with. This time I’m staying with Nic and Bert, who live in Stockton, a little ways down the freeway, but close enough.
Top four things I’m hoping to achieve at this conference:
- Make contacts with people who are into Drupal and DITA. (Had a chat with Kristof last week that got me all hyped on the possibilities.)
- Learn more ways to automate production processes. (I’m still spending too much time pressing buttons and watching stdout flash by.)
- Get my help.collab.net site evaluated by someone who knows what they’re talking about. (To help prioritize the long list of new stuff I want to do with it.)
- See if Mike Hughes has brought his Dobro. (Never rule out the possibility of some parking-lot picking.)
Obama and Manning
Once more to all my friends who at some point liked this bastard: Isn’t this a bit much?
Toldja
To all my friends who voted for, and argued for, this bastard:
Let’s not do that again, OK?
Supporting the home folks
Me working
Here’s me in my living room, banging out XML and listening in on a phone meeting. Am I spoiled? I suspect so.
