Matthew Lang

A little reminder that while we're connected in more ways now than we have ever been, our number of meaningful connections doesn't change at all.

The lesson to learn from Dunbar might be this: our pursuit of building ever-expanding and “influential” networks might be a fundamentally vain pursuit. Rarely, perhaps never, do our lives comprise of more than about 150 meaningful relationships. Although a digitally connective world might suggest that the size of our network is representative of our ‘value’ or ‘potential’ to have an influence on others, our human network capacity probably has not really changed at all.

— One Hundred and Fifty People: Revisiting Dunbar’s Number by Caesura Letters

Odell Beckham Jr shows the world how it's done.

And in case you think there's a stroke of luck here, you're wrong.

I've been without my iPhone for a week now. It's amazing how many things you miss when a single device can do so much.

It's been seven days now since I turned off my rather erratic iPhone 5. Due to a hardware fault with the screen, it phones people in my contacts, looks for voice commands I've not given and in general was just becoming a nuisance. The phone is out of contract and warranty. With a new iPhone 6 coming in the next couple of weeks, it was false economy to fork out the money for a replacement device. The last week without an iPhone has been an eye-opener.

I always hear people ask what did we do before the smartphone arrived. To be honest, we probably did a lot of the same things we do today, however the arrival of the smartphone has allowed many people to do different things with just the one device. Aside from the interruptive nature of smartphones and many people's persistence in being glued to their device, they are in fact amazing little devices. Regardless of your choice of operating systems from the big three of Apple, Google and Microsoft, it can't be said that smartphones aren't useful. In the last week I've had a real chance to see what aspects of my life are influenced by it.

I start the day with my alarm clock going, or in fact the alarm on my iPhone. I've been using the alarm on my phone for a few years now. Without it to wake me up, I've resorted to using my wife's phone to wake me in the morning. Before taking our oldest son to school I also usually flick through my RSS subscriptions with Unread. I do this just about every morning. Just a quick scan to see what's new.

One thing I have missed is the phone and messaging capabilities of my iPhone. Arranging for clients to get in contact with me is now a list of places where I might be available at certain times of the day. They can get me on iMessage, HipChat, Skype and email on my MacBook and we have a landline number that they can reach me on during normal working hours during the day. I now try and work from home rather than working from a cafe as it's easier for clients to get in contact with me.

These are the essentials parts of my phone that I truly miss having. Each has a fall-back plan to keep me going, but the loss of the convenience of the smartphone is something that's been hard to adjust to. These are the essentials, but what else is there that I miss doing?

I love taking pictures with my phone. Having the facility to snap a nice picture during a bike ride, the kids mucking about or even the latest attempt at cooking in the kitchen. Preserving these moments with images is great to do.

It's not a massive priority but participating in the social network of your choice is something just about everyone does. Staying in contact with family, friends and followers on different networks lets you connect to others in a way we couldn't before. I don't mind the hit on things social networks like App.net but it I do use Path a lot for staying in touch with family.

Logging. No, not the timber kind, the geeky, self-improvement kind. Logging tasks, actions, goals, journal entries, images, bookmarks, ideas and all that other stuff. I do this a lot with my phone. It is perhaps the one action that I do the most on my phone.

Lastly there's reading. I do a lot of reading on my Kindle, but there are times during the day where I might sit for five minutes and read a couple of things on Instapaper. The convenience of having a reading list on hand is great when you've got a few minutes to kill.

These are the non-essentials things I like to do on my phone. While my world won't stop if I don't do these things, they do make a degree of contribution to different aspects of my life. Of all these I think I miss having a camera on hand the most.

It is only for a couple of weeks more though, but what the past week has taught me is that there's only so many things that you can do on a phone and that there are apps I had installed in the past that I didn't use and therefore won't need them on my new phone. Also there's parts of the day where I enjoy not having a phone. I definitely need to tuck away my phone in the morning and in the evening. The only time should be on my phone is doing any of the actions I mentioned above and when I'm not in the company of others. Hopefully this will be easier to follow through with a little break from the magic little glass box.

At long last I managed to finish The Second World War which has been holding up my reading list for the last few months. Here's a few reviews of what I've been reading over the last few months.

• The Second World War by Antony Beevor - Without doubt this is the most complete and detailed account of the Second World War that you will find on any bookshelf. The bibliography alone takes up the last quarter of the book with supporting material from other books as well as journals of military personnel and civilians providing eye witness accounts of events. The book covers all the critical events from the leading up to the start of WWII until it's final days when Japan surrendered to the US. It seems wrong to say that I enjoyed this book given the topic, but I did. It was a learning experience for me. A chance to find out everything I didn't know about the Second World War. There were parts of the book that I found troubling to read, but the incidents that the book highlighted only re-inforce the human cost of war and why it should be avoided at all costs.
• Inferno by Dan Brown - Dan Brown's books sometimes receives unfair criticism that they are not of the same calibre as other great fictional books but I've never found that. I enjoyed this book. Another outing for the Harvard symbologist. It was a good read and it kept me turning pages right to the end. One concern I have though for these books are their duration. Like the Chase / Wilde series by Andy McDermott, I'm starting to see a repeating pattern in the adventures of Langdon as he hops across the world, interpreting symbols and saving the world. I don't think there's much mileage left in these books if Brown decides to write more of them, but I still found this book enjoyable.
• The City by Stella Gemmell - I wanted to love this book so much as I thought that it being from someone who was close to David Gemmell when he was alive, it might have some influences from him. I started the book with enthusiasm but it quickly wained over the course of the first sixty pages. I found it to be slow with no sign of picking up. After sixty pages I eventually gave up and moved on to something else.
• Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck & Cynthia Andres - It's been on the reading list for a while, but it's taken me to now to read it thanks to a prompt by another developer on App.net who mentioned he was reading it to get back to the basics of extreme programming again. The ideas and practices that I learned from this book just back up for me how important agile practices are to software development. A must read for any software developer whether they are starting their career or want to re-kindle those basics of good software development practices again.

Every yeay I read that blogs are dead or declining in use.

Blogs obviously aren't dead and I acknowledged that much right from the title. I (obviously) think there's a lot of value in the blog format, even apart from its massive influence on online media in general, but as someone who's been doing it since 1998 and still does it every day, it's difficult to ignore the blog's diminished place in our informational diet.

— RIP The Blog - 1997 to 2013 by Jason Kottke

Despite the declining use of blogs, I think they're still a great format for publishing and I'll continue to blog and read other blogs until they are truly dead.

This week I migrated my master list over to the Todoist service. I've been using Taskpaper for most of the year but one thing that is evidently missing from using this is that I have no way of easily reviewing the past week's completed tasks. I could put together a script that would count the number of completed tasks on each day in the archived section, but I keep putting it off. The other half of the problem is the synchronising conflicts I was getting from syncing my master list to Dropbox.

In the end I decided that it was definitely time to try something else. That's when I noticed Todoist while browsing the App Store. Unlike many cloud based task management services it does track the number of completed tasks for you while you work. As the end of the week draws near I am looking forward to seeing a healthy number of completed tasks for each day of the week.

Like Taskpaper, Todoist does support the concept of labels and projects which I still need. One last feature which is really nice is the templates feature. When you frequently do the same tasks over and over again, Todoist lets you export tasks as a template so that you can import them again.

It's fair to say that I've given Taskpaper a fair go but my needs have evolved over the last few months. I'm hoping that Todoist fits my needs for the foreseeable future.

As an American football fan, I thought this was such a refreshing take on the game. Given that this level of football has fewer risks when adopting such a strategy, it would still be great to see this approach in the NFL.

Slow plays, always punting on the 4th down and running the clock down are making the game safer for the teams. Safer for the winning team, but a drab to watch as a fan.

via Grantland

While flicking through my App.net timeline last week, I stumbled across a post by Guido Osorios which led me to reading about his reasons for downgrading his account on App.net to the free account.

I hate the fact that I originally payed for a great social API that didn’t hold up well at all. A little over a year has passed since its beginning, and so much about App.net permanently changed, and in my experience, it did for the bad. Sure, it may have hundreds of thousands of registered users now, but most of what made App.net different is long gone — I haven’t discovered a single person in months by now.

— Downgrading App.net by Guido Osorios

While I don't agree with Guido's comment about the direction that the API is taking, I do agree with his concern about finding people on App.net.

I am also finding it increasingly difficult to find people. With the introduction of PourOver, the number of feed accounts have risen and will likely continue. Having these types of accounts are great for members of App.net, but it would be nice to be able to search for just people in Alpha and not have any bot or feed accounts show up.

Maybe it's time for a search directory of just people accounts on App.net?

It would be great to have more people to follow on App.net especially some people I miss from Twitter, but that can only happen if more people join. Now that we have free accounts for people to try it out, I thought there would have been an influx of people but alas it seems that most people are happy to stay on Twitter.

Yet another big Apple announcement goes by and yet again we see just marginal improvements on the products that Apple have become famous for. Not that I was expecting anything grand or game changing, it's just that the hype around these things by tech sites and magazines is reaching the scales of ridiculous.

It seems common place now for magazine sites like The Verge to live blog these events even though we know 90% of what's coming. I wasn't surprised by anything that was announced at the event. 64-bit processors in the new iPhone 5S ... not surprised. Fingerprint security ... thought it was coming. It comes in gold! We already knew that.

Then there's the analysis and opinions of millions of people on whether this is Apple at their best or not. A million pointless questions being asked and everyone has their own answer. Not that it matters of course, because Apple will do what Apple want to do regardless of the views and opinions of others.

Debating on topics is fun, but I'm bored with the Apple debate now. Let them do what they do best, it's clearly working for them. If you like their products then fine, buy them. If not, go find an alternative. The world doesn't need a million different view points on a phone or a computer or anything materialistic like that.

There are more important things happening right now like state surveillance, war, chemical weapons and conflict. Maybe if these were debated with the same energy as the latest iPhone, we might actually make enough noise for those who should be listening to invoke change. It's a long shot, but it's worth a try.

There’s a great line from the start of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” spoken by everyone’s favourite pirate Jack Sparrow.

Complications arose, ensued, were overcome.

If only it was that easy. It is never that easy. When complications do happen, are we making things complicated for ourselves?

I do. I make things ridiculously complicated sometimes when I’m writing code. I’m always thinking too far ahead. What if we need to do this, what if the format changes? I’m always thinking of edge cases for features that won’t be encountered on a daily basis. I find it quite a hard habit to break.

Take for example this form I was working on yesterday. It required three things:

1. A question
2. Your email address
3. A list of other email addresses

So handling the first two things is easy, but I wanted to do something smart with the list of email addresses so that people could input any number of email addresses. I ended up with a form like this:

Handling the code to add and remove the email addresses from the list wouldn’t be too difficult but it’s clearly not the easiest thing to do. Annoyed at the complicated form I would need to build, I left my project to do some client work that had been scheduled in.

Then it hit me that night. What else uses lists of email addresses that are not constrained by size? When you are writing an email you simply enter the names of the people you want to send the email to. In one textbox. It’s that easy. The next day I changed my form to use a single textbox for the list of email addresses. A complicated form made easy.

Two things I took from this:

1. Keep it simple stupid

The KISS principle is a recurring topic in software development, but we developers tend to think of the YAGNI (You aren’t gonna need it) principle. The two are similar, but what I need to remember is the simplest and stupidest way is always going to work. It might not be clever, but as long as a simple design works, we should use it. If the simple design can’t handle an edge case in the future we can fix it then. There’s no need to worry about it for the moment.

2. Look to other examples

When building software, there’s no shortage of examples that you can refer to for influence. I’m not suggesting that you take a straight copy of a unique feature for another product, but when designing processes for your application, it can help to look to other examples to see how it is handled already. It’s probably going to be simpler than you first thought. I didn’t even think to initially look towards other examples of how this could be done. I could have saved myself a lot of time.

So there we go. My complications were not as quickly overcome as Jack Sparrow’s complications, but then he doesn’t write code does he?

Yes it's that time again where I consider moving to another blog platform. Over the last few years I've tried Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, Octopress and now I am currently on Squarespace.

The key benefit for me at the moment is that I can have two active blogs sitting on one site without having to separate them into different sub-domains. However I am wondering about merging my two blogs back into one so this isn't a big influence on the decision. What I do want is ease of deployment and a bit more control over my blog.

In the last few weeks I have just about nailed the setup on my favourite text editor and it now doubles up as my main tool for writing in Markdown. Squarespace does support Markdown, but I wish I had an easier way of posting to my blog.

Octopress is calling again, it did have a nice easy way of publishing, but I like the ability to post from the web which Squarespace does allow.

Hmm, a tough decision.

I stopped using Wunderlist for maintaining lists last week. It just didn't fit with how I worked. I wanted something a bit more low tech, so I switched back to a master list in my moleskine and index cards for tracking the stuff I want to do that week.Since I started freelancing though, I've been spurred to keep my development knowledge up to date and I'm also interested in getting some side projects off the ground. I also have a growing client list to maintain. This means more actions getting added to the master list on a daily basis. Maintaining it in my moleskine was becoming a real struggle as it was strewn across a couple of pages. I still needed something that let me track my master list in a digital way, without it becoming too technical.

Enter TaskPaper.

TaskPaper is a todo list that stands apart from many todo list applications in that it uses a plain text file for your list rather than a database or remote data storage. I'm a big fan of simple software that uses flat files for backend storage, especially when that software can link to your Dropbox and let you sync it across all your devices.

Taskpaper is like an editor but it also had nice features that let you interact with your list easily. The best of a todo list and a plain text file really. TaskPaper is also heavily influenced from Dave Allen's GTD system. TaskPaper allows you to create projects in your list and also attach tags to actions.

It's another change in the workflow, but I just want something that works and doesn't get in my way.

I previously wrote about the importance of maintaining your professional network. Today we're going to talk about the same thing, except in the real world.

I'm not one for attending mass networking events. These events are good if you want to find new contacts or be introduced to someone for the first time, but for existing contacts I prefer a more focused meeting. One to one networking if you like.Let me tell you about my mate John.

We worked together about ten years ago for a software vendor specialising in risk management software for health organisations. I loved the job and I loved working with John. He frequently used mind mapping to discuss problems in our software and always provided a great service to our customers. When we were all made redundant, me and John decided to stay in touch.

Over the last decade, I've met up with John about every four months. When each of us are armed with a coffee and a cake, the conversations goes from family life to careers and technology. We talk about ideas for software products, interesting applications, risk management, decision tools and more. The majority of the conversations always falls back to ideas for risk management and decision tools for the web.

It's a great chance to catch up with a good friend, but it also gives me the chance to find out what's happening in his career, his contacts and whether they are any opportunities for career moves. It's times like this that I appreciate the one to one nature of conversation. The conversation is fast, detailed and always leads to an idea or two. No email, no messaging, no smoke signals. You can't file this meeting away for later like you would an email or message, and then forget about it. While networking through the digital world is necessary, so is meetings like this. Whether it's frequent or not, the chance to find out what's happening, discuss ideas and ventures can always lead to an opportunity to further your career or skills.

The next time you find someone on LinkedIn that you want to connect with, remember the people you currently have in your network. When was the last time you had a one to one meeting with someone who influences you?

Some influential posts that have got me thinking that Twitter isn't really for me anymore.

The current problem with Twitter is not that they’re now trying to make money, it’s that they didn’t have a viable business plan from day one. They’ve turned those kings into serfs that are for sale.

— Twitter: Turning Kings in to Serfs by Curtis McHale

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I’m not quite sure if Twitter changed. But it seems to have, for me. And it is far more likely that I have or that I am. It is not currently a place I wish to be. I wish I could tell you why but I’m not sure I have examined it deeply enough.

— On Twitter

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Every developer should have a blog - Put yourself out there and make it findable. And still you tweet giving all your life's precious remaining keystrokes to a company and a service that doesn't love or care about you - to a service that can't even find a tweet you wrote a month ago.

— Your Words are Wasted