Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Web developer with a preference for Ruby on Rails

Moving on ...

For a few months now I have been thinking about reducing my time spent on Twitter. When I first started using Twitter, I used it solely for the purpose of finding useful tips and links for Ruby on Rails and conversing with the rest of the Ruby community. Now though it seems that there's less and less interesting stuff being posted on Twitter and most people use it for day to day stuff. That's all well and good if that's what you use Twitter for, but I'm starting to find that it's not for me.

The flip side of this is that I need another avenue to post my thoughts and other nonsense, which is why I going to be publishing more and more things on my blog.

After reading Scott Hanselman's post on the subject, it's pretty much cemented my feelings on the matter and I'm going to limit my time on Twitter for the foreseeable future. I'm still going to auto-post links from my blog to my Twitter account and the odd post from Path but other than that there won't be much activity on my timeline.

So where can you contact me then? Email always works. You can get me at matthew [at] matthewlang.co.uk, and I'm also on Path as well if you're interested.

Escaping from the walled garden

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

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

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

Your words are wasted

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.

— Your Words are Wasted by Scott Hanselman

The near opening paragraph to Scott Hanselman's latest post has been resonating in my head for a day now. In it, he champions the blog over the increasing walled gardens that social networks have become.

I've been thinking long and hard about leaving the world of social networks like Twitter, and just pouring out all my thoughts here. Writing has been something I've neglected in the last few months yet I really enjoy doing it. Rather than checking my Twitter timeline countless times per day, perhaps I should spend the time writing through the day.

I'll keep you posted on this one next week, however it's increasingly looking like I will take some time out from Twitter.

The habit manifesto

Buster Benson outlines what habit decisions are and provides some tips integrating these habits into your life. Here's an excerpt from the practice tracking tip:

If you’re not someone who naturally tracks everything you do in life, think about breaking off a separate habit decision statement for the habit of tracking. Practice tracking something other than a behavior that’s important to you. Experiment with tracking in a journal, and on a calendar in your kitchen, and with an app on your phone, and see which ones feel natural and enjoyable to you.

— Habit Manifesto by Buster Benson

Threat or Opportunity?

Ever since Google Drive came out, I've been wondering about it in relation to my journaling product that I am building that uses Dropbox. Is this a threat or an opportunity? Initially I perceived it as a threat and I was slightly nervous of the fact that another big company has entered the cloud storage market amongst other big names like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Google were definitely late to the party, but I was still concerned that people would move in their droves from Dropbox to Google just because of some special feature that Google had that Dropbox didn't.

After a few days though, my perception of Google Drive as a threat wore off and I kept plugging away at my journaling application.Then I started to think of opportunities.​ My product is small enough that I could add the ability to allow users to persist their journal entries to Google Drive, ​but should I? The whole idea behind Journalong is that I wanted something to persist plain text journal entries to my Dropbox account. Nowhere else.

Yes it would be nice if it could tie in with other cloud storage services, but that would inevitably prolong the release of Journalong. I had just gotten to the stage where I was ready for a public release. Is the opportunity to target more customers worth a delay in my product.In the end I took the decision to move on with releasing my journaling product.​ Google Drive can wait. That's the beauty of a minimum value product. Release it when it delivers the minimum value you need it to. There's plenty of time to develop it further in the future.​

Book store vs Amazon

While browsing through the books at my local Waterstones store, I became aware of how easy it was to pick up books, rifle through them and decide whether to add them to my reading list or not. It's something I do every month. Flick through a few books at the bookstore, take notes of their titles and then purchase them on Amazon for my Kindle. I've never just bought a book on Amazon though.While the purchase of books on Amazon is simple enough, the actual browsing of books isn't the same as your average book store. At the book store I find that it's quicker to pick up a book, flick through it, read the synopsis and then decide whether you like it or not.

On Amazon it's fairly easy to decide on whether a book interests you or not as all the information is there on the book's product page. Finding that book on Amazon however isn't as easy as the bookstore method. You can't glance or scan the books on the Amazon website.

Finding a specific genre or category is easy enough but then you're met with a massive volume of books displayed in a white spaced grid with tiny images of the books cover.I'd much rather be able to scan the book spines in a horizontal page ordered by author. Just like the bookshelf at the bookstore. They have images of the book cover on the Amazon website, but why not the spine?

They've probably already done tonnes of research on this with teams of designers and marketing folks and disagree with my view. For me however, the browsing of books on Amazon just doesn't compare to the experience of visiting a bookstore.​