My answer: of course we are – any company with a hierarchy will be. The main reason is that “promotion” in our industrial society, generally means “You’re really good and experienced at your job? Now stop doing it and start managing a bunch of people”.

And the fact is, most people are really, really bad managers. A manager should be leading by building trust and a culture of excellence/results/you-name-it, mentoring, empowering and setting clear objectives. Instead, when put in such a position, most will fail to build trust – instead they put process over people, waver on objectives, micromanage and bully. Management is hard. Management is the art of losing control.

And if you’re not doing too badly at the middle-management role, wait until you’re promoted to an executive role with the massive responsibilities it involves and the strategic leadership it demands…

Don’t like the sound of this?

1. Build a team culture where promotion does not necessarily equate management, but “here is a new challenge for you”,
2. mitigate the negative effects of hierarchy by adopting a less-hierarchical structure and Agile, Iterative and Incremental processes.
3. …or stay small.

I was once chatting with the architect in a small-ish (20 people) tech company. Asked about the size and structure of their group, he told me “Everybody codes here, except for the accountant and the CEO. The latter used to code, but he was so bad at it, we made him in charge of everything else”.

In panic, people try to replace the lost order of the organic process, by artificial forms of order based on control.

– Christopher Alexander, in The Timeless Way of Building

Don’t Panic. Change is on the Way.

One of the children invents a game, dangers, threats, and a set of absurd, almost random rules for their game. He will lead the others to a magical place where all wishes come true, but only if they follow his lead and the convoluted path he will trace for them.

I remember playing such games as a child, and I remember being so engrossed in play that the day would pass in the blink of an eye. To an external observer, however, the game would have felt utterly boring.

Stalker - 1979 Movie Poster

I watched Andrei Tarkovski’s 1979 Stalker (Сталкер) – the 2 hours-and-half epic of three middle aged men crossing a field and visiting a house in ruins, making up absurd rules and being afraid of invisible dangers, all the while very seriously bumbling about the meaning of life. I think I almost fell asleep at some point. And yet … it has been a long time since I pondered and blabbered so much about a movie I’d just seen. Stalker has the kind of not-pretty-but beautiful aesthetic I aim for when I point a photographic camera at the world. It is a demanding mess of metaphors and false leads. Full of religious references, pagan, messianic or otherwise, it touches at the ideas of sacrifice, the question of what it means to be good.

At some point the character of the Writer, played by Anatoli Solonitsyn, wonders whether the only decent thing to do with one’s life is to dedicate it to art, because it is the only unselfish action. This line was probably on the crew’s mind as they were shooting amidst the toxic puddles of an abandoned power station that eventually killed Tarkovski, hist wife-cum-assistant-director, and Solonitsyn himself. Beyond its shooting and screening, Stalker remains a story of hope and dedication.

The film is a matter of faith and hope for the viewer, too. If you are like me, you learned about Stalker because so many critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. In the emphatic words of actress Cate Blanchett “Every single frame of the film is burned into my retina.”. But does the opinion of an inspired elite mean the movie will invariably be a pleasant, even life-changing, experience?

Only by letting go can one go past the nagging impression that this might very well be a 163 minutes-long bad joke. But when one does let go, Stalker becomes a trance-like meditation on life, hope and the nature of man; watching it gave me one of the most intellectually stimulating evenings in a decade.

This is not science-fiction for everyone. Enter at your own risks.

“Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe.”

My document sucked.

It was well received by the colleagues and managers I showed it to, but behind the thanks and praise it was clear that their real opinion ranged from “tell me something I don’t know” to “too much bullsh*t”, via “not ambitious enough”. Truth is, it was a messy mix of half-baked vision for our management, sales points for our account managers, and a hodgepodge of ways to make our team better at tackling this challenge.

Back to the drawing board. This time however, I did what I do best: gather people, make consensus emerge, and synthesize it into something even better. First, I stripped my document of all its grandiloquent sales stuff, all the operational ideas, and rewrote it as a manifesto: a simple, five sentence-long, explanation of my vision: ubiquity (beyond mobile), freedom (in the mobile context), usefulness here and now, platform independence, and simplicity.

Then, one by one, I took each team in a large room with a blackboard, and had them work on the following exercise. I gave them the manifesto and drew three columns on the blackboard: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Wishes.

In the first column we were to list all the strengths that would help us fulfill the manifesto I’d given them: their own strengths, their team’s, the company’s – opportunities, too. Likewise for weaknesses. And in the third, I wanted them to tell me the wishes they had, what they thought we needed to make it happen, what solutions they had to our weaknesses, what could enable or empower us.

Those used to strategic planning will have of course recognized a bastardized version of the SWOT (or SPOT) analysis. The venerable tool can be very useful with business-oriented people, but it has often appeared to baffle of scare away others, so my version tries to be a gentler, kinder SWOT.

Because it was easier to hijack existing teams’ meetings than to gather random groups one by one, I had a chance to observe the different reactions and dynamics of our designers, developers, etc.

The designers (our UX and Art team) came first, and had a fairly balanced approach. The weaknesses they pointed out were rather focused on emotion and perception, and their third column was very clearly about wishes – about how they would like to work and what they would like to play with – and not so much on solutions.

Then came the conseil team (advisors, account managers and strategists) and although not the largest team, they were rather prolific. Their view was mostly focused on business – their first column had more opportunities than strengths, and their last column was very much about partnerships, market and process, yet I think it is fair to say that their insight embodied the whole team rather well.

Third team I had the exercise with were the project managers. They were passionate, finding very few strengths but working a lot on issues and solutions. Not surprisingly, their focus was a lot on the way we work, with a lot of good ideas for tools and processes. One bizarre aspect of their analysis is that I could take the result of their brainstorm, slap a completely different title on it such as “innovation”, “profitability” or “efficiency”, and it would work just as well. Albeit great, their reflection had not much, if anything at all, to do with the question of ubiquity or mobile projects.

Finally, I worked with the developers, and was in for yet another surprise. Never have I seen a group so blatantly and immediately focus on solutions, without bothering with the expression of the problem first. They had, I think, the best ideas, most concrete and easiest to apply – but I had to struggle to get them to define the problems they were fixing, and had to fight even more to squeeze out a few items for the “strengths” column. The old “if it ain’t broken don’t fix it” motto applied here, and the dev team really didn’t understand why we should spend any time on things that work just fine until I hinted that perhaps it would be wise for them to show how apt their team was at taking this challenge on.

I came out of the whole exercise with the most amazing material. The second version of my document, albeit by no means perfect, is in a complete different league from the first. But I also came out of it a little jarred and alienated by the exercise in stereotypes, and vowing never again to conduct it in ways that favour groupthink within company subcultures.

Discussions at work about Steve Job’s recently published thoughts on flash brought up an interesting question: is Jobs trying to tell us that there is no point in making Web sites any more, and that we should all be building apps for iPhone™? And… is he right?

Yes, and No.

The Web as an information ecosystem is not in danger.

Web technologies are not in danger. On the contrary: said Steve, in his thoughts about flash, raves about the open technologies built at W3C, like HTML5 or CSS. [for more on this, see my previous post about the iphone developer agreement.]

On the other hand, the paradigm of the web “site” as a space you travel to is, I believe, moribund. It is a major shift that finds its origin, among other things, in the development of mobiles.

Before the emergence of the mobile internet devices (laptops, smartphones, netbooks, tablets and so on) our perception was that the computer was transporting us (nay – teleporting?) to the internets. Hence the metaphor and the semantics used: site, navigator, compass, “go to Yahoo”. Said metaphor also spawned the first generations of virtual reality; said metaphor was acutely present in portals/platforms such as geocities, where all the sites were organised in virtual cities and neighbourhoods.

Photo (cc) mjmalone on flickr

With the arrival of wi-fi and reliable connectivity on cellular phone networks, the thinking is reversed. We are always mobile, always going somewhere, and the Web is following us around. And since the Web and its information ecosystem is always available, we are getting used to responding to immediate needs: here, and now.

Hence the emergence of a new metaphor and a new economy around it.

Exit Geocities (RIP, indeed, 1994 – 2009), exit the “web site”. Enter ubiquitous services, aimed at solving a particular problem or serving a particular need. Right now, this new metaphor is best served by proprietary apps and web widgets, but the shape of these services may change. The future will tell us if Apple (or someone else) wins the dominance game, or if the fragmentation in the “app stores” market will kill that model, as people such as PPK seem to believe.

My bet, regardless, is that the “paradigm shift” (buzzword alert!) from the web sites to the ubiquitous web services, is durable.

I don’t want to stalk you, either, so knowing that you keep checking into a handful of places is not on my agenda. A few marketers may be very happy to know that, but do you really want them to know that you keep going to that lovely italian restaurant every tuesday before going to the movies?

I don’t care where you are right now, because I’m not there, and if I were, I’d want a smarter, less loud and noisy and crass way for the two of us to have a chance encounter. I don’t want to witness you flashing your underwear – repeatedly; but I do like the idea of a serendipity engine.

I want foursquare to be bought out and become semi-abandonware, and I want dopplr to thrive. Not the other way around.

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Among cries of anger, especially from people who were looking forward to developing using Flash technology and porting to Apple’s devices using Adobe’s upcoming Unity tool, a few heavyweights such as John Gruber and Jean-Louis Gassé both chime in, claiming it is a strategic move by Apple to control the developer ecosystem.

This from JL Gassé:

Cross-platform tools dangle the old “write once, run everywhere” promise. But, by being cross-platform, they don’t use, they erase “uncommon” features. To Apple, this is anathema as it wants apps developers to use, to promote its differentiation. It’s that simple. Losing differentiation is death by low margins. It’s that simple. It’s business. Apple is right to keep control of its platform’s future.

I would almost agree with this, except that the following statement in the agreement-to-be makes Gassé’s point moot:

or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine

HTML5 and the javascript APIs, which the new apple developer agreement specifically approve of, is precisely the epitome of “write once build anywhere”:

1. HTML5 is an open standard
2. the javascript API giving Webkit access to device’s innards are being standardised at W3C, too
3. Webkit, the engine behind apple’s web capability, is open source, and widespread amongst most mobile platforms, including Google-driven Android phones… just one of the major competing platforms in the mobile market!

Is Apple really trying to stop developers following the lure of “write once, build anywhere”? Given how Android is gnawing at Apple’s share of several markets (especially in North America), and given how Apple and Google haven’t been particularly friendly of late, you’d think Apple would try to block developers from easily building for iPhone AND Android – something HTML5+JS does beautifully.

And yet, Apple is not only allowing apps to be built with HTML5+Javascript, they are actually promoting the use of these development technologies for their new iAds platform.

Two possibilities:

1. Apple’s strategy is not really to control the developers’ ecosystem. The point of the new terms for developers is, and only is, to give Adobe the finger. Childish and silly. I don’t believe that’s the case.
2. There are competing groups at apple, fighting for dominance. The Web geeks are scoring points with their “html5 everywhere” strategy of having the best implementation of open standards and bringing in the huge, creative mass of Web developers. On the other hand, the software geeks are trying hard to limit who can build applications for the iphone os devices: mac developers, and only mac developers. Old hands knowing the Apple HIG by heart, and early converts.

If my hunch is right, the second hypothesis is the right one, and the internal fight at Apple may turn nasty when the executives realize that the strategies of these two groups are completely at odds.

The real fight being fought is not one between Apple and Adobe. It is – within Apple’s ranks – between the Web and Software crowds.

(You know who I will root for).

Of course, I could write about my mother. She worked in the tough, male-driven industry of petro-chemistry. She mostly raised me alone, giving me a taste for culture, the arts, and science all at once; she taught me that nothing comes without hard work; I owe my odd sense of humour to her.

Of course, I could write about Stephanie, my wonderful life partner who not only inspires me, supports me through the most difficult choices, leads me with her vast experience, but also is an awfully talented and respected Web professional.

Of course I could write about some of my Web geeks friends who also happen to be women: Carine, Judy, Libby, Mia, and so many others.

And yet… I wish there were more. I wish there was one of my female teachers, or one of my female current co-workers, whom I could honestly call a role model, and I can’t. I do remember a couple of female physics teachers quite fondly (wait… were all my math teachers male?), and I love my female colleagues to bits, but every time I seriously think of the role models in my life, the statistics of a science/tech world ruled by men win.

Today I can only hope that boys in the following generation – the ones who probably don’t blog and might not know they can speak up for ALD this year – will, or do, have more female role models in their life, as teachers, co-workers, or peers.

Une version française de cet article, intitulée Trois modèles d’innovation, est disponible sur le Pheromone Lab.

Google

A current poster child of innovation management, Google has been following the McKnight and 3M doctrine: every employee is entitled to dedicate 20% of their time to experiment on projects of their liking. The most promising projects started by googlers may have a chance of becoming Google products, while the rest is still a good source of training. Also interesting is the pollination and competition factors: because employees need to “sell” their work to their colleagues through a peer-review system directly inspired from academia, a sane (?) competition atmosphere keeps everyone working their best.

I do not know, however, if Google employees are forced to deliver 5 days’ worth of work in 4 days, whether this 20% is done as overtime, or whether the sanctuary of “free time” is actually respected.

Stefan Sagmeister

Notable designer Sagmeister once decided that a way to keep his design team creative was to take a sabbatical year off every 7 years. During his year off, he usually travels, toys with ideas and prototypes, builds fun projects – all without the usual pressure of having to deliver.

I ignore, however, if Sagmeister pays his staff during that sabbatical, or if they all go and work elsewhere for a year and get hired back when he comes home…

Ferran Adria and El Bulli

In terms of culinary hype, few restaurants match Barcelona’s “El Bulli”, a restaurant that opens only 6 months a year. Adria and his team spend the other 6 months experimenting in their lab, slowly and carefully designing the next season’s menu. And when they get back, all reservations for the year are usually filled within the span of a day.

Alas, it seems the Michelin 3-stars restaurant will be closing soon… by lack of profits? Or to try and reinvent itself?

Investing in time

What do these three organizations have in common? They all invest time – giving their employees a chance to escape the daily grind of production and experiment. The main difference is how long, and how frequent, is that “free time”: 1 year every 7 years, 6 months a year… or 1 day a week?

mashed cauliflower, a photo by olgucz on flickr

Mashups were all the rage but a few years ago! Every Web developer and her dog were creating a “mashup application” – most often a few layers of points of interest applied onto google’s great map APIs. In that sense, it is true that a lot of the current applications of MAR are a new spawn of the mashup hype.

Fast forward a few years, and the world mashup is hardly ever uttered – or at least, very seldom without a hint of sarcasm. Most of those “mashup” applications have died, and google did a very smart move by not only allowing everyone to layer information over their maps – they actually let everyone integrate the rich maps and data on anyone’s web site.

Mashups are dead, but their progeny inherited a lot of the contemporary web landscape: only because of the mashup hype and the experimentation it prompted do we routinely think of the web not just as a collection of page, but as a large set of linked data that can be packed together into rich, cohesive units of information. Many of the “useful” tricks of the day, be it facebook connect, feed aggregation or the new portals (hah!) owe their existence to the stickiness of the mashup buzzword.

And now, for something completely different: my secret for a great veggie mash is a bit of butter, a dash of olive oils and a sprinkle of australian herb salt. That or a red wine stew sauce, actually…

Fast forward a few years to a new job, a different working context, and I find myself realising that mistakes I see around me are too often due to people’s incapability to say “no”. Being afraid to say no (when it matters) to colleagues, clients, boss, users or subordinates generally leads to one thing: the loss of trust and respect. So here’s a patchwork of situations when saying “no” is actually the right thing to do.

Management is the art of saying “no”

A few years back, I recall becoming fairly upset at my management: I would get myself invited to the directors’ meeting to bring up, again and again, issues which I thought were of the utmost importance. The management would agree with me that the issue was indeed a big problem, and usually proceeded to pat me on the head and encourage me to keep doing my best. Why weren’t they helping me fix a situation they agreed was noxious?

I later learned the mechanics of about any decent manager:

1. Are you coming to me with a problem but no solution? Go away.
2. Are you coming to me with a problem and some vague solution you kind of would like to brainstorm about? I’ll reply “no”.
3. Are you coming to me with a problem, and a set of solutions you’re ready to defend if I challenge you, and ready to improve if I embrace them? Let’s talk

In the words of past W3C colleague Dan Connolly: Management is the art of saying No. The refusal ritual is not just a tool for busy managers to manage their budget, it can actually be a very powerful way to lead and enforce a culture and the organization’s objectives. I recently found one such example in the book Collaboration by Morten Hanser, which devotes a whole chapter to “when not to collaborate”.

Saying no to your boss

Remember saying yes to that one week-end of work, because there was a project to rush out of the door? Remember saying yes to helping that colleague with his or her work, even though it had nothing to do with your own assignments? Remember saying yes to working a little longer that week, because the workload was particularly high?

Either of those taken separately are examples of chivalrous, courageous behaviour, and for some of us, there is absolutely no issue, and we will keep saying yes, yes, yes… until…

Remember ending up in the “hero syndrome” situation, where you burn out because you’ve said yes to too much, because everyone around you started taking you for granted, because you’ve been so good at doing so much that it would be a shame to call for help?

The biggest challenge of my work career – and my whole life, actually – may have been to learn this lesson. To know the freedoms I value, to stand my ground on the compromises I am not ready to make, and to be subtle but clear when I am making an exception. Learning to say no has made me a more respected and liked colleague, not less… and a happier person, too.

Saying no to your users

When you are building a product, the game usually goes like this: you realise that in order to succeed you somehow have to listen to your users/customers. So you listen, and boy do those customers have requests and great ideas. So you start adding all those features, considering any complaint as a life-threatening bug, burning money and time to keep up with the demands. What you usually end up with is an inconsistent, ugly, unusable patchwork of a product (hello, Photoshop!) which customers eventually desert.

The point of course is not to shun everything your customers demand and pretend you know better – it’s about upholding the clear vision you have for the product and, as the 37signals folk would say, Make each feature prove itself and show that it’s a survivor.

I like what Steve Jobs (himself a terrible dragon of a manager, apparently) has to say about innovation: innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

For more on this, I very much recommend going through Stephanie’s slideset on “Defying the Itch to Stitch”, where she explains how a great product is not about outdoing the competition, but about creating an original vision for your product.

Saying no to your clients

Likewise, in an agency or freelance context, most of us are often terrified of saying no to clients, in fear that they might just get someone else to work with them, someone more accommodating.

That may happen if you behave like an asshole, or keep saying “no” without ever making a convincing case for it, or bringing valuable alternatives.

But as my experience shows without a doubt: only juniors and amateurs always say yes; the expert will think things through, sometimes agree, sometimes say no and suggest a better alternative, and earn respect in the process.

What do you think? Has is your experience of saying “no” been a positive one? Share your insight in the comments, but remember the rule: all your comments have to start with “yes, and”…

A few weeks ago, Apple, a leader in sales of mobile devices, apparently started contacting selected developers with one message: stop assuming that you are building applications for 320x480px screens.

Score one for flexible design.

So, how can one create applications that would feel and work great in the current fragmented market of web devices? I’ve had, for a long time now, a hunch that web standard technologies such as HTML and CSS had the answer. HTML and CSS were made to meet this challenge, to build interfaces that scale, to cascade differently according to the media. The new CSS3 Media Queries pushes this capability quite far already, and I have been looking forward to experimenting more with it.

I was surprised, however, by a very interesting new trend: HTML+CSS+JS are being used not as the final UI layer for web applications, but instead as a programming language to be compiled into other languages (such as objectiveC, Java etc.) and the deployed, with native UI look and feel, onto a variety of devices.

This is the strategy currently followed by Nitobi’s PhoneGap and Appcelerator’s Titanium, both of which allow development using the basic Web technologies and JavaScript API, and package the result into “native apps” for iPhone, Android (and blackberry).

This could be a very exciting development for web standards as base layers for everything on the web… including applications that have very little to do with the Web paradigm. And for designers and developers, this could be the solution to the conundrum of flexible design and multi-platform development.

Score two for flexible design.

Re-reading this review after watching Where the Wild Things Are makes me appreciate it even more. WtWTA is a honest and beautiful rendition of the joys and pain of being a child growing up. This is the movie children would make if they had a few million dollars and the talent of a Spike Jonze – instead of being usually limited to horrible crayon drawings.

Whether it is suitable for children is besides the point, the good question is whether adults can deal with it. Whether, as an adult, one is ready to open up to deep, old, primal pleasures and hurts. Wanting to be loved, wanting to be the center of attention, hating the awkward silence after a good joke, realising you are the bad guy in the story…

Life as an adult, too, is “all fun and games until someone gets hurt” – but we too often forget.

To help me avoid the mistake, I keep repeating to myself this simple sentence, inspired by the insightful David Rollert:

In a war, a general will have a goal (e.g. achieve fast victory with minimal losses and no civilian casualty), which combined with an analysis of the situation will result in a strategy (e.g. play the surprise effect, blitzkrieg, etc). The strategy will then be put to effect on the ground through tactics (e.g. attack here, attack there, and reinforce defences there to alleviate the potential impact of a counterattack).

If I’m not too far off, I hope this may help me ban misuse of the dreaded s-word from most of my daily conversations. Wish me luck.

P.S.: nothing wrong with not being a strategists. Any war will need many more able tacticians than strategists.

P.P.S.: make love, not war.

Any good reading you would recommend in this area?

This reminded me of my recent reading of Beyond Culture by Edward T. Hall, where he argues that forcing pupils to stay still while being force-fed learning is counter to how our brain closely associates functions of problem solving to body movement:

The frontal part of the brain, the part where synthesis of thoughts and ideas as well as their expression takes place, is concerned in part with five surprisingly different but apparently related activities – perception, body movement, performance of planned action, memorizing, problem solving. Body movement! Who would have thought that body movement was related to problem solving? Can’t you just see old Miss Quinby telling Johnny, who is having trouble solving a problem in arithmetic, to stop fidgeting!

The past months have seen me navigating in many ends of the Web spectrum, from the academic to the commercial, from the purely technical to community or business facets. Each time I have been considered an expert, a senior, a veteran. Which, as far as the Web is concerned, I am. I also happen to be in my early thirties…

Yesterday I realised how humbling it is to meet people with decades of experience in their field. We the websmiths too often forget that being a senior after 3 years and a veteran after 10 years is an anomaly. Let us never forget how young the Web is.

No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.

Bixi is the new community bike service here in Montreal. Lots of brewhaha around launchtime, but to me, the really annoying shortcoming of the system so far was not being able to check the status of stations on the go.

According to a message I read on the facebook group for bixi a few weeks ago, there is “no plan to provide an API, iphone app or mobile access to the map of bixi stations”. That’s rather silly, knowing that the users will want to know, in real time and on the go, whether they can get or return a bike nearby.

I’m too lazy to build a real iphone app over the week-end, but I wanted to prove that it doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars to provide bixi users mobile access to the status of the stations.

30 minutes and about as many lines of python later, I had a working hack to include a map of all stations in google earth, google maps or the map application on my iphone.

iPhone Instructions

Here’s how to use it on the iphone (or networked iPod Touch):

Disclaimer: I built this using only publicly available data – not a public, official API, though. If the powers-that-be at bixi decide they don’t like it, or change the way they organise their data, or any other silly move, I’ll have to pull the plug on this little hack. In the meantime, I intend to use it and provide it for free. Enjoy.

There does not seem to be a lot of existing resources or information on the Web about this role. “Web developer”, “Project manager” or “Software architect” all have their wikipedia entry. Search for “Web architect” in wikipedia and you will currently be redirected to a page on Web design. Wrong, wrong, wrong… There is indeed a page for Website architecture, but it still needs work.

In the Web industry, the “architect” title has long been hogged by Information Architects, and the Web Architect is generally called “Tech Lead”. That name is problematic, however, because it implies that the lead has evident authority on the development team, when the reality is often one of much responsibility, little authority: the tech lead seldom has authority by virtue of being a manager, but gains authority through the building of trust and effective mentoring.

The good news is that the Info Arch world is reinventing itself as “User Experience”. This is an opportunity for web architects to reclaim a title that makes more sense: architecture is about knowledge of complex systems, design and technology, and nurturing a project from beginning to end.

Still, the fact is there aren’t a lot of good resources yet on the Web explaining the work we do. I decided to collect a list of resources for Web Architects, mostly for my own consumption, but if it benefits others, even better!

Know the Job

In a nutshell, my understanding of the job goes:

• Provide technical vision at every stage of the project, from feasibility to delivery.
• Build specifications and/or prototypes. Do it with a team, not alone.
• Participate in development and own responsibility of architectural consistency, quality, documentation, code reviews, testing.
• Know the methodologies and development processes and frameworks. Get teams to use the right ones for the right projects.
• Develop and maintain expertise in the team through research, exchange
• Communicate, communicate, communicate. Be a bridge between people who don’t speak the same language but need to work together.

One of the fairly good resources giving generic advice on being a Web architect / Tech lead is a tutorial by Daniel Pietraru called 36 steps to success as technical lead.

I don’t fully agree with all of them, but they all carry some wisdom if understood and applied well. Number 27 (Be sure you have authority along with responsibility) is a good summary of the Architect’s odd position, of responsibility but not always authority – the latter is earned, not given.

Number 7, too (Get your hands dirty and code) can be a great way to keep one’s skills sharp, earn some respect from other developers and help deliver projects on time, but they can also drag and confine you in a role that isn’t yours. An architect is not a developer – and there are responsibilities in the architect’s job that require a creative mindset.

There must be quite a few experienced tech leads/architects out there with worthy experience to share. Jeremy Miller has a good article on the Classic Technical Lead Blunder. I’m on the lookout for more.

Learn the Tech

Regardless of how much hands-on the architect role has on a given project, the need to know the stuff can not be underestimated. This doesn’t mean you have to know everything – it’s healthy to not know, even healthier to know when to ask, and know when to do your homework.

1. Spend time on the W3C’s Web site. No, really. Keep an eye on “best practices” on Accessibility, Internationalisation, mobile Web and of course Web Architecture.
2. Can one be an expert in every possible programming language? Probably not, but worth a try. On the Web today, you probably won’t be able to survive without php. Do keep an eye on python (the Python: Visual QuickStart and Beginning Python from APress come highly recommended, and I love Doug Hellmann’s python module of the week), django, Ruby on Rails…

Learn to think like your team mates

One of the most exciting parts of the job is that the architect works with almost everyone involved in a web project. This means we need to speak their language. We need to speak marketing and strategy when assessing the project, we need to speak project management with the PMs, we need to speak design with designers, UX with UX, speak code with developers, speak test with QA. Here are a few books and resources that help become polyglot in no time:

1. Read Boxes and Arrows on a regular basis, and infuse the vocabulary and mindset of User Experience. I also like infosthetics and GUUUI. Read Jakob Nielsen too – if you must.
2. A good architect needs to know about the different frameworks and methodologies for web project management. I found Mike Cohn’s Agile Estimating and Planning to be the best book on agile project management, period. Real Web Project Management is not bad, either, although obviously made for a more novice audience.

Know the process. Know when not to follow the process

One risk, as an architect, is to be dogmatic about architectural or process changes. We all have a favorite way of running a project or building an architecture, but not all projects would be better off as scrum, and not all development benefits from test-driven development. That said, one first has to know the tools, know them well, before knowing when not to use them.

Specifications: joelonsoftware has a piece on “Why bother with Functional Specifications”?

Tech specs, however, I remain conflicted about. Most of the time, the technical specification is a long, painful document that nobody will bother reading. Several agree, calling for the death of the web technical spec, but others still see value in it.

In my first weeks on the new job the most important problem I identified was that the team created specs that nobody could really use. We’re in the process of improving our specs with the help of User Stories. User stories are often seen only as a tool for agile teams to evaluate work, but even in non-agile environments, they provide a clear checklist that can be used by everyone: the client can validate a real list of scenarios, the project manager can keep track of work done and remaining, developers can reuse the User Stories within a test-driven or behavior-driven development method.

Test early, test often. A good way to release software with fewer bugs and a quicker path to fix issues is to apply some level of Test-Driven development (and unit testing), or more recently Behavior-Driven development. For the architect the work of bringing TDD/BDD to a team will be as much technical as human, so you may want to read articles like this one and learn how to sell, and how not to sell, TDD to your team.

Tool-wise, look into rspec for ruby, junit for java and unittest for python. For php I quite liked the SimpleTest library.

Productive Tools

Doing this job well implies being good at managing people, knowledge, code and time. Patience and soft skills are the tool of choice for managing people. For the rest, a quick selection would include:

tracking ongoing work and todo lists – Things remains to this day my favourite in this area, though others will swear by iGTD or OmniFocus. If you’re hesitating, know that others have gone through this too, and see which choice they made, and why.

QuickSilver (or other similar launchers if you are not on Mac) can save tons of time on a daily basis. The real time-saver however, is to learn one’s text editor inside and out. I still love TextMate to bits and want to learn more tricks with it… even if my daily routines sees me use spreadsheets and text processors more.

For more suggestions of tools and methods, The Productive Programmer is a very decent read. It did not teach me anything I had no clue about, but it was a good validation of some simple, solid principles every developer, or anyone working closely with developers, should be reminded of on a regular basis.

Keep a sense of humour

Because it won’t be easy every day.

This list of resources will grow over time. If you have any suggestions, or disagreement, the comment box is right here ☟.

One of the things I heard most often in recent talks was “the problem is we stopped caring”. I would almost agree with it it if didn’t remind me so much of the 80-years-old pianist who tried to teach me a couple of decades ago, but mostly managed to bore me with recurrent tales of how “things were better before”.

Have we stopped caring? This question brings back a memory of a work teleconference that happened a few years ago.

With 50-ish people of different cultures and backgrounds on the call, one of my colleagues (let’s call him Charles) made a rather rude, sexually connotated joke – a joke that would have passed quite well in his native France, perhaps, but made a few people, including one US female colleague (let’s call her, em, Julie) rather puzzled and mad. Julie wants to tell Charles off for his crude joke, but diplomatically asks – still on the call with 50 on the line – for a private conversation afterward. Charles replies “I don’t care”, making Julie even more aggravated.

What Charles actually wanted to say was “I don’t mind”, i.e. “OK, I’m not sure why you are upset at the joke but let’s talk as tolerant, intelligent people”. But for a non-native speaker of English, “I don’t mind” was just a slip of the tongue away from “I don’t care”…

Every time I hear one of the genial minds at TED lament “we have stopped caring” I can’t help remembering that incident. Surely, we have stopped minding. The past century, I want to believe, has made us humans much more tolerant: too many wars have flipped most of us away from xenophobia, large middle classes away from class hatred, globalization away from racism. Tolerance, which originally means “the ability to endure pain” has become an unquestioned virtue of our liberal-democratic societies.

We definitely have stopped minding, but have we stopped caring? In societies where not being upset at alien concepts or behavior, in cities where somehow the notion of community has been lost for the the protection of our sanity in a crowded environment, the line between tolerance and indifference is indeed thin. Has our (western, mostly) society made a collective, unconscious slip of the tongue from “I don’t mind” to “I don’t care”? Perhaps, but I’d like some proof that this isn’t just the old grumpy person in us complaining that “good old times” were better.

The “Renaissance Man” is an archetype personified by the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci: artists, craftsmen, engineers; polymaths, often polyglots. Men of the renaissance were exemplary to the people of our time, we who are often struggling with varied interests and skills in an education and professional context that often rewards extreme specialisation.

I already knew of extraordinary women of the renaissance. Catherine de’ Medici, for instance, was educated, intelligent, rich and powerful beyond the reach of any other man or woman of her time. Yet I would not call her a “Renaissance Woman”, for little of her known history points towards achievements in the arts and science. Undoubtedly Catherine was a patron to the arts and versed in the science of politics, but a worthy counterpart to Leonardo or Gallileo she was not. Neither was Anna Maria van Schurman, Isabel de Castilla or other great women of that age: none of them seem to ever get anywhere near science.

Hypatia as imagined by Raffaello Sanzio

I actually found one of the best examples of a Renaissance Woman in the age which the Renaissance was mimicking and rediscovering. Born around 350 AD, Hypatia of Alexandria was a scholar, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. Said to have been instrumental in the development of the hydrometer and the astrolabe, she ran her own school of philosophy, acted as one of the last librarians of Alexandria, and exerted immense political power over the region.

Hypatia’s extraordinary character, knowledge and freedom have inspired many romanticized accounts of her life. According to legend “she moved about freely, driving her own chariot, contrary to the norm for women’s public behavior”, and the Suda, the collected history of Byzantine Greece, tells how she rebuffed a suitor by showing him an unglamorous pile of rags stained during her periods.

It is because of her death, however, that she is still so well known today. Caught in a political feud between the imperial power and rising christianity, she perished at the hands of an angry christian mob in one of the most gruesome deaths since Hector’s fate at the hands of Achilles: dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles.* After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. (dixit the Ecclesiastical History).

Her death in the midst of political and religious conflict, unfortunately, makes it difficult to know truth from fiction. To Voltaire and the deists of the 18th century, she was the “most beautiful, most vertuous, most learned, and every way accomplish’d lady”, as John Toland wrote. To others, she was “A most Impudent School-Mistress of Alexandria.”

This detour through history provided me an unexpected clue in understanding why the Renaissance had produced so few “Renaissance Women” that we would still know of them today. A biography of Hypatia by John, Bishop of Nikiu, reads: there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles.

The terms used are strangely reminiscent of another age, that of witch hunts. Our collective psyche would generally place those shameful, dark times during the middle age, and I had to double check that my hunch was correct: coincidentally, witch hunts happened during the exact same period as the civilised renaissance, between the 15th and 18th century AD. If Renaissance men dabbling in engineering and alchemy were considered the pinnacle of civilisation while their female equivalents got burnt at the stake, is it surprising that we have no history of smart women of arts and science during that period?

My only problem is that I don’t need their plastic bags. In the past years I’ve trained myself to always go groceries-shopping with a couple of large cotton bags, thus trying not to waste plastic just to carry carrots and crumpets for a few blocks. My cash-register experience generally consists of an awkward dance, both trying not to be rude at the cashier but be fast enough to grab my veggies before they get shoved in bags by the Polyethylene Pam of the day.

A few weeks ago, my shopping basket included a rather voluminous pack of kitchen towels, the kind that would definitely not fit in my usual bags, and that I would simply lug home in my arms.

Aware of an opportunity to show his talent, the packing kid grabbed the pack, squeezed it with great pains into a plastic bag, and since it stuck out in an odd fashion, proceeded to use another three bags to make handles. A true work of art. A totally useless work of art: as I noticed, the pack of paper towels already came with a flimsy, but adequate, handle.

What would I tell the kid? Thank him for his zeal or tell him off for wasting his life all the way to the landfill? I smiled and left, nagged all the way home by the thought that this is what it’s like to put one’s heart into an utterly pointless, harmful even, task. Did he even realise it? Would I, in his place? Would I, if I were working in a job or industry that caused more harm than good, walk away or put all my heart into useless masterpieces?

The middle class no longer felt satisfied with mere time off, no longer wanted to go pile up in countryside camps or popular beaches. The middle class wanted more. The middle class longed for luxury.

Whoever invented the concept of “Luxury for all” probably had a finger or two in the invention of travel as a unique, glamorous experience. YOU can walk hand in hand with your tanned beloved on a desert, pristine beach. YOU can witness the same mystical sight of the adventurers of old: sunrise over Angkor Wat; sunset in Macchu Pichu. YOU will get all that with VIP treatment. YOU… and a few other thousands, too.

We the middle class believed in this story. All VIPs, all special, all travellers. We believed in the prose of Paradise in travel brochures, we believed in glossy pictures of palm trees. And yet, travel does not happen. Layovers do. Airport security that treats you, by default, like a criminal. “remove shoes, belts, and put any liquids in a plastic bag”. Whether you queue like cattle at check-in, during boarding, or pay extra for the real VIP service of faster service and impersonal lounges, travel does not happen. You leave a nondescript, “international” airport, spend hours hurled in a black buzzing box through the troposphere, and end in another, eerily similar, nondescript, “international” airport.

How can air travel, the most glamorous thing in the world, be so miserable? Or maybe air travel never existed. If there are some people thinking that man never went on the moon and that it was all fabricated, why isn’t there anyone questioning the sham of air travel, wondering if we’re travelling at all? The travel, I was told long ago, is in the journey, not the destination. Not in fancy hotels where everyone speaks perfect English and you get an iPod to bring with you to the gym. Not in third-world streets where kids have long learned the art of putting rich tourists ill at ease, feeling guilty of their gross wealth and waistband.

In this sense there is more travelling being done when anyone decides to walk their city across – East to West, South to North, whichever way makes sense. There is a departure, a destination, cityscape slowly offering itself to our gaze, much to discover, many to meet. Paradoxically, I learned: the faster you go, the less you travel.

Sometimes I wonder if current crises may not be an opportunity to redefine travel. Ditch those silly palm trees where to many seek lonely shade and lovely enlightenment: it’s just too expensive, burns up too much oil to get there anyway, and no-one ever returned from there a happier person. Not so far, not so fast. Bring back the journey.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.

Banksy – Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall

I would love to side with Banksy here. He has a point: art at a bus stop has a mathematically greater chance of touching more people than would a museum (minus perhaps the millions-a-year ilk of the Louvre). The bus stop also shelters a lot of people with a potential to be inspired by art – unlike the jaded artgoer, already taught that art is important and thus seen chin-stroking in front of a Rothko.

Put a Rothko under plexiglas at a bus stop: no-one will even bat an eyelash at it. Not even the aforementioned chin-stroker, who doesn’t necessarily have the right sensitivity to appreciate or recognise the painting. Education and a conviction that art matters is not enough. Neither will the non-artsy bus-goers.

Not convinced? Ask Joshua Bell, thought to be the best violinist of our age, about his little gig in a Washington Metro station: “In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.” Bell was out of his context, a masterpiece without a frame.

This story is getting old now – almost two years old as I write this, but it has been gnawing at a side of my mind on a regular basis. Was it enlightening, or full of self-righteous bias? I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Neither did the authors of the article themselves, concluding (with Kant and with panache) that there wasn’t much to be inferred from their small study on humanity. Bell just was out of context, a masterpiece without a frame.

What reminded me of the Josh Bell story was my reading of an essay by Antoni Tàpies called “Nothing is Paltry”. Tàpies, painter and thinker, thinks that we have lost the ability to look, and that perhaps there is something to be learned in the Japanese mystique around sacred, beautiful arteftacts shown only on special occasions, with a solemn ritual that ensures it is given proper attention. Context matters. The frame matters.

Is the bus stop a proper frame for some art? It probably depends on the art. Just as Rothko would be shunned at the bus stop, Banksy’s provocations would be obscenely out of place in between impressionist paintings (or actually… why not?).

Does all this reflection point, eventually, towards museums as guarantors of “proper” presentation? keeping us, the alien “visitors”, appropriately far from art, close enough for awe, distant enough for veneration.

Museums too often don’t “get it” and stay stuck in their ideological dualism of the curator and visitor. Too often galleries fail to invent any scheme to save us from the drabness of the “four white walls”. And I hate the “four white walls” with as much passion as I embrace attempts to showcase art in smart, enchanting narrative spaces. Museums and galleries have either not enough money, or not enough imagination to reinvent themselves. But if Tàpies is right, if the little study on humanity done by the Washington Post teaches us anything, it is that we are not quite rid of galleries and museums yet.

In the past 25 years since the launch of the Free Software Movement, we have made great progress in convincing the world, in particular the business world, that Open Source software could, and should be taken seriously. A lot of the software powering businesses today are the same free software that CXOs would never want to hear about a decade ago, and people like Bruce Perens deserve a lot of credit for that. However, all these years of advocacy have also created a noxious myth of a free lunch: that free software just builds itself through flowery good will and smooth collaborations. And all that without any money involved.

(Image by joanplanas on flickr)

The truth is a little more complex. In my humble observation, the large majority of FLOSS is either a small personal project (the “scratching my own itch type”) with little or no collaboration going on, and all done on a single person’s copious free time, or a larger project with financial backing for development and community management from governments, corporations or other organisations. Large, well organised open-source projects with no-one on the payroll are extremely rare exceptions.

Because of my new status as consultant to W3C, I have to track very closely how much time I spend on each of my projects. Far from being a hassle, this has provided me with fascinating data on how much it actually costs to run those projects.

For example, I recently worked on a new feature for the markup validator, which I believe could have a significant impact on how usable the tool is. For most end-users, the change will be almost invisible, yet making their life easier. I counted how much time I spent on the feature, and when adding up the research, code, discussions (including handling of feedback and ideas from users) and testing, I end up with a gross cost somewhere between 500 and 800 USD. And that is not counting the “donated” time of the people who contributed ideas and feedback. It could have been cheaper, if someone had worked on their free time on a patch, but even then, the community and QA work would likely have been done by people on a payroll.

Friend and ex-W3C colleague Karl Dubost often suggested that I should put a price on each bug and feature that would be submitted by the community. The idea would be that if someone submitted a patch, it would of course get in for free, but if the community cared about getting the bug fixed or new feature in without the wait, then everyone interested would chip in.

Maybe he was up to something.

Contemporary dance, however, has an opacity I never quite felt at ease with. I am not talking about the macho “you’ll never catch me looking at people in tutus hopping on a stage” fright, but more of an intellectual lack of confidence: what if I don’t get it?

And yet when I stumbled upon the presentation of O Vertigo’s La Chambre Blanche, its themes of madness and alienation and its incredible aesthetics made me buy a couple of tickets without much thought.

La Chambre Blanche is a choreographical work in which a confining site brings on states of dismay and frenzy in its captives. In the White Room, the characters are probed in their deepest intimacy and placed in a situation of extreme vulnerability where the body has no choice but to abandon itself to disequilibrium and dizziness.
(– Ginette Laurin, Choreographer)

My fears were apparently unjustified. Obviously I still have no idea what the choreographer and dancers meant with their creation, but they provided me with a canvas on which to apply my own interpretation, my own story. Within the first 10 minutes I was following a story of violence, domestic abuse, miscommunication, and how the characters on stage had no other escape than madness.

“You told me to wait here, and I waited here all that time and you never came back”, one of the character whispers to the outside world. They don’t know they can leave, when their only horizon is to bounce on the walls of the cramped white room, and interact – through love or death – whith whoever happens to be there, too.

I left the theater battered, exhausted, sore in my every muscle as if I’d been the one prancing around for that hour. I left with a head abuzz with thoughts and full of stories. I am not afraid of contemporary dance any more.

Short video of La Chambre Blanche (2008)

Back then, we had pen-pals from England. They had a different language, a different upbringing, a different culture. They had a meal called “tea” and swear words that our America-influenced TV didn’t even know of. They were but a hundred kilometres away, and yet so alien to our adolescent eyes.

There was no clear reason why we were made into such culturally permeable youth. In the 1980s and early 1990s, “Globalisation” wasn’t even a fashionable term yet, and the concept of a “grand tour” of Europe as a way to perfect the education of the well-off was a thing of the past under our longitudes. Post world-wars European nations just happened to try to stick together for a change, and teaching kids to talk with their neighbours carried some hope of a lasting peace. To our parents’ generation, it just seemed like a good idea at the time, just like speaking mostly Spanish to my (French) best friend in high schools just sounded fun.

Fast forward a decade or two, and I’d ended up living on three distinct continents. And with a generation scattered around the globe, with friends from Oslo to Buenos Aires, from New York to Shanghai, I share a recurring dream. Not a month passes without hearing about that dream, or having it myself: living in one big house with all my friends, my family, all my loved ones.

There is no such place, and yet I have seen it, again and again. In dreams.

Using subversion for the theme code itself did help us test changes to the theme scripts and style before pushing them to production, but the content itself was not duplicated: the development instance of the blog had some fairly antiquated content, while the production instance had all the latest article.

Synchronising the content from the production to the development server was not as easy as simply dumping and reimporting the whole SQL database. Be aware that if you import a whole WordPress database, you also import some field setup that will cause unwanted redirects.

Suppose you dump the wordpress database for http://www.myblog.example.com/ into a duplicate instance at http://dev.myblog.example.com/. Try accessing http://dev.myblog.example.com/ and wordpress will automatically redirect you to http://www.myblog.example.com/, which it thinks is the right URI for your blog. What to do? Go to the WordPress Dashboard and edit the settings? Not going to happen, since trying to access http://dev.myblog.example.com/wp-admin/ will also redirect you to http://www.myblog.example.com/.

The solution I found was to:

1. Make sure you use separate databases for your production and development blog. This is much safer, anyway. Also, make sure your databases and files are properly backed up before attempting the following hack.

   Disable all plugins before the sync. Especially if you are using wp-cache, disable it. You’ve been warned.

2. Dump the database from your production blog into the separate database for your development blog. With mysql, this will look like:

   mysqldump PROD_DATABASE_NAME -h PROD_DATABASE_HOST -u PROD_DATABASE_USER -p > wordpress_dump.sql

   then

   mysql DEV_DATABASE_NAME -h DEV_DATABASE_HOST -u DEV_DATABASE_USER -p < wordpress_dump.sql

   (You will be prompted for the database password both times. Make sure to replace the placeholders PROD_DATABASE_HOST with actual values for your setup.

3. Edit the development database to tell wordpress the location of the dev blog. With MySQL again:

   echo 'update wp_options set option_value="http://staging.address.com/" where option_name="home";' | mysql DEV_DATABASE_NAME -h DEV_DATABASE_HOST -u DEV_DATABASE_USER -p

   and

   echo 'update wp_options set option_value="http://staging.address.com/wordpress" where option_name="siteurl";' | mysql DEV_DATABASE_NAME -h DEV_DATABASE_HOST -u DEV_DATABASE_USER -p

This worked for me, in two very distinct configurations last week. Any way this could have been done in a less hack-ish way? Tell me in the comments.