Slashdot recently posted this article about a study that’s determined the internet is to blame for people’s dwindling social networks.

“This change indicates something that’s not good for our society. Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action”

It reminds me of Mesh and how excited people were about the whole social networking movement often associated with web 2.0. I often look at movements such as technology based social networking as symptoms. Held in that light I think it starts to get sad. It points to masses of people using technology who are desperate for social interaction. The sad part is watching them try to achieve that over the internet.

One of the presenters at Mesh was the guy who created Favourville. It’s a great example of what technologists hold up as examples of a web 2.0 social application. It allows people to connect with each other and exchange favours. You need to borrow a tall ladder, have a pile of rocks to get rid of, etc.

Great, someone using internet technology to connect people and build social networks? No, my first instinct was that this is yet another way for people not to know their neighbours. The only reason applications like favourville exist is due to a failed experiment called the suburbs combined with a technology called the internet. It isn’t opening up new possibilities, it’s attempting to fix what we’ve broken.

5 Loop

10 Go next door

20 Introduce yourself

30 Ask your neighbour if they have a ladder you can borrow.

40 Repeat until ladder borrowed

If you’ve heard of the concept of refactoring then you may have heard of code smells or database smells.

While these smell concepts have developed to the point where they have names and formal definitions, I’m guessing that wasn’t the original intention. That clarity only came through the work of documenting and conveying them as a formal topic through books and articles.

My guess is that orginally the concept of ‘smells’ was all about tacit knowledge. It’s about embracing a hunch which isn’t always done in technology, quite the opposite. Heavyweight processes often force tacit knowledge out by way of reviews, design documents, etc. If you can’t explain it, convey it, or write it out then it doesn’t exist.

The problem is that our greatest knowledge is tacit. You know something long before you can explain. How could that ever be the opposite? When was the last time you said I can explain it clearly but I don’t understand it. How many times have you said to your partner “crap, I’m sorry, I’m not explaining myself right”?

The greatest athletes can’t explain how they do it. Some brain doctor types argue that in order to do something at your complete potential requires you to put it into your sub-conscious, stop thinking about it. Athletes think about, and can explain, what they’re learning, ie the basics, the fundamentals. They can’t explain how to score 50 goals or throw 5 touchdown passes in a game.

Spoken and written word is flawed, it’s a hack, and we’ll never be able to completely convey what we experience through language. You break what’s beautiful about an idea the minute you attempt to convey it in words. In technology we sometimes allow ourselves to believe it’s all 1’s and 0’s and therefore has no place for tacit knowledge. In doing so we may lose out on the best part we have to offer.

I finally received some encouraging feedback about this site. It’s great to know that not only is someone reading it but they enjoy it. The comment was:

“I love this site. Good work…”

For some reason WordPress marked the comment for moderation, surprising given the high caliber of this particular comment. That of course drew my attention to the commenter’s URI which was serachzoloftblahblah…

I don’t mind you bots and spiders stopping by and fluffing my stats up a bit but come on, now you’re just playing with me. I’m a person, I’m not sure I can handle this emotional roller coaster.

Any relationship should really begin slowly. You catch her eye across the bar, maybe ask a friend about her, meet a few weeks later, eventually have a coffee together, some longer chats, etc. A nice gradual progression.

When’s the last time you meet a girl for the first time as she pushes past you at your front-door with a construction crew trailing behind her, begins some “minor” renovations to your place followed by moving in all her stuff while at the same time “getting to know you”?

Visual Studio is an obnoxious lady. I had to reinstall Windows last week because….well that’s another topic altogether. In doing so I installed Visual Studio again. It takes less time to install the entire OS then it does to install Visual Studio. The beast takes well over an hour to install. Does that make any sense? Of course there’s some technical explanation out there but I don’t want to know it. It’s just a bad way to start a relationship.

There was a post on slashdot today titled “Making an Argument Against Using Visual-Basic?” I’m sure it’s clear where I stand on this one.

C# and VB.NET are almost indistinct from a functional standpoint. In the end it is all compiled down to MSIL but we don’t program in MSIL and this isn’t primarily about language functionality. This should be about writing quality maintainable code.

In attempting to compel some clients to migrate off VB and over to C#, the best article I’ve come across that more or less states it all clearly is Not Another C# Versus VB Article.

Some other points not touched on in this article:

• “C# is a future language with international standardization muscle; the others are just legacy language reruns. Don’t write new code, especially class library code, in them!”
• Microsoft’s developer roadmap specifies that C# is intended for class library development while VB for RAD development.
• C# has much greater potential for widespread adoption, not only by developers but also by platforms, already having been released on other platforms (Mono 1.0).
• C# has the lead in language extension while VB continually plays catchup.

I was wondering, during my mks days, what disruptive technology we weren’t allowing ourselves to see. I kept thinking about source control being invisible, possibly at the OS level. It seems I’m not alone in this.

“It seems that the next big change in how we use computers might be the introduction of filesystems that store every old version of every file. With the explosion in size of cheap hard disks, there seems to be no reason not to keep a complete record of your computing life–and several research projects are working on it.”

This of course doesn’t address team collaboration and support for the development process itself, however, it would at least mean I no longer have to run a local Subversion server.

The quote above is from Keeping Your Life in Subversion. I have to confess that I keep my life in Subversion as well.

I recently switched bracket styles in code. Here’s what I used to do:

It’s clean and doesn’t take up a lot of lines. What I’ve never explicitly done is strived for a code style that makes errors, bad code etc easier to spot. I’ve made the simple switch to this style, which is most likely the more common of the two:

The result is easier to scan and see the opening and closing braces. Actually I really don’t even have to scan, I can just see them. Technically I like the look of the other style better but I agree the latter is easier to work with so I’ve given up on cool and made the switch.

In technology, we’re always discussing standards when it comes to formats and interfaces. Industries need to standardize on this format or that format in order to facilitate communications and the exchange of information, specifically digital information.

The thing is, aren’t we better off keeping the pool diverse? If you’re successful in having your industry adopt your standard, have you not simply created another monoculture and thereby signed your death cert?

Would any business in this position work towards NOT having their standards globally adopted in order to stave off extinction of that standard? Would it spell the end of MicroFormats if they somehow achieved global adoption?

If you’re not sure what monocultures have to do with technology then read this. It’s one of many reasons I use a limited amount of Microsoft technologies.

I ran into Rob Hyndman the other night, one of the organizers of Mesh, and he asked me how I felt Mesh went, no bs. I didn’t get a chance to answer him completely so here I am.

My take, Mesh was very well organized. As far as conferences go, this one was painless from the choice of location, to the layout, to lunch, etc. The only thing I missed was more details on the speakers, possibly adding small bio pieces to the conference pamphlet.

Content, the keynotes were great, some outstanding, the home run for me was Michael Geist. I’m biased, however, I think the StoryStream videos were a great addition as well.

Where things went a little off the rails for me was during the afternoon panels/workshops. I’m really not the best person to ask as I’m deep in technology not marketing. Anytime you put a technologist into a marketing focussed panel discussion you could be in trouble. While some of the discussions were interesting, most didn’t work for me. At times it just felt like sitting around discussing what other people may do in the coming year. We were gossiping. Will blogs be monetized, where’s web 2.0 heading, etc. The reason I know I’m not the target audience is because I’m sure that’s exactly what they’re supposed to be discussing in these sessions. Me, I’d rather build something than jabber about what someone else may build someday. I suppose that’s another reason I’m not in marketing.

Will I go to Mesh again? At this point yes.

Paul Graham wrote an interesting piece about the term web 2.0.

“And the fact that I both despise the phrase and understand it is the surest proof that it has started to mean something.”

His Web 2.0 list:

1. Ajax
2. Democracy
3. Don’t Maltreat Users