Chad Fowler
Articles by Chad Fowler
Things I mentioned in my Ruby Nation presentation
Posted by Chad Fowler on 15 June 2009 00:00
Photos by Dave Bock
I had a great time at Ruby Nation this weekend. After my presentation I got a number of questions asking about things I referenced during the talk. Here’s an attempt to point to some of them. If you weren’t there, you won’t have any context but feel free to follow the links anyway You might find something interesting.Bureau of Labor Statistics Time Use Survey
Karlheinz Stockhausen whose name I accidentally used when trying to refer to Stockholm Syndrome.
Pat Metheny – “Whenever young guys ask me what they should do to get better, I always say try to be the worst guy in whatever band you’re in. That’s the secret.”
Drepung Gomang Institute (for whom we translated Hindi)
What Would You Rather Be Doing?
Ask Sunday – the company I mentioned that helped me with research
Arduino – I used this to create the interface to my exercise bike
Gosu – The game library I used to write my exercise bike “game”
Building Games with Ruby – Andrea O.K. Wright’s presentation on game development in Ruby
You and Your Research – Richard Hamming at Bell Labs
Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order And Reducing Crime In Our Communities
Discussion Panel: Women in Rails
14 Worst Health Mistakes Even Smart Women Make – Referenced Harvard and University of Texas studies on the effect of the company you keep
How to Call Attention to Your Music – Derek Sivers free ebook
15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will
Your Customers Aren't Idiots
Posted by Chad Fowler on 05 December 2008 00:00
I was in a customer conference call with John Athayde recently, and he did something really smart. He was talking about his in-progress design for the customer's product and he wanted to explain that we would have reusable snippets of the design which would allow us to consistently provide the same view of an important part of the system whenever it would show up. This being a Rails project, we would do this using ERb partials.
So, John said, "We will extract this out into little snippets that I'll call -- partials". And so on.
He could have made up a metaphor and used a new customer-friendly term for this. Or he could have explained that we're using Rails, and Rails supports this thing called "partials" which is... blah blah blah. But the former requires us to learn a dumb new word just for this project, and the latter is too much information. The term "partial" is a pretty good one to describe what it does. In fact, in most well-designed systems, the terms the system uses to describe concepts are pretty good. Pretty easy to understand.
For some reason we developers feel compelled to hide these terms and concepts from our customers as if they're children that can't be trusted with sharp tools. They're not idiots. They just know different things than we do. Imagine if they tried to hide their terms and concepts from you because they assumed you were unable to understand them.
I saw Martin Fowler speak at an XP users' meeting several years ago, and when he got to the practice called "system metaphor", he said he didn't really do that practice so much anymore because (paraphrased from iffy memory), "Sometimes the best metaphor for a system is the system itself". Note to self- keep that in mind more often.