Anil Dash from Expert Labs spoke recently at the Fast Company Innovation Uncensored event in New York in April.
In addition to introducing the audience to ThinkTank, a tool in which Dash30 has been involved, Anil articulates a great case for using networks for the common good. In this 12-minute video, he talks about how people, including those in power, can harness the collective wisdom of the network to answer questions they sometimes didn’t know they had.
Too often, I quickly get invested in a design concept and find it very difficult to see “better” ways of doing things.
Adaptive Path’s Leah Buley shares her approach to user experience design and the importance of getting ad hoc teams of contributors to help. Not only does she make a great point regarding the importance of expanding the process to as many people as possible, but she is spot on when it comes to the idea of using light-weight sketches to explore as many ideas as possible.
Not only that, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable 60 minutes even if the video camera too often fails to show her slides.
In December 2009, Dash30 began contributing to an open source project called ThinkTank led by Gina Trapani. ThinkTank is an application that captures and organizes replies to your posts on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Dash30 was attracted to ThinkTank for several reasons. As an open source project, it represented a collaborative atmosphere rather than a client relationship. The application appealed to us as something we’d like to use ourselves. As an open source project offered was an absence of deadlines. We could work on it between other things without feeling an undo amount of time pressure.
And, most importantly, we thought we had something to contribute.
After forking the github project, installing it on our development server and discussing priorities with Gina, we dove in.
Since then, Expert Labs adopted ThinkTank and in February 2010 Anil Dash announced that Expert Labs’ first major technology initiative would involve using ThinkTank as a platform to help the White House refine the list of Grand Challenges facing us in the 21st century. Grand Challenges is part of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation in the realms of health, clean energy, national security and education. Expert Labs named Gina Project Director to lead the effort.
Starting with this post, I’ll walk through some of the thinking behind the work Dash30 has done on ThinkTank and our experiences contributing to an open source project. We’ve learned some lessons, met some very talented people and enjoyed contributing in some small way.
Have you ever tried to sort a set of strings programmatically only to be confused by the output? This usually happens with strings that contain a mixed set of numbers and letters.
David Koelle wrote a solution for this problem in 1997 called the Alphanum Algoritm.
Have you ever run into the following error message in PHP?
Fatal error: out of dynamic memory in yy_create_buffer()
I ran into this not long ago and had a hard time understanding the problem, though the fix is simple. This is a bug in PHP versions prior to 5.2 on BSD based systems.
Short of upgrading PHP to a newer version, open the php.ini file and toggle the output_buffering variable from “Off” to 4096. This variable can be found in the “Language Options” section of the file. This will have the side effect of slowing down the PHP interpreter, but it should also eliminate the bug by forcing the interpreter to flush its buffer to the web socket regularly while executing the file requested.
More information about this bug:
I’m not the first to say it, and certainly won’t be the last – Seth Godin is a genius. His presentation at the Business of Software Conference absolutely blew me away the first time I saw it, and its worth your time to watch it.
A number of years ago I was listening to a talk by Andy Stanley, who is the senior pastor at North Point Community Church in the metro Atlanta area. He was speaking about choosing to cheat at work, and he has apparently turned that thought into a book.
Work. Family. Church. Hobbies. Physical fitness. Housekeeping. Socializing. Fitting everything in is a delicate balancing act where something—or someone—is inevitably overlooked. The problem, writes author Andy Stanley, is not a lack of discipline or time management—it’s simply lack of time. With only 24 hours in each day, we sometimes need to “rob Peter to pay Paul.” We have to choose to cheat.
Sometimes words don’t do a story justice. The amount of effort invested into Python, currently my favorite programming language, is one of those stories. This illustration shows the people who have contributed to the project over time, showing their activity and how they relate to other developers who contributed.
This is a highly informative and entertaining look at what makes Amazon.com’s design work. From the synopsis:
On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.
If we were honest with ourselves, we would probably admit that trust is one of the scariest words we ever in encounter. It’s hard to earn, quickly taken away, and must be constantly cultivated. It requires us to open ourselves up to others, which is probably what makes it so difficult.
Trust can be a foreign concept to us in IT. We spend a lot of times interacting with computers, which do what we tell them to do (whether we believe it or not). But we don’t work in a vacuum, and have to develop relationships with our teammates, stakeholders, and others. Sometimes that trust needs to be developed quickly, particularly given how teams come together for projects and can disband once the project is over.
