I’m pretty unsentimental about things like birthdays and new years, but I’m also only human and sometimes things sneak up on you unexpectedly. Earlier this week I was standing in our kitchen, staring into space as I waited for the water to boil, and suddenly my eyes focused on this—a series of guidelines my wife wrote down for our 6-year old daughter during the course of a particular trying day with her:

I looked at it, and then I saw it, and then I read it. And then I read it. And I realized that as silly as I usually think New Year’s Resolutions are, that’s some pretty good advice so what the hell, goals are good, right? So here they are, my 2016 resolutions:

1. Care less about getting credit for things, care more about sharing victories (and defeats) with the people around me.
2. Get angry a lot less, because anger just leads to yelling and yelling leads to the Dark Side. Or something.
3. Be first less. Whether it’s getting on the bus or dividing up work on a project, let others go first. It’s not only the nice thing to do, I’ll probably end up learning a few useful new skills working on things I don’t normally work on.
4. I should probably not hug my co-workers all the time, but I certainly want them to know how much I appreciate them. So I’ll tell them that more often. And my family will get a lot more hugs.
5. Actively seek out places and projects where I can lend a helping hand. And—very important—don’t forget #1.
6. Say “please” and “thank you” all the time—not only with words, but with how I live my life.

For the creation of the mechanicals was a seismic event, an earth-rending convulsion that left nothing untouched: palaces, thrones, and empires, yes, but also the way men and women thought about themselves and their relationship to the world, to God, even their own bodies.

― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

The Mechanical wasn’t on my radar until a friend recommended it, but it jumped to the top of my reading queue as soon as I read the blurb. I’m not usually a fan of alternate history or steampunk, but this story about a mechanical creature that attains free will—and thereby freedom from his creators—felt too good to pass up. And I wasn’t disappointed.

The plot is a new twist on the story we’ve seen many times before in movies like The Terminator and I, Robot. Humans create a thing that becomes self-aware, and general chaos ensues. What makes this story interesting is the mid-1900s setting, an unbalanced war between the Dutch (who created the mechanicals) and the French (who struggle to find weapons that can compete), and the fascinating inner thoughts of Jax, our mechanical protagonist.

As with most good stories, this one is only about robots and war on the surface. Dig a little deeper and you find insightful reflections on free will from the perspective of someone who wasn’t born with it. Here is Jax, describing what it feels like to be free from the geis (the painful compulsion to serve his masters) he’s been under since his creation:

Freedom felt like… nothing. Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony. A gap in his consciousness where geasa had perpetually jostled for priority, demanding his obedience. It was the photographic negative of Jax’s existence during every minute of the 118 years since he’d been forged. It was overwhelming. Exhilarating. Terrifying.

And a little later in the story, his realization that free will comes with certain responsibilities:

But he’d given her his word. And Jax realized, to his own surprise and disappointment, he didn’t want that to be meaningless. What point in having the freedom to enter into promises of your own choosing, to forge bonds of your own design, if your only aim is to shatter them? No. That couldn’t be his legacy.

I’m not sure what genre to put this book in. It’s a bit of sci-fi and alternate history combined, but it has a distinct literary fiction feel to it with its beautiful prose and wonderful storytelling. I have a couple of small complaints—the story meanders a bit at times, and it stops rather suddenly (but that’s ok, because the second book in the trilogy just came out). It still gets a big thumbs up and recommendation, though. I really enjoyed it.

Buy The Mechanical on Amazon

I’ve been doing some work on threaded discussions and comment threads in our web and mobile apps, and I thought it might be useful to summarize some of my findings here. The particular issue we’re trying to address is how to deal with infinitely threaded discussions, like the kind you find on Hacker News and Reddit¹:

The first thing I did was some research on the different approaches currently used on the web and mobile for discussions and comments. There are some weird outliers, but in general there are five major ways threads are handled:

I did some further digging and came up with the following list of pros and cons for each approach.

Completely flat

• Example: New York Times
• Pros:
  • Easy to navigate—just scroll down
  • Content not pushed off screen
• Cons:
  • No context available
  • Difficult to follow conversation or see what a comment/reply refers to

Infinitely threaded

• Example: Reddit
• Pros:
  • Context always visible
  • Can have deep side conversations
• Cons:
  • Difficult to navigate
  • Hard to find new replies on a thread
  • Pushes content off screen (as threading continues to reduce column width)
  • Doesn’t let you decide which tangents (reply threads) you want to dig into²

Capped threaded

• Example: Stack Exchange
• Pros:
  • Sets expectations that replies can’t go on forever
  • Keeps context visible (up to a point)
  • Content not being pushed off the screen
• Cons:
  • Deeper levels of replies not possible

Infinitely threaded (collapsed)

• Example: Quora
• Pros:
  • Context available on demand
  • Easy to scroll and decide which tangents to go off on
  • Less cognitive load to scroll through
• Cons:
  • An extra action needed to view context

Teased capped threaded³

• Example: Facebook
• Pros:
  • Context available on demand
  • Easy to scroll and decide which tangents to go off on
  • Less cognitive load to scroll through
  • Can highlight relevant content as teasers
• Cons:
  • New comments in thread can be confusing without their context

Our approach

All design in a business is compromise. In our case, we need to figure out what we’re willing to gain, and what we’re willing to give up for it. In our case, our existing product uses infinitely threaded comments. So any change from that will obviously be… complicated. But considering that we want a single approach on mobile and web, it currently looks like we’re going to go with the Teased capped threaded approach:

This seems to strike the best compromise between easy scanning and the ability to drill into specific conversations. The “teaser reply” is particularly interesting, because it opens up some neat ways to provide relevant content to users. Perhaps you show the first unread reply, or the latest reply by someone you follow, or the most-liked reply. We’re still trying to figure out what would be most useful.

Another outstanding issue is if/how to deal with this approach differently on desktop and mobile. Some apps (like Quora and Facebook) split the view into two pages. The first page has the content and the first level of comments, and the second page has only the reply threads. In digging into it a bit more, it looks like this is mostly to make the app more performant. Here’s how Facebook does it:

And here’s Quora:

Youtube, on the other hand, does it all on one page:

We’ll need to dig into the performance issue, but my preference would be for a single page with truncated replies, like YouTube does it. Our current working hypothesis for a good solution is this:

• Show entire comment thread on the same screen (replies not on a separate screen) to make the flow better (easier to scan and dig into individual threads)
• Cap each individual comment at 5 lines (with a way to expand) (Mobile only)
• Show first reply to a comment, with “View more replies” to load 5 more (“View more” on mobile only)
• Show first 10 comments on a post, with “View more comments” to load the next 10 (“View more” on mobile only)

I like this hypothesis because it keeps the approach the same across devices, but still allows for differences in screen real estate available on mobile and desktop. We’re still in the middle of the debate, so if anyone has any recommendations or anything to add, please let me know!