Take care of the people you love, and try to make yourself known and understood. Dial it down, work with your hands, keep it quiet, and share what you know.

— Frank Chimero, This One’s for Me

In 16 days our family will walk out of an empty house in Cape Town and get on a plane to Portland, OR. It will be a one-way journey. I’ve been searching for the words to write about it, but I haven’t quite found the right ones. So I guess these ones will have to do.

I started my first blog in 2004. It was hosted on Windows Live Spaces, and it was terrible. I called it Leave The Great Indoors (yes, because of the John Mayer song and we just moved countries and just roll with it ok?). I have no idea what I wrote about back then, but I must have felt that there was something to this writing thing, because a year later I moved it to Blogger (because more features!). It still exists, but please don’t tell anyone.

The writing thing kept growing on me, and a couple of months later I started a UX-focused blog called UX-SA (because User Experience, and I’m from South Africa, and yes it’s a stupid name for a blog). That one also still exists, but again, please don’t tell anyone.

It was only in late 2009 that I got serious about it, bought a domain name (I don’t know what I was thinking — no one can pronounce Elezea), installed WordPress, and got stuck in. I proceeded to go through several identity crises, which included a move from Silicon Valley to Cape Town, 2 kids, and realizing that I’ll never learn how to deal with angry comments so I should probably turn those off.

One day I wrote a post that got mildly popular, and Jim Dalrymple linked to it from The Loop. He also must have subscribed to my RSS feed, because he has linked to the site a few times since then — something I’m still surprised by and incredibly grateful for every time it happens.

Some time after that a guy I’d never met, who lives in Portland, started following me on Twitter. He’s a regular reader of The Loop, and he decided to check out this guy who has the same last name as he does (let’s call him Rudolph, because that’s his name). We started chatting a bit, and when he came to visit his extended family in Cape Town we caught up for coffee. We kept in touch, as like-minded people are prone to do.

Last August my wife and I went to San Diego for a family reunion. I also set up some interviews because we were strongly considering moving there. But we took one look at California and realized we won’t be able to live there again (Cape Town kind of gets you addicted to leafy mountain beauty, and well, California). On a whim I gave Rudolph a call, and asked him if he thinks we should move to Portland. I’d been following him on Instagram for a while, and it looked like a nice place.

So this random guy I met on the Internet went to work and helped us figure out if Portland might be the city for us. A few months later I started looking for jobs there. Since I’d never been to Oregon I took a one-week trip to check it out and speak to some people in person. Of course I stayed with Rudolph and his lovely family.

I talked to several companies in Portland, but the conversations that kept sticking in my mind were the ones I had with HealthSparq, a healthcare transparency company that’s part of Cambia Health Solutions. I never thought I’d work in the healthcare field, but the team’s passion and vision won me over. So on April 13th I’m starting at Healthsparq as a Director of Product. Healthsparq’s president, Scott Decker, wrote a post the other day that’s a pretty good summary of why I decided to join them. From Health Care Transparency: Opening Up the Market:

It’s important that these new transparency tools provide robust information that people want to know in a way they can make actionable. While more and more health care data is being generated and released — from personal tracking devices to government and payer data — the information won’t be useful unless it is understandable and easy to navigate. These new transparency tools should provide as complete a picture as possible of price and quality, from the moment a person begins receiving care for a specific condition to the time when they no longer require treatment.

That’s a tough UX problem, and a vision I can get behind. I’m excited about the move to a new city with new beginnings and new things to explore — and a product I can believe in.

Anyway, I’m telling you the strange story of how this all happened because I’m worried that we don’t always appreciate how cool the internet can be. My decision to start a crappy blog in 2004 eventually led to a bunch of connections with fantastic people who decided to give me a shot (remind me to tell you about the day that Francisco sent me a DM to ask if I’d like to write for Smashing Magazine). This move wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t met Jim and Rudolph online, and if they weren’t such nice people, and I can’t quite get my brain around how great that is.

We give the internet a lot of crap, and yes, it can be a vile place sometimes. But we’re moving to Portland because of relationships that were started and cemented on the internet, so I’m going to remain in awe of this technology that has the power to help us make each other’s lives so much better.

Lee Hutchinson, who was a system administrator at Boeing at the time of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, looks back at that tumultuous time in a long but absolutely fascinating article for Ars Technica:

In August 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) issued its final report. Behind the direct cause of the foam strike, the report leveled damning critiques at NASA’s pre- and post-launch decision-making, painting a picture of an agency dominated by milestone-obsessed middle management1. That focus on narrow, group-specific work and reporting, without a complementary focus on cross-department integration and communication2, contributed at least as much to the loss of the shuttle as did the foam impact. Those accusations held a faint echo of familiarity—many of them had been raised 17 years earlier by the Rogers Commission investigating Challenger’s destruction.

The report also asked a team at NASA to figure out what a rescue plan might have looked like:

To put the decisions made during the flight of STS-107 into perspective, the Board asked NASA to determine if there were options for the safe return of the STS-107 crew.

The rest of the article explains the possible rescue plan in detail. If you have any interest in science or space exploration this is a must-read.

I found the article particularly interesting because I had just finished reading my favorite novel of the year so far: The Martian by Andy Weir. The article echoed a lot of the concepts mentioned in the novel, which gave me a new appreciation for the story. I highly recommend this surprisingly plausible and funny book as well.

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1. See, this is a problem everywhere, not just in software development… ↩

2. This too. ↩

Evie Nagy did a fascinating interview with danah boyd about her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. On how teens use Facebook and Twitter:

They’re also more likely to have protected accounts, and use it to talk to a small group of their actual friends. To them Facebook is everyone they ever knew, and Twitter is something they’ve locked down to just a handful of people they care about — which is often the opposite of how adults use them.

A lot of the teens I talk to, they’ll have like 30 followers. It’s a small world for them, as opposed to trying to grow large followings. There are teens who are themselves microcelebrities, which is a different game. There are also a lot of teens who use Twitter around interests. An obsession with One Direction, and just talking to other One Direction people. That becomes Twitter, and then they’ll use Instagram with another group of friends. This one girl I talked to said, ‘Yeah, if you’re not into the things that I’m into, don’t follow me on Twitter.’

I’ve long been a fan of danah’s work, so I just bought the book and can’t wait to read it.

Related, Kayleigh Roberts wrote a very interesting article on how teens try to get celebrities to follow them on Twitter. From The Psychology of Begging to Be Followed on Twitter:

It’s not rare for a teen who is spamming to reach what is known as the tweet limit, something that the average user of the site might not even know exists. The tweet limit is 1,000 tweets per day, and many teens reach it regularly, especially when seeking the attention of a celebrity. It may seem excessive, but celebrities with millions of followers receive so many tweets, that it’s easy for even 1,000 to go unnoticed. Reaching the tweet limit can happen by accident, but it’s often a premeditated decision.

This is a world I didn’t even knew existed. I feel pretty old right now.

Great article by Zach Holman on startup growth, hiring, and culture:

I think a number of startups end up reaching some type of blindness as they grow and reach success. They are the same companies whose founders are college dropouts, but now that they’re a hundred employees they decide to follow Google’s model and recruit exclusively from top five-ranked schools. They are the same companies that hire a monoculture, not realizing that their success stemmed in part from the oddball founding crew that came together in the initial years. They are the same companies that miss out on the clever-but-unknown hacker because they’ve been in the spotlight themselves for so long.

Flappy Bird — that insufferable iOS game — has been in the news quite a bit recently. One of the more incensed “reviews” comes from Paul Tassi’s Winged Fury:

Flappy Bird is not a game. It’s an addictive collection of pixels you don’t win, you simply play until you’re frustrated enough to delete it. And yet, it’s tapped into some primal sense of accomplishment for this, the attention-deficit world we live in. Have nothing to do for more than a few moments? Whip out your phone and flap your way through some pipes. You’ll be dead in seconds with each attempt, and therefore the game can kill any span of time from half a minute to hours. […]

The time spent there is lost forever. The skill required to achieve high scores is wasted potential with no benefit whatsoever to the player. To brag about a score here is to boast to a friend how many times you managed to punch a brick wall before stopping.

Ian Bogost’s The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird starts like this:

Games are grotesque.

And it he only gets angrier from there:

Flappy Bird is a perversely, oppressively difficult game. […] Flappy Bird is not difficult to challenge you, nor even to teach the institution of videogames a thing or two. Rather, Flappy Bird is difficult because that’s how it is. It is a game that is indifferent, like an iron gate rusted shut, like the ice that shuts down a city. It’s not hard for the sake of your experience; it’s just hard because that’s the way it is. Where masocore games want nothing more than to please their players with pain and humiliation (thus their appropriation of the term “masochism”), Flappy Bird just exists. It wants nothing and expects even less.

Look, way too much time has been wasted discussing how much time people are wasting on Flappy Bird. Still, it’s just so exactly like the internet to latch onto a phenomenon like this and then blow it completely out of proportion — and in the case of Forbes and The Atlantic, turn it into some highbrow existential reflection. It’s why I hate the internet, and it’s why I love the internet, all wrapped up into one silly little game.

But perhaps the last word should go to Bogost:

For no matter how stupid it is to be a game, it is no less stupid to be a man who plays one.

I’ve been thinking about this whole “being online” thing quite a bit over the past week or so, so James Shelley’s The Overinflated Currency of Personal Brands struck quite a chord:

What happens when the fame contagion infects an entire society? [American historian Daniel Boorstin] speculated that “The quest for celebrity, the pressure for well-knownness, everywhere makes the worker overshadow the work.” Increasingly we will go about our lives and work not actually concerned with the living and working itself, but with being known for our lives and work. Our lives and work become nothing but source material for the promotion of our personalities. Ultimately, achievement and accomplishment come to mean nothing, if they are not mechanisms for propagating our individual cult stories.

I see this more and more online, and it’s a worrisome trend — this tendency to measure the value of our work by the number of people who see it and comment on it. Our search for meaningful work should always outweigh our search for recognition. This idea of individual stories and meaning remind me of Donald Miller’s words in one of my favorite books, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years:

If [it’s true about] a good story being a condensed version of life — that is, if story is just life without the meaningless scenes — I wondered if life could be lived more like a good story in the first place. I wondered if a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally.

Planning a good story for our lives has nothing to do with “well-knownness” and everything to do with the amount of meaning we pack into each day. I know I’m being a bit sentimental today, but it’s because our family is on the verge of a very big change, and much of it is driven by a renewed appreciation for living life with greater intention. Over the past few years I’ve seen my decisions increasingly being influenced by a desire for my daughters to one day say to their friends, “My Dad wasn’t afraid to take risks.” So that’s what we’re doing…

I rarely find myself in a position where I want to “engage” with the company who makes my toothpaste, so I generally don’t follow brands on Twitter (or any non-individual accounts, for that matter). But I recently indulged in a couple of guilty pleasure accounts. Faces in Things posts pictures of (wait for it) things that look like faces, and Behind the Scenes posts (wait for it) behind-the-scenes pictures from iconic movies.

I found the accounts interesting and funny for a while, but then I started noticing a few things that made me uncomfortable. Two things started bugging me:

1. Photos are never attributed to their original sources, and
2. These accounts (and several similar ones, most notably History In Pictures) seem to be run by the same people who just end up retweeting their own stuff to create some kind of snowball effect

I started suspecting that these accounts were created to amass hundreds of thousands of followers, only to then be sold to the highest bidder who wants to pimp their products to an unsuspecting audience. It’s a common practice on Facebook (I’ve written about that in The dirty world of Facebook EdgeRank Optimization), but I haven’t seen it on Twitter before.

Anyway, I unfollowed the accounts and didn’t think much more of it.

And then I read Wynken de Worde’s It’s history, not a viral feed1, in which he tears these Twitter accounts apart. He focuses quite a bit on the attribution issue, confirms that most of the accounts exist only for the bait-and-switch sale2, and then concludes:

Feeds like @HistoryinPics make it impossible for anyone interested in a picture to find out more about it, to better understand what it is showing, and to assess its accuracy. As a teacher and as someone who works in a cultural heritage institution, I am deeply invested in the value of studying the past and of recognizing that the past is never neutral or transparent. We see the past through our own perspective and often put it to use for our own purposes. We don’t always need to trace history’s contours in order to enjoy a letter or a photograph, but they are there to be traced. These accounts capitalize on a notion that history is nothing more than superficial glimpses of some vaguely defined time before ours, one that exists for us to look at and exclaim over and move on from without worrying about what it means and whether it happened. […]

And so @HistoryInPics makes me angry not for what it fails to do, but that it gets so many people to participate in it, including people who care about the same issues that I do. Attribution, citation, and accuracy are the basis of understanding history. @HistoryInPics might not care about those things, but I would like to think that you do. The next time you come across one of these pictures, ask yourself what it shows and what it doesn’t, and what message you’re conveying by spreading it.

The inaccuracy of these accounts (see, for example, 12 More Viral Photos That Are Totally Fake) is a huge deal, of course. But for some reason it’s still the lack of attribution that grates me the most. Back in 2009 I adopted Chris Messina’s use of slashtags on Twitter to attribute sources using the syntax “/via @name”. I’ve been using it ever since, and I saw many people who did the same. But it’s a practice that has slowly diminished over the past few years3.

Why is it a big deal to tell people where we found something? Isn’t the web free and open and we’re all one and blah blah blah? Sure, but the web is also fundamentally about hyperlinks. The ability to follow links back to their original sources — with plenty of pleasant detours along the way — is the core of what makes the internet such a wonderful place. Do you ever get happily lost on Wikipedia? Exactly. So if we stop caring about attribution, we rob others of the ability to find more people and topics that they might be interested in. I’ll say it again: It’s not about making the source feel important. It’s about helping others follow the breadcrumbs to places of interest.

So I guess the point of this post is to join in Wynken’s plea that we look at these new crop of Twitter accounts more critically, and call them what they are: get rich quick schemes. And to ask that we remember to take attribution seriously. It’s the right thing to do.

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1. Link via The Loop. ↩

2. Also see Alexis Madrigal’s interesting reporting in The 2 Teenagers Who Run the Wildly Popular Twitter Feed @HistoryInPics. ↩

3. There were other attempts at attribution syntax, of course — most notably the much-mocked curator’s ǝpoɔ. ↩

Justin Jackson’s This is real life is probably one of my favorite posts of the year so far. I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just quote this bit:

You see, I can pretend to be cool on the Internet, but in real life I’m just a dad in a bathrobe.

Justin, from a fellow dad in a bathrobe:

Every time someone writes about smart cities my ears perk up. Sommer Mathis just published a great interview with Anthony Townsend (the author of the new book Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia). From The Rise and Fall and Eventual Rise Again of the ‘Smart City’, quoting Townsend:

But our “smart” cities are going to look much more like the web, where there’s going to be a lot of things deployed by individual decision, talking to each other through open standards in very ad hoc, loosely knit ways.

And what I like about that is that kind of architecture is actually what a good urbanist would tell you builds a good city. You build an open grid, you allow people to customize the pieces of it that they have jurisdiction over, and you get this fine-grained, resilient, vibrant kind of system with a lot of complexity, as opposed to a very controlled, hierarchical system that’s actually fairly brittle when it comes under stress.

It’s great to see smart city thinking evolve away from large centralised systems to citizen-inspired networks. Some more interesting articles on this topic:

• Death, life and place in great digital cities
• Clever cities: The multiplexed metropolis
• Smart cities and smart citizens
• 4 Smart Designs For New Cities That Can Withstand Any Storm

I’ve been thinking about Miya Tokumitsu’s In the Name of Love for days now. Miya argues that the mantra “Do what you love” devalues work and hurts workers:

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers. […]

“Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow DWYL as career advice upon those covetous of her success.

If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.

It’s a tough critique, and at first I was looking for reasons to dismiss the argument. But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me. The “do what you love” idea is related to another theme I often see on social networks. It’s some variation of the message “If you don’t want to go back to work after vacation, you should find a job that doesn’t make you want to go on vacation all the time.” This has always felt wrong to me. I love my job — I really do. But that doesn’t mean I can’t also enjoy spending several days with my family, hiking, climbing, and hopefully with my nose buried in a zombie book.

This doesn’t mean I’m lazy, it doesn’t mean my job isn’t meaningful, it doesn’t mean I don’t like the people I work with. I will just always find a different kind of enjoyment in actively doing nothing than I do when I work. And it turns out that leisure time — and in particular, being bored — is really good for us. Nicholas Carr says this in The web expands to fill all boredom:

We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom.1

So I just think that it’s ok to split up work and leisure. If we’re lucky we get to have jobs that we love doing — and we should absolutely work hard to accomplish that goal. But spending time away from work (or working on side projects) is important and healthy, and we shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge that. It doesn’t diminish your job satisfaction or dedication if you enjoy being on vacation.

Anyway, I’ll have Miya have the last word:

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask, “Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like nonwork?” “Why should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. If we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.

And if we did that, more of us could get around to doing what it is we really love.

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1. Also see Joseph Epstein’s excellent essay on boredom called Duh, Bor-ing. ↩