Here’s an interesting image posted by one of my networking professors during lecture that contrasts a distorted signal to its ideal form: 

What you’re seeing here is a small blip in a stream of data being transferred across a network (it could be a video from Youtube or a Facebook profile image). Ideally, we’d like that blip to be nicely defined to the point where we can confidently say if it’s a 1 or a 0 and turn it into something useful like a MP3 file. But in reality, this blip would be distorted, sometimes beyond the point of recognition.   

Many people have devised smart ways of mitigating the effect of this distortion; they’ve created sophisticated algorithms for how the data is transmitted and how it’s checked for errors.

It’s pretty amazing how much complexity is behind the deceptively simple concept of transferring data.. and it’s completely invisible to our daily lives.

The richness is in me, in my heart and in my head, not in my pockets.

Engineers, designers, scientists… we’re all trying to make technology disappear; that’s the truth. That’s how life should be so that we can focus on real human habits and human needs as opposed to focusing on the technology.

I like escalators because an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. There would never be an “Escalator temporarily out of order” sign, only “Escalator temporarily stairs.. sorry for the convenience.

In the studio you can lose yourself entirely, and that can be a really narcotic and wonderful thing but it can be easy to forget that the main purpose of what you’re doing is to make a piece of music that is heard by someone else and that communicates and transmits an idea or a sensation or an emotion to someone else. It’s easy to lose sight of that when you’re in the antiseptic, closed wall environment of a studio. Working in the open air, you never lose sight of that as an objective of moving someone else..

Tumblr has recently scrapped their entire landing page in favor of giving visitors a sample of Tumblr content: 

Original

New

I like this approach much better because it’s functional and makes it immediately clear to new users what they’ll be a part of when they join. I know this won’t work for everyone, but I’d really like to see more startups (especially those with web-based services) forget the landing page as well and just show people what exactly makes their product useful. 

Now that I have some downtime before my next school quarter, I decided to create my own look-and-feel for Tumblr. 

It’s only been a few days since I started, but I am really really impressed with how much thought Tumblr has put into their developer resources. The documentation is nicely laid out, the tag language is easily understandable, and using their API has been an absolute joy. 

For the rest of the week, I’ll be spending time adding in additional meta data and replacing pagination with infinite scroll.

The meta icons were taken from Carlo Franco’s Effector Theme. In the meantime, I’ve reached out to ask if I can use them here.

EDIT: Infinite scroll has now been implemented. It’s a little rough, but it’ll work for now.

EDIT: Meta data for notes has been added. Just need to add note types.

Ultimately, the people who learn to love what they do.. will be the ones who accomplish the most. Those who push only for the sake of some future reward, or to avoid failure, very often burn out, sometimes tragically.

Facebook gave their last presentation today at UCSD. Two of the people who were presenting were UCSD alumni and one of them happened to be one of the first Facebook employees. 

The presenters immediately jumped into talking about their philosophy of “moving fast, and breaking things.” As one guy mentioned, it’s far more efficient to release a hundred ideas, kill off the bad ones, and focus on the good ideas. 

Another presenter mentioned that Mark Zuckerberg would hold a meeting every Friday (10 minutes of updates and 50 minutes of Q&A) where honesty is encouraged.

Breaking social norms is also encouraged and respected. For example, one time during dinner, Sheryl Sandberg split a line into two lines in order to make the process of getting dinner more efficient. A couple people might have thought of doing that, but were too scared to act on the idea. 

Overall, the most important thing is to take an idea, run with it and see if anyone else would want to use it.

Just got out of the the 24-hour Facebook Hackathon at UCSD. It’s the first time ever Facebook has ever held its yearly competitive sprint here and was a huge learning experience for me.

Mockup

Production

Our entry was called Qriocity (pronounced “curiosity”), which was named after Sony’s former name for their online music service. The idea of the application was to be able to pull Spotify updates from your friends and compile them into a nice visual layout that allowed you to preview the songs and even load them into Spotify. 

Unlike other competitions, I decided to focus a lot on structuring our front-end very early on. Unfortunately this ended up taking up a lot more setup time than I had originally anticipated. 

Some lessons I learned:

• Get setup time out of the way as soon as possible
• I need to learn this stuff much better. 
• It’s important to have distinct roles that don’t overlap too much. 
• Get something working as soon as possible

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.

Don’t ever design anything that you haven’t understood because as a designer you’re a translator.. and if you don’t understand what you’re doing, how can you possibly do it justice?

I was listening to Pentagram architect James Biber give some interesting insight into how he designed the Harley-Davidson museum. In order to understand the Harley-Davidson culture and create an appropriate museum he took advantage of several opportunities to ride a Harley with other bikers and even worked out a contract to ride a different motorcycle every year:

I got a chance to be the rider.. I got to learn the culture slowly and authentically. And I would not have designed the same museum after that five years of experience as I would have designed in the beginning. And so it was a kind of method architecture, a kind of method acting, by becoming part of that culture.

Source: Pentagram

… You gotta pick important stuff, because you only have a limited time.

Error is the price we pay for progress.