I write about software development, tools, and people.
And how marketing makes it all better.
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Consistency matters. Consistency matters for branding, because of copyright and recognition reasons, because you’re investing lots of money into that exact arrangement of letters. Consistency matters for code, because computers are terrible at approximation and “close enough”. Consistency matters for documentation,…
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Garbage: Solving the last meter problem
The important part is not how far behind someone is, but how well a solution works given their constraints. Can we make an improvement that is worth the disruption?
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Lady Conference Speaker: Story Arcs
The trick to telling a story is to tell people what reward they are going to get for following the story up front, so they are incentivized to follow along.
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Technically Lazy
Conflating code-y and technical means that a lot of technical people who could do the job really well are filtered out based on a lazy habit of thought.
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Try not to insult your audience
I keep thinking about that catastrophically bad Apple commercial for the new iPad.I can see what they were trying to do, to say that all these tools could exist inside their new, skinnier iPad. But the way it read to…
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Context is King
Amanda Ciarci wrote an article called Content vs Context: If Content Is King, Context Is Queen in Marketing. It talks about how the right content doesn’t work as well if it’s not paired with the right context. We can all think…
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Most of my favorite talks start with an excellent title. I have never been sure if the title drives a good talk, or if the talk thinking gels a good title. Some of both, probably. You have to admit, though,…
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Bar oil and tailored messaging
I just spent a paragraph explaining to you what bar oil is. It’s not because you’re dumber or smarter than professional woodsmen, it’s because a message only works if you know who the audience is and what they care about.…
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Guardrails and Plimsoll Lines
In an era where we have to assume that our data is being collected, and the data we collect, I think we need to get more nuanced about our guardrails. We need to think about what the worst possible outcome…
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Identify the problem, then offer the solution
You’ve got trouble, right here in River City It starts with P and that rhymes with T and that stands for trouble. The good people of River City were not dying to spend a lot of money on trombones and…