Jon Udell's Traction User Group 2010 closing keynote, Oct 13 2010, Newport RI. For TUG 2010 Newport slides, agenda and more see www.TractionSoftware.com
1. Being Observable culture, environment, habit Jon Udell TUG2010 October 2010 http://jonudell.net http://delicious.com/judell/tug2010
2. “The women could bring their crafts out into the communal yard, to chat and help one another as they worked and watched the children play.” “The children, in turn, could play at helping, pretending to do what the big folks do, as children will. ” “Such play can function as a sort of vocational kindergarten, teaching the children the basic steps in processes that they will have to master in earnest later. ”
3.
4. He drives to the office in the morning and comes home at night. 1960 2010 (imagined) what does daddy do for work? You can see for yourself! It’s all online! But basically he writes articles and software, and … 2010 (actual) He sits in his office at home and talks on the phone and types on the computer
5.
6.
7. JL : My father documented his work in the arts and trades. He was a commercial artist through the 20s, then shifted into furniture and buildings at the craftsman/artisan level. JU : And he left behind detailed logs of his practice? JL : Yeah, detailed files of every project he ever worked on. So I learned that as part of my carpentry and woodworking, growing up in his shop, and continued it when I left his shop and came east to work on old buildings. jim mcgee : knowledge work as craft work john leeke : craft work as knowledge work (corollary)
8. themes of john’s work (and mine) narration of work network effects text, audio, and video tacit knowledge
9. We've been using this tool since November, internally at UserLand. We shipped Radio 8 with it. When we switched over our workgroup productivity soared. All of a sudden people could narrate their work. Watch Jake as he reports his progress on the next project he does. We've gotten very formal about how we use it. I can't imagine an engineering project without this tool. - Dave Winer, 2002 narration of work
14. jon galloway “ Hopefully it’s helpful to you, but I know that there are f olks out there with some real skill at diagnosing application performance issues , and there are better debugging tools available , too. How would you go about diagnosing something like this?” Troubleshooting an Intermittent .NET High CPU problem
15. chris gemignani Task: Recreate a New York Times infographic using Excel New York Times version Excel version
18. If I type for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, for the next 44 years, that means there are 198M keystrokes left in my hands. That's a ceiling of 168M more words I can type in my lifetime. OK. So now, next time someone emails you ask yourself "is emailing this person back the best use of my remaining keystrokes?" Instead, consider writing a blog post or adding to a wiki with your keystrokes, then emailing the link to the original emailer. but not all software people work observably UPDATE: This is about reach and effectiveness vs. efficiency. If you email someone one on one, you're reaching that one person. If you blog about it (or update a wiki, or whatever) you get the message out on the web itself and your keystrokes travel farther and reach more people. Assuming you want your message to reach as many people as possible, blog it. You only have so many hours in the day. (message not received) (scott hanselman’s message re: “Count your keystrokes!”)
19. why don’t most people work observably? “I’m too busy to blog” “I don’t publish half-baked ideas” “I don’t get paid to do it” Subtext Text “I am not a performer”