Halogen Labs

Bruno over at Rails Spikes posted a couple months ago (sheesh I am late to the party) about why email sucks for communication.

I telecommute, and a large portion of my communication with the rest of the company (and our customer) is over email. I hate it. The web development team uses IM (An internal Jabber server, actually), and it works well for daily standup meetings.

So why does email suck? Bruno sees the tip of the iceberg:

Which brings me to an idea my friend Dan exposed me to: the higher the fidelity of your communication, the better chance you have of making yourself understood. Makes sense, right? A phone with a good connection is better than a walkie-talkie with white noise and static. An MP3 with a high bit rate transmits communicates more than one with a low bit rate.

Alistair Cockburn, founder of the “Crystal” development methodologies, summed up this phenomena in an article entitled “Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development.”

Whaaa?!?!?

What he’s saying is that people aren’t robots (duh), and act different month-to-month, day-to-day, and even minute-to-minute.

The big issue is that there’s a ton of information that isn’t being communicated when you type to someone. Even over the phone, you’re missing subtle gestures that you’d normally pick up when you’re speaking to someone face-to-face in front of a whiteboard.

It’s all about the bandwidth, baby.

I had problems getting the Flex JSON parser to consume the default Rails JSON output of #to_json, and I managed to find this setting to put in my environment.rb:

ActiveSupport::JSON.unquote_hash_key_identifiers = false

And Flex happily drank down the JSON I fed it :)

One of the big features of Thunderbird 2 was that you could now tag your messages. I was excited, until I tried to use it.

Unfortunately, they’re tags in name only.

In fact, they look and function no differently than the old labels. The only difference it seemed, was that you could create as many as you wanted, and you weren’t limited to 10 of them.

So why aren’t Thunderbird 2′s tags actually tags?

For me, the reason is that they are expensive to create:

Tags are nice because they’re lightweight, and inexpensive. They’re cheap. When you use del.icio.us, you don’t have to go through a dialog to add a new tag, you just type it. You’re not prompted if you type a tag that you already used. Indeed, that is the benefit of tags; they’re organic and they align with how your brain works.

Adding tags through a dialog just doesn’t work: it’s slow and expensive.