Whiteboards change everything
Posted by Jon on Mar 15, 2008
We’re still getting settled in to the new Intense Debate offices. Definitely an interesting time.
The other day we finally got our whiteboards put in (actually they’re psuedo-whiteboards, but that’s another topic for another day) and it’s completely changed how we work. Every meeting I’ve had since has in some way involved a whiteboard. Every new coding project (I think) has also leveraged the whiteboard to outline objects, work through a problem, etc.
It’s amazing what a difference such a simple addition can make.
Simple Things
Posted by Jon on Feb 8, 2008
Sometimes it’s the simple, but clever things that are most interesting. A great example is this post: Sniff browser history for improved user experience
To summarize the post, basically it describes a method to allow you to check if the visitor to a page has visited a specific url (or url’s) recently (ie is in the browser’s history). The idea is simple: apply a different color to visited links for a set of hidden url’s on the page, and then use javascript to check the color of the url’s. If the element has the color for visited links, then you know the user has been to that page recently (it’s in the browser history), and if not than the page is not in the history. Oh so simple, but quite clever.
The article mentions using this to dynamically show various subscribe buttons based on what rss readers are in your browser’s history, but I’m sure there are plenty of other practical applications as well. Kind of makes me want to clear my own browser history though…
The Power of Collaboration
Posted by Jon on Jan 15, 2008
I’m sure everyone already knows that collaboration is, in general, a good thing, but I often forget just how important it can be. There’s a lot of advantages to sharing your ideas and working with someone else to flesh them out. In my mind there are 3 key benefits that I hope to make clear below.
First, and probably most underestimated, is that it forces you to verbalize your own thoughts and ideas. When it’s all in your head it can be surprisingly easy to overlook small details or miss things. Expressing your ideas, and hearing yourself say them out loud, can sometimes cause you to catch your own mistakes or missing pieces. Yet there’s an even more valuable exercise in sharing your thoughts with someone else…mainly, that the other person has to be able to understand what your saying. Often times this can mean that you’ll be forced to find a new way to express your thoughts, or put them in a new framework, in order to help make it clear to the other person. It’s similar to teaching in this respect because you have to have a very deep understanding of whatever it is you’re trying to share in order to effectively communicate this to others. Many times this will force you to think about something in a new way that you probably never would’ve considered if you were just brainstorming on your own.
Second, is that it provides a fresh perspective on your stale thoughts. The longer you spend thinking/working on something on your own the more entrenched you become in a few initial assumptions/beliefs/ideas. It quickly gets to the point that in your mind you no longer even consider any other possibilities. Often I personally don’t even realize I’ve done it at all, but it very much shapes your future thinking as you can no longer think outside of these initial constraints. By collaborating with someone who is not already in your frame of reference they can easily see, and point out, when these initial constraints are wrong or hindering. It’s a very similar idea to my previous post The importance of an outside perspective.
And finally, and most obviously, collaborating brings in a whole new mind (or several) on a problem. Everyone has a different thought process and getting more people involved in solving a problem or thinking about an idea is going to give you more perspectives and thus more possibilities. We all know that person that thinks in a completely different way than we do, and it is often times that person that provides the most contribution of new ideas to the discussion. This is also important in providing new ways of thinking about a problem that can lead to solutions that no single individual could’ve come up with on their own (or wouldn’t have in a time frame comparable). These are often the best solutions/ideas and are what most people think of when they think of collaboration.
So the moral of the story is this: collaboration is good. Flesh out ideas with other people, and do it early in the process if possible (although adding a new person in down the line isn’t always bad either). The added benefits make it well worth your while for key decisions.
Stupid IE
Posted by Jon on Jan 13, 2008
I spent a good chunk of my day today diagnosing an odd problem with IE that I figured I’d share in case it might somehow help someone else out there.
I’ve known for a while that there are a few pluses and minuses to using the innerHTML property instead of DOM methods to create/modify page contents in javascript. IE in particular has some oddities to avoid (for example tables have a read-only innerHTML property…attempting to set it will result in a nasty error). All this considered though, there are many advantages as well. I was testing some code I’d written and found that on some blogs this new code would crash (only in IE of course), but on others it’d be fine. I checked the troublesome page for tables, but it didn’t have any. I then went to the source of all knowledge, Google, and started my search for other odd situations with IE and innerHTML that might be causing my troubles.
Unfortunately I didn’t find much of anything useful. There were a lot of interesting articles about modifications to using the innerHTML property to speed up rendering, special instances where using innerHTML produced unexpected results, etc…but nothing that related to the error (and crash) that I was experiencing. So I broke down to doing the trial and error method…what if I put the code here instead of there….ok, now how about there instead. Eventually I ended up narrowing down the problem until I found it.
The problem came from the style attribute “height:auto”. It appears that if an element (in this case it was a <p> element, but it seems to be true of <em>, and probably others as well) has this attribute then setting the innerHTML property of a child of that element causes IE to crash and give a very unhelpful “an unknown runtime error has occurred” error message. I tried it with <div>’s and <a>’s as the child nodes and it seems to break for both.
So not sure if this helps anyone else out there, but it definitely took me a while to hunt down. The joys of web programming….
Decisiveness
Posted by Jon on Jan 12, 2008
As I talked about in my previous post, this is a time of change in my life. I’ve had to make a lot of important and tough decisions in a relatively short time, and will continue to have to make several more in the coming weeks. It’s gotten me thinking about decision making in general and so I thought I’d spill some of those thoughts here.
In general, I’ve not always been good at being decisive. It’s often much easier to “wait it out”, “see how things go”, “or run with it”. Unfortunately though, not making a decision is in fact a decision…and rarely the right one. Basically since high school I’ve often found myself falling into leadership roles. Some are by chance, some are sought after, and some are out of pure necessity. One thing that has become overwhelmingly apparent, though, is that a good leader MUST be able to make decisions quickly and intelligently. It’s of the utmost important that a leader is able to quickly examine all possibilities and choose the best one in a short time. Also, just as importantly, a leader must be willing to stick to their guns and not shy away from the decision they’ve made, and be willing to accept responsibility if the decision turns out to be the wrong one. It’s very tempting to blame the information, the group, or just the individual circumstances for a wrong decision, but the truth is that none of that matters. Ultimately the leader made the decision for the group and the leader is responsible for the decision to the group.
Being able to make sound decisions quickly is a necessity, especially in the web startup space where things move so quickly. Although I feel I still have a long way to go in being able to quickly evaluate all possibilities and still be sure to choose the right ones more often than the wrong ones, I do feel I’ve made a lot of progress in a relatively short time. I’d really encourage everyone to take on a leadership role or two at some point and actively consider this topic. Or if you can’t find yourself a leadership role just practice being more decisive in your own life. Start by being the one to make a decision among friends when someone asks “What do you want to do tonight?”. Even these tiny steps can start you on a path to become a decisive, effective leader and should not be underestimated.
A new year
Posted by Jon on Jan 10, 2008
Along with the change in the calendar year a lot is changing both for me personally and for Intense Debate. We’ve had a team member leave, which has been an adjustment for all of us here at Intense Debate, but all things considered I think the transition is happening rather smoothly. We’ve also got a completely new server infrastructure we started running on around the end of the year. It was a huge pain, but things have been running much smoother since and it was a much needed upgrade. Definitely worth the time and effort (although that’s much easier to say now that it’s all done). And of course we’ve got a lot of changes ahead in the coming weeks. Expect several announcements from our team about the upcoming changes.
This is gonna be a big year.
Spreading the holiday cheer
Posted by Jon on Dec 23, 2007
Thought I’d dust off the old elf outfit and spread a little holiday cheer…
Sadly the holiday cheer is no more 
The importance of an outside perspective
Posted by Jon on Dec 18, 2007
It often surprises me just how powerful a pair of “fresh eyes” can be. One prime example of this is a question one of our users asked me today during an IM conversation. Notice in the comments below (if there are any) that users can add in their profile information for Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Users can add this to their profile information at IntenseDebate.com. His question was this: why not include the start of the url for each of the services since that will be the same for every user?
Seems simple enough, right? Fairly obvious? Yet the truth is my team and I might never have thought of this helpful (though small) change that can simplify this process for all of our future users. Granted this won’t be a life changing moment for anyone, but this is just one example of a greater underlying principle.
The point is this: never underestimate the power of fresh eyes. Always be sure you’re taking feedback and asking for advice from someone new to the product/service. Their perspective will be completely different and will often have simple suggestions that make all the difference in usability.
Intense Debate open beta launch
Posted by Jon on Oct 30, 2007
Well, we finally opened up the beta to everyone today. It’s been a crazy week leading up to this and an even crazier day today, but all in all I’d say things went pretty well.
There have been a few minor bugs here and there, but overall things held up pretty well. We had several major reviews and a huge spike in traffic, and all things considered I was really happy with how well everything managed to hold up.
While I’m glad to get to this point, and there is certainly a fair amount of relief to finally be at this point, it’s really just a new beginning. We’ll keep cranking away to continue to make Intense Debate even better, and now we’ll have an endless flow of feedback from all of our new users to help shape the product.
So if you have a blog (or if you’d be willing to set one up) I’d encourage you to check us out at IntenseDebate.com….it’s a whole new way to comment.
Pandora
Posted by Jon on Oct 19, 2007
I had forgotten how much I love Pandora. I was reminded of it during a recent visit with Seth Levine and I pretty much haven’t turned it off since. To me I like it because it’s so amazingly simple. I’m not very good at remembering names of songs or artists (or anything for that matter), and I find it so convenient to be able to just find the name of an artist or two that I’m into right now and create an entire radio station (that I can listen to all day) with a variety of music that has similar characteristics to the artists I entered. I don’t have to create a complicated playlist and I don’t have to remember the name of all the artists and songs I want to listen to. Instead I just pop in one or two artists and have music to listen to all day.
I spend a lot of time at my computer and I had kind of phased out listening to music while working because I found it too much effort to keep up the variety to last me all day. I had replaced it with podcasts instead because it was just easier for me to find fresh content that way. However the simplicity of Pandora has reinvigorated my music listening by making it so easy to get fresh, new music (that I actually like). I’m certainly not going to eliminate podcasts from my daily work habits, but music is definitely working its way back in thanks to Pandora.
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