Andrew Montalenti

Information fanaticism

On finding alternative sources of news in the pre-web era (this quote comes from ~1992):

The information is there, but it’s there to a fanatic, you know, somebody wants to spend a substantial part of their time and energy exploring it and comparing today’s lies with yesterday’s leaks and so on. That’s a research job and it just simply doesn’t make sense to ask the general population to dedicate themselves to this task on every issue.

[…]

Very few people are going to have the time or the energy or the commitment to carry out the constant battle that’s required to get outside of MacNeil/Lehrer or Dan Rather or somebody like that. The easy thing to do, you know — you come home from work, you’re tired, you’ve had a busy day, you’re not going to spend the evening carrying on a research project, so you turn on the tube and say, “it’s probably right”, or you look at the headlines in the paper, and then you watch the sports or something.

That’s basically the way the system of indoctrination works. Sure, the other stuff is there, but you’re going to have to work to find it.

Continue reading Information fanaticism

Edward Tufte is the father of modern information visualization. If you don’t know who he is, you probably should, and you can get up to speed by reading this profile in Washington Monthly, The Information Sage.

Last year, I attended one of Tufte’s one-day courses in NYC. I even showed him an early, prototype version of Parse.ly Dash. His feedback — even if it came quickly in 5 minutes — was helpful in understanding how to move the product forward.

I thought, when attending his presentation, that my main takeaways would be in the field I associated with him, namely, information visualization. But actually, my main takeaways were about communication, teaching, and journalism.

Continue reading The End of PowerPoint

Fully distributed teams: in lists

Things fully distributed teams need:

real-time chat
hosted code repos and code review
async updates
email groups
basic project management
bug / issue tracking
customer support tools
easy way to share files
standard way to collaborate on documents and drawings
personal task lists
personal equipment budgets
wiki
team calendar
webcams (caution: use sparingly)

Things fully distributed teams are happy to live without:

constant interruptions
long commutes
“brainstorming sessions”
all-hands meetings
equipment fragmentation
slow, shared internet
9-to-5
“that guy”

Things fully distributed teams do miss out on:

face time
a good, group laugh
after-work beers
office serendipity

The New Novel

Salon.com has an interesting article about the craft of writing. It’s from 2010, but still interesting.

… far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. “People would come up to me at parties,” author Ann Bauer recently told me, “and say, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this …’ And I’d (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read … Now, the ‘What do you read?’ question is inevitably answered, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to read. I’m just concentrating on my writing.’”

When I was younger, I thought there was no greater ambition than becoming the writer of the next great novel. However, this article made me reflect on my own media consumption habits, and what a small audience I would affect even if I did write such a work.

I think similarly about painting and sculpture and classical music. These expressive forms are certainly demanding of skill, but who is the audience?

It would be unfair to consider television programming or film the new novel. Certainly, these media have the capacity to change people’s ideas and have a wide impact. But, even with the technology and cost barriers breaking down on film production, it lacks the visceral nature of writing. Anyone with an idea and a pen (or laptop) can pursue writing, but you have to be a technician of sorts to make a film.

By this disqualification, software — though increasingly recognized as an art form — is definitely not it, either. So, what is?

The Sullivan Ouster at University of Virginia: a retrospective

The NYTimes features UVA on its Sunday Magazine cover today, reflecting back on the Sullivan ouster and what it means for higher education.

Three months ago, I put together a summary of the best links discussing the ouster as it happened. Today, combined with the NYTimes piece, it’s easy to get a full context and perspective on this story.

Trying to reach Storify.com ... 404: Not Found

Update from the future in 2024: Unfortunately, when I wrote this post back in 2012, I chose to use a third-party service, Storify, to do my summary of the news story. Unfortunately, not even Internet Archive has a trace of this now, and Storify has fully shut down. I leave this post here only as a reminder of the annoyance of Internet bitrot and the importance of supporting the Internet Archive and its mission.

New-Age Ed Thory in Practice

Had a short conversation on Twitter with Siva Vaidhyanathan (author of The Googlization of Everything) about new-age ed theory — where professors & students are “managed” for learning. Take a look.

Continue reading New-Age Ed Thory in Practice

My old backpack

Ten years ago today, I bought myself a birthday present. It was a Brenthaven Backpack.

At the tender age of 18, I coveted few things. But among the web designers and programmers whose blogs I read regularly and whom I looked up to, this backpack was the ultimate in durability and functionality.

It featured a padded, hardened laptop sleeve that could sustain even a dead drop from ten or fifteen feet. It had padded, adjustable shoulder straps. It was made from a seemingly indestructible material. It had hidden pockets everywhere.

At the time, I didn’t have a laptop — just a desktop computer. It ran Windows and Linux, and I used it mostly for web design and Macromedia Flash programming. Adobe hadn’t bought Macromedia yet.

Notebook computers were generally clunky and underpowered devices — not meant for doing “real work”. But my Dad purchased me a used MacBook Titanium from a friend of his — and I knew this was a true luxury.

Continue reading My old backpack

Progress Tiers: Epic, Story, Task, Step

I realize that for about 10 years now, I’ve been doing project-oriented work — generally, writing software with working software taking shape over the course of months and even years.

I have developed a theory of “progress tiers” in how this work is optimally managed.

Epics are high-level themes of functionality that manifests in software. For example, “E-mail Notifications”. This is too vague to express a specific user feature, but does express an area of strategic importance to the product. For example, it may be that the product is used primarily via the web, that it lacks engagement from some users, and that all users of the system are also active e-mail users. Therefore, it makes sense that the application would generate some e-mail notifications — but, it’s not yet clear which ones are the right ones, how they should look, how frequently they should arrive, etc.

Understanding the priority of Epics helps the team understand its product roadmap and vision, and the strategic context for the functionality they deliver.

Continue reading Progress Tiers: Epic, Story, Task, Step

Cloud GNU: where are you?

This continues an article I wrote nearly three years ago, Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed.

In the three years since I wrote that original piece, Linux has grown — albeit slowly — in desktop usage. After nearly 2 years of no growth (2008-2010, lingering around 1% of market), in 2011 Linux saw a significant uptick in desktop adoption (+64% from May 2011 to January 2012). However, Linux’s desktop share still about 1/5 of the share of Apple OS X and 1/50 the share of Microsoft Windows. This despite the fact that Linux continues to dominate Microsoft in the server market.

The proprietary software industry may be filled with vaporware, mediocre software, and heavyweight kludges, but there is certainly also a lot of good stuff that keeps users coming back.

However, I believe the 2011/2012 up-tick in Linux desktop usage reflects a different trend: the increasingly commoditized role that desktop operating systems (and by extension, desktop software) play in an omni-connected world of cloud software.

Why doesn’t Linux run software application X or Y?

For end users, the above was a core complaint for many years (approx. 2000-2009) when evaluating Linux. However, this complaint has faded in the last two years. Let’s reflect on the most common and useful pieces of software on desktop operating systems these days:

Continue reading Cloud GNU: where are you?

The Debian Manifesto

The Debian design process is open to ensure that the system is of the highest quality and that it reflects the needs of the user community. By involving others with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds, Debian is able to be developed in a modular fashion. Its components are of high quality because those with expertise in a certain area are given the opportunity to construct or maintain the individual components of Debian involving that area. Involving others also ensures that valuable suggestions for improvement can be incorporated into the distribution during its development; thus, a distribution is created based on the needs and wants of the users rather than the needs and wants of the constructor. It is very difficult for one individual or small group to anticipate these needs and wants in advance without direct input from others.

This amazing quote from 1994 (!!!) actually models the way I think about software engineering at Parse.ly.

A nice piece of nostalgia on Debian’s 19th birthday.