Standing the test of time

17 August, 2010

A decade is nearly a century in IT land. But a good system can stand the test of time.

I had a friend visiting this weekend who I used to work with back in NZ. I had a big hand in designing parts of the CAD/CAM engine of the application, and managing the team we all worked on together. He still works there and happened to have a development environment setup with said application. Firing it up was like seeing an old long lost friend, the grey matter was reconnecting the interface and parts that I designed, they were still there and working - 10-12 years later !

Remember those old friends who it's just like yesterday when you see them ? This was just like that. Smiles all round as I was fumbling my way through it and remembering, "whoah .. that's still there", "would you look at that", "hang on, wow, I remember what the document that specced that was called!".

One of my favourite interview questions is "What's your proudest moment?" I think that's it. Right there. Over a decade ago I helped design something, and today, thousands and thousands of users across the world are using this application day in day out to design and manufacture parts of buildings.

What's something you put built, designed, sketched out, built, qa'd, pm'd years ago and is still there to this day ? Go and dig up your old applications, you might be pleasantly surprised...

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The "Dynamic UX" project - Episode 1

21 January, 2009

Friday night, I was cleaning the house I had one of those moments which resulted in hitting up the blackboard scrawling lots of slightly out of the box thinking. Rather than put together a horrendously long post, I've thrown up this video giving a backgrounder on what I'm thinking about, and hoping to put into action....
Pontificating on Dynamic UX from Rowan Hick on Vimeo. The basic premise for those that don't watch the video is - the core web experience over the past number of years, really hasn't changed - however what we do have, is substantially enhanced productivity through the use of many great frameworks and languages. So let's look at the core web experience, and how can we alter that based on the behaviour of the user, change the layout and content shown to suit the individual user. Next Episode, mapping out a system for profiling the behaviour of the user. Look out for a github repo soon.

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What's on your desk

06 January, 2009

Following on from John Nunemakers post. I've been wanting to share this for quite sometime. I should preface this with, I'm one of *those* guys that loves to tweak, tinker, prod and play with things. It drives my fiance nuts.. So here goes. I recently just put the finishing coats of paint on my home office. Software for profit: Textmate - what can I say NetBeans - @adamw523 is convincing me slowly that maybe this is the way of the future. Haml plugin needs some work though. I sincerely hope there's a Textmate2 in the works. Rescuetime - I'm competitive as hell. Apparently for this week I'm in the Top 1% of users for efficency. Jungledisk - no nasty catastrophic disk failures here 1password - what, you put your passwords in a text file ? Expandrive - mounting your server to your local filesystem over SSH ... Mailplane - saved my life iTerm - put your production servers on a red background, white foreground profile, never again will you forget you're on a production server... Skype - one of these days I'm going to give the "laptop handheld video tour" and it will end in tragedy... I just know it. Plus everyone seems to talk to the cats over skype video.. it's amazing. Online services: "rails ourapp" - Tend to build what we need, not a big fan of paying out for something invariably you have to change your processes to suit. Photos - Flickr Pro Account. Please never let Flickr die Devguard - kinda rocks for subversion hosting, if you're not into this whole git hotness yet. Now, for the fun part.. The brains: MBP - for profit Tower - Watercooled (both GPU and CPU), overclocked, beast. C2D E8500 @ 3.59ghz, 4GB DDR2-1000MHZ, EVGA 8800GT, 15'000RPM Velocripator drive. *always* put your money into fast drives, money well spent. Backup - Lacie BigTriple in Raid 1 config. Routers - Hacked (DD-WRT rocks) Mouse - A logitech thing that has outlived currently 3 or 4 Mightymice I've used at various co's ... Video: BenQ 24" - 1920 x 1200, anything less is a crime against multitasking, as good as you can get without spending stupid money. Audio: NuForce Icon - I like detail (USB, outputs clean audio) Sophia Electric Baby tube amp - I like detail and warmth, plus, VALVES ROCK. Energy RC Mini's - kick ass Mirage Omni 8" Sub - when it's not downstairs The brawn: Maple desk - all hand made. Had immense amounts of fun turning stock maple lumber and ply into this. Took approximately two months. Cost a lot more than what any rikety piece of Ikea cardboard would cost (don't ever think you can build furniture to save money). Amazingly when moving house, I didn't trust the movers, so I managed to get it all into a VW Golf in one go (albeit I was driving with the top of my head underneath the top of the desk - visualise that!). Comes apart in 3 pieces, only way to lift it. The last word:

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