March 11, 2024

s18e01: Pulling the Cord; Do Not Reply; Fast User Switching

0.0 Context Setting

Monday, 11 March, 2024 in Portland, Oregon after being away for a while. But I’m back now! That break allows for a new season, so I’m just going to with that.

0.1 Hallway Track News

Hallway Track is taking a little break while I cue up the next few sessions.

I expect we’ll start up again around mid-April.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Two big things and one little thing today.

1.1 The Pulling the Cord alpha

Here is a new thing that I am doing.

For a long time, I’ve been working with leaders and executives in government explaining and persuading them to take an alternative approach to buying and building tech in their business-as-usual approach.

I am, I’ve been told, very good at this. I did it again recently for a client, and remembered how fun and fulfilling it feels to:

• empathize with leaders, fundamentally, feel trapped into some sort of groundhog day time loop of trying harder and not really getting any different results, i.e. spending a lot of money on tech that still, more or less, sucks
• I mean, really, really candidly talk about this in a way that gains trust
• Be very clear about what consultants can and can’t do, given that I’m a consultant too
• Be very clear about what vendors can and can’t do
• Help them understand the clear, realist choice they have, if they have a procurement coming up and they want to know what to do about it and what to change
• and a bunch more.

All of which is to say I’m testing turning this into a sort of Pulling the Cord-as-a-Service.

I’m going to test it first for middle management - the program managers, procurement managers, and so on in government, who want to do things a different way, and want to know how better to influence their peers and leadership to provide the cover to properly investigate and use a different approach.

But the big thing I’m going for is the kind of meetings I have with the exec leadership -- the decision makers who sit above the office and department directors, sometimes even above the agency directors, and are in control functions like “your proposal for a new procurement needs to be approved by finance and central IT”. That’s a separate thing.

So. A test. 15 people on the 20th March: The Pulling the Cord alpha.

Sign up if it’s for you pass it on if you know someone who’d be into it.

1.2 Do Not Reply

For the last three weeks or so, I’ve been working with Florian Fangohr on the next version of what I showed in s17e10, the Reply Management Stickers¹.

The new versions are at https://donotreply.cards (and also at https://nepasrépondre.cards and https://keineantwort.cards for the respective French and German versions. Spanish to come, soon)

Anyway phooey did a lot catch my attention about going through this whole process:

• Using Figma, Framer and Height in anger
• “Launching a website”, which to be honest is not something that I’ve been involved in to such an extent for quite a while, which includes for this kind of website “fuck it, we’re doing it live”
• Framer is definitely better than Squarespace, but still has stupendous frustrations, in the same way that Wordpress is now built around Blocks. These website building systems are like some sort of in-between no-code hellishness, where in Framer’s case, you can insert a form, but the form is only hooked up to certain third party services, where you can embed forms, but it’s difficult to style them based on the styles you’ve set up, and where you can do all of this, if you just learn Typescript and React which... I do not want to do? And I imagine that I will just have to Learn to Code in 2024.
• Ugh, other Framer stuff. It has support for a production/staging distinction but not versioning or branching, so the usual “multiplayer web development” also turns into a “what did you do” and figuring out ad-hoc workarounds for branching.
• There are other things like “there is a CMS” and you can do some things but not other things that you would expect to be able to do. It’s the whole 90% of the way there problem until you try to do the 10% and then start screaming.

So. This was a recent trial-by-hobby-fire of putting together a punch list of stuff to do to get live and the opportunity to be somewhat of a creative director again after a break of around ten years. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked with such a great designer, especially a long time since I’ve been told not to be happy with something being okay.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff I’m proud of. The cards aren’t just images now, they have previews that get pulled in and use the updated images if you just share them as their URL, which is super nice.

There’s also a lot that’s missing and we haven’t done yet, and a lot that I could write about the design process and what went into the decisions we made, and why. Some of our decisions have happened to have been obvious (yes, we took direct inspiration from The Designers Republic), but there’s a lot about the copy that I had to think about, and is important about why I wanted to put these together.

1.3 Fast User Switching

Look, all that stuff about streaming music services like Apple Music and Spotify generating batshit trend reports and suggestions because you have the temerity to be a parent or caregiver who has to play music to a younger, smaller person? And how it’s super irritating?

I don’t get why streaming music services can’t have user profile accounts in the same way that video streaming services have user profile accounts. I would like to be able quickly and trivially switch to a kids account in Spotify or Apple Music and just play from there. Or even from a search in my profile, to select to play the next track as the kids profile and then stay in that profile until switched back. PLEASE.

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OK, that’s it for today. How are you doing, and how have you been?

Best,

Dan

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