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Feb
08

Data versus Meaning

By | Development, Focus

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Data Cloud

At a conference last week, I was subjected to all kinds of talks on data, data integrity, data storage, data in the cloud, and data-centered design patterns.  One speaker summed things up perfectly:

If you make the center of your world data, then everything else becomes easy.

This got me thinking.  From a computer-centric viewpoint it all makes sense.  Our machines are built specifically to store data, crunch data, and present that data to the user.

But I don’t just work with computers.  I also read a lot.  And I write a lot.  And I publish books.  And even in the computer world I spend a great deal of time working on WordPress – a tool used primarily for writing.

From the media-centric viewpoint, this argument stops making sense.  The most important piece of this blog, for example, is the content.  And that content is stored, essentially, as blobs in the database.  The data on my server consists of titles, keywords, post dates, views, comments, and other meta information that adds little value to the content itself.

This meta doesn’t provide any meaning to the data/content it’s meant to represent.  And that, is a huge failure on our part as developers. [Read more...]

Dec
22

Legibility

By | Family, In the Life

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FedEx Door Tag

When I was in elementary school, I was required, like most students, to take a basic penmanship class.  We learned the basics of writing in print, in cursive, and in some weird hybrid style they claimed was italics.  (I learned later that this third style was just a particular form of cursive writing, but I’ve since forgotten it completely.)

Throughout my life, my handwriting has changed dramatically.  At one point in time, I was graded on my ability to take notes.  My teachers would collect our notebooks at the end of the week and tell us whether we were recording too much or too little.  To my surprise, though, I always got low marks for my note taking.  Not because I didn’t write enough – each page was numbered and cross referenced – but because I often couldn’t read my own handwriting later. [Read more...]

Feb
19

In Your Free Time

By | Focus

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There’s often a disconnect between what we spend our “paid” time doing and what we spend our “free” time doing.  It’s this disconnect that makes so many people despise their jobs or rejoice for the weekends — our professions are not the same as our passions. [Read more...]

Feb
03

Rockin’ the Old School

By | Focus

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I learned something about myself last night.  Rather, I remembered something about myself.  When I was in high school, I always had issues typing essays.  I’d write draft after draft and take home C after C on my papers.  It was frustrating, but I managed to keep my grades up through endless re-writes and the unearned goodwill of several teachers.  It wasn’t until my junior year when I discovered a very interesting thing. [Read more...]

Dec
14

Keep Things Separate

By | Family, Focus

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Many of us struggle to find a sort of balance between our work and our lives.  We bring work home on the weekends, make personal calls from the office, or otherwise blur the lines between things that belong solely in the home or in the office.  It’s important to keep these things as separate as possible, though, and what we should be doing is fighting for that kind of distinction. [Read more...]

Oct
26

Fostering Creativity

By | Focus

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The creative muscle is like any real muscle, it can be trained, it can grow, but most importantly it can whither neglect.  It is vital to our careers as marketers to nurture this muscle from time to time, whether by taking a short vacation, doing pro-bono work for an interesting client, or by engaging in other extra-curricular activities.  One activity that is a good workout for anyone in a writing-intensive industry is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. [Read more...]