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software engineering

Dealing with the outside world for programmers

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To work with the outside world where business and entrepreneurs lives, you must understand that we are in an alternate universe. For a programmer, playing with technology is fun. We live in a world where building your own server and rolling out your own custom solutions to every problem is something desirable. If something is hard to master and uses bleeding edge technology, it’s even better!

But when you step out in the real world where entrepreneurs of all shape, size and technical skills build businesses and deliver value, they don’t care about what is going on under the hood. When people need a business solution, what they really want is something that makes their job easier. That’s perfectly logical: who would implement a solution that makes their live harder and more unpleasant?

So, considering this, the role of a programmer in the business is to use technology to solve problems for people. Your job is greasing the wheels of business to make sure everything goes smoothly, regardless of the technology involved behind the scene. If your solution slows down people and gets in the way, you failed your client or your employer and this is something that should be a priority for you to fix.

cin-hammer

If you don’t fix your software when this happens, people using it to do their work will find a way around it instead of working with it. A tool is pointless without people using it, and if less and less people are trusting your software, the information in it will become unreliable. Software is alive and should evolve with the need of its users: if you don’t care for it, it will wither and die.

Sometimes this will be at the intersection of business needs and fun: a new tablet application for users needing mobility or a new web site that works with the newest browsers. But it won’t always be fun and unicorns: at other times, doing your job means maintaining an old PHP web application that’s used only by a few people, but that is essential to keep the business going. Or it means making sure that your application works fine on old Windows XP desktops that are still in use even if you’re developing in on the latest MacBook.

So, you have a choice: if you want to deal with the outside world and make people glad to have a programmer around, then you need to learn that the best solution is not always the complex one. Yes, this can mean that the solution to their problem is a WordPress installation and not a custom solution that took you a year to code, but your job is to make people happy.

Will you come with me outside?

And for any entrepreneurs reading this, where are we failing you?

My software side project : an event scheduler

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Last week, I spoke about starting my new side project and why I wanted to do it. But now, it’s time to define what I’ll be doing so you can follow along. I’ve toyed with many concepts over the last year, but most of them were pretty bad or would have taken too long to make. But one idea that would always stand out is making an event scheduler for conferences. The seed for this idea was planted by an heartfelt post on Amy Hoy’s blog about how most software to schedule events sucks which you can find at https://unicornfree.com/2014/fuck-innovation-take-2-the-obvious-fucking-fuck-fuckers. I’ll be shamelessly grabbing a few ideas from that post with the higher aim of making a good piece of software.

I’m still a bit unsure about making a product for which I’m not in the target market. On the other hand, managing schedules is a problem domain I know very well so I’m not straying too far from things I know. I’m hopeful I’ll be able to do something interesting and this idea can stay small enough as to be doable for a side project. I also took a quick look at my competitors: most of the products that include event scheduling seems to be huge integrated solutions that manages everything for the speaker lineup to the ticketing. I want to do only scheduling and do it well for smaller events, a market I feel is under-served right now.

ScheduleAllTheThings

The minimum viable product in that case would only have the ability for conference organizers to create their schedule and modify it easily on a laptop or a tablet. That way, the organizers can easily adjust the schedule on the fly as needed when things runs late or get cancelled. Pretty soon though, I want to add the ability to publish schedules to the public so attendees can see the latest version of the schedule on their own device. While this is not yet available, a workaround for organizers needing to show the updated schedule could be to display it on a large screen for attendees.

My usual process to create a new product beside some doodling that nobody can understand is to create a few mockups of how I’d like things to look like. I’m not a designer, so it’s mostly to have an idea of where things will be so I can see the UI for real and validate that it makes sense.

I work with GIMP, copy-pasting controls I make in Firebug by modifying existing web applications and controls. I like to use GIMP since it has layers and I have a decent handle on their drawing tools so I can do small modifications to colors, add more text and duplicate controls. Here is the first mockup I’ll be working from, which shows how the sessions with be displayed for each room in a day. I decided to go with this first since it’s the heart of the application and so needs to be easy to use.

CalendrierVersion2

When an event and a day is selected, I’ll show a collapsed view of all the sessions that occurs in a single room for the event. Sessions that are in green are not overlapping with anything and are working just fine, but sessions that are in red currently have overlaps with other sessions in the same room that needs to be adjusted. When a room is expanded, each session is shown on it’s own line. That way, all sessions will be fully visible even if some are in conflict to make it easier to adjust the schedule. In both the collapsed and the expanded view, the organizer can click on a session to show a quick edit menu and adjust the session on the fly, or open a popup with more details on the selected session (not shown in this mockup).

My next step at this point will be to prototype this to see how sessions will be really displayed. Since this is such a big part of the application, I want to explore it a bit to make sure it is easy to use on computers and tablets before committing to a decision on the design or on the architecture. Other parts of the application will be more straightforward so I’ll be thinking about it a bit more before throwing myself into the code, but most of the big unknowns are about the scheduling.