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I am not a fan of Facebook

Mon, 28 May 2012 20:04:08 +1000

I’m not a fan of Facebook. Not at all. Clearly that places me in the minority of people in the Western world. But following their recent IPO, I have been collecting links on articles about the Facebook IPO, and it seems that although I am in the minority, there would appear to be more and more commentators who share my view.

I think that Facebook is overvalued (ever after its first week falls) and I also think that it’s future is uncertain unless it can come up with a way to pull off the dual miracles of growing revenue at a ridiculous pace AND inventing a way to monetize their service in a world dominated by mobile devices.

Here’s a list of articles that share my viewpoint:

And just for balance, here’s the one article I saw last week that has come strongly in favour of Facebook’s valuation:

FaceBook worth every penny

Bearish? Yep.

Warning: if you're deploying to the App Store and your app uses any kind of encryption, then you need to read this article.

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:30:12 +1000

Warning: if you're deploying to the App Store and your app uses any kind of encryption, then you need to read this article.

Rant: This article in the SMH irritates the hell out of me

Fri, 11 May 2012 22:44:00 +1000

Rant: This article in the SMH irritates the hell out of me:

I read this article today in the Sydney Morning Herald. I don’t normally respond to newspaper articles, but this one really pissed me off.

How is this not price fixing? And how come these stories never get to the underlying reason why retail prices here are so high? It’s at least partly because we have some of the highest retail rents in the world, sustained by a retail property oligopoly.

Lowering the GST application value below $1,000 would cost significantly more to police than it would generate in revenue, so the outcome would simply be that consumers pay more TWICE - once for the new tax and then again for the extra compliance costs.

I simply do not understand why consumers should be forced to carry the can for outdated business models locked up by retail property moguls.

Update 20120517: Apparently, it’s not just me getting irritated by price-fixing retailers, there are now calls for the ACCC to take a look as well.

Pinboard is absolutely fantastic! That is all.

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:13:28 +1000

Pinboard is absolutely fantastic! That is all.

The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made—and change the politics of jobs too

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:47:34 +1000

The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made—and change the politics of jobs too

Startups, this is how design works

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:56:00 +1000

Startups, this is how design works

Mobile payments is alive with possibilities

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:02:00 +1100

It’s simply amazing to me how much is going on in mobile payments at the moment. Here’s a sample of some of the stories that I have seen just this week:

And then there is the completely open question of what Apple will do. 2012 is definitely going to be a very interesting year for mobile payments.

Here's a really great collection of tools to assist with the design of complex systems

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:32:30 +1100

Here's a really great collection of tools to assist with the design of complex systems

Are jobs obsolete?

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:02:00 +1100

A while back I wrote a short piece titled “I’m almost certain that I’ll never be “employed” again”. Today I found this article by Douglas Rushkoff writing for CNN in September 2011 “Are jobs obsolete?” in which he says:

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.

If you think you’ve got a job today, it’s highly likely that you will not have one tomorrow, at least in the way that we have come to understand employment since the industrial revolution.

The only way out is to create and build something. Prior to the industrial revolution, that something was made from atoms. From now on, it’s very likely that something will be made from bits.

Bootstrap is a Pattern Language

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:26:00 +1100

One of the most important advances in the way we build software systems is the development of patterns. By giving patterns simple and concise names, it allows programmers and designers to communicate about the necessary components of a system in a very efficient manner. Instead of needing to explain what a reactor is and how it works, we can simply say “this problem needs a reactor”, and skilled engineers can understand what that means.

Assembling a number of related patterns together allows for the formation of a “pattern language”. This is analogous to the way in which visual designers talk about a “design language”, an overarching suite of visual ideas and metaphors that are related and consistent.

Twitter’s Bootstrap is just such a pattern language, and the fact that is has been so successfully taken on in so many web projects so quickly suggests that the creators have managed to very effectively define and name the right abstractions, in a way that resonates with programmers and designers.

Of course, there will always be a place for bespoke, purposeful web design, so I do not think Bootstrap is going to become the *only* web design framework, but I suspect that as it evolves, it will become more and more important as one of the foundational pieces of web application infrastructure.

Computing 10,000x more efficiently

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:35:00 +1100

Computing 10,000x more efficiently:

When I read stories like this, it gives me great optimism about what technology can provide in the years to come. And I don’t just mean faster versions of Angry Birds.

Need a quick way to test your responsive web design? Try this!

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:32:13 +1100

Need a quick way to test your responsive web design? Try this!

designcloud: Helvertical by Brock Davis

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:16:25 +1100

designcloud:

Helvertical by Brock Davis

I'm almost certain that I'll never be "employed" again

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:41:00 +1100

The following pair of links came through my Twitter timeline today almost simultaneously, and they make me believe that I will never be “employed” again:

In Praise of Cheap Labor - Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all. Paul Krugman, New York Times

Labor Efficiency: The Next Great Internet Disruption. Nick Cronin, TechCrunch

They also reinforce ideas that I first heard during my MBA eight or so years ago that employment of the future will be all about the “portfolio career”.

I’m pretty sure the future is now.

Paper Prototyping

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:33:00 +1100

I have been using paper prototyping for a while now to help with the design of some of the web and smartphone apps that we have been building for Geodica.

There is something quite liberating about moving away from a computer and just using a simple pen and a piece of paper, and even though I am not particularly talented as an artist, it is still possible to produce meaningful and descriptive low-fidelity prototypes with very little hassle. I think the reason pen and paper work so well for prototyping comes down to the simple fact that the form factor and ease-of-use are yet to be exceeded by technology.

So in the interests of promoting the discipline of paper prototyping, here are some links to products and resources that I have found very useful:

Paper-based UX Workbooks

UXPin - I have been using the UXPin stuff since it first came out. It has gone through a couple of revisions, and the latest packs have a hard cover and come with lots of extras like personas and stick-on components for on-screen elements. I can thoroughly recommend these packs. It’s also worth following Marcin from UXPin on Twitter at @uxpin. He posts quite a few good links on paper prototyping.
App Sketchbook - I have not used this one personally, but the products listed on their web site look great. They are simpler than the UXPin versions, and might be useful if you wanted to carry around something more like a notebook.

Wireframe Template Libraries

Keynotopia - If you want to take your paper prototypes and move them into something more concrete, the Keynotopia template library for Keynote is brilliant. This library contains templates for iPhone, iPad and Android, as well as for MacOSX and Windows. I can’t quite put my finger on why this is true, but I find Keynote a lot easier for building higher-fidelity prototypes than PowerPoint, and this library is a great addition to my toolset.

Other Paper Prototyping Resources

Here are a couple of other paper prototyping and UX resources that you might find useful:

Good luck with pen and paper!

Footnote: I’ve also noticed lately that I spend less and less time using Microsoft Word, and more and more time using TextMate and simple text files, often with MarkDown. I think this is a change in behaviour related to the use of pen and paper for prototyping. When you remove all of the gratuitous visual distractions and the egregious bugs (such as the way bulleted lists and paragraph numbering still do not work properly after *14* releases of the app!), you have a lot more time to focus on *what* you are writing, and much less on *how* you are writing it.

thisistheverge: QR Codes Are the Roller-Skating Horses of...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:21:28 +1100

thisistheverge:

QR Codes Are the Roller-Skating Horses of Advertising - Alexis Madrigal - The Atlantic

What technology stack would you use if you were going to build a retail bank from scratch?

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:45:00 +1100

As anyone who works inside a large, modern retail bank will attest, many technology systems are out-dated, poorly architected, littered with unfortunate and opportunistic compromises and generally sclerotic in a way that has a material effect on the activities of the businesses they allegedly support. The level of technical debt has crippled technology operations in the much same way that financial debt has crippled their owning organisation’s financial operations.

For example, core-banking systems are often 20 years old or more, run on large mainframes that whilst being generally performant today, can be costly to maintain and extend. Some have already reached or exceeded their performance limits. Supporting systems may run on more modern infrastructure, but even if they are built with good intentions, very quickly fall victim to the quarterly bonus cycle that favours the short-term fix and attendant accrual of further technical debt.

There are many suggested remedies for these problems, but for the purposes of this question, we can categorise them into:

Incrementalism - overlaying changes onto existing systems and processes
Reboot - trying something completely different

The perceived risks of incrementalism are lower, but technical debt piles up in the medium term in the form of ever-increasing complexity. Reboots are difficult to initiate because they appear too ambitious to management fatigued by previous failures, with the irony that previous failures are due in no small part to layers of unmanageable complexity built up by successive incremental changes and short-term fixes. At the centre of these problems is a profound mismatch between the short-term incentives of management and the much longer lifetime over which mission critical business systems operate.

But even though this mismatch is relatively easy to characterise, there is no evidence the situation is likely to change any time soon. The result is that for the majority of systems, businesses make incremental changes for as long as they possibly can. Businesses argue this is economically sound, technologists argue that it has hidden costs. Both are probably correct, depending on their context. However, there comes a time when a reboot of some form is simply unavoidable.

For example, three of the four big Australian retail banks have attempted massive core system replacement projects of one form or another over the last five years, with a view to replacing 15-20 year old production systems. In the online banking domain, some of our large banks have production systems first rolled out during the initial wave of online banking deployments in the late 1990s, and are now in the process of re-platforming.

Leaving aside the degree to which these programs have been or will be successful, there is no doubt that we exist in an environment where banks are making very big decisions about changes to their mission critical systems. Systems that have been incrementally updated to the point where it is no longer economically or technically viable to make changes to them at an appropriate level of risk.

Which brings us to the inevitable technology reboot: when presented with the chance to start from scratch, what should an enterprise architect do? What are the foundational pieces of a technology stack required to support a retail bank? How would the decisions made today be different from those made in the past? Is it possible to simplify the environment? Is batch relevant in 2012, or would it be possible to use technology to move to a completely real-time orientation? What is the role of next generation transaction switching systems such as Distra or Transacumen? How should the online platform interact with the back-end, should there even be a difference? Can a bank realistically deploy into cloud-based infrastructure, and what about the rise and rise of mobile?

We are already seeing new retail entrants such as Movenbank in Europe and BankSimple in the USA make very bold moves with their technology stacks. We are also seeing multiple potentially disruptive moves in the payments space with players such as Square, Dwolla and Stripe. As start-ups, these organisations have the advantage of zero technical legacy to work with, but they do have to operate within the confines of the banking environment.

So, as an enterprise architect, what would you do if you had the opportunity to rebuild the technology stack of a retail bank completely from scratch?

Comments on HackerNews

Every time I am forced to do this, a little part of me dies.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:15:41 +1100

Every time I am forced to do this, a little part of me dies.

A friend of mine holidaying in Byron Bay came back to their...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:16:22 +1100

A friend of mine holidaying in Byron Bay came back to their beach tent to find this little guy sleeping. It seems like all the rain lately has re-invigorated the iguana population.

A generation of Windows use has taught us that this is an...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:57:00 +1100

A generation of Windows use has taught us that this is an acceptable user interface. #itsnot