I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs. Jobs’ desire (bordering on compulsion) to produce the very highest quality products warms my heart. Admittedly, he sounds like he was an incredibly difficult person to be around a lot of the time, and you’d have needed to be able to adopt a water-off-a-duck’s back approach to a lot of his outbursts, but I admire the fact that he allowed his intuition to tell him when something wasn’t right and he just wasn’t prepared to settle for second best.

Take the following quote:

At the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1981 … Adam Osborne released the first truly portable personal computer. It was not great – it had a five-inch screen and not much memory – but it worked well enough. As Osborne famously declared, "Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous." Jobs found that approach to be morally appalling …

Like Jobs, I find the “adequacy is sufficient” attitude appalling (though I’m not sure about morally appalling). It reminds me of the tenet of the Agile development methodology that you should aim to deliver goods and services that are “just barely good enough”. If a product is good enough to ship and be accepted by the customer then it’s good enough, and any effort expended on trying to make it better than that, in your opinion, is simply an opportunity cost – that is, you could have spent that time profitably on other paid work.

Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, claimed that the perfect racing car would fall to pieces as soon as it crossed the finish line to win a race. If it didn’t it just showed that it was over engineered. Of course this was hyperbole. Chapman was exaggerating to make a point. You only need to look at those beautiful Lotus racing cars he designed to realise that they were engineered for more than merely crossing the finishing line first.

I became a convert to the Agile methodology a few years back and I still believe it’s got a lot to offer. For a while I tried to convince myself that aiming to deliver “barely good enough” was the way to go, but it always rankled with me. These days I find the idea repugnant. To me it represents one of the worst aspects of the business world: the short-termist approach of “let’s just ship whatever we can manage to persuade the customer to accept and involves the least possible work for us”. It’s an accountant’s balance sheet view of product management: the smallest possible number in red that gives the biggest possible number in blue – maximise the credits, minimise the debits, and ship whatever whatever we can get away with. This kind of thinking will get you sales but it will not get you repeat business and it’s not a recipe for success (by which I mean growing numbers of happy customers and happy staff).

Steve Jobs had the signatures of the Macintosh team moulded on the inside of the cases of the original Apple Macs. That’s right: the inside – and you couldn’t even open the case to see this. Why did he do this? Well imagine how you’d feel if yours was one of those names! For all the berating and bawling out he did, imagine the team-bonding, morale-boosting effect of having your name moulded into the first Apple Mac. Wouldn’t you want to produce the best computer in the world if you knew your signature was on it. (If the answer to that question is no then you would never have been employed as part of that team.)

Jobs also fretted over the exact colour of the case, insisted on rounded corners for dialog boxes, obsessed over the choice of system fonts – things that the majority of buyers wouldn’t consciously even notice and wouldn’t really care about even if their attention was drawn to it. But Jobs noticed, and he cared about these things and he wanted to produce a product that he could be genuinely proud of. To an extent he was doing it for himself. He was designing the computer he wanted to own. And he continued doing this with hardware products (Apple software is another story altogether) for the rest of his life.

The point is that I increasingly feel, for our own self-respect and self-regard, we should always try to do the very best work we are capable of. Adopting the “adequacy is sufficient” attitude, or believing that “just barely good enough” should be the height of your aspirations, inevitably leads to a feeling that all you need to do is the minimum you need to do to avoid getting the sack so that you can continue collecting your pay cheque. The accountancy ethos rubs off: minimum personal outlay for maximum financial income.

For me that’s not enough. Just barely good enough is never going to be enough. It’s laziness. It’s a lazy, unambitious, unimaginative outlook on life that I want no part of – and I don’t want to have to work with people who think that way either. I want to aim to do work that is every bit as good as I can make it – whether or not anybody else ever notices. Personally, a good day for me is when I end the day feeling like I’ve done something I can be proud of.

I haven’t posted to this blog since December 2nd last year. I’ve toyed with the idea of blogging several times since then but never actually got around to it. Why not? Well, I wasn’t exactly sure. I could just never quite bring myself to do it. But just recently I decided I’d better make my mind up what I was doing with ITauthor.com and, when I thought about it, I realised that the reason I’ve left it unattended for so long was that it just wasn’t fun any more.

Until a few years ago this blog was mainly a way for me to note down things that I thought might be useful:

a) To me, a few weeks or months later when I’d forgotten exactly how to do that thing I’d spent hours figuring out how to do
b) To someone else going through the same pain. I could save them a few hours of figuring out time

Most of the stuff I wrote about wasn’t about technical writing as such, it was mainly about the other things I was working on, or playing around with, usually in my free time. So, there’s stuff in here about Plone and Zope, there’s stuff about Perl, there’s stuff about C# and JavaScript. For example, back in August 2007, while learning C#, I worked out how to create a log file - so I noted it down:

http://www.itauthor.com/2007/08/21/writing-to-a-log-file-in-c/

So what changed? Well, the problem stems from vain ambition. For some bizarre reason I started to get interested in page views. I also think I had some notion of building up a reputation for myself as a documentation expert within the tech writing community. What was I thinking?

The result of this was that I started to restrict myself to writing about technical writing, and when I was thinking about what to blog about I began to think along the lines of: “What can I write about that technical writers might be interested in, so that I can improve ITauthor.com’s Google page ranking?” But it worked. Steadily more people were visiting the site. ITauthor posts were being linked to from other tech writing blogs, tweeted about by tech writers, mentioned in Parliament (OK, I made that last one up).

To make matters worse, the site was included in a couple of lists of influential technical writing blogs. The trouble with that was: it stirred up my competitive nature. I looked at some of the blogs above me in those lists and thought, “What’ve they got that I haven’t? How am I going to be further up that list next year?” Then I started getting people contacting me asking me to write about their products or services. Admittedly this was flattering, but now I was in the situation where there was an expectation on me to write certain things. No longer was the blog just a blog where I could dash off a quick note about something for my own future use. Now I had a reasonable expectation that people were actually reading what I wrote and some people were even waiting for me to write things. All of a sudden this seemed very familiar … hang on a minute … this felt just like … like … work!

ITauthor had turned into an unpaid job. And I’ve got several of those already: husband, father, gardener (well, very, very part-time gardener – you should see the state of our garden). I really didn’t need to give myself yet more unpaid work. My real, paying, job requires more than enough of my time, thought and energy.

So ITauthor entered a period of hibernation.

Is this me coming out of that blogging hibernation now? I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see. What I do know is that I’ve realised that ITauthor.com is just my little personal blog. That’s all it ever has been. That’s all I now want it to be. I would quite like to start blogging again. But it’s got to be something I can do quickly and simply, without lots of prep. It’s got to be on my terms. It’s got to be about whatever I want it to be about: related to tech writing, or completely unrelated. And above everything else I’m not doing this for a living so it’s got to be fun again.

It’s thick snow in my part of Edinburgh this morning. I just took the dog for a walk over the golf course – an exciting treat for her as she only ever gets to do that when it’s snowy – and I listened to the latest Hanselminutes show, all about remote working at Microsoft:

Show #242 - The Plight of the Remote Worker with Pete Brown

I'm a partial remote worker. What I mean by this is I work four days a week: two days from home, and the other two days I drive 50 miles to work in the office, then join the queues and crawl the 50 miles back again (a round trip of typically two and a half to three hours). Some of the points Scott Hanselman makes in this podcast struck a chord with me.

He mentions how remote workers are often paranoid about being perceived as not doing enough work, and how they over-compensate by working extra hard – or at least by working extra long hours. This is certainly true in my case. The days I work from home I always work in the evenings – partly because there are always things I’d planned to get done that day but I didn’t get finished by six o’ clock so I spend another couple of hours or so in the evening trying to finish things off. But I also feel obliged to work evenings because I remember that, when I went to make myself a coffee, I tidied up the kitchen while the kettle boiled and I feel guilty because I know I ended up spending 10 minutes doing that and I could have gone back to my computer and worked while the kettle boiled. The fact that, while at work, everybody spends time each day getting a coffee, chatting about non-work things, sitting in meeting rooms waiting for the meeting to get started, and a hundred other things that stop you getting stuff done in the office … that all seems not to count somehow. As a remote worker – to guard against the perception that you’re slacking off, watching daytime TV – you attempt to ensure you have spent a minimum of 8 hours doing productive work. Even if that means some of those hours are in the evening. Even if that means choosing work over time with your kids. Even if that means leaving your partner to prepare the evening meal, and then leaving her to watch TV alone for the rest of the evening.

The “remote guilt” that Scott talks about is a truly bad feature of working from home. Not only do many remote workers worry that they need to be seen as providing extra value to the company to justify working from home, they are often, nevertheless, seen by management as less committed members of staff than the high visibility folks who make sure they’re notice around the office every day (irrespective of the actual value the company is actually getting from them).

As a low visibility remote worker it’s hard not to feel that, if it came to a management meeting to discuss who to make redundant, you’d be a prime candidate: “Well, he’s good – but he’s never in the office.”

However, there are many great things about working from home, rather than commuting long distance to work. For example: not sitting in a car for three hours every day; not spending £60 on petrol; reducing your carbon footprint; getting more work done. And there are usually good reasons for not relocating nearer the office: not forcing your family to move away from friends and family; not forcing your partner to find a new job; continuing to live somewhere you like living.

So, if I sound like I’m bitching, I’m not. I choose to be a (partial) remote worker, and I like it. It just worries me, that’s all. 

Technology to make you more visible as a remote worker

Although Scott starts off the podcast by saying that Microsoft are not generally keen on remote working, it seems like they do, at least, have the technology to make the remote worker’s life easier. Scott talks about Microsoft Lync and Microsoft RoundTable. At Microsoft the issue seems to be getting people to use these technologies. For most of us though the issue would be getting our companies to invest in technology like this. The fear and paranoia of the remote worker tends to mean that, having been allowed to work from home, you accept that this is probably at the expense of any other discretionary goodness from your company (like pay rises) – so asking for anything that makes remote working less alienating, if it costs money, is probably not a good idea and you’d better just shut up, count yourself lucky and keep working those long hours. 

However, Microsoft RoundTable does sound great. Here’s a promo video for it. It’s an incredibly silly video, but it does give you the gist of what RoundTable is:

Finally, in January of this year, Scott put a video on Channel 9 showing the work Microsoft Research had been doing into "Embodied Social Proxies". This is something beyond video conference: having a physical presence in a meeting that you’re attending remotely.

It looks fabulous, but I think it’s going to be a long time before many companies invest in something like this:

Over the past few days my broadband connection from Sky Broadband ("up to 20 Mb/s" so they claim) has been getting steadily more of a bad joke. In the mornings it's workable (today I was generally getting around 2.5 Mb/s download). After lunch it becomes sluggish and tiresome to use (round about 0.75 Mb/s). But from about 5pm you may as well give up. 

As I write my download connection is 0.06 Mb/s. Yes, that's right, a measly 60 kilobits per second. That means a long, long wait between clicking a link on a Web page and eventually having the result page in a readable state in front of you.

At this speed iTunes and Tweetdeck simply don't work.

This, I'm assuming, is due to Sky's wonderful Traffic Management policy: the more useful you find the internet, the more we're going to try and discourage you from using it.

So I logged into my Sky account and went to try and raise a Support call. Here's the form they present you with, saying: "tell us about your query":

What?!!! In that space? Now they're really just rubbing salt in my wounds.

OK, so, after writing out my complaint elsewhere and then copying it into this field and submitting it, lo and behold, as I suspected (but didn't want to assume, in case I had to get all the way back there again if I was wrong) there's a follow-up screen where you can pick from options and then you can send Sky Support an email. But honestly! Usability: ever heard of it Sky? Did you ever roadtest this on anyone? Did you ever think how it feels to spend 10 minutes on a grindingly slow connection waiting for pages to slowly load, just to get to this page.

So I'm off to have a cold beer now, watch some football and cool down a bit.

And maybe by tomorrow this page will have uploaded to Web host. And maybe Sky will get back to me. But at the moment I'm not optimistic.

I bought my first computer in 1989. I was studying for a Publishing degree and we used the little, all-in-one, Apple Macs, with tiny black and white screens, for writing essays and doing page layouts in Aldus PageMaker (not easy on a tiny, tinsy little screen). At the end of first year, we were encouraged to get our own computers so that we could work at home and give the next year's first years a chance to get on the Macs in the computer suite.

Naturally, I wanted a Mac. But I couldn't afford one.*  So instead I settled for an Amstrad PCW 9512, which couldn't do page layout but, as an alternative to a typewriter, saved me a lot of Tippex by allowing me to edit my essays on screen before printing them out to the daisy-wheel printer that came as part of the package. I had a small collection of typewriters that immediately became obsolete (although, all these years later, I still have them - but probably not for much longer).

A couple of months back I had a clear out and I took the PCW - which had been sitting, unused in a big cardboard box in a cupboard for the past twelve years since we moved house - and I added it to a pile of slightly less ancient computer equipment at our local recycling centre (otherwise known as "the dump").

This weekend I had another chucking out session and I came across the PCW keyboard, a collection of the sturdily built 3" disks that the PCW used and some books, including a well-thumbed copy of the original user manual. I'd forgotten what a good piece of documentation that was. Buy almost any hardware or software now and you'll get a flimsy little pamphlet, with health and safety warnings and some basic startup instructions, printed in 23 different languages. The PCW 9512 came with a really substantial book.

The PCW 9512 was sold as a "Personal Computer Wordprocessor". Its main market was small businesses that couldn't afford an IBM PC. It came with LocoScript, word-processing software, and a mail-merge program for producing personalised copies of standard letters.

But in the back of the user manual there were sections on using Mallard Basic and Logo. I immediately got deeply fascinated by BASIC and I started buying the PCW Plus magazine every month for the program listings they published. I ended up spending hours and hours, usually late at night, writing a Pacman-type game, instead of studying (or sleeping). Eventually this game got too big and unwieldy for BASIC - and the more functionality I added to it, the slower it became - so I started rewriting it in C. At this point it was becoming a bit of an obsession, with long, compulsive coding sessions, but the arrival of my daughter snapped me out of the habit and it was then several years before I did any more coding.

However, the starting point for my real interest in software - I mean writing it, rather than writing about it - came with this manual for the PCW.  So, I'm a little loathe to consign it to the dump, but it's just part of the general clutter I'm trying to get rid of, so it's got to go.

For more details about the Amstrad PCW, have a look at it's page on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW

* I haven't been able to find the price for an Apple Mac SE in 1989 but, from memory, I think it was almost £2000, whereas the PCW9512 retailed for £499 + VAT and came with a bundled printer.