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One of the biggest challenges of my work is communicating it. Both at MAPC and Code for Boston we do a lot of things that people do not have foundational knowledge about. When I meet people outside the technology industry for the first time and describe what I do, they need to have some kind of foundation in about thirty-seconds or they are going to get lost and confused quickly. They need the elevator pitch.

One of the annoying truisms that I have learned is that security is the opposite of user experience. Nowhere is this more evident to me than with Google and Gmail. For some reason I seem to be logged out of my Gmail account nearly once a week, if not more. This has grown frustrating because I recently installed an app called Kiwi which is supposed to make Gmail more usable by enabling some MacOS native features with the mail client. Unfortunately it means 1Password will no longer auto-fill the login. Therefore I find myself going through extra steps to log back in to my Gmail accounts on an almost daily basis.

One of the tensions in software is between ease of use and flexibility. A lot of companies attempt to build out easy versions of already established software and then market this to developers. Or alternatively they have already done a big chunk of complicated software development work for you and offer an API. An example of this would be the rapid prototyping that was enabled by the Sunlight Foundation’s APIs. You can build great products based on them, but eventually you run into their limitations.

By far my favorite way to learn a new subject is to find a well written book or tutorial on it. I have spent many years learning about software development but did not find it to be a true joy until I found Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial. I have attempted to watch and follow online courses but have found that I do not retain the information as well. I made a couple of failed attempts to learn Swift using Stanford’s online course but found picking up the professor’s book to be much easier to follow. I found the same be true of learning automated testing with RSpec. It becomes easy to figure out why companies like O’Reilly Media do so well.

One of the biggest banes of my existence is dealing with passwords. In order to manage my collection I have an app called 1Password that mostly takes care of my password management. However they recently released a new beta version that has proven to be buggy. Ironically I attempted to report the bugs in their beta form and after filling out their form failed to login. Then I attempted to recover my password by putting in my username and did not get a reset email. Maybe it went to an email address I no longer own. Either way I instead decided to report my bug via twitter.