As part of my technical writing certificate, I recently completed a Print and Online Design course. It was there I learned the acronym that I will never forget: CRAP.
C = Contrast
R = Repetition
A = Alignment
P = Proximity
We learned about these principles of design the first week of the course, and we continued to apply them to every document assignment whether it was meant for print or online publication. They particularly resonated with me as an easy-to-remember, efficient way to organize information on a web page, PowerPoint slide, Word document (e.g. resume), instruction manual or guide, and so on.
We’ve been getting more agile over the last year at Info-Tech, and even before that we’d been moving towards an Agile approach for a couple of years.
One of the interesting things about Agile is the abstraction of the concept of “units of work,” and taking that abstract idea and putting it to something that the team holds itself accountable towards.
For example, the concept of a velocity is basically that a person can get a set amount of work done in a week. We level this out so that while some people can do more work in that amount of time, and others can do less in that same time, the average ends up being a number that we can all commit to. Over time, we’ve decided that the number is 20.
How we got to that number is interesting though, and required us to think a little bit differently. Getting people to understand abstracted time made me feel a little bit like Jennifer Aniston’s character in The Break Up; “I don’t want you to do the dishes…I want you to WANT to do the dishes!” We had to make people not think about time, but think about the concept of effort. Don’t think about how much time it took you to do that task, think about how much EFFORT it took you to do that task. Read More »
IT’s first Innovation Day of 2012 was met with eagerness by the production team. We had an idea saved specifically for this event and we were excited to put it to action. With our innovation plans armed and ready, the production team donned a new name: Apostrophe Apocalypse.
So what was Apostrophe Apocalypse’s innovation? Production how-to videos. Prior to Innovation Day, our team discussed the possibility of creating how-to videos for the research department. Why? As a co-op on the production team, and someone who has recently come face to face with the daunting number of process details, documents, and standards that needed to be remembered, I, for one, can conclude that it’s a lot of information, and that additional guidance would be welcomed. We intend for the videos to help research analysts deliver their content, and in turn, help us review it.
In a growth business like Info-Tech, you will always find the winds of change.
At times, those are gale force.
This is a Good Thing, as change — well managed — leads to process improvements and higher productivity.
Recently I’ve been trying to get my head around a change issue, and frankly, I haven’t figured out where my allegiances lie, so I’ll just lay out the issue for others to consider the tradeoffs as well.
In a nutshell, there are a ton of cool technologies out there that facilitate RAD development of systems. There was a proposal to do a redesign of a part of a system using a totally new technology, not yet used in house. We, as a growth company, definitely want to support these types of new technologies, yet integration with our other systems is crucial, as we often need to report and act on this data. When I voiced my concern with respect to interoperability, it was proposed that this could be well solved by adding a service which could be called by external systems.
DIG is an conference and trade show in London Ontario hosted by the London Economic Development Corporation and many of London’s prominent gaming companies.
DIG 2011 was the first of the DIG conferences to contain a web design/development stream. We sent a large contingent of our web designers/developers to check out what DIG had to offer.
The keynote, presented by Jeffery Zeldman, the Executive Creative Director of Happy Cog started the day. Along with an audience gift of a blue beanie, Jeffery started of saying “Content is King.” He called on web designers to adopt a content centric design on their sites. Along with this, he championed the idea of a “user centric design”, to think that as user, “What would I think of this?”
He also talked about the importance of “the scent of information”, saying users will continue clicking as long as they feel they are getting closer to the content they want, and that their results are refining in relevancy, killing the myth of the “3 clicks” rule. Users are also willing to accept the same content can have a different look, based on the device/form factor they are consuming it from.
This led into his next concept. A mobile strategy should be, in reality, a small screen strategy. Web designers can leverage adaptive design to scale a site and its content from the mobile experience to the desktop one.
Asking any developer which language they prefer between PHP and Ruby on Rails will always get you a fairly good divide, once you get past the fact that you are comparing a language, and a language and a framework. You’ll find that every developer has their go-to language and will defend them till the death.
PHP has been around since 1994, and was built primarily as a server-side scripting language for web development and dynamic content. PHP code was originally embedded within the HTML code of a page to allow the content to change depending on the needs of the coder; this has changed more so now with the entrance of frameworks into the development world. This file, with a mix of PHP and HTML, was then rendered through the PHP engine to pure HTML and passed back to the browser.
Ruby was born in 1993, and first publicly released in 1995, as a scripting language to be more powerful than Perl and more object-oriented than Python. Although older than PHP, Ruby didn’t really come of age until 2005 when it started to gain interest with ties to the Rails framework. Ruby on Rails was brought to the life it knows today and has been gaining ground ever since.
There really is no real apples-to-apples comparison of PHP to Ruby on Rails.
Since PHP is a standalone language, and Ruby on Rails is a language coupled with a framework, you can only look at the general differences. With PHP, you can add a framework like CakePHP, which allows for a more fair comparison.
There are a lot of different areas that can be compared within the languages themselves:
This year I went to CES 2012 along with Lead Research Analyst Mark Tauschek and Research Analyst Michael Battista. One of the key things we wanted to deliver during the conference were videos of the show floor and updates on the major news.
We managed to record half a dozen different videos while in Las Vegas, and we experimented with how they would get up on the site. Unfortunately, the horrible bandwidth conditions in Las Vegas prevented me from uploading videos during that time, and we had to post them when we got back.
Then when I returned to London I came down with pneumonia, and spent the next two weeks recovering, so while we got some videos up on the site, they didn’t have much context around them.
The show was interesting, and with over 140,000 attendees, Las Vegas was hopping and the convention center was packed. I had been told to pack good walking shoes, but even that didn’t prepare me for the massive amounts of walking we did. Whether it was the two miles to the convention center, or the miles of show floor, or the two miles back to our hotel, there seemed to be a Lord of the Rings magnitude of endless walking.
The show itself was a spectacle, but in terms of news, it was hard to top what was coming out from the technology press. Tech blogs like Gizmodo and The Verge had well over three dozen employees on the show floor covering every nook and cranny, and one could follow the show simply by reading their sites.
There wasn’t a ton of news that directly relates to IT, however, with the consumerization of IT in full swing, many of these consumer products will eventually find their way into IT departments. The art is in telling which products will make their way into our domains.
There were plenty of fun toys for geeks, from OLED TV’s to 2k, 4k, and 8k displays (which logistics dictate there won’t be content or delivery mechanisms to get content to them for several years), Electric Delorians, Ferraris, ultra light laptops, and tons of gadgets that blink, fly, or drive.
While I’m not sure if I’ll return to CES, I can at least say I’ve been to the biggest show in Las Vegas. We also have a much better idea of how to cover a show like this in the future, and I’m confident that next time we’ll be able to get video updated in real time.
With 2011 drawing to a close, Systems Architect David Richardson and SalesForce.com Evangelist Liam Nediger sat down to look back on some of IT’s big accomplishments and the evolution of Info-Tech Research Group’s SalesForce.com implementation in 2011.
In Info-Tech’s IT department, there lives a team known as Production. We specialize in editing and managing the research on the website. Recently, we started to have monthly Timely Tidbit sessions to discuss grammar or standards issues that come up, and we arrive at a consensus about how to deal with them. One of the goals that has come out of these sessions is to develop and enhance our Style Guide. Each time we solidify a standard way of phrasing or formatting something, if it merits documenting, we plan to add it to the Guide.
Our first session focused on problems with gender-neutral singular pronoun use. What I mean by that is when someone uses a generic singular noun and then refers to it later in the sentence with a plural pronoun. For example, “when the employee wins their claim, costs can be significant.” The pronoun must agree in number and gender with the noun, and in this sentence, “their” is plural while “the employee” is singular. Eek! But the English language doesn’t have a gender-neutral singular pronoun to use in these cases. So, we had to decide how we wanted to approach this problem.
Info-Tech’s IT department has a pretty amazing co-op program in partnership with Fanshawe (as well as a new one through the University of Waterloo). For the past couple of years, we’ve brought in an amazing crop of students to work side-by-side with us, both learning and teaching.
This most recent term we brought in a record eight co-op students, and the following is a special guest post by Info-Tech Co-Op Ian Lamb.
Avoid Writing Code
“Excuse me? But I’m a programmer, that’s what I do!”
I’m sure when you were just starting out in the industry you probably had grand ideas of writing everything from scratch. You imagined yourself nerding out at the office after hours writing your ridiculously awesome script that would make your website the greatest thing ever. I know I did!
