Scott Bush

While watch­ing the aud­tion por­tion of this season’s Amer­i­can Idol with my wife, see­ing all those aspir­ing singers so excited to receive the show’s “golden ticket,” I was struck by a thought: that’s the hap­pi­est they’ll ever be dur­ing their Amer­i­can Idol experience.

Why is that? It’s because of that moment. That moment is both a pin­na­cle of achieve­ment and the begin­ning of a new, unknown jour­ney. To be accepted by the judges and counted among the tiny per­cent­age of win­ners who make it to Hol­ly­wood is inde­scrib­able, to judge by the reac­tions of the suc­cess­ful con­tes­tants. They have won; they are sep­a­rate from the pack, dis­tin­guished now by their abil­i­ties. The hard work, count­less hours of intense prac­tice, and of course all the drama and infight­ing that makes these “real­ity” shows entertaining—all of this lies in the weeks (and if they’re lucky, months) ahead. For now, though, they exist in that moment of happiness.

That’s not to say their suc­cesses in on the show won’t eclipse the hap­pi­ness of win­ning the golden ticket. I’m sure if you asked any season’s win­ner or runner-up if they were hap­pier with their on-stage achieve­ments than they were pass­ing the audi­tion por­tion you’d hear “yes, of course!” But that achieve­ment comes with the knowl­edge of the hard work required to get there, tem­pered by the inevitable elim­i­na­tion of other con­tes­tants who’d become friends, and weighed down with other Idol tri­als that we as view­ers sim­ply can’t know. Greater and greater suc­cess comes with a cost—one cer­tainly worth paying—but a cost none the less.

In short, these Idol con­tes­tants are most happy in that moment.

The immi­nent birth of my first daugh­ter will be my moment, that moment in my life that is both pin­na­cle and mere begin­ning of hap­pi­ness. That hap­pi­ness is sure to have costs the I can’t even fathom, all of which will be well worth paying. (Though I’m sure cur­rent par­ents can tell me stories—and many have!) But our “golden ticket” moment will be her birth… but don’t expect me to jump up and down and scream; it’s not my style.

Best of all? No harsh cri­tiques from Simon Cowell.

Do you enjoy a peanut-butter and pesto sand­wich? How about an ice-cream sun­dae cov­ered in vin­daloo? Ever seen a hilar­i­ous Shake­spearean com­edy fol­lowed by a dark and mur­der­ous Greek tragedy? That was our expe­ri­ence (the plays, not the strange food com­bi­na­tions) in Dec. and Jan. as we attended the first two entries in the Seat­tle Shakespeare’s Company’s 09–10 sea­son: Twelfth Night and Elec­tra.

The two plays could not have been more dif­fer­ent, but I’ll start by men­tion­ing how they were the same: pro­fes­sional. If you’ve never been to an SCC per­for­mance, you should check one out. The the­atre, located in the bot­tom of the Seat­tle Cen­ter, is inti­mate and wel­com­ing. The sets are usu­ally sparse but ade­quate to sup­port the act­ing, which is always top-notch. My wife and I have been season-ticket hold­ers for four years now and after 14 plays I’ve yet to see an actor trip, appear out-of-character, or miss a line (that I could tell, at least). This troupe is, in one word: excel­lent. (more…)

You may have cringed when read­ing the term “date math,” which sounds both cum­ber­some and dif­fi­cult. It brings to mind the addi­tion and sub­trac­tion of tricky num­bers like 7, 29, and 31; and con­cepts like “two weeks from now,” “yes­ter­day,” and “next month.” And if you’ve every tried to build a sys­tem that tracks rel­a­tive dates you know such things can be a hassle.

So why bother? Because date math is very use­ful! For exam­ple, sup­pose you man­age a web­site that includes due dates, sub­mis­sion dead­lines, and pri­or­ity reg­is­tra­tion peri­ods that recur. If you’re me, you man­age a site that’s full of such dates that recur every aca­d­e­mic quar­ter. Keep­ing these dates in sync is a task that PHP’s date math func­tions were born writ­ten to do.

(more…)

I’ve learned a lot in my life, the vast major­ity of it far less use­ful than the lit­tle gems that are worth know­ing. (An exam­ple of the use­less stuff: the Kon­ami code. Will I ever for­get “up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, select, start”?) One of the gems that repeat­edly comes up when work­ing with clients and project stake­hold­ers is this:

The short answer is always “Yes.”

I first heard this indis­pens­able phrase from Chad Estes. He was my boss at an Inter­net start-up called Echo­space where i worked at the end of and for years fol­low­ing col­lege. We had a tech­nol­ogy called “Sin­glePage” back in 2001 that was essen­tially what AJAX is today: the abil­ity to load new data in a web­page with­out refresh­ing the entire page. Big-time stuff back then.

As a start-up, we were eager for clients. I attended a few early “pitch” meet­ings with a large com­pany (who shall go unnamed here) and they had requests for all kinds of things for the site we were propos­ing to build for them. One of our devel­op­ers lis­tened to these requests, frowned and started shak­ing his head. “No, that would require too many HTTP requests,” he said (or some­thing sim­i­lar but equally “techie”). Chad inter­vened and said that we’d look into a way to do that for them and the meet­ing con­tin­ued. In the end, we secured them as a client and built a great prod­uct for them, but after­wards Chad addressed the entire company—all eight of us—and taught us the phrase above.

“No mat­ter what a client or a poten­tial client asks for,” he said (though I admit I’m para­phras­ing; my memory’s not per­fect), “the short answer is always ‘Yes.’ We want them to see us as capa­ble, get-it-done peo­ple. Even if they ask for the impos­si­ble, we can do it.” It sounds like a recipe for dis­as­ter, as every­one has sto­ries of the boss who over-promised fea­tures on behalf of devel­op­ers who knew the impos­si­ble couldn’t be accom­plished given the con­straints. And that’s when Chad explained the corol­lary to this phrase.

“We can always tell them later that what they want will require addi­tional time, money, or resources. But before we do that, we have to build in them a sense of con­fi­dence about us. And,” he added, look­ing at me (I was a tech­ni­cal writer and client man­ager at Echo­space), “if we clearly com­mu­ni­cate the issues and con­straints, they will bet­ter under­stand what they’re ask­ing and either agree to the addi­tional time, money, or what­ever; or they’ll change their mind on their own with­out us hav­ing told them ‘no, we can’t do that.’”

It’s great advice. Though some might argue it’s dis­hon­est, I dis­agree. It’s a mat­ter of per­cep­tion: any fea­ture or tool can be built (espe­cially on the web); it’s just a mat­ter of pri­or­ity and resources. Say­ing “yes” to a request isn’t dishonest—it’s smart. It lets you con­tinue the dia­log with the client, refine what they’re ask­ing for, and be up front about the require­ments to bring that fea­ture to reality.

I’ve used the phrase dozens and dozens of times in my career, and I don’t antic­i­pate it becom­ing any less use­ful in the future. As long as it’s used with integrity and hon­esty, it can only serve you well.

So do you think you can start using this phrase when deal­ing with your clients and col­leagues? (…you should have already said “Yes” by now.)

• Ana­lyt­ics — Sur­pris­ingly, it wasn’t until this year that I added web ana­lyt­ics (Google Ana­lyt­ics, of course). I knew about GA and its ben­e­fits of course, but hadn’t both­ered because I didn’t think many folks were read­ing this blog. But I finally decided it was silly not to know, and might prove inter­est­ing, which it has.
• AdSense — As a corol­lary to the ana­lyt­ics, I decided to install a Word­Press plug-in to man­age Google’s ad-display plat­form AdSense. It’s not that I think my small read­er­ship war­rants ads to defray host­ing costs or that I expect much use­ful­ness to come of the ads on dis­play. How­ever, I’ve writ­ten about AdSense before and hav­ing a work­ing knowl­edge of it is a use­ful skill for a web developer/marketer. And hey, if I make a few bucks so much the bet­ter! But I’m still a long way off from the $100 min­i­mum for Google to cut me a check.
• Top­ics — Though it does fly in the face of com­mon blog­ging advice to “pick a theme and write exclu­sively on that topic,” I con­tinue to write about var­i­ous top­ics. This year, mar­tial arts, web devel­op­ment and cod­ing, and design have com­prised the bulk of my posts. Not sur­pris­ingly, these are what occupy a lot of my thoughts. In the com­ing year I’ll con­tinue to write about these and other top­ics, but I hope to change my cur­rent Word­Press theme to one that bet­ter orga­nizes the con­tent into dis­tinct con­tent areas.
• Com­ments — Despite open­ing com­ments to all users with­out requir­ing an account, I rarely get com­ments. It’s sad. The inte­gra­tion with the plug-in Word­Book instantly adds my blog posts to my Face­Book “Wall” when I post here. This has increased read­er­ship and does gar­ner com­ments on the Face­Book entry (but not on my blog). I’ll inves­ti­gate a way to cross-post com­ments from Face­Book my blog as well as ask folks to com­ment on my blog, too! Except you comment-spam robots, you can stay away. In fact, a great plug-in called WP Spam-Free has stopped 806 spam com­ments from appearing.
• Stats — 69 posts in 2009! Quite an achieve­ment, actu­ally; espe­cially con­sid­er­ing I write because I love it and not to meet any quota. Here’s how they broke down in my favorite categories:
  • Design — 15 posts; my favorite: Exam­ples of design as a fail-safe measure
  • Lan­guage — 6 posts; my favorite: Drownd is not a word
  • Mar­ket­ing — 6 posts; my favorite: Why Taster’s Choice should fire their ad agency
  • Lan­guage — 7 posts; my favorite: Drownd is not a word
  • Mar­tial arts — 9 posts, my favorite: Kotek­i­tae, or bet­ter liv­ing through bruising
  • Web devel­op­ment — 13 posts; my favorite: Mock-up to valid XHTML: how to build a web page (a two-parter!)

So, here’s to another enjoy­able year writ­ing about inter­est­ing things that I hope oth­ers find use­ful, and fail­ing that, at least humorous.