threehv

It’s no secret that the office phone is often switched off. Please just leave a voicemail and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

The reason for this is because programming involves juggling a lot of information that needs to be held in your head at the same time. Programmers call this “flow”, sportsmen call it “being in the zone”, and even a thirty second interruption knocks you out of that productive state. The worst of it is that it can take fifteen to twenty minutes to return back up to speed, so that quick call actually has a very high cost.

The trick here is that when you manage programmers, specifically, task switches take a really, really, really long time. That’s because programming is the kind of task where you have to keep a lot of things in your head at once. The more things you remember at once, the more productive you are at programming. A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping zillions of things in their head at once: everything from names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility functions that they wrote and call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they store their source code.

“Do something that scares you” is what they say.

Today is one of those days I’ll look back on and say “this is where it all began” or “this is where it all went wrong”.

Regrets eh?

I’m going to do something that is probably considered heresy amongst the people I know.

I’m going to stop reading Hacker News.

It’s a great place, full of very smart people; some of whom have actually been there and done that.

But unfortunately, it’s also falling prey to GroupThink (which is why I stopped reading Slashdot all those years ago).

“Measure everything” and “A/B test your way to success!”. Well actually I hate statistics – they do nothing for me – and I’d rather go with my instincts.

“Fail early, fail fast”. Boring. I’d rather go out in a huge fireball over the night sky. Or even better, be an actual success.

“You’ve got to be lean”. Don’t tell me what to do. Toyota make dull cars. Reliable, but dull. Not stylish, not beautiful. Money-making but dull. That’s what lean gives you.

This marks the end of phase one of threehv. Now is the time to start over…

I’ve just got myself one of those iPhone 4s’s. I really really liked Windows Phone 7, but there’s just the odd problem with it – the keyboard is just a bit too imprecise, it’s just too easy to turn a vertical swipe into a horizontal swipe. Whereas, iOS is precise and exact. And Siri is amazing (even if lots of stuff doesn’t work in the UK yet)

But the UI does look tired. Compare Spotify on iOS to the amazing Spotify client on WP7. And the live tiles are lovely.

All of this is irrelevant to Android. The reviews of Android 4 suggest it’s fixed most of its flaws but given the size of those flaws, I’d be amazed if it comes close to WP7.

So, in UI terms (which is what is most important to me) it’s still Apple out in front. But they’re being pushed hard by Microsoft.

Update: From the sounds of this review Android still has a long way to go, new font or no new font.