Design vs. Develop

Public Service Announcement:

Hello friends. Recently, I’ve been hearing the words “organic” and “viral” used to describe far too many inorganic and non-living things. I suppose this is merely a product of the year where both YouTube and Whole Foods have dramatically risen in popularity. However, consider phrases such as “random”, “word of mouth”, and “grassroots” when trendily reaching for “organic” or “viral.” You may prevent yourself from sounding like an obnoxious Internet startup CEO or even express yourself more clearly!

Yesterday, I attended The New New Internet conference in Tyson’s Corner. Overall, I felt it was very strong for a first year conference. Successful software companies, Silicon Valley startups, bloggers, and established federal contractors were all well represented.

A speaker from Google showed how obsessive they are with keeping the user interface clean and uncluttered. He also highlighted the redundancy of their data system. At one point, one of their datacenters caught on fire, but there was no downtime or data loss involved.

There were two Q&A panels. The first was about Web 2.0 and enterprise markets. There were two takes on Ruby and Ruby on Rails: 1) The 10 to 1 productivity gain is irresistible. 2) Programmers comprise a very small fraction of the overall IT budget. However, as a developer, I felt that these views were missing some key points. First, a productivity gain of that magnitude makes it feasible to implement a new idea several different ways, get feedback, and debug the top choice all in the time it would take to write it once in another language. Second, if you can save your developers that much time, they be able to build more tools to help the IT department save money. Finally, great developers love using good tools. You have a much better shot of attracting and retaining talent if developers have the flexibility to choose the best solutions for each situation.

The second Q&A Panel was supposed to be about monetization, but the topic was almost blatantly avoided. However, many of the other presentations did touch on monetization and had good information to consider.

TechCrunch had a lot to say about the resurgence of .com era ideas. Many of these businesses were either too far ahead of their time or were drowned in more VC money than the founders knew what to do with. With a larger Internet audience and less rush, a lot of these ideas should be tried again.

I was happy to see a conference like this in our backyard. There’s a very large IT market in this area that tends to be overlooked amidst all of the other government operations.

The conversation over at BeyondDC has continued well into a second week. As I wrote my last post, I realized it contains a lot of what I’ve been trying to figure out for the last year, so I’m copying it here:

This is the issue I’m running into left and right with the smart growth movement. There’s a lot of nice sounding theory, but when faced with an actual problem in an actual place, everyone starts cursing the darkness. They yell at the government for not making things “dense enough” without defining exactly how dense they want the place to be. It just ends up making planners look like extremists who are going to whine no matter what you do, so people quit listening. This is terribly frustrating. And this is why this blog post bothered me. Battles like the one in Loudon are going on everywhere (admittedly, usually on smaller scales), but they’re going on between people who want their views and people who want their quarter acre. “Smart growth” is the last thing on any of these people’s minds and will continue to be as long as the movement is about catchy slogans and adjectives ending in -ity instead of specific solutions to specific problems.

I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that Density and Diversity are more a byproduct of Design, rather than the three predicating a “good place.” Design seems to be what we’re really lacking, as I see plenty of Density and Diversity popping up around here almost due to sheer market forces. People gravitate towards well-designed things and places. We just aren’t building many of them any more (and building very little public property in general). If we put some energy into that instead of trying to get three things to happen in the same place at the same time, I think we’d get a lot farther and people would begin to get the bigger picture. And thus I remain a Sidewalk Advocate and little more when it comes to city planning.

I read this post over at BeyondDC and had to respond, simply because the content was so alarmist. Loudon County has voted to continue restricting development in certain areas. I say good for them. They’ve decided what they value and they’re getting it. That’s way more than what other places seem to be doing these days.

Not everyone seems to share my opinion. Others seem to feel Loudon is being selfish and that this will “be a disaster for regional sprawl control and any other nearby localities hoping to preserve their own rural character.”

He goes on to say that “growth doesn’t go away if you fail to accommodate it” and proceeds to rant about incentives, Fairfax County, and West Virginia; all without quoting a single statistic, study, or example.

This is why I’m leery of so closely associating myself with the “smart-growth” crowd. I’m much more interested in getting towns to build sidewalks and places you can walk to. I can think of many “dense” areas that are for all practical purposes unwalkable. I think we could go a much longer way in getting things built more sanely if we didn’t vilify car commutes.

Just posting to announce the October 19-20th 2006 DC PHP Conference schedule. Some of the top names in PHP will be there, including Rasmus Lerdorf and Chris Shiflett. We’re convincing the federal government to move away from ColdFusion and other closed source applications over to open source tools and open standards.

From Economist.com:

Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the heart of oil and gas country, has seen bus travel jump 28% in a year

Bringing Tulsa Transit’s ridership to an all time weekday morning rush high of 15.

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