Tag: essay

Clear Communication

“Your guidelines should be so clear as to not permit so much wriggle room,” he said.

I started at my screen for a moment, feeling my neck heat up with the sheer arrogance of his implication. Besides the fact that I did spend quite a bit of time trying to make them as transparent and clear as possible, it’s a known impossibility.

Anyone who’s ever written anything knows that it will always be interpreted by someone in an unintended way. Have a look at the US Constitution, which we’re still arguing about to this day. It’s categorically impossible to write anything in a way that will be perfectly understood by everyone who reads it, past, present, or future.

Let’s step back though and think about what the post of such a statement might be.

Everything we write for the purposes of education should be as clear as possible, in order to minimize confusion. We can all agree on that. Guidelines, documentation, how-tos, and the like are all for education. When you write a story, a novel for example, you don’t need to write for clarity but for a different purpose. I won’t get into that today.

To that end, his statement was correct. We should write our guidelines not to permit wriggle room.

However when we consider what the guidelines were, and please note they are indeed guidelines and rules, we hit a different situation. Guidelines are meant to direct people into doing what is expected of them. Some can be as clear as “Don’t steal” but others have to be a little more broad like “Don’t hurt people intentionally.” That’s a very big statement, and while it’s certainly a good guideline for any group, enforcing it without specific examples is always going to be problematic.

The difference between rules and guidelines is that rules can be clear, while guidelines must allow for interpretation. And even with rules, it’s categorically impossible to write them in a way that will never ever be misconstrued.

So what do we do?

We write things as clearly as possible. We state, upfront, that the guidelines have an intended purpose and what that is. We remind people that the guidelines cannot cover each and every possible permutation of events. We admit that some of these will be up to the discretion of the people enforcing them. We write a disclaimer that we are human and we are mortal.

We do our best. And if someone says “These could be better” we ask “How? Please help.”

I can tell you from experience, less than 1% of people who complain about your guidelines will help, though.

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14 November, 2016
The Privilege of Privacy

Ask 100 women online where the live, and the majority will give you a vague answer.

California.

Chicago.

LA.

Orange County.

Those are enormous locations. While you probably could have found me in Chicago, if you asked enough people, you’d need to know a lot more than just the city. And now? Good luck. Most of my neighbors don’t know me. Their kids do, go figure, but it’s not the 1950s anymore.

The longer a women (or any minority) has been online, the less likely they are to want to talk about their location online. At least not in public. We get used to the constant, low level, shit throwing people say. People will ask what kind of ‘creature’ we are for posting a Vine, or call us ‘the hot one.’ It’s something I’m constantly pushing back at, and being vocally against, but it’s me against the world, and sometimes it’s a Sisyphean struggle.

But that doesn’t mean some people don’t have my home address. It means the people who do are people I trust and respect. I know that they won’t generally just show up at my house (unless there’s a crisis).

So what happens when you know, say, that I live in New Jersey and someone mentions WordCamp Jersey in a public chat?

You shut the hell up and don’t say “Hey, Ipstenu lives there, you should ping her!” No, you ping me directly and say “Hey, Billy was talking about WC Jersey. I thought you mentioned living nearby. Did you know about that?” And that way you give the public information to the private individual.

This seems to be an odd concept to people who come from a place of general safety and security. Yes, I’m talking about you, heterosexual cisgender white christian men. They tend to be the most flagrant abusers of personal information that I’ve seen online.

When I ran a forum, I had a rule that basically read like this: People’s personal information is just that, theirs and personal. If they say “I live in Wyoming” that’s cool, but you don’t get to speak for them. And yes, I banned people for violating that after they were warned.

Most of the time, personal information that is privileged is obvious. If I run a website, I have your IPs and email. I don’t give them away to ad collectors without your consent because that’s just a shitty thing to do. It’s unethical. In some places it’s illegal. That’s why you’ll get disclaimers on what information is tracked, or notes about how to opt-out.

But less understood is the concept that information you and another person discuss in private is just that. Private. It shouldn’t be. It’s basically the same thing. You are in a place of privilege where by you have access to information others do not. That privilege comes with responsibility.

So let me lay this out for you.

If someone tells you a thing in private, it’s not always yours to repeat.

If someone tells you a personal thing in private, it’s definitely not yours to repeat.

For example, if someone tells you “Hey, I think I’m gay.” you absolutely, 100%, do not EVER turn around and say “Oh, Bob? He’s gay.” That’s not your information. And that’s an obvious case isn’t it? Well, where I live is also an obvious case.

The Internet is filled with doxers and harassers and people who jackhammer Hollywood Walk of Fame stars. People are attacked online, usually on Twitter or IRC or 4Chan, every single day.

It’s your job, as the holder of privileged information, to be the secret keeper. Be the friend. Keep it to yourself. And for god’s sake, if they ask you not to repeat something, either don’t repeat it or tell them outright that you will probably forget, so please don’t tell you.

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11 November, 2016
The Privilege of Default Settings

You’ve probably heard the analogy that being a heterosexual, white, cisgender, Christian male is playing the game of life at its easiest setting. Most things are aimed at you, from consumer products on down to expectations. Being those things causes you to come from a place of privilege, even if you’re poor. The world is aimed towards you a little more, and your default assumptions are ‘correct’ because media and everything else reinforces them.

Sometimes when I look at the choices and decisions we make in Open Source, I think we’re falling prey to the same concept.

The day after my team lost the World Series in 2016, I found myself struggling through an emotional (and chemical) hangover, whereby I was pretty much half the speed at thinking as I normally am. In this state of mind, I decided it was a dandy idea to sit and do some serious UI testing of products for myself as well as WordPress core. It was surprising, enlightening, and humbling.

I know WordPress. I know it really, really well. I use it daily, I write it in it every day. I monitor and support end users. I review code every day. Rarely has 36 hours passed without me learning something new about it, but also seeing a hundred people making the same mistakes. I often tell people “If I can’t figure out how to use your plugin, based on the readme, you didn’t write it well enough.” A new version of this is that when hungover me can’t figure out what your plugin does, there’s a lot more wrong.

Related to this is the tone and language in which I am wiring to you this very moment. I write from a place of decent education and intelligence. I use words like obsequious and peradventure from time to time, not because they sound cool (though they do, I like the sound of words) but because they draw your attention to the point in different ways.

This proves beyond peradventure that the intent of the name of the product was to leverage the name of its competitor.

I don’t actually send plugin emails with that stuff, no matter how much I think in that way. It would make people think I’m talking down to them.

Which brings me back to my point.

We, who create for WordPress, are in a place of exceptionally high privilege. We name drop people like Helen and Mark and Matt and Mike (no, the other Mike) without a second thought because they’re a part of our lives. We’re not trying to seem high and mighty, but these are people with whom we’ve played Cards Against Humanity, or had churros, or sat on a bed giggling like tween girls. We’ve made a tribe with people we see daily, virtually, and they’re a part of our norm.

But to the average WordPress user? They don’t care. Or if they do, they care jealously. And worse, when we say things like how we talked and made a decision about them without their input, they feel left out. And they were. They were intentionally, mindfully, willfully left out.

We felt our default assumptions were correct.

We felt that we knew better.

We felt, based on our experiences and usage and tests, that we were right.

Well. We can be wrong. We know this. Often we trust our heads more than our hearts, making amazing mistakes by assuming we know the best from our expertise. And the biggest fallouts when it comes to our work will be in those moments. When we decide “this is right” without taking the time to use our product hung over, or to ask for more help, or to trust that gut feeling.

This is incredibly hard to do. When you consider WordPress, there are times a feature will make it to Beta and we’ll realize we were wrong. Post Formats UI, anyone?

As gutting as it was to pull that so late, the decision was wise and sound. Not because this wasn’t something people wanted (and might use) but because it’s implementation wasn’t up to snuff. It was a fundamental feeling of ‘this is wrong.’ And Mark trusted his heart in the moment and said even if the code was fine, there was something off in the using. He understood the implications, too. That how the UI was implemented would influence future work.

It’s difficult to explain how huge that is without sounding like I’m making a mountain out of molehill or fighting a strawman. The decision we make in WordPress, in any project, do not live their lives out in a vacuum. The decision to make widgets, featured images, categories, custom post types, and on and on all have influenced how future features are designed and built. We know this. So when we introduce a new feature, a new flow for using features, we have to consider the future.

And that means we need to forget our privilege of someone who knows the code, who knows the system, and who has all the benefits of experience. We need to be the first time user, the uneducated, the newbie. We have to accept that we will be wrong, and we have to be willing to admit our wrongness. To fail to do this means we’ll never learn.

9 November, 2016
The Problem with Renaming

If you caught my talk in Seattle last week, I talked about names, versions, and SVN.

One of the things I touched on with names was their problematic nature. And believe me, I know about that. You see, I’m a Cleveland Indians fan.

And yes, I think the name (and the logo) are racist.

You can’t rename things, but you can rebrand

When I said this, I meant that you can’t rename a plugin slug. Yoast SEO will forever have the URL of wordpress-seo because we do not have a way to rename the slug and properly redirect everyone. We just don’t. And even if we did, the old URL would need to remain in perpetuity in order for everyone who upgraded super late to still get the new code.

Names are really important. Your name is (often) your brand, and your brand is how people know you and how to find you. When you consider a name like the Cleveland Indians, today we can see the problems with it. Racism. But in 1914, we were a little simpler, a little more naive…. A little stupider. Okay a lot stupider.

The problems that Cleveland faces with renaming are related to the problems you would face in renaming your product.

Rebranding has a cost, and it could be everything

The crux of all issues with renaming is that if people don’t like the new name, or can’t find you because of it, they will walk away. If you’re a small company with a few sales, and people can’t find your name anymore, you could go bankrupt. For Cleveland, it would be worse. If the baseball team went belly up, it would translate to thousands of people going out of work.

This is not to say the renaming or rebranding isn’t important. Cleveland’s reasons are obvious. Yours may be less so. You may be asked to rebrand to prevent a potential legal issue. Or you may decide that Mailpoet is a better name than Wysija Newsletters. But the rebranding can come at a cost.

Losing history can loose users

In baseball, one of the rationales for not renaming a team is the team history. A team is known by it’s name and its mascot (and logo). The logos of most team are fairly mutable over time, you can see the growth and development when you look at it historically. There’s a reason most redesigns are actually not dramatic, but careful and planned. That can not be said of the names, which rarely (if ever) change unless a team moves.

The same goes for your name. If Cleveland renames their baseball team to, say, the Lancers or the Blues, how do you handle the change? You have to make sure everyone knows (this is easier for baseball than the rest of us) and you have to make sure they know why.

When a similar warning was put up before Tom & Jerry cartoons, the Internet lost their shit. Go figure. And yet that’s the problem here. People react in unpredictable ways to being told “A thing you liked and empathized with is bad” because they think it means they were bad. Generally no, they weren’t.

That’s a much bigger issue for baseball than for your code though. Unless you decided to name your theme Mien Kampf, or decided to present your plugin as ‘The Final Solution.’ That’s because a name is not isolated. You are not isolated. You live in a world where the implications and uses of a word and a logo can have far reaching effects. People who, for whatever reason, connect with your plugin name can feel left out when you rebrand.

No matter how deep your pockets are, you will pay

Thankfully you are way luckier than baseball (or football, hello). You have the opportunity to know the world you’re in. Today we are more aware of the implications of our words, but also we now listen to other cultures and viewpoints about how our words and actions are perceived.

The cost of renaming yourself is high, but the ultimate question is not to ask how much the cost is of the renaming. The question is which cost is higher: The loss that stems from renaming, or the loss that stems from defending a name. If you’re being sued by Microsoft for copyright infringement over a name, and yes it happens, it doesn’t matter what your intentions were. What matters is you’re probably going to lose.

If you’re baseball, you generally have a lot more money than the average joe. You might be able to win a lawsuit. But your reputation will be tarnished, and that too will impact your bottom line.

If you know what to do and you don’t do it, there you bloody well are, aren’t you.

— Lord Buckley

2 November, 2016
Bundling – Not What We Wanted

There is a problem with bundling.

We like to bundle things together, to say “If you buy X, get Y as well for less!” And the simple problem is that our customers don’t actually always want X. We treat bundling like it solves our problems, but it doesn’t. It just makes angry customers who have more than they need, and pay more than they wanted for things they don’t use.

Let’s think of it like a coffee shop for a moment.

You go to Mooncoins and you want a latte and a gluten free donut. When you get there, you look for your $5 latte and see that you can’t buy it anymore but you can spend $10 for a latte and a vegan donut, non-gluten-free. If you want the gluten free bundle that’s another $15 and it comes with a muffin. You don’t want the muffin. You want the option to name your own bundle.

Okay, so how does this relate to software?

If you live in the US, you’ve probably heard about the Progressive insurance company. Yes, the Flo ones. Since they own Jacob’s Field in Cleveland, I hear a lot more of their commercials than I care about, but they have a weird deal with a ‘name your own price bundle’ where you pick what you want, and how much you want to pay for it. Within reason.

This means we ask “What are you bundling?”

I get waxed once a month or so and they offer ‘packages.’ There’s a ‘whole face’ package and a then separate services for lip, chin, and eyebrows. What I want is lip and chin, which they don’t offer, so instead of paying less for two services (which is what you get in a package), I have a choice of paying more for a package I don’t want (whole face) or more for two services I want (lip and chin).

The company wants me to pay for a package, which would save me quite a bit more than buying the lip, chin, and eyebrows as separates would cost. But they don’t have a ‘pick two’ option.

When you decide what you want to put in a bundle, you presume you know more about what the customer wants than the customer. And the flaw in this plan is that you don’t know more than the customers. You presume you know what works best, but you don’t.

You may have an idea of what works best for the people you’ve run into, but some of them would look at the price difference between paying for two services and paying for a package, see than it works out to less than $50 a year, and go for it. Then you have someone who thinks that $50 a year isn’t nothing, and would like to save it and not use services they don’t really want.

Bundling is meant to reduce options and let people pick what they need. What it more often does is require people to make different decisions of what they want and need, but also what the value is on those things in time and money.

Maybe we should start rethinking what we bundle and instead consider how we bundle. Let the customers have options. Use features like “People who bought X also bought Y.” Add in discounts “If you buy 3 products, get 5% off your entire purchase.” Offer them example bundles that are your current deals “Most people buy these 3 together. Purchase them now and save 5%, or mix and match your own.”

But start looking at how people purchase your products as a whole, and give them discounts not on the bundle you invent, but on the bundle they create. Guide them to what they need, not what you think they want.

21 October, 2016
Two Forks In The Road

I believe in healthy competition.

Rivals, professionally and personally, have the ability to inspire us to reach great heights. They also have the ability to be terrible, but when a true rival, who respects you and your work, arrives, they should be embraced.

The other day I said that I would love to see a W3TC killer. Killer was the wrong word, as what I mean is that I would love to see something as amazing as W3TC that reaches out and tackles caching in a new and inventive way. I’d also love to see a WordPress killer, an iPhone killer, and a Linux killer. And a Hybrid Car killer.

I don’t mean I want any of those things to fail, I mean I want to see them have a challenger who does what they do, differently, in a way that inspires them to do more and more and better.

Growth stagnates without good rivalry. When you have a rival who does what you do, and they succeed, you want to succeed. When you’re both healthy rivals, you can carry it even further. Reaching out to your rivals and telling them “I am impressed with how you did X! Nice job!” is the greatest gift. With WordPress code, taking a leaf from their book and forking some of their code (with credit) is another way to hat-tip them.

In truth, W3TC and WP Super Cache never really competed. They can’t. They have wildly different approaches to just about everything, and they’re not even ‘after’ the same customer base. WP Super Cache appeals to people with it’s simplicity and directness. It works and you can (mostly) ignore it. W3TC has an insanely deep and complex set of tools that works closer to the base level of a server. W3TC has options, oh my god it has options, and they can overwhelm.

But the real crux to all this, besides the take away that caching is hella hard, is that there is always more than one way to solve a problem. And there is always room for multiple solutions in any ecosystem. It comes down to needs, wants, and user preferences. Both plugins I’ve named here do a great job at meeting the needs for their audiences. And both plugins grew out of someone’s need. Donnacha and Fredrick both created something to solve their own problems. They shared these solutions with the world and became unintentional rivals and kings of caching.

Okay so back to what I said.

Should there be a ‘killer’ caching plugin? Will there be one?

Maybe.

There should never be one killer app, no matter what it is. There should never be one perfect solution. Mostly because I don’t believe there’s such a thing. There’s nothing we can create that will suit everyone’s needs and wants. It’s statistically impossible. So when we talk about a ‘killer’ anything we never mean that. We mean “There should be options and the options creators should be healthy competition with each other to create some awesome things.”

And I really truly thing we should do that. I would love to see someone tackle WordPress with a serious self-hosted alternative. Something easier to install on my own than Ghost, but as easy as Hugo or Jekyll to write a post. Something extendable like Drupal, but with better backwards compatibility. Something next. And I want to see WordPress take what it learns from those other tools to become even more.

Because healthy rivalry between friends and equals is a good thing.

7 October, 2016