Coffee Visualizations

My knowledge of coffee growing up in Canada is all from Tim Horton’s. In university I was fuelled by this type of coffee. I would get the classic “double double”, that’s two sugars and two milk. After moving to Europe and having friends from Australia I got introduced to different kinds of coffees, latte, cappucinos and macchiatos. Steamed milk vs milk froth, I was far away from the simple double double. What’s the difference between all of them?

As I was enjoying my latte (image above) at CoffeeWorks in London I thought about what makes a latte different than a standard coffee brew. Here are some menus that I came across that helped me understand the composition of the different types of coffee.

They have different colours which correlates to the intensity of flavour as illustrated in this menu at Kipferl in London.

There could be different ingredients such as milk or water. Below is a coffee menu from m* cafe in Santiago de Compostela which shows the breakdown of different coffee drinks in a graphical style.

Watch disruption

I got my Pebble watch recently. I was excited for this watch for a few months. The idea of having notifications on my wrist was an exciting idea. The Kickstarter advertisements of having notifications from RunKeeper come through on my watch while running was why I wanted this watch. However this was not to be because at the time of writing this blog article, there was very little the watch could really do. The only thing it could do is tell me the time, display that I have phone calls and the ability to control my music. The lack of having a stopwatch is very surprising because that is almost a basic feature for digital watches. The great thing is that updates for the Pebble are coming soon and there are no wires required to connect to the Pebble to upgrade it is all done via the app. Having the battery die in one week was something new to get used to as watches with batteries seem to last months to years. All of these little things distract from the overall user experience but I am hopeful that the Pebble will deliver over time.

Let’s take a step back, this concept of the ability to tell time has been around for a while. First portable time devices were the pocket watch and that required people to synchronize time against the central clock at home or in the town square. This was powered by winding up the clock, no batteries yet and still very manual. The Pebble is currently better than a pocketwatch.

I love my battery powered watch. It was given to me as a gift and it is better than a watch I would have chosen myself. However it suffers from the lack of connectivity, where am I, which timezone am I in? Having the ability to automatically correct itself depending on where I am or whether it is daylight savings time, would be really useful. I almost missed a connecting bus departure due to daylight savings time, good thing my iPhone changed it’s time automatically.

The ability of having a watch know where I am or if it is daylight savings time, invokes the notion that the watch is somehow smart, or better worded a smart watch. But is this really a new idea? It is the current hype with Apple and Samsung since both are rumoured to have smart watches coming out. There are currently watch straps for the iPod Nano so that you can wear as a watch.  This could just be Apple observing and testing how people may interact with a watch that can do more than just telling time.

I don’t think the idea of a smart watch is a new idea because cartoons such as Dick Tracy from the 1930s portrayed a world were a talking watch was how one could communicate. It is now in 2013 that we have the technology to really make watches communicate and become smart.

I look at my current Pebble and I like it for it signals a new era for watches but I don’t love it yet. Here is a list of things I would like to see happen in this space to make the watch useful given the current hardware of the Pebble.

1. Simple functionality such as a stopwatch/timer
2. Show turn by turn direction of when to turn so I dont have to have my phone out
3. Show me information like a news ticker, latest tweets, what’s happening in the world, how far I have walked tooday (like a Nike fuel band)

The Pebble’s technology with e-ink is nice but I think if Apple/Samsung step into this area, e-ink won’t be something that consumers will really care about. Having colour and touchscreens will make the Pebble obsolete. I hope that the Pebble team get their act in gear and use their current momentum to build a fan base that will support them through to the future.

Prime time of your life

You are in your late 20s and early 30s, you are out of college and probably paying the last of your student loan. You are really becoming an adult. Some say this is the prime time of your life. Now what should you do during this time?

Travel
Go see the world. I am glad that my parents encouraged me to go travel and explore career opportunities internationally. Sometimes they think I spend too much money on travel. But sometimes when you are in the prime time of your life it is the best time to travel. Going to Pamplona for the running of the bulls at 25 years old is much different than going at 50. Likewise going to a country side cottage at 50 is much different than at 25, both can be equally fun but the activities may be different. Travelling when you are in your 20s will help you see the world in different perspectives and that will only help you in the future.

Money or Passion

Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work again – Confucius

Should you work for money? Should you work all the time and max your earning potential?

What’s your passion? Should you work for your passion?

For some people it is a job title, for some it is the job and some it is the money. What is success for you? This definition is not the same for everyone, we have different motivators. Therefore you shouldn’t be in the same race as everyone else.

Professionally I work as an IT consultant. Personally I may not be the most passionate about programming but I wake up every morning excited to go to work. Why? Programming is a gift for me. I program mainly in C# during my day job but everyday utilizing the craft of coding I am able to think and learn. I get to work with people and find out what their problems are and use code to help find the solution. I get to mentor others to help them learn. In return I also get to learn from others, better techniques or different languages.

Watching television we see many cooking shows lately from Jamie’s 30 minute meals to Top Chef. Now everyone thinks it’s easy to make it in the restaurant world. My passion is food, I like eating it and making it but could it be my career? I don’t think so I don’t want to work in a kitchen 10+hr days for 6 days a week. On television we only see the good parts.

We live in reality and sometimes we are slaves to the idea of money or suffer because we can’t pay the bills with our passion. Some of us hate our jobs but can’t leave because it helps pay for the lifestyle we want. Some of us pursue our passions but the “struggling artist” scenario creeps in. What can we do?

Finding a Direction
If you are not exactly feeling 100% in the prime time of your life, answer the following questions to help guide you

• What are your priorities at the moment? It is your career? It is your health? It is your family (or future family)?
• Are you making time for your priorities?
• What are your gifts/skills?
• How much money is enough money?
• What kind of work do you enjoy doing that time just passes?
• What challenges do you enjoy?

Are you in the driver seat for your future? Like a driver of a car it’s never too late to change course. Here is an interesting read from the Harvard Business Review, The Top Five Career Regrets

After answering these questions myself earlier this year I was able to make a choice in my career and life.

Combining my skills and passion is what I should be doing. I like to think about problems that involve cooking/food and think about what tech can be used to help solve the problem. I try to use it as the theme for my side projects. Some ideas I have are interactive grocery lists, a sensor in your fridge that tells you want food is in it while you are not a home and visual guides during cooking. But can I quit my day job yet? The short answer to that is no. With a wedding coming up I know that I will need money but at what cost? I know that my priorities in life is my health, family and friends. I did not want to work long hours to get a lot of money. If I worked long hours I would not be able to socialize with my fiance or friends, go to the gym regularly or have the energy after work on my passions on the side. I am happy that in my current role because I get to hone my skills and time for my priorities. I work on my side projects and maybe one makes it big but no matter what I am doing I’m enjoying it because I’m using technology (my skill) to help solve problems that are interesting to me.

By giving enough time to your passion on a regular basis you can remove the risk of become the struggling artist. This takes time rather than a big bang approach. You can transform your passion into your career.

What are you going to do with the prime time of your life?

Importance of side projects

What ever you are currently working on for your job/career, do you have time for side projects?

Why bother?
Side projects can be something related to the skills related to your day to day work. Since I work with code every day and as programmers know the language you code today will not be the same code you

The language you code in today is not the same language you will code in tomorrow

The only person responsible for your career is you. Side projects can help you keep your skills up to date by trying out new features of a programming language.  You can also expand your creativity by showing what you can do with the skills you currently have. Blogging and mentoring can also help your learning process by teaching. Outside the world of coding, the skills that you have today will need to be improved for the future. Your skills have to be crafted and honed to be better for the future.

What to work on?
So you decided that you want to do something on the side, what should you work on?

Find something that you can improve and find a solution

Reading tutorials and books will teach you the basics but if you find a problem that’s when you learn a million times faster. You focus on what you need to know like a laser.

I tried to “learn” how to program again with the web and relearning HTML5 and Javascript and all of the things that has evolved since 2006. I spent a few months reading blogs and listening to podcasts about the latest in web development. I could talk the talk and knew what was the hottest topics in the space, but could I code? Could I make anything? No. Only once I started coding with some new Javascript frameworks that I realized that reality is more than just reading about programming or tutorials about programming. You learn so much more by applying that knowledge.

Trial by fire is the best teacher

How to work on it?
Like most people you work 40 hrs a week and maybe more hours other weeks. Where do you find the time?

24 hrs – 8 hrs sleep – 8 hrs work – 2hrs commute – 2hrs eat = 4 hrs

You have about 4 hours a day of time to work on things. If you worked on your side project every day after work you would be putting in 20 hrs of extra time. That’s pretty good if you want to burn yourself out. You should treat this as time going to the gym or hanging out with your friends. It’s all about balance. Plus you need time for the knowledge to sink in and register as knowledge in your brain. Having 2-3 days a week of 4hrs solid time would be best.

What will happen?
You could miss out on some nights out drinking. You could make something something rubbish. You could fail at saying “Hello World” in a new language. You could make something new and exciting. You could teach someone something new. The most important thing that will happen is that

…you could learn from yourself, learn to grow.

Developing with Sencha Touch

A few months ago I started getting into web development to get my skills up to scratch because I believe that the web will be the future. To be more specific I think that HTML5/CSS3 allows a similar experience across different platforms whether that be Mac, Linux or Windows, desktop or mobile. I want to keep my skills up for the future.

What is Sencha?
Sencha Touch is a user interface JavaScript framework used to develop for mobile devices. Sencha Touch aims to enable developers to quickly and easily create HTML5 based mobile apps that work on Android, iOS and Blackberry devices, and produce a native-app-like experience inside a browser.

Why did I use Sencha?
There are many other frameworks out there, why Sencha? To be honest I am a fan of knockout.js and Kendo UI because it adopts the MVVM framework that I am used to with WPF desktop development. I used Sencha Touch because of the HTML5 is Ready contest.

Design Process
My idea was to create a weather app (yes another weather app). Everything started out as sketches. I wanted to include a background image of each city in the background and use a carousel to slide between each city.

If there was reason to send these sketches around to other people I would use something like Balsamiq. For the purpose of this app and showing the idea to friends I used POP (Protyping on Paper). This is a great app to link different sketches together.

Coding Experience
Sencha Touch is a framework and it is big (46 MB). Unlike other JavaScript frameworks that only require a single file this may seem like overkill. So why is it so big? Sencha Touch requires you to build the files. It uses Compass/SASS to build the styles.  It optimizes the JavaScript files you will use by the ones you reference in your application.

It was hard building the UI with JavaScript because as a begineer I didn’t know whether to put the components or how to structure it. The Sencha Architect tool (another application to download) really made this process much easier to create different user interface layouts.

Final Product
Given that I started looking into coding in January and the contest was up in February; 3 weeks. The first 2 weeks was spent trying to figure out Sencha Touch/Sencha Command/Sencha Architect, the last week was the real coding. Therefore my application was coded in one week.

You can upload your application in zip file to Sencha Cmd. Sencha will host it for you. You can look at the application I created by clicking on this link here for Weather View.

The final application has the carousel control to move between cities. For each city, the tab control shows the weather for Now, Later and in the Future. For the Later part I wanted to create something like the BBC weather graph but due to the time constraints I settled with the normal graph. Below are images of the application.

For cities where the time is in the night time (6pm-6am) I tried to use a night background image.

Given more time I would have improved the application by having cleaner weather icons and better user interface. Congratulations to one of the winner Weathy. On the week the contest ended Haze also released. Weather apps they can be beautiful in addition to being useful.

User Interface Book Recommendations

Here is a list of a few of my favourite books for UI designers.

Understanding Design

The Design of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman
What is the thought process of designing something? Why is something considered a good design and others not? This book delves into these topics. The examples in this book are not focused on software but everyday things. Why are traffic lights best designed in a column rather than a row? Different people see different things and in different ways. As designers we need to be aware of how our audience and end users will use our product. This book is highly recommended.

Steal like an Artist
Austin Kleon
Where does your inspiration come from? All great artists steal. It’s making something new of that thought is what is important. This book talks about coming with ideas and channeling them to something constructive. It is done in a light way with playful graphics but it makes it all a joy to read. Good afternoon read.

User Experience

Undercover User Experience Design
Cennydd Bowles and James Box
This book is a good read to see how you can bring practices of user experience design into organizations where it never existed before. By just doing the user experience design process you are putting structure to some existing practices such as business requirement gathering. However by gathering requirements by listening and observing users you can slow introduce mockups and usability testing to help explain ideas and concepts to users easier.

Observing the User Experience
Mike Kuniavsky
I read this book in 2012 only to realize that I had already read this book back in 2005-2006 when I worked for Toyota. This book highlights what you should should be looking for when you are observing the user and why you are observing the user.

User experience design is nothing new but now is a great time to focus on it.

Measuring the User Experience
William Albert and Thomas Tullis
How do you know if you are doing user experience right? Do you just feel if things just work? Like everything else in life, if you want to see improvement you need to record it so that you can measure it. This book focuses on how to conduct surveys and how generate reports out of the data gathered. Decent use cases here helps the authors drive their points.

A Book Apart

A Book Apart Series of Books
This is actually a series of books I read all of them as they are not long read and are packed with tons of information. The topics in the series range from web technologies (HTML5, CSS3), how to use web technologies (responsive design, mobile first) to how you should approach design (designing for emotion, design is a job).

Infographics

Visualize This: The Flowing Data Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics
Nathan Yau

I have been following Nathan’s blog for a while and really admire his work. It is not only because his work looks nice but he takes the time to share his technique and tips on how to create the visualizations yourself.

The explanation of stats and how to analyze for trends is useful in this book

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward R. Tufte
Edward Tufte is one of the originals when it comes to making data beautiful so that people would want to consume it. This book is not available in an e-format because the author was persistent that this work was best displayed on the large high quality paper that this book is bound in. Tufte discusses the common pitfalls of graphing mistakes and how to improve on them.

Information is Beautiful
David McCandless
When I first saw this book in the book store I had to pick it up. I didn’t know why but the book just looked beautiful. Flipping through the book I saw the colourful infographics and at the moment I said this is something I would like to do as a living. Making information beautiful and telling a story with data is both an art and a skill has it takes knowledge of analysis and stats with a visual eye.

Top Podcasts for 2012

This year I rediscovered my love for podcasts. Podcasts are broadcasts of information very similar to traditional talk radio however you can choose what you want to listen to. I have use podcasts as a way to get more information while travelling to work or while working out.

On an iPhone you can listen to podcasts with iTunes. If you listen to more than 5 podcasts you may want to look into an app that will help you manage them. I did not like the Podcast app, it was not accurate at telling me what I had listen to or not. I highly recommend RSSRadio. This app is amazing! It does a lot for you from categorizing, selective auto update, sharing abilities and it is very easy to use.

Without further ado here are my favourite podcasts divided in categories…

General Technology

I have embraced that I am a developer and part of that is keeping up with technology. What is going on in my world and how are others experiencing it?
Hanselminutes

Scott Hanselman’s podcast is one of the first podcasts I have ever first listened to in my life. My favourite podcasts are ones with his wife and their talk about relationships and another favourite is the one about Typescript.

This Developer’s Life

Developers are an interesting bunch of people. Some are old or shy or egotisical, mix this all in with technology and you get a life of a developer. Rob Conery and Scott Hanselman brings you all of this in an homage style to another popular podcast This American’s Life.

Knowledge

Knowing one thing in life, gives you one view on life. To learn a bit about things I am not normally exposed to I find these podcasts to be enlightening and enjoyable all at the same time.

Stuff You Should Know

Highly recommended! Chuck and Josh research tons of random topics to bring you a highly entertaining and informative show on common topics that I often wonder about. They dig deeper than just a Wikipedia lookup and are passionate about bringing you information

NPR: Planet Money

Money is the thing that makes the world go round. NPR takes current topics of finance and the economy to makes it relevant to everyone.

99% Invisible

Roman Mars highlights the fact that architecture plays a big part of our daily lives and historic events.

NPR: TED Radio Hour

If you are a fan of TED talks then this podcast is for you. Good to have new and different perspectives on a plethora of topics

HBR Ideacast

If you are into leadership with a business and management angle this is for you. I listened to a lot of these to build on my leadership skills.

Rachet and The Geek

I am a Scott Hanselman fan. If he has a podcast I listen to it. This one is with social media guru, Luvvie, and they talk about more general topics about media and pop culture.

Career/Startups

I find that if you approach your career the same way startups approach business then you will see much successes. People in established careers are sometimes afraid to be wrong. Stepping out to try new ideas and learn something from the experience is something hard to do. If you have a great new idea, will people like it, will people join you on your idea? This is essentially the startup mentality to grow their ideas and businesses.

Startups for the Rest of Us

Rob Walling and Mike Taber have started their startups from working part time at nights and bootstrapping their way to success. Each have a slightly different approach and it is good to hear their progress weekly about how things are going and their insightful tips.

Seth Godin’s Startup School

Seth Godin held a workshop with lessons to entrepreneurs and these are the audio recording of those sessions. The best thing to do with this podcast is to pay attention and try to listen without taking notes. Really good advice.

Unofficial Linchpin

If you like material from Seth Godin you should check out the book Linchpin. This podcast is here to showcase people who demonstrate linchpin attributes. Hosted by Andy Traub.

Mixergy

Andrew Warner hosts this podcasts which interviews up and coming entrepreneurs. There are some business that are not tech business featured here and there are lots of stories of how they became successful. Useful business tips.

This Week in Startups

This podcast is hosted by Jason Calacanis. Not everyone may like his style because sometimes he is a bit rushed and opinionated but I think it gives the show character. Features the who’s who of the startup world and latest news from startups.

Web Design

I have been working with user interfaces in the financial industry for the past 5-6 years. All of this work has been on the desktop side using technologies from Excel, Winforms to WPF which are all Microsoft based technologies. I haven’t done web development in a long time but my interest in this field has grown this year. Why? I find a lot of innovations in user interfaces have come from this space and that now web browsers and Javascript libraries are capable of a lot more than they were in the past. People seem to be more open in ideas and sharing them more than desktop development.

The Big Web Show

Hosted by Jeffrey Zeldman. Jeffrey is the founder of Happy Cog but more notably A List Apart. Big web stars come through this show to talk about art trends, typography, web topics and web trends.

Shoptalk

A show about experiences working with web technology front end. Special guests are on the show and they have rapidfire shows where it’s a whole mix bag of topics.

Electronic Music

Podcasts seems to be a natural platform for electronic music DJ’s to release new music. The music is made from a laptop can thus releasing it can be done immediately, the feedback from the public is almost instantaneous. Here is a list of some of my favourite DJ’s podcasts.

Avicii Levels

Avicii is one of the latest Swedish house DJ’s. This monthly podcast features songs that were popular in his latest sets, a download recommendation and a feature on a new DJ.

Sebastian Ingrosso Refune Radio

Sebastian Ingrosso is one third of the former Swedish house mega group Swedish House Mafia. This podcast features new tracks and tracks popular in his setlists.

That’s it for this year! Thanks for reading and happy listening.