Innovation in Software

For the last two years, the digital sector has been a minor miracle in the wider economy. Whilst everybody else was fretting over bank collapses and credit crunches, the software sector has held firm.

Services companies (like Vagueware), have seen revenue growth as people seek efficiency gains, more streamlined processes supported by software and ways to leverage data in more creative ways. Product companies have ridden the wave of efficiency gains as people upgrade to compete. Together, we’re probably the only areas still recruiting and holding firm. The recession is something we’ve been sheltered from for the most part.

No more.

This morning Adobe – creators of the cornerstone software of many a web outfit in Photoshop, et al – announced they’re shedding 680 employees, a total of 9% of their workforce in order to “align costs with its 2010 operating plan and budget [...] and the realities of the business environment”.

So that’s 9% from one of the industry top dogs. Ouch. Maybe they were heavy, and it was time to restructure, but that’s one big kick in the stomach for a sector that’s been strong whilst all else flails.

Add into the mix EA’s 1500-job cull and things start to look grimmer still.

One phrase springs to mind: buckle up.

Almost 18 months ago, I had a little bit of a rant about the lack of vision in the industry. A taste:

I have a problem with “the vision thing” in the industry at the moment. I don’t know where we’re going, or why. The technology – and our insight on how it can be applied – available to us has the ability to change the World, and instead we’re producing pointless crap and obsessing over details of page animations as if they alone will save the World.

If I hear one more wannabe-startup tell me that they plan to change the World and get rich off the back of social networking I will scream. If I see one more aggressive pitch for a site that a teenager could put together in a weekend under the guise of it being “World leading” I will hurt somebody. If I’m asked just one more time to give a quote to develop a site “a bit like eBay but with a social graph” I’m going to quit and go and be a farmer or something.

The response I got from that article was interesting. One reader suggested they had quit their job after thinking through some of the points I made. Mostly people suggested I needed a good lie down, that I was burning out.

We’re now a year and a half in, and I still feel that way sometimes. In that time, iPhone and Android app markets have grown beyond recognition, fewer startups are trying to build up to a point of acquisition quickly by simply AJAX-ifying calendars or todo lists, and the “Web 2.0 craze” seems to have settled down. We’re slowly – but surely – starting to settle down to real work.

We’re still a fair few miles away from where we could be, though. We still are spending too much time as an industry obsessed with entertainment than helping to effect change in some of the biggest problems we face as a society.

However, I’m curious: since writing that article, this blog has picked up thousands of new regular readers, people to whom the Vision Thing is a brand new concept. I’d be interested in hearing what some of you think a year and a half down the line. Are the problems still there? Have I outlived my stay in the sector and it’s time to go and buy that farm? Leave your thoughts below, I’d love to hear them.

For various reasons I’ve decided to change the comments system on this blog to use Disqus. That means there is much more social media cohesion within the comments, and hopefully we’re going to be able to have a better 2-way discussion here.

Let’s get started: It seems twitter traffic might be peaking right now. So, I posit that all people who have access to the Internet today who want a twitter account (or indeed any other social media account), has one. There are few new users who are likely to sign up. Therefore the only growth available for such sites, is new Internet markets where access is limited (e.g. Africa). Discuss.

Source: Wikipedia

Somaliland is an autonomous region that is probably very much like your pre-conceived notions. Its 3.5 million people have struggled through warfare (many suffer post-traumatic stress disorder), the economy is “in early stages of development” and it has suffered greatly to gain recognised independence.

Few people know of its existence, fewer still care about its future. But we should. The Horn of Africa has seen great misery and human suffering over recent decades, and whilst it is a country that has many faults including widespread corruption, it is at least a better attempt at democratic, peaceful governance than anywhere else nearby.

Alas, the entire country is now at risk, thanks to a technical “solution” to a problem that never really was.

The current edition of Private Eye has in its column “From Our Own Correspondent” a story from Hargeisa that should make all involved ashamed of themselves. Emphasis throughout is mine:

Somalialand is the only place in the Horn of Africa that is democratic, stable and tolerant. Yet because of misplaced fears of the mushrooming of micro-states, we remain unrecognised by the international community, 18 years after declaring our independence. As a result the world keeps us at arm’s length and has instead forced on us consultants so greedy and inept that the very peace we now enjoy is under threat.

Elections in an impoverished, nomadic society are never easy, but our record of closely contested polls compares pretty well with our neighbours [Somalia, Ethiopia, et al]. Our friends faraway nevertheless thought that what we really needed was a state of the art biometric finger printing and facial recognition system to compile a voter’s roll. But an operation of such complexity – not to mention the $10m funding – could not possibly be trusted to us natives.

[...]

Alas, this model [...] has somewhat underperformed. Presidential elections have been postponed four times now and are 18 months late, and now we have the prospect of civil war as our politicians cannot agree on a way forward.”

It’s a stable country that has a reasonable record on electoral fraud prevention. Who then thought that an advanced biometric system was what this country needed?

I’ve left out from the Private Eye piece the criticisms of how NGO Interpeace are (mis-?) handling this, how Britain and the US are washing their hands of it, and the details of who is blaming who, but the error was there at the start: they placed the country’s future in a technology system that wasn’t needed. No doubt it was profitable for somebody.

This is a country with a GDP per head of $226 – the vast majority of the population are living on less than $1 per day. $10 million could have helped address woeful statistics such as only 25% of Somaliland adults are literate, and just 17% of children go to school. The funding could have even helped the 72% of the population without access to clean water get some new wells.

But it gets worse.

The nomadic culture that dominates Somaliland (any two citizens can work out how they are related by sharing their names and clans), is culturally sensitive to finger-printing. That of course makes a biometric database a fatally flawed model. The problem they are attempting to address – that people from neighbouring countries could vote – has been “solved” with a system that introduces new problems, that means not even all of those entitled to vote want to necessarily register.

To cap it all off, the people who went about delivering the system didn’t just do a bad job at implementation, but a thoroughly awful one. According to some sources on the ground:

The current voter list is neither accurate nor can it form the basis of a fair and transparent election. The only alternative is to go ahead with the election without voter lists.
Interpeace stated in a controversial and a very contradictory press release dated July 25, 2009:

“The Voter Registration system was seriously abused during its implementation, with widespread corruption and systematic fraud, resulting in the failure to record the fingerprints of more than half of all registrants. In other cases, over 150 registrations were made with a single fingerprint at the same registration centre, or through photographs instead of in person.”

Say what? There are voters walking around with 150 polling cards, and others who got registered without ever actually turning up? That sounds like the kind of thing the project was meant to protect against. But the systems can spot all that and deal with duplicate registrations, right? Well, according to another source close to the action:

IT Professionals advised the hardware of the server should be upgraded and software to be reexamined to be fit to handle database of 4 million voters in Somaliland. The testing phase must include plan for next 20 years according to population growth rate.

They called for upgrade of both hardware and Software including the operation system, which should have latest security and performance tuning patches. The hardware upgrade should include Hard Disk, RAM and the Processor. They highlighted that majority of the data captured in the server are not in text [but in] binary format like picture and fingerprint, which needs massive storage area. RAM and Processor helps the server to boot and run quickly particularly during filtering the duplicates. [sic throughout]

Failures then, include:

1. The whole project has several fatally flawed assumptions under-pinning core choices
2. The money could have been put to more effective use elsewhere
3. The software was designed incorrectly and therefore its output is unreliable and can’t be trusted
4. The server infrastructure is under-equipped and under-managed so now they need to add more storage, more memory and increase processing power (and by the sounds of it, whack on a few service pack upgrades).

These are all failures we see in IT projects on a regular basis. If this were a new ERM or accounts platform we’d sit around the board room table, gravely shake our heads, talk about “lessons learned”, and put it all down as a bad job. We’d move on, avoiding the compulsion to try and “fix it” due to our own notions of “sunk cost”. This is in essence, like thousands of IT projects that have happened over the last few decades.

Except in this case, the consequences are more serious: the country now faces civil war.

As you go about your daily work rolling out technology to your clients and customers, you may not think that your potential failure to deliver will result in human fatality. However it will have consequences.

Iit’s important we think carefully as our industry takes a greater hold on the workings of civilisation and shapes ever more its potential, about what our lust for automation and control can do to lives if we fail to live up to expectations. Somaliland is an extreme – but sobering – example.

As an early supporter of NO2ID and long-term member of Liberty, Amnesty International, and others, I have heard enough stories about technology tampering with elections that even as an advocate of the power of software to improve society, I am perfectly happy that my native democracy requires nothing more than pieces of paper and some pencils to conduct an election. I sincerely hope that somebody decides it’s good enough for Somaliland too, before it’s too late.

Many years ago I ran FreeBSD on pretty much every system I touched. I loved it. The lack of political polarisation that touches the GNU/Linux community combined with the power of Unix under the hood sucked me in.

I even, almost infamously, had a rant about another operating system I now use daily. I was a zealot. I am ashamed of my attitude in that email – my only excuse is that I was still quite young, a rather naive and opinionated 26 year old.

Today, I use exclusively OS X, and occasionally boot up a virtual Windows instance to test code on MS code. I have a terminal open nearly all the time and often dive down to the Unix goodness, but more often than not the bulk of my work is in the browser, text editor, IDE or Mail app.

Why then, I was asked the other day, do I not just ditch Apple and get a Linux (or even BSD), machine to work with? The bulk of my work (except for iPhone application development) would continue as before.

My answer is very simple: carpenters don’t build lathes.

To explain, let’s first go back to that rant I had about OS X. About a month later, I ordered my first Apple laptop – an iBook G4 – and was very happy with it. What happened in that month?

I realised when shopping around, I needed to check out the chipsets used for WiFi in each laptop because FreeBSD wireless support was pretty hit-and-miss back then. I also needed to understand the graphics chip-set because I’d need to compile X if I wanted to run a graphical desktop environment. I then realised I’d need to assess pretty much every feature in terms of hardware compatibility to make a purchasing decision. And then, on receipt of my new laptop I would have to spend a few hours doing all the compiling and fixing, and I would then need to do this work every few months as part of an upgrade cycle.

Yes, I’d get the power and flexibility of my own tailored operating system environment, but isn’t that a lot of work?

I recalled a few months previously a friend was playing with his new smart phone. It was running Symbian and he seemed to be doing lots of prodding and poking with it. Enquiring what he was doing, he said he was “doing some maintenance” to keep it in working order. Hang on, was he effectively sysadmin’ing his phone? “Yes, I suppose”, came the reply. When you have to do systems administration work on your phone, your phone is no longer a tool to assist with your work, it is an object of work in itself.

It was this insight when thinking about my operating system choices that directed me to OS X: I wanted the power of Unix, sure, but I wanted it to just work. I wanted to be able to get on with my work, the laptop and operating system as tools rather than objects of work themselves.

This small insight has made my life a great deal easier, and still dictates not using any other operating system. Some of my peers see it as weakness (even more point to my original rant above), but I see it as spending my time doing the things I love.

And it’s also an insight I think that as developers we forget: are we developing tools that assist with objectives, or tools that are objects of work themselves. Are we building interfaces and suggesting business logic that means our customers spend time managing the behaviour to fit around them? If so, why?

In the last few weeks I’ve seen some really interesting “reductions” in functionality that aim to make tools more directly useful, rather than requiring some administration.

Take for example, the role of authentication. You need to “contain” all of your customer’s “stuff” in a way that is linked to their “account”. So we have user registration, user profiles, account activations, password resets, etc. Seems like a lot of stuff. Are we sure we need it?

Take for example, Posterous. Their home page explains it all:

All you need to do is email stuff to post@posterous.com and you’re up and running. No signup, no captchas, no password strength indicators unless you want to add them. You’re a person capturing stuff – why do you need to admin yet another web application?

BootStrap UK (which is worthy of an article in its own right as a concept), needs accounts but has a simpler registration system: just follow @bootstrapuk on Twitter and they’ll follow you and direct message you a password. Done.

There are other examples out there as well, sometimes using software to help break out “lathe obsession” elsewhere in society. One iPhone app I’ve seen reviewed gets the banking system to work around the customer, rather than demand the customer head into a branch to suit the banking system. Brilliant.

We often spend too much time trying to work out how a customers will need to behave around our application, rather than how we need to get out of the way and let our customers use what we produce in order to do their thing. In every customer we need to start seeing the carpenter more, and assume they – perhaps unlike many of us developers – don’t like tinkering with lathes for its own sake.

One of the problems with modern journalism is that some of the barriers taken for granted have broken down, and that can mean new ethical dilemmas being created every day.

Take the story of David Rohde’s kidnapping. Who he? You might very well ask. A reporter for the New York Times, he was kidnapped around seven months ago by the Taliban. You didn’t read about it in the papers? Well, no. Despite it being picked up by an Afghan news agency and being reported in some UGC news websites, the New York Times conducted a cover-up operation over the last seven months.

The only people who didn’t play ball the NYTimes were worried about were a couple (perhaps only one) of the Wikipedia editors who spent a reasonable amount of effort trying to insert one single reference to the kidnapping in Rohde’s Wikipedia article.

The Wikipedia team conspired to remove the edit and temporarily block the page from time to time. The New York Time have decided to point out how tricky dealing with this was by way of a free puff piece for Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales.

It’s an interesting case in how truth takes a back seat for a while, and raises some interesting questions for me about how exactly news organisations are meant to behave in a new era of constant information flow.

First, their reasoning for suppressing this information:

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.

Well, that doesn’t seem very sound logic. Yes, if it had been splashed across CNN for a couple of news cycles because there wasn’t much going on that weekend, you’d have a problem. However, that wouldn’t happen. Even the original news stories that were published intimated journalists being kidnapped were not big news, and part of daily life in that part of the World.

In fact, the story not getting sympathetic coverage could well have caused more damage – why feed and keep a man who is worthless to you and his fellow journalists? If no ransom is possible,  wouldn’t it be simpler to just kill him?

Then there is their attempt to change history that irks a little:

Two days after the kidnapping, a Wikipedia user altered the entry on Mr. Rohde to emphasize his work that could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantánamo, and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims. Mr. Rohde won a Pulitzer Prize for his Bosnia coverage in 1996, when he worked for The Christian Science Monitor.The Wikipedia editor in that case was Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at The Times and friend of Mr. Rohde who has written extensively about groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Like many Wikipedia editors, he adopted a user name that hid his true identity.

“I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be,” he said. “I’d never edited a Wikipedia page before.”

With his editors’ blessing, Mr. Moss had already made similar changes to Mr. Rohde’s “topic page” on The Times’s Web site, and in both cases he omitted the name of Mr. Rohde’s former employer, because it contained the word Christian.

Woah, there! That’s some pretty hefty editing going on there. First, Michael Moss edits the page to make Rohde look more sympathetic to Muslims, under a pseudonym. Then he edits up the NYTimes.com topic pages, all the while trying to get rid of the mention of his previous employer.

I have to ask, why? The most prominent article on Rohde found through Google before the story of his escape and this cover-up broke over the weekend, points out quite clearly who his previous employer was. This was, in essence, a futile exercise that did not take or remove any information away from the Internet that was already out there, and simply made the NY Times look like they were practising their Stalinist air-brushing techniques.

I’m disappointed in all involved. I don’t think Rohde would have been killed if things had been left as they were. I don’t think a short mention on the evening news would even have happened. A couple of small pieces in competing papers pointing out his work in highlighting issues Muslims around the World faced might actually have helped him gain an earlier release. Either way, if he was still alive after seven months, there was little chance he would be killed at any point by his captors.

Wikipedia might be the biggest boy in town when it comes to UGC news content, but it won’t be for long. You won’t be able to suppress stories in future that are based in fact, and the final line of the NYTimes pieces:

…the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”

Harks of naïveness in itself: journalists are no longer gate-keepers to truth. Yes, lives are involved and everybody is glad that Rohde managed to escape over the last couple of days. However the guys sat in news rooms – foreign correspondents whose lives are on the line, even more so – are going to have to accept this behaviour just isn’t going to be possible a few years from now. The real question then is should it be?

It seems I’m not the only person slightly bemused by the reaction to Steve Jobs’ revelation he had a liver transplant.

Other people’s reactions include:

• He owes me more work because I’m a fan of his work
• My share portfolio is at risk because of this
• I want more shiny plastic things from Apple. This worries me they won’t be as shiny.
• He didn’t tell us something personal that we deserve to know

My reaction:

• You just had a fricking liver transplant? Wow, get well soon and don’t listen to those guys baying for your attention, you need rest, ‘k?

This isn’t about shares or gadgets or what he owes you. It’s about somebody who is seriously ill taking some time out to make sure they can live a little longer. You know “life”, that thing you take for granted? The thing that isn’t really about accumulating possessions but being able to breathe, eat, love, dream? The mob doesn’t get that – perhaps because it isn’t available to download in the App Store or listed on the Nasdaq…

And yet, somehow, this reaction is predictable. Much in the same way that sexism is alive and well in the industry, selfishness – in particular consumerist self-absorption – is rife. We are the pinnacle of consumerism. We thrive on early adopters, so we grow them. And what we grow, we reap – this is another problem we need to think about.

As a collective the consumers seem no longer to see the humanity behind technology, choosing instead to become voyeuristic onanists viewing technology almost in the form of a fetish they are addicted to. In fact, porn is a good metaphor for where we are right now: dehumanise and objectify humanity to serve a selfish need. It doesn’t matter if the lens the fetish is viewed through is that of a camera or the blogosphere, providing it’s possible to sit at screens satisfying our cravings in private.

Maybe that’s just the Catholic in me talking. The Agnostic in me thinks we can do better too, though.

Some will argue this is just the fruit of modern capitalism. All advertising in a capitalist free-market society relies on a principle of false idolatry, designed to invoke a sense of inferiority in our subconsciousness. Apple does it better than anybody else on Earth, taking their marketing cues from designer label brands.

I think we might have gone a step too far. We might need to dial it back a notch or three and re-imagine what we’re here to do. There is something pure about what we do that is beyond the gadget and the price tag, the plastic or the electronics. As Dijkstra said (and is quoted as saying on my business cards): Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Yet here we are complaining about the telescope manufacturer needing a liver transplant because all we want is more telescopes. Good. Grief.

We should be grateful for the genius behind every design decision that comes out of our great technology companies, and they should rightly be rewarded with praise – they advance society one little increment at a time. But when somebody takes time out to have a life-saving operation, there is something distasteful about a swarm of self-interested parties demanding to know where their share of the grief is going to come from.

I don’t know the answer, I don’t have the solution. All I know is that I don’t want to be part of the problem.

P.S. writing this story I was reminded of the most human thing I ever read by Jobs’: his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 which I highly recommend taking the time to read.

I know we’ve been here before, and in some cases it’s been more directly offensive but it seems that some guys are still idiots when it comes to dealing with women in technology with a modicum of respect.

Hoss Gifford’s recent presentation at Flashbelt caused many in the audience to feel more than a little offended. From the mail Courtney Remes sent published at the above link, his presentation was not exactly family-friendly. For those of you who want a slightly cleaner version of what happened than the version Courtney described, it involved:

• Photos of women in high heels with legs spread, genitals visible through see-through underwear and Hoss’ face photoshopped on underneath, captioned “Drink Me” at both the start and end of the presentation
• An invitation to a woman in the audience to draw something on-screen which he remarked looked like male genitals
• Several drawings of his own of male genitals in a childish manner showing semen covering a face
• Lots and lots of swearing, lots of references to genitalia
• The phrase “if you are easily offended, then f[…] you”
• An animated movie of a woman’s face that is positioned as if she’s having sex with the viewer that gets closer to orgasm the quicker you move your mouse.

Many in the audience apparently laughed at this. If that’s what the Flash community is like these days, frankly, I’m going to steer clients away from Flash so we don’t have to deal with such juvenile behaviour whilst doing our work.

Some in the “community” (which frankly doesn’t exist as such if this is their collective attitude), suggest that feeling offended at such a presentation at a professional conference marks you out as being prudish or “too politically correct”. What? Politically correct? Since when has it been acceptable at any professional conference where people are expecting professional material, to be this crass and obscene?

It seems the conference organiser has unreservedly apologised, but that’s not the issue: it shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and the fact it did is only partly his fault.

There is no other industry on the planet (with the notable exception of the porn industry), where this behaviour and attitude would even be remotely tolerated. Collectively we are going to have to deal with this, and sooner rather than later.

We all have the capacity to make off-colour humour sometimes, but not in a professional context in front of an audience of industry professionals paying good money to hear your keynote. What jokes you tell down the pub are between you and your drinking buddies, but when you are going out of your way to offend and disenfranchise a whole section of your professional community because you have the “professional” mind of a 15-year old, you need to reassess what the hell you’re playing at.

We need more diversity in this sector for it to thrive and this attitude is just going to make fewer women interested in being involved in future. Quite frankly, I don’t blame them. If we can’t act as grown-ups, treat women as equals deserving of professional respect and at least hold back from the knob jokes when we’re delivering a keynote presentation at a conference they paid $399 to attend, we don’t deserve their skills and the industry almost deserves to whither and die.

Many in the industry aren’t remotely like Hoss. Those of us who feel we need to act as professionals need to start standing our ground and talking about these issues more. We are not prudes, we’re not being “politically correct”, we’re just trying to build an inclusive and professional industry everybody can be proud of.

That all said, some of the feedback on Twitter has gone beyond the pale. Yes, it’s offensive and we need to constructively address the issues, but is this really called for?

• gabbyhon: If you waterboard this Hoss Gifford asshole, he sure as hell will never pull that vile crap again. I’m just sayin’.
• kwatson49: I heard the birth of Hoss Gifford was the reason that birth control was invented. Interesting.

This isn’t constructive in the slightest. It doesn’t help the situation one jot, and it doesn’t make the people who think this behaviour is acceptable reassess their attitude – it just makes them more keen to defend the indefensible. I suggest we concentrate on finding something more positive and constructive to take away from it.

We are a powerful and influential industry – it’s time to behave like adults and treat everybody with some respect. Here’s hoping this is all another educational experience for the whole sector.

I have been throwing a mantra around at clients in the last year:

Only 20% of software development is about writing code. The other 80% is all about communication

As an industry, we are awful at communication. I don’t mean writing reports, I mean listening. Really listening.

Guess what? The clients have noticed. I’m spending more time picking up pieces after people didn’t listen. Sometimes I look at work I’ve done myself and realise I didn’t do it so well myself. Live and learn…

This last week I was reminded of an old article I wrote here that discussed the rudeness and arrogance of some developers. A client suggest we “resume this phone call when you’re less frustrated with me”, and when I apologised and explained my frustration he simply answered “that’s fine, but I’ve had the same thing for years from my ex-wife”.

Wow.

When I realise I’ve dropped the ball, I’ve upset somebody and I’ve not known how I did it, I step back and re-evaluate myself. It would have been easy to blame the client, it would have been less challenging to just write it off as one of those things. But that doesn’t help him, and therefore I’m failing.

Stories I hear at events tell me I’m one of the few guys who will go through that process – the majority just write off the client as being at fault, and we all end up with a bad reputation.

I’m worried for the next few years this problem is going to get worse across the industry. We have more clued up people in the industry than ever before, and we are building more and more echo chambers where you hear people at events talking about Twitter as if it were as common place in people’s lives as a fridge.

Over the next few years we are going to see an influx of creators, innovators and entrepreneurs with great ideas who don’t know much (yet) about software development. I just sat down with one potential client and explained Behaviour-Driven Development at an abstract level and they were blown away by the sophistication of the philosophy. I then realised that to me this is every-day stuff, to them it’s not a million miles away from arcane magic.

We need to do a better job at explaining development to people who don’t know anything about it. We need to explain why it’s worth spending money on doing less, but that less is of a higher quality. We need to stop and listen to what they need to help build a great business. And that is key: ultimately, we are not providing a service or building a product – we are helping them build a great business.

And the only way for most of us to help them do that, is to produce great software.

And in turn, the only way to do that is to get better at the other 80% of the job we’ve been so used to ignoring until now: communication.

I expect I’m going to be talking about this a lot more over the next few years.

When you first watch this, you think it’s some guy being videoed by people laughing at him for not dancing very well. Then another guy joins in and it’s two guys who are clearly drunk and probably on something. Then the third guy gets involved… and within a minute you start to laugh…

By the end I am asking myself the same question as the girl whose voice you hear asking “How did he do that?”. He understands his audience and gave them what they wanted right there and then, that’s all.

(via Seth whose blog should be in your RSS reader if it isn’t already).