Nick Bradbury

Don't Trade Your Life for Tech

Those of us in the technology sector see it all the time: co-workers who put in incredible hours coding away as though they have nothing else in their lives.  And quite often, they don't.

I used to be one of those people.

When I was working on HomeSite over a decade ago, I rarely left my desk.  If I wasn't coding, I was answering email or doing some other work-related task.  I hardly slept, ate far too much junk food, and traded my health for what I thought was a successful career as a software developer.

If that sounds familiar to you, do yourself a favor and stop living this way.  It's not worth it.  Eventually you'll look back and wish you would've spent more time getting out and meeting people (non-geeky people, that is), and you'll look down at your pizza-filled belly and wonder how you let yourself get so unhealthy.

A friend of mine plays for the NFL, and despite the obvious differences in our chosen careers, we've also noticed some similarities.  When they're in their 20's, football players often have their youth eaten up by their jobs, and they reach their mid-30's with little to show for their lives outside of career-related highs and lows.  By the time they hit 40, their sagging health reflects the stress and damage they did to themselves when they were younger.  Sounds an awful lot like the world of software development, doesn't it?

These days, I have a great wife, two wonderful kids, and a nice social life that doesn't involve anything remotely tech-related.  Sure, I still have late-night coding frenzies every now and then, but for the most part I stop work at a decent hour and de-geek myself by spending time with my friends and family.

And you know what?  I write better code because of it, and I make better decisions at work because of it.  Not submerging myself in tech all the time actually makes me more productive when I'm sitting in front of the keyboard.  Wish I would've know that when I was in my 20's!

Did I Sell Out (Part II)?

When I asked "Did I Sell Out?" yesterday, I was more than a little worried about the response I'd get.  So I'm both flattered and relieved to see so many positive comments.  My thanks to everyone who took the time to reply.

Of course, there were some negative reactions, mostly about TopStyle.  I want to make it clear that TopStyle's stagnation was just as much my fault as it was NewsGator's.  It would be easy to blame everything on the "big company that swallowed me up," but the truth is that NewsGator has been exceptionally good to me.  As Ian Landsman points out, being acquired can be a horrible, demoralizing process - but that hasn't been the case with NewsGator.  They've been very hands-off with my work, enabling me to feel like I'm still an independent developer despite working for such a huge corporation (that's a joke, folks - we're a fairly small company).  I won't say that the acquisition has been easy, but I can't imagine it being any easier.

Before the acquisition, I was already struggling to find time to update TopStyle due to all the attention that FeedDemon required, and that situation worsened after the acquisition, in part due to the extra work required to enable FeedDemon to support NewsGator's synchronization platform (and synchronization was the key reason I sought the acquisition).  Really, the bottom line here is that I bit off more than I could chew (both pre- and post- acquisition), and TopStyle suffered as a result.

As many of you know, we've been searching for a developer to take over TopStyle for quite some time, and that proved more difficult than we anticipated.  Apparently it's not easy finding someone (1) with several years of Delphi programming experience and (2) with strong UI skills and (3) who deeply understands the needs of web authors and (4) has the ability to take over such a large project by themselves :)

This search delayed the next version of TopStyle far more than we would've liked, but the good news is that we have found someone who meets all four of the above criteria.  I don't want to announce who it is just yet because he hasn't officially started, but once he's up to speed, I'll introduce him here.  In the meantime, I'll be working with him to take over TopStyle and define TopStyle 4.0's feature set - yes, there will be a TopStyle 4.0!

Did I Sell Out?

Every now and then I'll receive a comment like this one from someone claiming that I "sold out" when I was acquired by NewsGator.

On the one hand, I'm a little flattered by these comments, because they mean that someone relies on my software enough to get pissed off at me. And I try not to take them too seriously, since accusations of "selling out" happen all over the place - for example, every time a rock band changes direction, they're accused of selling out, regardless of whether that change was for artistic or purely financial reasons.

But it's hard not to be insulted, and it's especially stinging when someone suggests that I have "zero attachment" to my software. I'm personally attached to every application I've created - I sweated over each one for a long time, and feel personally responsible for every bug, missing feature, and usability problem in them. And to think that my reason for being acquired was just to make money ignores the fact that I was doing just fine financially by selling two fairly popular applications as a one-man show.

Of course, I can understand why TopStyle customers would think I sold out. After all, TopStyle has stagnated since I was acquired by NewsGator. My hope is that making TopStyle 3.5 - which includes some fairly significant new features - a free upgrade will serve in some small part as an apology for taking so long between releases.

Given that I'm a somewhat-independent developer, my reputation means everything to me, and my name would be tarnished - perhaps forever - if I really did sell out at the expense of my software and its customers. Are these accusations of my selling out limited to a few disgruntled customers, or do a lot of people believe that I sold out?

I'd honestly like to know, so please feel free to comment here.

ANN: TopStyle 3.5 Beta

I'm pleased to announce that TopStyle 3.5 - which will be a free upgrade for all 3.x customers - is now in beta. New features in v3.5 include:

• Box Spy - exposes an HTML tag's margins, padding and content box as you mouse over it in the preview
• Ability to apply the current style sheet to an external URL
• Replace in files ("Extended Replace")
• Style definitions for Firefox 2, IE7, Safari 2 and Opera 9
• Support for PNG images in the thumbnail viewer

If you'd like to give it a spin, stop by the TopStyle Beta Site for details. Of course, since this is a beta release, it comes with the usual warning that you shouldn't download it unless you're comfortable using unfinished software.

2008 SXSW Interactive Panel Picker: "Simplicity Ain't So Simple"

If you're planning to attend SXSW 2008, please consider voting for my "Simplicity Ain't So Simple" session proposal.  The proposed panel is to be a roundtable discussion between a Windows developer (myself), a Mac developer (Brent Simmons), and a Web developer (TBA) about the challenges of designing software that's simple to use.

Link Blogs are Attention Streams

I've been writing about attention for quite a while now, ever since Steve Gillmor introduced me to the concept at Gnomedex 2004. Since then I've experimented with various ways to improve RSS aggregation by examining what you're paying attention to, but I've rarely been satisfied with what I've come up with.

The basic problem with RSS aggregators is that once you subscribe to enough feeds, you've got too much information to keep up with. Sure, on a slow day you can read everything you're subscribed to, but when you're busy, you might just want to read the stuff that's important to you.

This was the impetus for the popular topics feature in FeedDemon 2.5, which shows the most talked about items in your subscribed feeds. I know I rely on this "personal memetracker" feature a lot - when I'm nose down in the code and don't have time to read my feeds, I just mark everything as read and then view FeedDemon's popular topics to see the most commonly linked articles. Overall I've found this more effective than the various online memetrackers because it's personalized with only the feeds that I'm subscribed to.

Lately I've noticed that my popular topics have been bringing me a ton of articles that are of interest to me, articles I might've missed if FeedDemon didn't have this feature. And I've also noticed that the single biggest reason I'm getting so many interesting articles is because I'm subscribed to a number of link blogs.

If you're not familiar with link blogs, they're basically collections of articles that someone finds interesting. For example, FeedDemon 2.5 added the ability to share your favorite links as an RSS feed, and I have a link blog feed of my own. FeedDemon isn't the only aggregator that offers this feature, either - NewsGator Online has had it for quite some time, and it's also available in Google Reader.

Whenever I read something interesting, I copy it to my link blog. So my link blog is like my attention stream - it contains the stuff that I'm paying attention to.

And now that I'm subscribed to several link blogs, I can see what others are paying attention to. When an article appears in more than one of link blogs that I'm subscribed to, it shows up in FeedDemon's popular topics. This consistently brings me new articles that I never would've found by myself.

That to me is the holy grail of "attention." One of the main goals of the attention concept is to enable you to filter out the noise and just see the stuff that's important to you, and I'm finding that FeedDemon's popular topics combined with subscribing to link blogs is consistently doing just that.

I think there's a lot more that can be done here - not just in FeedDemon, but in other aggregators as well. If you use an RSS aggregator, I believe you could really benefit from seeing the things that the people you pay attention to are paying the most attention to.

One Fish, Two Fish, Dead Fish, New Fish

Yesterday we had a funeral service for a goldfish that belonged to my six-year-old daughter Hannah.  She won it at a carnival recently, and it never really adapted to the non-carny life.  When we looked in the goldfish bowl yesterday, it was clear that her now-floating fishy had seen better days.

So I took her to a nearby pond, and we had a brief but touching ceremony which ended with her plopping the ex-fish into the water.  I asked her if she wanted to wish him well wherever he's going, and she responded, "I wish he could go to Disney World and have a chance to ride all the rides."

Not a bad thought, really.  After all, who wouldn't want a quick spin through the Haunted Mansion after they pass away?

Guitar Hero II Ate My Weekend

Instead of going to Gnomedex this past weekend, I chose to stay home with my kids because today is their first day at a new school. So I had big plans for the weekend, plans that involved spending "quality time" with them making sure they were comfortable with going to a new school.

But then my son asked to play Guitar Hero II, which he received as a birthday present. And every plan went out the window. Holy crap, what an addictive game!

We'd already played all the way to the end when we got to try Freebird (on medium), so my son, my daughter and I spent the majority of the weekend re-playing our favorite songs. My daughter decided that Jane's Addiction's Stop was her favorite, while my son preferred YYZ and Pyschobilly Freakout. Me, I liked 'em all.

All I can say is, after a weekend of Guitar Hero II, I got blisters on my fingers. And I guess my kids are well prepared to enter the school of rock :)

My iTunes Widgets

Niall Kennedy has the news about Apple's new My iTunes, which enables sharing your iTunes purchases, favorites and reviews as Flash-based widgets. This is a great move by Apple, although I do wish I could customize which purchases appear in the widget (for example, I'd like to exclude music I purchased for my wife, since her tastes are quite different than mine).

You can also subscribe to an Atom feed of your recent iTunes purchases - something I've wanted for quite a while.

Hot Enough to Boil an Entire Monkey

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, I'm happy to report that as of 10am today, our air conditioning is finally working again.

But going two days and nights without air conditioning hasn't been fun, especially given that temperatures have risen above 100 degrees this week.

I have to agree with Shelley Powers - I can't imagine living without air conditioning, and I feel for those who do. I admit it: I am spoiled yuppie scum when it comes to staying cool. As critical as Internet access is to a techie like myself, I could live without connectivity longer than I could live without air conditioning.

Air conditioning is more important than Internet access - imagine that!