This is one side of the story of twistori. I will tell the other later.

Anyone who knows me knows about my rants. I like to rant. I rant about a lot of things, and always have—but as the years have accumulated in me and changed me, so have the topics of my rants shifted and changed.

When I was a young kid, I ranted about people. I couldn't stand almost anyone around me (and not without reason). I hated that I had almost nobody to talk to, to relate to. I hated how easy it was to fool and trick people, how nobody was awake enough to notice. I hated how everyone was so tied up with themselves all the time that they didn't see.

I was still ranting about people when I got to middle and high school, but by then I was also ranting about technology. I'd found the internet and developed some friends who, at least, weren't confused by my vocabulary, and most of them I found through tech "communities." Tech (and writing) became the thing for me, so it consumed a lot of my waking thoughts and thus also featured heavily in my rants.

Rants which were still bitter and angry, because I was a bitter and angry person.

In the past few years, time and experience—and more importantly, dedication to learning from that experience, however painful—have mellowed me.

Most of my rants are now positive. Instead of being self-serving Rants to Wither You with How Smart and Cynical is Amy they are, in a way, Rants for Good: ranting on behalf of people; about responsibility, against victimhood; about shipping and thinking for one's self. I rant about bad software, and bad writing, and bad attitudes, and try to be constructive about it, to help and prod people to go and do better.

Because people can do better, and people can and *do* change. Change is something I believe in. I can't look back on the young, angry, disconnected me and still believe in a static world.

I still see lots of change needed in the world and I figure I'm stuck here for the next 60 or 70 years, so I'm in it for the long-haul.

So, to the point. Finally. Perhaps.

This has been an anti-manifesto for a new project, built around Twitter, that Thomas and I produced and shipped yesterday. It was an idea that I'd been kicking around for months; for which I'd registered the domain two months ago; and which had, in my head, grown so immense (and so awesome) that it could never be built by mere humans.

The project as I just described has also been the subject of many private rants to friends, as has the reasoning behind it.

Yesterday morning on waking I half-thought to myself, "Amy, you're a hypocrite." So I accosted Thomas in his bath and demanded some technical knowledge.

Six hours later, we both tweeted about Twistori.

Will it change the world? No, probably not, for any significant value of "world."

Do I have hope that it will help us further our Rants for Good agenda? Yes, indeed.

Was it also a lot of fun? You bet your sweet ass.

I—like so many others in the Rails-o-sphere—am getting interested in git (a new-fangled source control system).

I'm a late adopter in this case, at least by some people's standards. Because "some people," in the Rails community, means the guys who went and created the git repository service github. So on the one hand, Chris, Tom and PJ built a service, and on the other, I'm just starting to read the man pages... I'm pretty behind.

Since it's totally unlike what I'm used to, I suspect I'll be writing about it here a bit in the future. I don't know enough to say anything now except this:

If svn is your sometimes catankerous but serviceable steed, git is like a chimera crossed with a unicorn with handy built-in saddle bags plus a sword.

In this case, sword stands for "really awesome offline and collaborative performance, YOU KNOW I'M POINTING AT YOU SVN."

Ahem.

So, there has to be value in this post somewhere. Ahhh, here we are!

Here's what I'm reading to get up to speed:

• official git site, svn -> git crash course being particularly useful
• Dr. Nic's writings especially this one on teams (which prompted this article)
• Rein's blog with lots of git goodness, especially his presentation
• New Bamboo with How to use git with capistrano
• Everyday git with 20 Commands Or So

Hope you find it useful!

And I would be appreciative of any super ninja git tips or tricks you might know (especially for those coming from years of torture and indoctrination by svn).

The below article should appear in the July issue of the UK internet mag, .net (unrelated to the Microsoft framework, ewww). Since I know few of you will have access to the issue, I thought I'd post it here, too. But in case you are so geographically inclined, it never hurts to support a decent publication!

At my recent usability workshop, I asked attendees the following question: "How many of you religiously keep your project management software up to date? Adding tasks when you learn about them, and checking them off when done?"

Out of nearly 40 people, there were no raised hands. None!

How about you? Would you have raised your hand? Do you keep up with your electronic to-do lists? How about your email?

Twenty-five years ago, an email client was simply a collection of directories, which showed lists of messages by sender, subject, and date. You could browse, read, respond, file or delete messages—all through a command-line interface. The fancier versions let you view your message in a "pane" below the message list.

Sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it? That's because email clients haven't evolved much in the past quarter century. Sure, they've gotten prettier—and added more columns to their list view. But essentially they approach the business of email with the same interaction model as the command-line clients of yore.

And email is now a hassle for almost everyone. Just like those project management apps, email clients don't take into account the real behavior of real humans.

Email is often the main communication medium in business, carrying critical conversation, information, tasks, and files. This is no great revelation, I know, since everyone uses email.

But then why isn't the software better? Why don't they give you a way to select a portion of a message and mark it as "the main point" for later? Or to extract a to-do item from any sentence? To browse all files sent by a certain person or a group of people? Or simply get an overview of who is talking about what from a person-centric view? Or show you only emails from "important people" which have gone unanswered?

How many hours do people waste trying to make their email clients work for them?

It isn't always this way. We've all used software that is more than just effective, but positively delightful because it almost intuits what we need it for. That effect isn't magic, but the result of hard work and a good understanding of people.

I think all most designers and developers need is a solid grounding in ethnography plus a willingness to question the status quo. By understanding the way actual people really use email (or whatever), what context is has in their lives, designers & developers can approach human problems with human solutions. The technology is already here and has been here. The next trailblazers will be those who focus on the people problems created by software and what software can do to solve them.

Luckily for us, human nature has been a human interest for thousands of years.

I have a lot more to say on this topic and several articles brewing. But it was really an interesting challenge to compose a piece within the limits of a deadline and word limit. I haven't written for a magazine for years and I really had a blast, so thanks, Oliver, for the opportunity!

Talk to me

How do you use email?

What's your favorite email client?

If you had a magic wand of Software Improvement, what would you make it do differently?

Participating in ColorWars has been a really cool experience. It's taught me a lot.

But the #1 thing I would say is it's taught me to JUST SHIP, YOU FUCKING IDIOT.

(And by YOU FUCKING IDIOT, I mean me, not you. You are not a fucking idiot. You are my reader! And clearly you are therefore more charming, beautiful, thoughtful and productive than other people.)

Ahem.

So. We all know we should ship early, ship often. That small, achievable goals are the best. That having something useful and publishable within a day or two or three trumps planning everything perfectly to the nth degree. That we should make proverbial hay while the proverbial sun is proverbially shining (and before the proverbial atmosphere gains a proverbial 8 degrees from proverbial heat constipation).

We know it.

So why am I writing about something we all—even me, the fucking idiot—already know?

Of course, telling people what they know (and believe) already is a time-honored tradition. It's a huge industry in the western world. Telling people what they already know—and thus making them feel good about their own prescience, confirming their belief that they are correct, and also (maybe) encouraging them to do what they should be doing—is sometimes referred to as "self-help." Sometimes these tomes, videos, advice, etc., are filed under "Business," but really the idea is the same.

But here's the thing.

Nodding along to Getting Real isn't going to ship your product.

Neither is reading this rant.

Heck, I'd even argue that the small token amount of satisfaction we get from feeling correct and justified and thinking about doing what we already know we should do is actually antithetical to putting out the actual effort. It's like emotional satisficing—it feels good enough, but with no effort, so we're not moved powerfully enough by our remaining creative frustration to actually, well, move.

So the only thing that really teaches you to fucking ship is, well, fucking shipping.

The only thing that gets you to consistently fucking ship is, well, fucking shipping. (You probably saw that one coming.)

It's like exercise: you know it's good for you. People tell you how good you'll feel for it, and maybe you even remember vaguely that you thought it felt good after a long hot yoga session (my poison of choice). But rationales and even memories can't ever be as real to us flaky humans as actually going out and doing it and feeling it.

So you go exercise. You feel wiped out, but like superman afterwards. You think to yourself, "Ah, right, this is what that feels like."

AND THAT is the motivation to go do it again. Not, weeks later, reminding yourself, "I recall, I believe, that it felt pretty good after." Not beating yourself up, saying "I should go contort myself in 100 degree heat." And certainly not rationalizing, "If I want to <insert specific goal here>, I must go do yoga again."

The fulfillment in shipping is shipping.

The fulfillment in exercising is the actual exercise itself, the immediate effect on your body.

Weighting ourselves down with "goals" more distant, more abstract, or even more concrete detracts from the sheer nowness of the real reward and moves us ever further from action.

And it seems like the more we talk about doing it, the more we think about it, the more we know our approach is right and the more we pat ourselves on the back for it, the less likely we are to ever do the thing.