on shameless self-promotion in a time of social networks

I can't go a single day without hearing (or overhearing) a conversation from a friend or acquaintance discussing one social network or another. I usually roll my eyes, or ignore these conversations. As an internet luddite, I try to avoid these time sucking privacy invasive services. But today I did something, something so contrary to my years of preaching that I felt it necessary to explain my motives.

Today I joined twitter, the poster-child for time wasting, self-indulgent, Web 2.0 buzzword compliance. What could possibly make such an adamant hater of social networking pull such a 180 overnight? It's really simple, shameless self-promotion.

I spent several days last week at a conference, Tulsa Tech Fest, meeting many very interesting people. I found quickly that social networks, particularly twitter, were the dominant means of communication and organization amongst the conference attendees that I was most interested in keeping up with. I heard many tales of meetups, and user groups, all of which are held in places that aren't here.

If I want an opportunity to get out of here, and do the sort of work I'd like to do, for the sort of company I'd like to be doing it for, I've got to be something more than another obscure, unknown developer. Given that I'm not currently able to live in a more developer friendly area, the best option for moving forward in my goals, is shameless self-promotion. Now, back to how this all relates to twitter.

I'm excepting my self-imposed ban on social networking, for purely self-serving reasons. I need a way to better communicate with others who are working towards the same ends that I am. Several years ago, the most prevalent tool for this sort of communication was IRC. But my brief and informal survey seems to show that a lot of conversation has moved to the vast unorganized land of twitter.

So here I am, forsaking my self imposed title as an internet luddite in exchange for the chance for some shameless self-promotion. Sometimes, I guess, we all make sacrifices in exchange for making progress towards our goals. With that in mind, I humbly apologize for my hypocrisy, and by all means follow me on twitter. (sigh)

on subtle failure

While reading through the top links on proggit, I ran into a project I'd seen a long while ago and promised myself I'd keep track of.  I didn't.  But this story isn't about me and my need for a simple bookmarking/reminder service, and the ways in which such a thing could change how I keep track of interesting things on the web.  That story will come later.  No this story is about the clutter project, the project I had accidentally lost track of.

From reading their very dark website, you'll discover that clutter is YAGUIWT(Yet Another GUI Widget Toolkit). What makes it special? It's cross platform-ish, has bindings to a ton of languages, and supposedly doesn't bring the cruft that most of the well known toolkits have grown to contain. Despite being a bit dark, and being quite a visual shift from reddit's simple blue on white look, it's a visually appealing site that has the touches of professional design. It was easy to get my bearings on the site and find information about the project and things of interest, save for one little subtle thing. Screenshots.

Again, the clutter project, is a GUI/Widget toolkit, a graphical tool to make your applications usable by the masses. A tool that claims to work across several platforms, and languages. But most importantly, it's end result is a visible GUI application. I thought at first that I was just missing the link to the screenshots. They have to be there. Maybe they're just not linked off of one of the top pages. Who would make a well designed, and informative web page about a GUI/Widget toolkit, and not put up any screenshots? So, being the resourceful individual that I am, I moved on to the omnipresent google. This search should return all the instances of the word screenshot on their site. That's bound to turn up these hidden screenshots. Except it doesn't.

Failing to put up screenshots has obviously not caused the death of the project. But it's still a failure. A subtle failure, but a failure nonetheless. They've failed at managing their user's expectations. They've failed by forcing me to go hunt for information, that should be clearly displayed on their site. Or at the very least made it known that the information wasn't provided by the site. Despite failing to provide me with information I think is pertinent, as a programmer I'm still very intrigued by their product.

The time I spent hunting for the missing screenshots (and subsequently writing this post) should have been spent reading the API docs, or downloading the source, or installing a binary package, or a sample application, or any other activity that could lead to me becoming an active user, contributor, or at the least a vocal supporter. Instead I'll add the project back to my mental (or conveniently web based, and amazingly intuitive, and hopefully soon to be released) list of things to check back on when I have time. Odds are good that like the last time, I won't.