Scott Hanselman

I was perusing the Interwebs yesterday and stumbled on a new article from Zach Holman called Don't Give Your Users Shit Work. I was a little taken aback by the swear word in the title. I clicked around Zach's site, and found his Talks area and clicked on A Documentation Talk and the second slide dropped the F-bomb. Wow, really? I said to myself, is this how to connect with someone who is trying to learn about a technology? I was surprised to find swearing to up front and center on Zach's blog.

Is swearing in technology conference presentations appropriate? When did this start being OK? Swearing has always been a part of popular culture and certainly always been a part of technology and technology people. However, in my experience swearing has been more often an after work bonding activity, if at all. It's hanging with fellow coders in a pub after a long day's debugging. It wasn't a part of presentations and certainly not welcome in the boardroom.

I propose that David Heinemeier Hanson popularized swearing unapologetically, or at least brought it out in the open at large keynotes and presentations. David says:

...I’ve used profanity to great effect is at conferences where you feel you know the audience enough to loosen your tie and want to create a mental dog ear for an idea. Of all the presentations I’ve given, I’ve generally had the most positive feedback from the ones that carried enough passion to warrant profanity and it’s been very effective in making people remember key ideas.

As with any tool, it can certainly be misused and applied to the wrong audience. But you can cut yourself with a great steak knife too. Use profanity with care and in the right context and it can be f***ing amazing.

He rightfully notes that it's a tool used with care and isn't appropriate for all instances, but from what I've seen of DHHs talks as well as in pursuing Zach's (who is a lovely chap, by the way), it appears they believe it's a good tool more often than not.

Perhaps it's generational or cultural, but more and more a lot of new under-30 web techies drop the F-bomb and swear liberally in their presentations and slides. Is this the way young web technologists do business now?

I believe that having S*** and F*** in your conference slides or titles doesn't make you cool or professional, or a better coder. It makes you look crass. When is it appropriate and why is it appropriate when other things aren't?

A few years back there was a controversy when some sexually suggestive pictures were used at a popular technology conference in a database presentation. From Martin Fowler:

The main lines of the debate are familiar. Various people, not all women, lay the charge that the images and general tone was offensive. Such material makes women feel degraded and alienated. This kind of presentation would not be tolerated at most professional events.

Defenders of the presenter point out that the slides were humorous and no offense was intended.

Clearly everyone agrees that sexism has no place in technology presentations. They agreed before this incident and many re-declared their support for sexism-free presentations after.

However, many top presenters don't agree that words that are evocative of sex and feces are in fact not appropriate. They would argue these two words have transcended their original meaning and are now well-used as punctuation or that the F-word is useful as nine different parts of speech. Both of these arguments are demonstrably true, but there's so many other words to use. Is the linguistic usefulness of the F-word too tantalizing to give up? Martin mentions DDH using his own words:

David Heinemeier Hansson is happy to proclaim himself as an R rated individual and is happy to consign "professional" to the same pit to which he cast "enterprise".

I personally don't put the word professional in the same overused category as "enterprise." Professionalism is well understood, in my opinion and usual not up for debate. Perhaps swearing is appropriate on a golf course where the Sales Suits make deals, but it's not appropriate in business meetings, earnings calls, or technology presentations.

There's hundreds of thousands of perfectly cromulent words to use that aren't the Seven Dirty Words. Or even just the two words that evoke scatology or copulation. At least use some colorful metaphors or create a new turn of phrase. Shakespeare managed, thou frothy tickle-brained popinjay. Zounds.

However, I do recognize that swearing, or specifically the choice to swear in a public forum is stylistic. I wouldn't presume to ascribe intelligence or lack thereof based solely on swearing. To DHH and Zach Holman's credit, their swearing in presentations is a conscious and calculated choice.

Zach says, via Twitter:

I love words. And those words evoke a lot of emotion. I want presentations to be emotional. I want a story to be told...it's certainly a stylistic choice I've made (and connected with). I actually am fine with offending or alienating a few. Because I believe it lets me connect deeper with others.

And this last point is where Zach and I differ. While I'm known to swear in person occasionally, I don't swear on this blog or in presentations. In fact, when I did swear in a recent "off the record" podcast, many found it out of character and off-putting.

Swearing in presentations or as a part of your public persona might be attractive to some technologists who admire your "passion" or "zeal" but there's no doubt that many others will find that kind of unnecessary coarseness turn off.

It's worth noting that DHH is Danish and it's been my experience all over the world that it's primarily Americans that are the most easily offended by the use of our own swear words. You'll often hear the F-bomb on even teenage television shows in many European countries and their movies are almost never censored for language.

Swearing in presentations isn't unique to DHH or Zach, and it's not unique to one technology or another. I'm just using them as an example. Both are reasonable and logical guys, so they both realize this is a difference in a opinion and not a personal attach. In fact, Rob Conery and are working on getting both fellows on the show to talk about Swearing, Connecting with your Audience and Professionalism sometime soon.

My question is, do swear words add as much as they subtract? Do they increase your impact while decreasing your potential audience? I believe that swearing decreases your reach and offers little benefit in return. Swearing is guaranteed to reduce the size of your potential audience.

As I've said before:

"Being generally pleasant and helpful isn't sugarcoating, it's being pleasant and helpful."

I appreciate and respect that profanity in presentations is a deliberate choice. You're cultivating a personal brand.

However, you take no chances of offending by not swearing, but you guarantee to offend someone if you do.

Better if it's a focused style, a conscious choice and all part of your master plan but it's not for me. I choose to blog, speak and teach without swearing. My message is clearer without these words.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I have long said it's important to not give bile a permalink so don't take this as a post that's picking on a specific company. Nearly every company is guilty of withholding information for no apparent reason. Sometimes it's to protect shareholder value but most often it's motivated by fear, the unknown, and fear of the unknown. This is my opinion.

I really believe there's little reason to not be extremely transparent in business today. Especially when business means releasing software or hardware on a regular cadence. Apple is great about being secretive and announcing "one more thing" that  no one expected, but that's not an easy culture to maintain.

I'm a fan of clear roadmaps. It's OK if the roadmap gets blurry long term, but at least tell me where the road is! The thing is, if you don't release a public roadmap, it'll get leaked or someone will make one up for you.

Also, if you aren't transparent with your customers you take a risk that the customer use your opaqueness against you.

• "They haven't said anything about Product X, I wonder if they themselves know what they're going to do!"
• "We've asked for Feature Y for the last 2 years and while they say it's coming, they won't say when or what's taking so long!"

The irony is that the customers who are pounding on you the most, demanding updates and status are your best customers. They care!

I'm not saying my Mom needs to know the technology roadmap or the release notes for her Universal Remote Control. I'm saying I do. Why? Because I'm an enthusiast and I've likely sold more of these remotes just by being a fan than Best Buy.

Here's a concrete example. I've got a TiVo (Digital Video Recorder) and I like it. Except when I hate it. It works great and then stops working, and this is a known issue. The TiVo Premiere I have has a dual core processor. Except it's slow because only one of the processors is enabled. It uses Flash for its UI and much of the UI is in HiDef with a 16x9 ratio. Except a bunch of the menus are NOT in HiDef. You move in an out of the menus with a jarring leap from HiDef to Standard Def and back. It's been like this for years, plural.

If you search the web or forums where TiVo enthusiasts hang out, you'll hear them complaining. Understand that these are folks that have a TiVo, sure, but they care enough to want the new features. They care enough to participate in an online forum. For every one customer who is complaining about you online, there are like 100 just like them complaining offline.

Online discontent is just the beginning. The spark of discontent can ignite into the fires of rebellion.

So why not just be straight with them? I'll pick on TiVo VP of User Experience Margret Schmidt for a moment. First, to be clear, she's exceedingly helpful on Twitter, positive, kind and has put herself out there as a public face for her company, so kudos and respect for her. I've asked her questions like "when will the second core be enabled" and "when will Flash stop hanging" and "when will all the menus be HD." Unfortunately it's clear that her hands are tied by some higher level mandate. 

@tivodesign TiVo Margret Schmidt - @shanselman No updates I can share, but updates are coming. (Sorry, I know that isn't helpful.)

It's apparently company policy not to comment on new features or their roadmap, even when those features have been speculated about online for years. Nurture the community you have by entrusting them with your plans. They'll understand if you don't know exact dates. But don't hide the truth.

I would encourage TiVo, Microsoft (I work here and pushing for transparency is part of my job) and companies like them who release products on a regular cadence as well as existing products to just be transparent.

Think of the hundreds if not thousands of forum posts with anger that would be assuaged with a TiVo Release Notes blog post that said something like:

"We know our users have been waiting for an updated that enables the second core in your dual core TiVos. We've had some _______ problem with _____. It's been a sticky issue but our engineers tell me they've got it cracked. Look for an update in the next __ months that enables this exciting feature. Thanks for your patience and most of all, for your enthusiasm! Viva Tivo!"

It's not hard. Just say something.

Related Links

Here's some examples of some technology roadmaps that are clear and organized:

• Xamarin's MonoTouch framework
• Telerik ASP.NET controls
• Intel Roadmap (they have a whole site for this!)
• Visual Studio Roadmap
• Logitech SqueezeBox Software Roadmap
• The Wikipedia article on Technology Roadmaps is excellent

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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The Backstory: I was thinking since the NuGet .NET package management site is starting to fill up that I should start looking for gems (no pun intended) in there. You know, really useful stuff that folks might otherwise not find. I'll look for mostly open source projects, ones I think are really useful. I'll look at how they built their NuGet packages, if there's anything interesting about the way the designed the out of the box experience (and anything they could do to make it better) as well as what the package itself does.  Today, it's imageresizer.

Bertrand Le Roy has long been an advocate of doing image resizing correctly on .NET and particularly on ASP.NET. Last week he posted a great post on a new library to choose from; a library that is pure .NET and works in medium trust. It's "imageresizer." What a creative name! ;)

Seriously, though, it couldn't be easier. Here's a nice sample from Bertrand's blog showing how to do resizing of a JPEG as stream of bytes using the imageresizer library directly:

var settings = new ResizeSettings {
    MaxWidth = thumbnailSize,
    MaxHeight = thumbnailSize,
    Format = "jpg"
};
settings.Add("quality", quality.ToString());
ImageBuilder.Current.Build(inStream, outStream, settings);
resized = outStream.ToArray();

There's a complete API with lots of flexibility. However, how quickly can I get from File | New Project to something cool?

Well, make a new ASP.NET (MVC or WebForms) project and put an image in a folder.

Their default NuGet package is called ImageResizer, and their ASP.NET preconfigured web.config package is "ImageResizer.WebConfig" which includes a default intercepting module to get you the instant gratification you crave. I used NuGet to install-package imageresizer.webconfig.

I've got an image of my giant head that I can, of course, visit in any browser.

And now with the intercepting HttpModule installed with imageresizer.webconfig I can add ?width=100 to the end of the query string and I get a nice resized image that fits into the constraints of "100 wide." It's a trivial example, but it's a nice touch to have them do the "figure out how tall this should be" work for me.

Of course, I'm sure you could DoS (Denial of Service) someone's system with resizing request, but for small sites their intercepting module is a quick fix and a great example. DoS problems aren't unique to CPU intensive requests and a problem solved elsewhere.

UPDATE: Please read the comment from the author below. He points out a correction and some useful stuff.

I'd like to clarify that it's not just for small sites. It's been running large social networking sites for years, and there are at least 6 companies using it with 10-20TB image collections (it powers a lot of photo album systems).  It's designed for web farms, Amazon EC2 clusters, and even..... Microsoft Azure.

"Performance-wise, it's just as fast as GDI (despite Bertrand's article, which he'll be updating soon). Default behavior is to favor quality over performance (since it's never more than a 40% difference even with the worst settings), but that IS adjustable."

He also tells me in email:

"All the cropping, flipping, rotation, and format conversion can be done from the URL syntax also. Everything you can do from the Managed API you can also do from the URL."

For more sophisticated use they include a separate API dll where you can do even more like cropping, rotating, flipping, watermarking and even conversion. Bertrand has a chart that explores their speed issues, as they are slower than straight GDI and Windows Imaging Components, but as I said, they are pure managed code and work in Medium Trust which is a huge win. Their quality is also top notch.

ImageResizer also includes plugin support that you can buy. Genius, seriously, I tip my hat to these guys. The most popular and useful features are free, and crazy easy to use. If you want to do even more you buy plugins like DiskCache for huge performance wins, S3Reader or AzureReader for Amazon or Azure support, and lots of free plugins for 404 handling, DropShadows and more. So polished. Kudos to Nathanael Jones and team for a really nice use of ASP.NET, .NET, NuGet and a clever open source library with a plugin model for profit.

Related Links

• Bertrand's Blog
  • Server-side resizing with WPF: now with JPG
  • Resizing images from the server using WPF/WIC instead of GDI+
  • The fastest way to resize images from ASP.NET. And it’s (more) supported-ish.
• Nathanael's Blog
  • 20 Image Resizing Pitfalls

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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There's a lot of garbage out of there on the internet. I know, I've been writing some on this blog for almost 10 years. ;) One way to let Google and Friends know that you are a real person and are really the writer of something is to use microformats like authorship markup like rel="author" to markup your content.

When you write a blog post, make sure that the rel="author" attribute is on the page with a link back to your "About Me" page or to your Google+ profile. The easiest way is to just include a link like this:

by <a title="Scott Hanselman is on Google+" rel="author" href="http://profiles.google.com/hanselman.scott?rel=author" alt="Google+" title="Google+">Scott Hanselman</a>

But it's not proof enough that you wrote something just to link to a profile. You have to close the loop by linking back to your site from your profile, indicating that the page is about your. This will end up looking like this with a rel="me" attribute:

<a href="https://www.hanselman.com/blog/" rel="me" title="Scott Hanselman">Scott Hanselman</a>

While this isn't a perfect way to guarantee to Google that you actually authored and own some content, it's a good start. Presumably if Google trusts your Profile and your website there is an implied chain of trust. If some spammer decides to programmatically steal your entire site, or even just suck it down with RSS and reblog it, it's now possible for Google to downrank those splogs (spam blogs) or delist them, while simultaneously assigning a higher Page Rank - or Author Rank - to your site.

Alternatively you can have an "author page" or About Me page on your site within the same domain and use rel="author" to point to it. You then use rel="me" to markup links that all point to sites that represent the same person. If you are using rel="author" to point to an About Me page, that page should the include a link with rel="me" that points to your Google Profile.

If this seems confusing, you can use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to test our your pages and how they might show up if Google decides to trust you.

The most important part with the Rich Snippets Testing Tool is the Extracted Author info. Does Google successfully extract that you are an author and show those links without  errors or warnings?

At this point, you know only that Google doesn't think you suck but you have no idea if they will actually use the data. This appears to be where magic pixie dust comes in. You essentially wait a week or two and if it works, when you start Googling for your articles they will start showing up like this in search results:

Or a specific article, for example:

Note that Google shows that I'm in some Google+ circles and that there's 31 comments on a G+ post on this blog post.

Aside: This starts to seem a little unbalanced to me, as Google could have looked at my RSS feed or RSS Comments Feed and determined how many actual comments there are on that post on my site. Or, I could include microformat metadata on comments to indicate that they are comments vs. original content. I want the discussion to happen on my blog, not on Google+. Or maybe I want the conversation to happen on Disqus, or on Facebook. It's too bad that Google doesn't support a microformat like rel="comments" (I made that up) so that I might take control of the URL where comments should be left. Maybe I want Twitter or Facebook profiles to be used with rel="author." With the addition of Google+ and the "convenience" of using Google+ for rel="author" and the automatic retrieval of comment metadata, again from Google+, the open markup-based Google The Search Engine plus Google+ The Social Networks becomes a walled garden without choice, like Facebook.

Commentary on openness put aside, the usefulness of rel="author" in the context of Google users and from the perspective of the content author is obvious.

• Search results that list pages written by actual humans alongside their smiling faces will be more likely to be clicked on.
• Folks can +1 results directly from the results AND add you, the author, to their Google+ circles.

Of course, I'm not sure what I think about searching Google for the word "phony" and finding my face show up as the result. ;)

The task for you, Dear Reader, is to go forth and implement rel="author" for your blogs and content.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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A very good friend of mine - not a programmer but a very technical IT professional - sent me their resume to review today and I noticed how the top part of the resume contained a lot of applications, technologies, keywords and acronyms.

At what point do we as a subculture need to stop doing this?

It's so ironic that the most technical amongst us without jobs are asked to create a resume to be consumed by the least technical so that they might facilitate an introduction to the very technical people with jobs to give. Some larger companies *cough*Nike*cough* are rumored to use high speed scanners and OCR to hunt for keywords and assign a weight value to a resume. This just results in us padding our resumes with every TLA (three letter acronym) we've ever encountered.

And why are we still listing Word and Excel? Has anyone missed out on an opportunity or lost a job when they forgot to add Microsoft Office? At what point in an industry or a level of experience does it become compulsory to know these tools?

Aside: Ever get a resume in Microsoft Word format then press the little Paragraph Mark toolbar button that shows tabs and spaces as characters? Not to sound too judgey or anything, but if you really want to know if someone knows Word or not, explore some of the insane feats that the uninitiated can do with a few thousand ill-conceived tabs or spaces.

I am less interested in whether you know Word or Excel and more interested if you know, for example, about iCal files. Could you subscribe to an iCal feed in a calendaring app? (Any calendaring app, to be clear) Could you write a program that creates a feed like this? Do you understand structured data, the many ways to store it and the many ways to move it from place to place?

I am less interested in the fact you have "Mozilla" on your list of Apps you're an "expert" at, and more interested in your understanding of HTTP and what certain headers do, how caching works and how mime-types enable browsers to launch apps. Do you know why bookmarklets are interesting? Why Greasemonkey is useful?

Are you a user? Are you a Real User? Do you actually use the hell out of your applications, your phones, your web sites, the Web itself?

I am less interested in your experience with Basecamp and more interested in how you implemented Agile at your last job. Did you use Scrum or Scrummerfall? What worked and what didn't and more importantly, do you know why?

I blogged years ago how funny it was that folks work for five-plus years to get the privilege of putting ",PhD" at the end of their names, but computer people take a 45 minute test and tack on ",A+,MCSD,MCP,MCSE+I" without a thought.

Why don't we include projects rather than companies on our resumes? How about a little post-mortem with some details about what worked and what didn't and why? Do you have 20 years experience or do you have the same 1 year of experience twenty times?

Do you know how to make text dance? There's a big difference between the XMLs, CSVs, vCards and open text formats of the world and the PSDs and proprietary binary formats of the world. Other than Adobe products that do years to master, I am going to assume you know how to use an application. I'm assuming you've seen a mouse, get the concept behind hotkeys and you can type, although perhaps that's too much to assume.

If you're truly able to make Excel dance or you spent a summer writing a TCP driver, by all means, tell us. If you wrote your own SQL lexer, you're a special person. But instead of a list of applications you know, tell a story about your successes and failures and the applications and technologies that played starring roles in your experiences.

I like what StackOverflow Careers is doing in this space in that a listing emphasizes not just what you've done, but also what you've written and what you've read. The list of technologies only happens in the context of projects you've worked on. Here's an invite if you want to try it. This is not an ad link or an affiliate code. They have advertised on my podcast once before, but I mention them here because their resumes present a more well-rounded picture of an engineer. My profile is at http://careers.stackoverflow.com/shanselman.

Personally, I think on my next resume I'll just put this:

Scott Hanselman
Programmer.
I know apps.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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