Internet DNA Podcast
re there really any good apps for Dry January, what does the future of Tech hold and is Dan a git?
Transcription
Internet DNA. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. So unsurprisingly, today we're gonna talk about our new year's resolutions and our thoughts and properties for the year ahead. My, my main thing that is featuring right now in the new year is I'm doing dry January, which isn't take any tech based. It was, well actually the reason I decided to do this, cause it was Skype, quite a scary thought. But now I've started, it's not so bad, but I thought I'd look up before I started. I thought on the Cup some apps to help me with. They just really made me off. If someone can find or make a decent dry January app, then let me know. But it was things like
this doesn't have that drink.
Yeah, well that would be a lot better because one of them was, well, when you've drunk clots, yeah. Go ahead and document what you've done. Well, I don't remember.
Ralph had one of those and when I probably shouldn't mention this first name and he, he was like, look, I've drunk 75 units less this month than last month. But for me that's not really jot dry. January dry January is no units
for the whole. So this one was trying to remember what you have done. Yeah. Is a bit of an oxymoron in itself. At least one was right down the days that you haven't drunk. And I'm thinking, wow, I can remember those cause I haven't drunk so that's useless as well. And no one said hang out on the leaderboard with your friends on drinking as well. I'm thinking cool. That's enough to stop me drinking again. Well that haven't drunk.
Yeah. This is why talking about dry January, which is, it's basically, and not maybe in your case, but it's basically a, an alcoholics guilt management system.
If there was an app called that, maybe I would use it. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't
drink very much at all. I don't need a dry January cause sort of, I'm more pretty much dry as it as it is.
Okay. Well, I needed a dry January. And it's quite interesting because it's not that it's that difficult, it's that it was a habit and it was a crutch and it was just something I did in the evening. But the moment I change that glass of wine for a gas tonic, it makes no difference to my life whatsoever. But the thought of doing that, it was quite scary. They actually doing it isn't anyway, what I wanted from an app was something that yeah, said, well done. No, it didn't even say, well done. Sort of recorded. How much better life was for me. So possibly how much better my health was, how much better my sleep was and I wanted it to do it automatically, which I know maybe I need a watch, but I wanted it to just magically be able to know all these things without me having to go and write it down. Cause that's slightly defeats the object
exercise. Go and write it down. I want something to auto magically never ever seen about me. Well that's difficult because we need to, we need the data to play with good enough. So next year I want some apps that
a magic, what about, have you gotten any tech New Year's resolutions then you're obviously not doing dry January.
No, my, my resolution for this year is to put everything into get, so even the things that I don't think need to go into get just anything I do is go to get versioned and managed properly. So
become one big get.
Yeah, well yeah. More than I already am. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. Version. Again, I say that that was just, that was just asking. So, um, I guess because I find most of my problems are due to either myself or other people changing things on the servers. So I'm then overwrite something that somebody else has already written a cloud as we talked about last week. So they will, these problems. I have a local Dev version of all my sites that I have on my computer and so I work on those and I don't always download from the server because it just seems madness to download an entire site back onto your machine when you should have the latest version.
He hasn't touched the site in a year and a half has suddenly changed it while you're doing yeah,
exactly. All suburbs. Some plugin has altered some file somewhere. So pain. Yeah. And so it's this making sure that I have everything in get so I know what the, what the one on the service should look like, what everybody else is using. They just going to use the get repository and they're going to pull from the get repository so that it's the latest version for everybody rather than what happens currently, which is just, but to do that with everything as well. So um, files, not just web stuff, you know, other types of files that I keep on my computer and everything. Yeah. Everything. Yeah. Version everything. So there we go.
My New Year's I'm going to do more of is
Adobe XD. I on you
the sketch for PC users. Yeah. I haven't used Adobe XD much.
I had
just started and it's, it's fantastic and it is sketch really. It is is really great. As obviously I do prototyping, I do websites, I do apps and I'm really enjoying it and need to know more and start, need to start finding it as comfortable as Photoshop and illustrator and
wireframing framing basically.
Exactly why framing and prototyping. So if I was a math unit yet, I could use a, I've been drinking already this morning. It doesn't matter if I was a Mac user, I could use Invisalign vision studio, I could use sketch. Now part of me feels there's a monopoly going on and that Mac has possibly, this is only my opinion, obviously paying these companies a lot of money not to put them on PC so all designers have to move to Mac. But I haven't and although I've thought about it, I'm still on PC and I do feel we are slightly penalized, so appreciated Adobe, um, for this. And I'm going to be using it more. I'm enjoying creating a prototype, pay it for a new digital product at the moment on it. And hopefully that's going to become of more use in the future. So that's my thing that I'm,
and more time, I'm going to call it washing pro, but that might not be its name but it's just a web version. So it's available for all systems, but it's got some really nice thing where you basically you build out a process and then it will show what, what happens at this part of the journey and so forth. And then you build out everything is as uh, almost like Wichita used to play elements and then you can stick all of which types of elements together to make pages.
Oh, I haven't come across that. So his wireframe pro is it?
I think so. I'll have to check what it's actually called. Um, cause I've used a lot of them in the past and that system, what name is popping in my head at the moment? Yeah, I think so. Mock flow, actually,
yes, that could be it. Like, okay, well I might take a look at that as well, just in case, but I'm enjoying being able to use the software that I have felt excluded from for a while.
Okay. And then my other resolution is to go serverless as far as I can. So all my new sites are going to be surplus
beyond the cloud and out into space.
Uh, that's basically, instead of using a server, it's quite, it's probably talk about this in a separate episode, what is less, but you just use the compute resources rather than running a service. So remember last week we were saying you have to buy, in the old days you had to buy a big server and sometimes you only needed a little server and you had to buy the one that for the most amount of traffic that you got. And so then most of the time it was useless. So now we say, oh well you can have lots of little servers and we'll just expand as and when we need them. And then the next step from that is we don't have any servers. We literally just run any compute files. So any PHP script we just run directly off a compute. And then we only pay for specifically the amount of computing time we use.
They arrested me quicker than then having servers around the world
show scales. So it you don't have to worry about it. Secondly, you don't have to have any sis ops running a server trying to reconfigure your servers and manage of that nonsense and our patching and updating the service. That's not, you don't have to worry about that at all. Certainly on, on AWS, there's a huge big have you at the free tier is massive. So we could probably run all our sites, maybe not all, but let's say 80% of our site traffic for free because the free tier is so, so generous on AWS. Um, and I'm sure it's the same on, on Google cloud and maybe as you as well.
So serverless,
yeah, I really hate about, my job is managing servers and updates and configuring things,
but I'm still at the point of being in the cloud was you weren't doing that anyway.
Well, you still have to. So, um, when you're on the cloud in that sense, uh, you have to understand the difference between being on the cloud and being in the cloud. So AWS manage all the cloud stuff, but if you provision a server on there that's just like you had a server, so you still have to configure that server to run as you want. Now you basically what you do is you configure it once and then you save it as a machine image and then when you launch all the new ones you say use that machine image but you still have to like when there's updates you then have to update that machine image and so that they will update when they update it is, it's still a lot of sis ops, you can't get away from it with servers. So, um,
yeah. So there's like to, I think next week we need to get away from the servers and cloud all together going down. It seems to be in your lab.
We're still my love, but it's a lot like my work, so yeah. But yeah, we should get away from it. We should get away from that.
But what's your proxy for 2019 where is the world going in three minutes.
Multichannel, I think is this year thing to abstract a way. What we think of as, I guess at the moment you, you build a content management system and you say, and here is the website and they're kind of linked together, but I think what we'll slowly start to happen this year is people will start, have it using what's known as a headless CMS. So it's just a content management system. And then if you want your social great to show up on your social or you wanted to sit in an APP or you want to syndicate the content or as in how the content is delivered is then separated completely from the content management system. So you'll build a separate little web app to pull the data, the content in, or you push it out to your website or it will run your newsletter. So all the contents managed in one place.
And this is a bit like not sticking to social media across, oh, we'll get with digital platforms. Yeah, exactly. That is that. Okay. That's interesting.
So I, the market lead, uh, kind of at the moment I would guess would be something like butter CMS. Okay. It's pure
CNS.
Yeah. Which basically means that there's no theme part of it. The theme side of it, as you know in wordpress that's not there. It's literally just the back end and then you build whatever you want on the front end or connected to something else to deliver it, the content so then the contents properly abstracted out and then you can connect to it via an API,
hello,
your websites, your app, all your social media and possibly even pushing it to um, while you sent newsletters you could even push, it's a desktop publishing software.
Exactly that. So you want to bang it out into Adobe in design, not a problem. You set up the templates in InDesign and importance via the API, the content. So that is proper multichannel.
That is very interesting and something I expect we'll see. And him more over the years.
Yeah. Cause at the moment we manage our content in different places and that leads to issues of replication or non standardization of the way we deliver content. So I think that's the way it's going to move. Obviously I work in publishing so that's my prophecy for publishing is the transition to headless.
Yeah.
Well my, it's, I'm, this isn't so much the prophecy as a personal mission and that's, I want to put the design back into design thinking, design thinking, user experience design. All these things are designed in a fantastic, but they're becoming a very technical because of the amount of people that have to be involved in it. And the design is becoming a smaller and smaller part of it and it's all becoming about function and why frame and there's something to be said of the brilliant send workability, not just saying it from a design point of view, but design this still important and I feel its weight needs to be lifted a bit within these design methodologies. So that's what I'm going to be working too.
Well, I mean, I think probably what's happened to the web, it's all become due to things like bootstrap and all these sort of um, CSS libraries and frameworks change. The colors change the images, but the sites are all starting to look, they're very similar in the main, obviously there still some fantastic sites out there, but I find that a lot of it is very formulaic and that's because I don't want to right 12,000 coat lines of CSS or Sass or less or whatever in order to generate a decent looking site. So I'm just gonna load in some framework like bootstrap and then I'm going to alter the bits I want to alter. And that tends to lead to other sites looking quite samey.
I mean that's the smaller sites. I agree. Businesses and digital products, it's more to do with the, the research on what has been and therefore stang safe. We're moving the risk, creating something new. It's a little bit risky, but I think it's also needed.
I think from a, from a corporate point of view, that's the mitigation of risk is quite important. And also there's a certain argument that says calls would be really awkward to drive if the, if the things were in the same place all the time. So when we started building cars, break might be on the head, on the steering wheel and the clutch might be a lever on the side. And that's really awkward. So they need, there's a certain amount of standardization in functionality. And I'm, I'm a real stickler for this, which is, I mean, and then you know, this don't make me think thing, which is, if that are already known ways in which we do things, even if you've got a way that might be slightly better, if it confuses the user, because that's not what they're used to, it's still hard to push that through, especially in a corporate environment because there'll be like, that's just confusing people. It's not that it's not better. So we know in keyboards that the qwerty keyboard was designed so that, yeah, so that on old mechanical typewriters, you didn't jam keys, but it hasn't changed because everybody's used to the qwerty keyboard. And so even if you had a better keyboard, like a divorce or whatever they call them, it never gets, it never gets taken up. Not because it's not better, but because users aren't used to it. So you have to be slightly careful when you reinvent the wheel.
Yeah. I think that keyboard issue, I think it will change how, I don't know because it's a bit like changing causes driving from one side of the road to the other, which countries have done, but you can't do it slowly. You have to do it very quickly.
It would be the same that the keyboard set that you're going to have a couple of months of road accidents. This guy turns out he's driving, he turns left without crossing the road. He's done that for 20 years. Yeah, and he's just not got his brain running this morning and he's going to turn out and turn left without crossing the road because we changed the side road. It's great
traffic. Less dangerous.
Yeah.
Maybe it might be people so cross that they'd go out and
I'm just trying to illustrate a point which is it's not, it's not risk free. Two, we've, we've, we've gone off on a tangent there but we always do.
But coming back to your, we need the steering rather than the same place in the gears in the same place. And therefore you're saying we need the menus in the same place and the, and the banners and the actions in the same place. Well, just take you think back to flash and how we had moving menus and hidden menus and maybe with the, in fact 2019 I think we'll see a lot more of CSS, client side
animation within our websites. And so maybe we'll see a little bit these really difficult to use menus. We're going to get back to the call. You can design the outside of the car however you like, but actually the user of the Ux has to be fairly standardized. So yeah, you want to put banners and different places and I'm actually cool with that. But, um, you want to change how people log in to some weird other login system. People are used to where things are. And I mean, I'm amazed when we do testing when there can be a big orange brought me saying press me and half the people were going, I don't know what to press because it's in a different place
is where user experience design and testing is fantastic, isn't it? Yeah. That is where it really, really works and never ever assume anything. And that's what I love about that technical and, and research
and
less visual side of,
of, of what we're putting into the websites. It's not where they expect it. They just almost can't see it.
Oh, how'd that on bt chat yesterday? It was so annoying. I had to wait seven and a half minutes. So then to come and say hi. They said Hi. I said Hi. I clicked submit my high. Yeah, but the button was in the wrong place. So I'd collect, exit the message, I guess all the thing down because the button is right under high. That button. Where is the submit button? Far Away on the right hand side of my screen cause I hadn't put any episode. Then I had to open it up and wait for another seven minutes,
so that's probably a bit of what we call dark. But they wanted me to do that. It's like the Yes please. In a big button in green and then some tiny text off to the left saying no saint you. Yeah. It's all designed to make you press yes please. Because they didn't want to speak to me. Although when I did find this, he said, they said, here's a phone number, humans. Anyway, I think we're going to have to close it for today. Are going to move on to CSS animation. All sorts of different animations are finally coming back. Have they had a very sort of
deserted void when we lost FlashForge?
I don't know if is it a decade now? So we're going to be honest. Let's be honest about flash. I mean I loved it at the time, but looking back it's going to be, I bet there's
new web designers and graphic designers and things
who don't even know the web flats. I don't know if you spend a lot of time on code pen, but wow, you can do some amazing animation now just using html and Svg, and that's what I'm really excited to talk.
That's actually, and, and, and hopefully maybe that we might 2020 new year's resolution to start doing more. Anyway, have a 2019 I will do my well at my dry January and I'll speak to you next. [inaudible] thanks. Hi everyone. All right.
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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.