Product, Product, Product

Working this past week with Jason Adams has given me a brand-new ap­pre­ci­a­tion for the cat­e­gory of ideas that we en­gi­neers call “product.”

For a long time, I’ve dis­cussed the dif­fi­cult-to-de­fine word “Quality” and it’s im­por­tance to the suc­cess of soft­ware pro­jects. To me, cap­i­tal “Q” Quality meant that a piece of soft­ware was fast, ex­ten­si­ble, and re­li­able. It was a check­list and a se­ries of met­rics that could be tracked and op­ti­mized through it­er­a­tion. I had, and ar­guably still have, an en­gi­neer’s de­f­i­n­i­tion of “Quality”.

But the ver­sion of Quality that can be de­fined with num­bers is not com­plete. A com­plete de­f­i­n­i­tion of Quality in­cludes some­thing that I cur­rently don’t know how to de­fine. Peo­ple like Jason Adams and Eduardo Villuendas can.

At the end of Radical Speed Month, my goal is to be able to de­scribe it, at least shal­lowly. Right now, I feel that I un­der­stand some of the base com­po­nents, but not well enough to bring them to­gether into a co­he­sive whole.

Harper Desktop

Harper Desktop is com­ing along amaz­ingly! My goal for this week was to get the full pipeline work­ing. That means:

1. Reading text from ar­bi­trary text ar­eas on ma­cOS.
2. Locating er­rors within it us­ing harper-core.
3. Rendering high­lights over those er­rors.
4. Showing a sug­ges­tion popup to users so they can re­view po­ten­tial cor­rec­tions.
5. Applying the cor­rec­tions.

This is a pipeline that we’ve suc­cess­fully repli­cated in sev­eral other apps, but this is the first time we’ve tried to do it sys­tem-wide. I’m pleased to say: It’s all work­ing!

The only thing miss­ing from a “complete” Harper Desktop ex­pe­ri­ence is con­fig­u­ra­tion. Users need to be able to ma­nip­u­late their dic­tio­nary, up­date their rule pref­er­ences, and whitelist (or black­list) apps from be­ing ma­nip­u­lated by Harper.

Fortunately, Jason Adams has been hard at work re­fin­ing what Harper’s set­tings menus look like. Ac­tu­ally, to say that is all he has been do­ing would be disin­gen­u­ous. In re­al­ity, he has been re­vamp­ing the en­tirety of Harper’s de­sign and look.

The hope is that much, if not all, of Jason’s work here will be ported back to the Chrome Extension.

The Magic of Meetups

I have never felt the magic of mee­tups more than dur­ing the short sin­gle-day mee­tups that Jason and I have been do­ing over the past few days. I feel more pro­duc­tive, mo­ti­vated, and op­ti­mistic than ever, and I think that is in no small part thanks to mee­tups. I get the hype now.