
Step Outside Your Own Head (includes insights into DHH, Gmail, and Quicksilver) - mattjaynes
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/04/step-outside-your-own-head.html
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bsaunder
I keep get the feeling that we (technical folks) are doing a great job of
solving _our_ problems while most of the non-technical folks get left behind.

It seems as though if we better understood the world from their perspective,
there's a lot of value yet to be create by us for the needs of non-technical
people. Generally speaking, creating value is profitable.

Good article.

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byrneseyeview
I started getting technical when I realized that life was more fun when I can
outsource the boring parts to a computer.

This isn't especially rare, either: Excel/VBA wasn't designed to be a
financial modeling language, but it's one of the standards in quantitative
finance because so many traders kept track of information in Excel, and ended
up getting really good at it. As languages proliferate and integration between
web apps gets more common, I think moving along the user-developer continuum
will get easier.

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mojuba
Folders are a good tool, but once you create more than one level in your
hierarchy, you are lost and you end up searching documents by text patterns.
Still, a single level folder system works, especially if all folders somehow
fit your screen so that you can see all at once.

Leaving only search/tagging is an extreme and I think developers will
eventually come to the idea of one-level folder system combined with optional
tagging (i.e. you tag only if a word can't be found in the document but you
feel it's relevant).

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willarson
His point about cross-polination of fields leading to innovation is also made
extensively by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his two books "Flow" and
"Creativity". I'd highly recommend them to anyone who is interested in the
process of creativity (he looks at it in a number of different fields), or who
is interested in human behavior (especially one's own).

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timg
I have never hated any feature so much as tagging...

Alternatives?

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akkartik
Why?

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jaggederest
Arg, my roommate shows up yet again on news.YC yet again :P

