We all use search forms every day. There’s usually an advanced search form of some sort that allows you to enter a boolean expression. You know Boolean expressions as “This OR That” – an inclusive search that increases results – or “This AND That” – an exclusive search that limits results.
When you need to filter your results, a powerful method is to make a list of companies, individuals, skills – whatever you are using to get more precise answers – and create a Boolean expression to get a better initial set of results from a search engine. Yet when someone gives you a list of 10, 20, 50, or 100 items the idea of making a delimited list of “Item1” OR “Item2” OR “Item3” is more difficult than you’d like to be.
Never fear: Google Sheets to the rescue! This is a perfect example of a task for a Lazy Programmerā¢ to solve, as it’s much easier to have a spreadsheet count values and rearrange text for you than it is for you to do the work by hand. Let’s take a look.
As an example, I created a utility spreadsheetĀ that takes a range of values, counts those values, and outputs a result string that delivers a boolean expression to paste into your favorite advanced search page. Whether you’d like to create a list of criteria to find your next job, search Twitter more effectively, or simply create a customized search for Google, this expression builder can help.
This spreadsheet has two formulas that do the work for you. The first one joins a range of values into a concatenated string (turns list of Orange and Apple into ‘Orange’ OR ‘Apple’ OR ”):
There are five functions in this expression:
JOINĀ combines an expression of values into a string connecting each item with the string ‘ OR ‘;
INDIRECTĀ tells the spreadsheet to wait until the range expression in the formula from A2 to the last unblank value in column A is completed and we know the number of the last row to select;
TEXTĀ converts a complex expression into a value – in this case a calculation of the number of rows in the column of this spreadsheet minus the number of blank rows in the column of this spreadsheet – so that INDIRECT will take result of this expression and substitute “5”, the last row above that has a value. This results in a range from A2:A5 to feed back to JOIN;
ROWSĀ counts the number of rows in a range – the standard number in a Google Spreadsheet is 1000 – and returns an integer to feed back to the expression inside of TEXT;
COUNTBLANKĀ returns the number of blank rows in a range, so that our calculation of rows minus the number of blank rows leaves us with the number of rows containing values (4) or the total number of rows including the header (5).
Now that we have our formula, it creates the string:
'Orange' OR 'Apple' OR 'Banana' OR 'Grapefruit' OR ''
From the rows of Orange, Apple, Banana, Grapefruit above. And there is one problem here: that we need to remove the trailing “OR ”” that resulted from the expression.
Our second formula, REGEXREPLACE, removes the last “OR ”” from the string. RegEx is sort of like Black Magic, so you will probably need to use a helper site like Rubular. This string looks for a specific string right before the end of the line (represented by $)
OR ''
and replaces it with nothing.
This leaves you with the strong you want to paste into a search form:
'Orange' OR 'Apple' OR 'Banana' OR 'Grapefruit'
You’re all set! Now, use this utility with any number of rows in your list of items to create a Boolean expression made for you automagically.
Most of us, when asked “how do you create job security”, default to explaining a way of interacting with others that only we can do. If you have unique skills, of course you would want to create a solution where you can solve the problem. It’s romantic to think that you – the cowboy or cowgirl – can race into the important situation and solve the problem where no one else can, or do it faster than anyone else.
Described differently, “I am the only one who can get it done on time and under budget” also looks a lot like “I am a bottleneck”, or “my company is now vulnerable to the ‘Bus Problem’, where if I get hit by a bus my company will have absolutely no way to do the things I know how to do. These statements now look a bit different.
A Corollary To What You Do Today
But what if creating personal job security looked completely different and had more to do with creating systems everywhere you go that helpĀ everyone else in the company raise their game?Ā In this version of the bus problem, maybe the solution is to make bus schedules (so that all buses run on time), and develop contingency plans (like snow routes) for what happens when there is inclement weather or other unexpected behavior like traffic?
The best way to solve the problem of institutional knowledge sharing is to share that knowledge. Duh. But it means more than simply barfing out that information in whatever messaging suite happens to be the flavor of the month. True knowledge sharing means that you can isolate the facts and share the strategy implications of changing course, that you can write a procedure anyone in your company can follow, and that if you are not in the office the process works without you there.
What does this look like in practice?
Let’s say for the moment that you are responsible for updating the team on a new feature in your product. As a consumer of that information inside of the company, each person in each role needs something different. Sales might need to know if the price of that product changes or if specific customers had been waiting for it. Marketing might need to know if there are marketable features that could be shared with a wide audience. Engineers might want to know if there are new things to test and build. And Customer Support needs to know the typical things customers will ask and how to solve their problems.
Compare your original goal of becoming the only one who can solve a critical problem with the goal of sharing information with everyone in the company at the right time to ensure a productive product release. If you don’t create systems that ensure people on your team know what they need to know before you can tell it to them, you will fail. Your participation in the process should be the reinforcement of the knowledge, rather than the only way they know that information.
Start today by writing down an important thing that no one knows into instructions that person can follow, and then take the day off. Train a trusted resource, take the day off, and see how things went. If you get to “One in a Row” on this problem, you’re ready to tackle the next critical business process you own until the whole business can run without you telling them which buses run next on the schedule.
Photos used to be easy to manage in the pre-digital era. You bought some film, took some shots that you hoped would turn out well, and then printed all of the pictures. Or if you were more picky you decided to print only the good ones. It was expensive to print, time-consuming, and difficult to store.
Fast forward to 2017 and things are very different (duh.) Storage is almost free, it’s trivial to store tens of thousands of photos so that you can print them on demand, and relatively easy to store if you have an access device like a phone or a computer. Scrolling through a photo album looks much different than it used to, but also opens up many more opportunities for creativity and organization than ever.
What Happens if You Have A Lot Of Photos?
If you have a lot of photos (let’s call this 10,000+) that you want to load and maintain accessibility using a cloud service of your choice, managing these photos can be challenging. Here’s the Job To Be Done: determine how to synchronize 10+ years of photos made pre-cloud services so that they update with all of the handy-dandy cloud services without breaking the bank and while maintaining the discoverability we like from cloud services.
I’m choosing to optimize in this example for a consumer or pro-sumer set up where the main goal is viewing the image or movie on lots of different devices. I’m also viewing this from an Apple-biased point of view, so a spoiler here is that the recommendation will not end with the option to use Google Photos and Just Forget About it. (Though this is a perfectly fine answer).
What and How Do You Back Up?
There are a few obvious options when considering a backup procedure for your photos (or for your whole computer).
Here they are, in order of “solves everything” to “solves a point solution like photos”:
back up the whole computer to a shared location (Carbonite, Crashplan, or similar)
create a local backup NAS using RAID and AWS
continue with lame local back up to a single hard drive
upload photos to a cloud service like Google Photos or iCloud
Option 1: Whole Computer Backup
Backing up the whole computer to a shared location in some cloud somewhere seems like a great option if you have an unlimited symmetrical internet connection. For people with a fiber connection, this one would work great. For those of us with a typical cable modem connection for internet, have you thought about how long it takes to upload data?
If you haven’t thought about it, here’s a handy table from that article:
Most of us are looking at the 10Mbps link speed and somewhere between 100GB and 1000GB to upload. Once you start talking about hundreds of gigabytes or more of data this might take days (or almost a week) to complete unless you want to take the radical step of using an Amazon SnowballĀ and putting your data in deep storage.
More practical services like Carbonite or Crashplan will still take days to run a full backup.
So what’s a way that you could back up everything yet still keep a copy locally?
Option 2: Network Attached Storage
Being geeky as I am, I love the idea of purchasing new hardware to back up files on the computer seamlessly to a local storage server on the network and then seamlessly upload the files as needed to a cloud service that maximized the savings.
This is a fun idea, but it’s not cheap either. If you were going to set up a home NAS you might investigate a Synology NAS (2 or 4 or 8 bay) which will set you back a minimum of $600-800 including the right number of hard drives for the storage you need. There are other, cheaper solutions available from Western Digital but frankly I’d be worried about uploading to someone else’s cloud not named Apple, Amazon, or Google.
The goal here was not to optimize for local storage but to find a place to upload about 175GB of photos and videos that have accumulated over a decade.
Maybe there is a simple, practical solution – a local USB drive is fast, easy, and cheap (I have a 2TB Western Digital Passport, and that’s good for the Sneakernet at my place).
Option 3: Local Back Up to a Single Drive
This is the least bad option (given that I’m using it today) but it doesn’t protect against the inevitable hard drive failure that will happen at some point. Local back up also doesn’t protect against loss from theft or fire and fails to solve the basic problem of “how can I use these images more effectively instead of looking at them in a file tree once every 6 months?”
As a backup (not the only backup), I think this solution actually works quite well. The primary benefit of being able to put a 2TB drive in your pocket is that you can easily move a large number of files between computers even when you have a relatively fast wireless internet.
So we’ve got a solution for local backup, and haven’t yet landed on the right solution for cloud backup.
Option 4: Upload photos to a cloud service
There are lots of cloud services you might choose to solve this problem, though I lean toward the paid version to gain a little bit of leverage around getting the data out should one of the services go away in the future.
So which one should you choose? The free one (Google Photos), the paid one (Dropbox), or the more expensive and integrated one (Apple iCloud)? Perhaps you like to solve your own problems and would like to buy raw storage using AWS. For this solution I’m optimizing for ease of use and a turnkey system.
Google Photos gives you instant upload and permanent storage, and a decent photo editing and management service. It is also optimized for the Android ecosystem – it works for iOS, but doesn’t show up natively within Apple Products unless you are super clever about how you set things up.
Dropbox offers plenty of storage (1TB for $99/year) but is more of a file synching service than a photo synching service. It is extremely handy for sharing large files and less easy to find that photo you were looking for (the Carousel photo app notwithstanding).
So, Apple has trapped me again into making a choice based on the discoverability of files and lock-in to the ecosystem I use most.
Getting the files to the service takes a little work
You’re not quite done. If you pick iCloud like I did there is some work you need to do first to ensure that you don’t fill up your hard drive.
Open Photos while holding down the option key – this will give you the option to create a new System Photo Library in the place of your choosing.
Make a new System Photo Library on an External Hard Drive
This gives you the ability to let OSX’s magic “Optimize space setting” expand to whatever amount it needs to without taking up space on your primary hard drive. If you don’t care or have a gigantic hard drive, have at it. But until Apple changes this setting this is the only way to separate your iCloudified photos and videos from your hard drive space.
Next, enable this new Photo Library to use iCloud
If you don’t want to create an ever-growing photo library, deselect photo > settings > general > copy items to the Photos library
Next, select photo > settings > iCloud > optimize mac storage or set to download originals if you’d like to make a backup at the same time. You’ll need to have enough iCloud storage to store your originals (but you knew that anyway).
Now, you’re ready to import photos from your external hard drive.
Use the Import option in Photos (file > import) to import the photos you’d like to add to your iCloud library.
When this is done select the Import New Items option to add these to your Photos Library.
There’s one more thing you’ll need to do – create a smart folder of “referenced” photos – before you can add these external photos to iCloud. Now, use the File > Consolidate…Ā option to add the photos to iCloud.
My happy place is an art studio where all of the items have their own section.
I love to draw. Ever since I can remember I’ve created doodles, pictures, paintings, and other kinds of art. And it generally comes naturally to me – the kind of skill that other people call “artistic” and that I call “just drawing” – until it doesn’t.
I’m not sure what this gap feels like to people who don’t draw, so I’ll try to describe it in terms most people find easy to understand: imposter syndrome. When I don’t “feel” like drawing, I come up with every excuse to avoid that practice. I stay away from art materials and all of those wonderful colors. I stop drawing because there’s no chance of messing up.
That’s really not fun. Sometimes it has lasted for years. I am not sure of the first time I had this feeling but I would guess it happened when I enrolled in a Ph.D program in History instead of renting an Art Studio and drawing for a living. Maybe not drawing was a good thing, though.
If I hadn’t taken a break from drawing I would have spent much less time with computers. I might have missed out on learning to program. I might also have not engaged with new technologies like mobile and social and local commerce.
I am drawing again.
It doesn’t take much to get started again on drawing. Just a little bit of time.
The hack that got me going again? Repetition. Small pictures. Doodling. Pretending “this drawing doesn’t matter.” Because the real benefit to creating and writing about it is a pattern itself – the self-reinforcing loop that happens when you make stuff, and look back later to see whether it’s good – and its absence is an anti-pattern.
So if you see me stop drawing, ask me to draw you something. Give me a commission. It doesn’t need to be paid, and it can be just enough to give me an idea. Making art pays off for me in many more areas of my life than the artwork I create. That process of making is a pattern that leads me to a place where I build amazing things.
A prospective customer may have only 30 to 60 seconds to understand your Unique Selling Proposition. When you’re not right there with the customer, one of the best ways to share the benefit of your product is a brief and effective “Explainer Video”.Ā You’ve seen them – they are the 2-4 minute video clips that accompany almost any product these days. Depending upon your budget, the time available, and your level of effort, it’s easy to spend lots of money building an explainer video and not end up with much in return. The goal is to create a “good-enough” explainer video for a minimum amount of money that won’t embarrass you or your company and will give you a good template for future action.
Creating an effective piece of content requires some time and effort, but it’s not that hard to start. I created an explainer video for creating explainer videos (how meta) to demonstrate the process and have eight tips to get you ready for “lights, camera, ACTION!”
Tip 1: Write a Script.
It’s easy to come up with words on the fly, and they sound even better when you took a few minutes to write them down. To get the right level of detail, think of your script either as talking points or as a word-for-word reading that you can record and re-record until you get it right. The basics that you’ll want to follow are as follows:
What will happen in the video – what’s the big idea that you’re trying to convey?Ā Usually this is a bite-sized concept that someone can understand in two to five minutes.
What you will say –Ā what idea are you trying to convey right now? Demonstrating a portion of the screen or an easy-to-use idea makes more sense if you don’t just read your script or your slide.
What you will demonstrate – show, don’t tell to get the maximum impact.You may need to show something more than once to get the viewer’s attention and to communicate what you mean. As a teacher friend of mine says, “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, Tell them, and then Tell them what you told them.” It’s a good model for planning your teaching approach.
Practice each of these until you have a relatively smooth delivery. Some explainer sections may come together in a single take, while others require a bit of editing to get right.
Tip 2: Create a Motion Graphic Intro or Exit.
Video walkthroughs always look more professional when they have a snappy introduction and exit. Perhaps this is because we are all conditioned on 15- and 30-second commercials, and it remains that the intro is a worthwhile investment of your time. You can use iMovie or ScreenFlow (as I did in the overview above) or you can use a service like GetMoovdĀ to build a 5-10 second introduction. The key here is to end up with something that looks and sounds professional – that look and feel lends credibility.
Note: if you’re not good at this part, this is an excellent item to outsource. Whether you use oDesk, 99Designs, or some other source, getting a freelancer to create an intro clip is much cheaper than hiring a designer to build the entire explainer video for you.
Tip 3: Buy a Decent Microphone.
The first thing that many people recognize about a video (paradoxically, it seems) is how it sounds. The better a piece sounds, the higher the quality bar to the listener. You may not be a professional sound engineer, and there are a few things to do and make an immediate impact on the results.
First, use a real microphone, not just your iPhone earbuds. I recommend the Blue Snowball – it’s a USB mic and works well to eliminate a lot of the typical background noise you might here (clicks, etc). I also found that investing in a $5 microphone shield made it easier for me to avoid some of the vocal “pops” I’ve heard before when I try to record.
The Snowball has a standard microphone mount so it will also fit on a stand if you’d like to go “professional”. If you don’t want to spend $50 on a microphone, you can probably get away with a $25 headset that has a noise canceling boom microphone.
The Blue Snowball is a great choice for getting started however, and also makes you feel just a little bit like a newscaster or a Rock Star while you’re laying down your lines.
Tip 4: Spend $99 on Screen Capture Software
Once your audio sounds good, you’ll also need to make some improvements on the video side. Creating videos with solid, consistent transitions and unobtrusive titles is also a great investment toward the goal of winning customer trust and time.
ScreenFlowĀ is the best screen recorder you will find for the Mac. I’ve used Camtasia, Premiere, iMovie, and Flash. This one makes it really easy to record the screen (even allowing you to record the ScreenFlow software itself or record output on an iPad or iPhone.
Adding transitions, editing sound, and fitting things together is really easy. When you’re ready to publish, ScreenFlow also connects directly to popular video hosting sites like YouTube or Wistia. In short, this is money well spent and the investment (a small one, really) is worth your time and money.
Tip 5: Take the time to Smooth the Vocals
Now that you’ve invested in a microphone and the screen recording software, make sure you invest a little time in making the audio sound better as well. You can use software like Audacity or GarageBand if you want to do some serious processing, and I’d recommend just using the tools in ScreenFlow. Simply lower the background audio, smooth the volume levels, add a small amount of vocal effect, and remove background hiss and the vocals will sound much better.
A note of caution – it sounds like a great idea to filter the vocals with a fancy filter. It never comes out sounding like you want, so just a touch of filter is probably a better idea.
Your goal is to bring the vocals out of the background and make sure that they sound consistent – not to have the listener be surprised by an overloaded vocal.
Tip 6: Add Callouts to your Video
Professional explainer videos help you to know where to look in each segment of the video. This might take the form of a low-key “lower-third” caption on the screen, an animated callout to accompany a multi-step procedure, or other styles of getting the customer’s attention.
Good callouts are:
Not necessarily a repetition of an audio track
Limited in the number of words – they are not a book – and help to bridge gaps in audio or video
Linked to the “Big Idea”
Bad callouts have these characteristics:
Take too long to read
Distract the viewer
Leave more questions than answers
Building callouts is easier said than done. One good method of determining whether you have the right level of instruction is to show the video to testers when it’s partway finished and ask them for feedback. If they ask for callouts, it’s a good sign that the script needs to be refined or that callouts are needed.
Tip 7: Create Standard Transitions
In addition to callouts, you’ll need standard transitions between sections to help the viewer know what’s happening next. These provide a visual and mental break for the viewer. You might think of using a “Lower Third” technique, e.g.
A simple treatment catches your eye. Use BoldĀ to set off parts of your text or italicĀ to emphasize a point. And try not to do too much. Transitions should show up gracefully, add meaningful value, and then disappear. If they become the focal point, you said too much with the graphic.
Tip 8: Add some background music
Last and certainly not least, the tone of the background music sets the mood for the video. Consider adding a backing track to your video at a very low volume level, in addition to whatever main music you will be adding. Whether you create a simple loop that adds a sound texture or do something more elaborate, building sound layers will make your explainer video sound more professional and interesting.
While these tips give you the fundamentals for creating a great explainer video, they are hardly the last tips out there. If you’d like to read more about the topic, check out The Greatest Explainer VideosĀ or read the book The Art of Explanation.
Are you Super? Some programmers are 10x+ times better than their peers. And this distinction applies to team productivity in general. It makes it really important for you to know the thing you do better than anyone else. Doing more of that thing will make you happier at work and in general.
What is the one thing you do better than anyone else? If other people were to talk about how you interact in the world, whatās the āsignature strengthā they would talk about when they talk about you? Continue reading →
Like you, I spend a lot of time doing the same things over and over again. In physical space this is easier to think about: when you have clutter in your home, if you attack each area systematically youāll eventually get to a clean room. Itās impossible to ignore a stack of things in your way that cover every surface. In contrast, itās really easy to ignore a stack of digital things when youāre not looking at your computer screen. So what should you do when you have a lot of unwanted emails that keep showing up in your inbox?
Iāve tried a lot of solutions to this problem, and read some great suggestions about getting your inbox down to reasonable level. Getting your inbox down to true zero might be overkill, and there are some great easy tips to make that task faster and more manageable. But the thing that helps me the most is SaneBox – itās a simple subscription service that makes my life easier. Sanebox connects to my email accounts and automatically files the emails I might not need to read immediately into SaneBulk and SaneNews folders. It also catches my important emails – those from people I talk to frequently – and puts those emails into the SaneTop folder. Sanebox makes the daily email scan easier because Iām reading (or deleting) emails of the same type.
My favorite Sanebox feature is SaneBlackhole, because it magically makes unwanted email disappear. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and blogs, and sometimes my name makes it onto an email list and Iām not sure how it got there. Instead of having to figure out how to unsubscribe, I just drag the email into SaneBlackhole and Sanebox makes sure I donāt see more emails from that sender. The best thing about Sanebox is that it doesnāt care what email program I use – it just works. So if your inbox is making you crazy, Iād recommend checking out Sanebox (yes, Iām a subscriber).
The first thing that many people recognize about a video (paradoxically, it seems) is how it sounds. The better a piece sounds, the higher the quality bar to the listener. You may not be a professional sound engineer, and there are a few things to do and make an immediate impact on the results.
Once your audio sounds good, you’ll also need to make some improvements on the video side. Creating videos with solid, consistent transitions and unobtrusive titles is also a great investment toward the goal of winning customer trust and time.
