I was thinking about great works of art attributed to a single person or small group. Things like The David, The 5th Symphony, or Pride and Prejudice. They are each on the short list of the greatest sculpture, classical composition, and novel.

What would the short list for software be? I put together a list, but of course, it is personal to my experience and biases. Here is my top 5 in roughly chronological order.

• C and UNIX
• The ARM instruction set
• TeX
• VisiCalc
• Web browser/server

I edited down this list from of about twenty. Notable removals were the collected works of NASA and Pong.

There are some similarities I see that bind them and maybe help to define great works.

1. They are in wide use over a long period of time. Visicalc is possibly a stretch here, but its influence and core functionality are in 123, Excel, Google Sheets, etc.
2. They were made to make something else. C was made to make UNIX to make microcomputers. Sophie Wilson used ARM to make microprocessors and Acorn machines. TeX was made to make The Art of Computer Programming [amazon affiliate link]. Dan Bricklin made Visicalc as an MBA student to analyze business cases.
3. They are mostly attributed to a single person or pair. That was true of many of the entries on my list, especially programming languages.
4. They define languages. Again Visicalc is a stretch, but I do think of Excel as a Programming Language and Microsoft is releasing Power Fx, a language based on spreadsheets.

This combination is also what drove Alan Kay and his team to develop Smalltalk, Object-Oriented programming, GUIs, etc to try to make Dynabooks, so that presumably they could write content in that new medium.

That work led directly to Macs and is even more directly used in NeXT/Objective-C, which is what Tim Berners-Lee used to make the first browser. And if you use it to edit a Google Sheet on an iPad, it’s on a UNIX variant running on ARM, probably using algorithms documented in TAoCP.

If you are trying to learn programming by implementing something new, you are conflating two skills and making it hard to do either of them well.

Yesterday, when I wrote about deliberate practice, I listed the two things you need to do to make practice effective

1. Break it down so that you are practicing one thing and trying to make it automatic
2. Set it up so that you have instant feedback on whether you are doing it right

As you work on your program, sometimes you are thinking about the syntax of the language and sometimes you are thinking about where to go next. It’s better if you can stay in one mode for a long period of time until that skill becomes automatic.

And, since there’s no set goal, it’s hard to know if you accomplished it. You have no objective feedback.

I remembered that in a recent Under the Radar episode, Marco Arment and David Smith talked about cloning apps as a learning exercise.

By cloning, we can concentrate on just coding without having to come up with the content too. Even this can be broken down further. Structure your practice sessions to concentrate on one aspect at a time. For example, just the UI.

You can think of the target app as an executable spec, which is easy to compare your work to. If you are learning UI programming you can screenshot both screens and flip back and forth between them to see how close you can match it. This establishes instant feedback.

I recently tried this exercise for the Breathe app on the Apple Watch, only working on the animation and wrote up a SwiftUI animation tutorial on App-o-Mat.

You have probably heard that 10,000 hours of practice leads to expertise, a notion popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. The details are more complex than this and are spelled out by the researcher behind this statement, Anders Ericsson, in Peak [amazon affiliate link]. If you want a good breakdown of it, Badass [amazon affiliate link] by Kathy Sierra is much a better distillation and practical guide to practice than Gladwell. (I gave a talk about Badass for iOS developers a few years ago—there’s a synopsis of the book there)

The main thing to know is that the nature of the practice matters. Ericsson calls it deliberate practice. I think if you’ve taken music lessons, you have probably been exposed to deliberate practice.

Skills are broken down and practiced individually until they become automatic and expert-level in isolation. Bigger skills are built up from automatic ones and you constantly repractice those skills to keep them automatic.

In athletics, deliberate practice is also the norm.

But, what about knowledge work? It’s certainly not the norm to talk about deliberate practice in knowledge work. You don’t see systematic practice very often.

One reason why is that a key element of deliberate practice is instantaneous feedback. If I throw a pitch, I can get the speed right away. I know how it felt. I know where it ended up in the strike zone. Modern technology can give me all kinds of data on it. When I play a guitar chord, I instantly know if I did it right (or at least, my teacher does).

That’s not easy to do for knowledge work.

I do think that, in programming, there’s a big opportunity to introduce a regimen of deliberate practice. There are tons of tutorials on individual tech blogs and Dev that show a market for them. We just need to remember what we need to train.

If you type in code that you read from a blog, you are practicing transcribing, not programming. Since programming is about disambiguation, that’s the skill to practice. Take a vague description of some goal and figure out how to program it. in my Swift Book Companion, that’s all I offer. There is no code to copy—only vague descriptions of code to write.

In Cal Newport’s Deep Thoughts podcast (see Ep. 32), practice is a common topic. He offers these two practice exercises for knowledge workers in general.

1. Practice working uninterrupted on hard problems for at least 30 minutes and build that up to 1-2 hours. The practice is on not getting distracted and not stopping, not the actual work. You can easily get feedback on that part.
2. Practice reading hard material uninterrupted. Again, the practice is on the focus.

A similar thing I do everyday for practice is morning pages. I talked about this in the first episode of my podcast. I am practicing “writing on demand”.

The two things to remember if you are designing practice for yourself.

1. Break it down so that you are practicing one thing and trying to make it automatic
2. Set it up so that you have instant feedback on whether you are doing it right

Once it’s automatic, it can be part of the next thing you practice.

When planning a project, one thing I do is to imagine failure and work backwards. I am trying to figure out a theoretical root cause that I can mitigate. That’s a common project management technique.

But, if the seeming root cause is external, I keep going.

Instead of: The project slipped because …

Team X didn’t deliver part Y by MM-DD

which is hard to control, I assume responsibility for the failure:

We didn’t start the code using part Y until MM-DD

Then, these follow:

• We didn’t build a mock of part Y so we could start our work before it was delivered
• We didn’t ask for part Y to be put in staging before it was finished
• We didn’t publish a full timeline showing the dependency on part Y to team X

And so on. These are all things I can do something about.

Creators of visualizations can learn a lot from sonifications, especially the focus on action. When your alarm goes off, you know to get up (or at least snooze). When I look at a lot of application dashboards, I often don’t know what to do. It looks bad, so now what?

One way we solved it at my old job was to pre-define levels on visualizations meant to show system health. We started with numbered levels, but then for simplicity we settled on green, yellow, and red. When you are driving, you know exactly what to do when the light is green or red. Even yellow only has a few options.

To help us think about these levels more, we labeled them Excellent, Acceptable, and Unacceptable.

Like red and green traffic lights, it’s clear what to do when your levels are Excellent or Unacceptable. Yellow/Acceptable levels are harder, but since our company mantra was “Don’t do Nothing” (in the face of a problem) and our goal was Excellence, we had to do something.

For us this meant (something like):

• Yellow: Investigate and put a ticket on the backlog with enough priority to get addressed soon. It will be released as appropriate (no rush).
• Red: Make a ticket and assign it now. It might be released immediately.

In practice, other things mattered.

• How red or how yellow?
• Is this a blip or sustained issue?
• Is this caused by us or related to the environment (e.g. is US-East down?)
• Will it go away on its own?

But even under these ambiguities, the first few steps were pretty clear, and the options for what to do next were small. And since the status got posted to our slack every morning (and reported to grand-bosses every month), we were very unlikely to let it drop.

A couple of days ago I wrote about sonifications, the sound equivalent to visualizations. Even though they haven’t permeated business culture in the same way visualizations have, they are around us used in a folk way—meaning, designers use sound in their interfaces, but it isn’t systematic or directly supported in tools.

Even without that discipline, sonifications generally do a much better job of making themselves actionable. This is because that’s the main reason you use sound. You need to interrupt the user and get them to do something now. In my last essay on this topic, I gave a list of examples you encounter while driving: car honks, sirens, lane-drift warnings, etc—they all need immediate attention.

If we look at visualizations we encounter while driving, actionability is a core-driver. The gas light, tire-pressure warning, traffic lights all translate to simple actions. Even the check engine light wants you take an action (which is true even if you ignore it).

A lot of visualizations I see elsewhere aren’t that clear. It’s easy to make charts in most software that has data, and the easiest thing to do is to pick a chart template and populate it. It practically makes itself.

The problem is that many visualizations are communicating the list of data and not the action. Instead of random lines going up and down periodically, I want a green or red light*. And just like in my hometown of Queens, if I don’t pay attention to the light, a honk.

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* Augmented for color-blindness and accessibility, of course

I cringe when I hear a GUI described as “ugly”. It’s not that I don’t see it too, but the feedback isn’t helpful. I can’t set the ugliness lower.

If something looks “ugly” to you, use that to guide your attention and analysis. What we often perceive as ugly is rooted in rules of perception and communication.

To give you an idea, considering just the visual look of a design (not its interactions), try to judge

• How easy is it to see the entire UI as various levels: as a whole, as a collection of a few parts, at a detail level.
• How quickly can you scan and visually acquire a component.
• How correct is your intuition on how a component would work based on what it looks like
• How easy it is to tell things apart.
• How easy is it to group things

Then, try to express you critique as: this “attribute of the design” doesn’t accomplish “this specific communication goal”

Here are some examples of what I mean:

• The button icons aren’t easy to tell apart so they are hard to find right away.
• The buttons need more padding because the text is too close to the border, making it harder to read.
• I can’t tell the difference between the various header levels
• The colors of the icons don’t feel like they come from a unified palette. Let’s try to match their saturation and brightness levels.
• It isn’t clear if this visualization means that the state of the system is good or bad — it needs more context
• There isn’t enough contrast between the most important parts and rest of the UI
• There isn’t enough whitespace helping to form a hierarchy of information
• The spacing between paragraphs isn’t proportionate to the font and line height. It makes it harder to read the text.

Look at the visual variables: colors, values (lightness/darkness), sizes, positions, and shapes. Consider whitespace. Look at the relationships between the components.

Consider if there is too much or too little contrast. Is there harmony between things that are supposed to be the same? Do the most important things draw the eye? Can you scan?

These are just the surface level. Bad UIs are usually bad at a level deeper than that. But if it looks “ugly”, expressing that as contrast/harmony of visual variables is more actionable.