Missing N7

Happy New Year! I'm drinking a cup of American tea (an inappropriate approximation of real tea made in a Mr. Coffee machine with a bag of Tazo English Breakfast and - shudder - half-and-half in lieu of milk) from my hotel corner-room overlooking sunny downtown Bellevue. 

A "view" in Bellevue is dominated by sprawling carparks in all directions, attenuated by big box shops and chain restaurants, revealing glimpses of evergreens, mountains and water peeking through the gaps between glass high-rises in the distance. It's not unpleasant, and apart from the tea situation, I can't complain.. 

The end of 2013 and beginning of the year have been rather travel heavy - jetting from London to Vancouver to my beloved Sunshine Coast, to rural Ontario near Renfrew with a short stint in Ottawa and now back on the West Coast for a week in the Seattle area. I'm off to Prague for another week following before returning home to N7 and maybe that's why I'm feeling a little homesick. 

I've written briefly about homesickness here before. It's still a pang I feel acutely whenever I see Instagram photos of Vancouver sushi, the seawall or the North Shore mountains (so, daily then).

It's also a feeling that I get thinking of my kitchen in N7, a pint of ale at the Swimmer and the Holloway Road Waitrose. Gracie and I had some long discussions over the holiday about how much we both miss the West Coast, that invariably end on the depressing note that as displaced and half Brit/Canuck as we both are, we'll always be missing something regardless what country we live in.

I'm not sure what the future holds, but right now I know I love both North London and the West Coast fervently and will pine for the other no matter where I am. Since I'm currently on the West Coast looking out at mountains and carparks, London homesickness dominates. 

Which is why I was surprised to come across this post by Susie Bubble about leaving the N7 area - I knew she was a Londoner but I didn't realize she was a neighbour. Although I discovered her blog almost 10 years ago, and attempted her bubble-skirt alterations from my North Shore apartment on Keith Rd with an actual view of Grouse mountain, right now I appreciate her nostalgic farewell to the dodgy neighbourhood around Emirates that we also call home.

You should check out Susie's link as it's much better than this post. But here's some pics from good times had in 2013, in and around our hood and up the Cally from Kings Cross to Archway.

What I'm Into: Friends' Kickstarters

Crowd-funding waxes and wanes in public mythology. The drama around Double Fine's first Kickstarter run with the $1M raised in 24 hours seems like so long ago now. I remember everyone crying from the rooftops how crowd-funding would democratize development and change the world. Then a few years later, the moaning - handfuls of high-profile failures and a myriad of slipped dates, with Double Fine like the cherry on top coming in tremendously over-budget and over-deadline just like any other AAA project.

There was a period of saturation, with everyone and their dog asking for money, and then a period of ambivalence as indie creators and punters alike realized crowd campaigns were not a universal salve or automatic ticket to funding.

I don't have any data to support this feeling (there's your first bullshit flag) but it seems to me that crowd-funding is only now reaching a period of maturity - fewer copycat or on-the-fly campaigns, more infrastructure for manufacturing and delivery - and that's pretty cool.

I've backed 2 campaigns in the last month that I want to share, both games, both by friends/acquaintances, and both fully funded within the first few days:

Dreaming Spires

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/949153718/dreaming-spires

Jeremy's Oxford-themed board game is rich in history, characters and a gorgeously scholastic aesthetic. They say "write what you know" and as Jez is an Oxford alum and consummate board game geek, Dreaming Spires most certainly comes from an authentic (and well-researched!) place. It also looks fun to play - strategically building a college up from the medieval era, attracting scholars and competing in historical Oxford events? I can get into that!

Everyone who knows me as game developer also knows "I hate games" - especially board games, which I perceive as a hindrance of social gatherings. I'm decidedly a single-player gamer. At parties I prefer to, you know, talk about shit and drink alcohol.

Jez has often assured me you can do both while playing board games, as has Gracie, but I've never quite been sold. However, Dreaming Spires appeals to me in a way other games haven't due to the solid biographical emphasis on characters. I can get attached to characters. They are the heart of storytelling for me. I may not be interested in leading a faceless army or civilization but I want to attract Oscar Wilde to my college, damn it!

Also interesting about this project is that it's being run in partnership with board game publisher Game Salute, veterans of the Kickstarter business. To me this is a fascinating signal of the maturity of the crowd-funding platform - indies working with publisher support for logistics, especially in a physical goods space like board games, just makes sense.

Night In The Woods

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1307515311/night-in-the-woods

From Alec Holowka of the venerable Indie House back home in Vancouver comes an adventure game that I actually want to play. Plus, it is beautiful.

Everyone seems to be into adventure games nostalgia. For many years I thought I was too - until I realized most people's nostalgia, adventures and fantasies didn't match mine. I crave new game worlds where I can explore aimlessly, with deep characterization to immerse myself in. I don't give a shit about puzzles or normal "game stuff" which is perhaps why I enjoyed Sworcery so profoundly while none of my gamer mates rated it. I love it when the mundane aspects of life are reflected in alternate universes. I am one of those people who relished every moment of waiting for the bus to my forklift job in the original Shenmue for Dreamcast.

So Night In The Woods looks well up my alley. In some ways it reminds me of Cheap Thrills the webcomic - except with mystery. I'm really drawn to all of the character concepts and designs, the world aesthetic, and the fact that the main character is female and that her femaleness seems to be of absolutely zero consequence. (That she looks like a punk cat and is therefore totally unsexualized may help on this front.) Also, I love things that are darkly, hopelessly sarcastic and I love to play bass and break stuff.

There is a lot for me to potentially love about Night In The Woods. But even if the game doesn't turn out precisely how I'm envisioning it, I'm happy I can do my small part to support some artists I respect to create work of their own imagining. And maybe that's the real point of crowd-funding in the end.

Have you backed anything recently?

Cert, Then and Now

 
This Friday my team hits code freeze - which, in case you don't work in software (looking at you, Mum & Dad) is kind of a big deal. It means we've only a day or two left to make any fixes or changes to our app before we branch - or "freeze" - a Release Candidate build.

This "RC0" build then gets tossed over the fence to the certification and regression testing processes required to sign it off for launch. If all goes well (pro tip: things never go well) this build will be the final 1.0 software that gets released to users when the new Xbox launches on Nov 22.

More likely, Cert and QE will find a shipstopping issue that we've somehow missed, and the team will frantically fix and spin up new RCs until one is deemed worthy of public release. (We've started an office pool on what RC number the Xbox final OS will ship with - but that's probably not something I ought to say on the Internet!)

Cert is always a weird time in the lifecycle of a product and it's one they rarely teach you about in school. Having a build in Cert means you are essentially on-call - it's limbo-like but you have to be on your toes ready to fix a shipstopper at any moment. I have fond memories of my first ever Cert on the Madden game back in 2008 - I was a lowly junior engineer so none of the really tough ship-blocking bugs came to me. So for me, life was pretty damn chill. Our entire dev team of 11 engineers piled onto one sofa together and spent 12 hour days playing Wario Ware and Boom Blox on a retail Wii kit while we waited for bugs to roll in.

Of course that was the old days - because this industry moves so quickly I'm basically a granny. Now the world has shifted from box products to digital delivery, there is usually a 1.1 release to start work on immediately. No time to take a big holiday or comp leave while the discs get manufactured. Users expect you to push them an updated version at least once a month! And that's not a bad thing.

The larger software industry's paradigm shift to Agile has also helped. Hopefully, if your team has been following Scrum methods they'll be working at a sustainable pace and won't be burned out in need of a rest come launch. They'll also have been releasing every sprint (even if just to soft launch or internal dogfooding) and have automated testing so the build quality should be high - meaning fewer issues to find in a certification pass.

In fact, it's possible to make the argument that Agile precludes the need for Cert and that it's a sad old relic of the console waterfall era. I'm not going to make that argument, as there are enough people discussing "bug sprints" and "stabilization" or "integration" sprints to indicate it's still a common enough problem at the end of a project. And certification continues to be required in one form or another on all closed platforms from game console TCRs to the Apple App Store's submission process.

So while I miss the weeks on weeks of Wario Ware, I think dev is generally changing for the better. Our Cert period beginning next week will be a interesting time, with attentions divided between 1.1 development and urgent fixes on the 1.0 RC. Cross fingers there aren't too many of the latter!

What I'm Into: Lash Extensions Lifehack

Bit of a girly post here. Let's talk eyelashes. 

I've got a complex about my natural lashes. They are short, mousy brown and generally unremarkable. It wouldn't bother me half as much if my partner, a big hairy Brummie, didn't have the same freaking genetic disorder as Elizabeth Taylor which gives him two rows of gorgeously long black lashes. What a waste.

So to make up for my lacklustre lashline, and generally being a lazy cow with no time to do makeup properly, I've been faking it since 2009. 

I started out with individual Duralash bunches:

Many women start with the temporary caterpillar strip falsies for special occasions, but those intimidated the fuck out of tomboy little me at first. Not to mention they defeat my whole purpose of extreme laziness - so inspired by this Kingdom of Style post I reached straight for the permanent glue.

I wore them on and off through my last two years of uni, although they are fussy to apply and while fine in the winter, seemed to just melt off my face in the summer months. I finally gave up the grudge when I realized they were taking so long to stick on each week it was hardly worth the time saved on mascara daily. That, and they look completely ridiculous up close:

I had my first real set of salon extensions done when I was working in Tokyo. Everybody gets everything done in Tokyo, and I was spending a lot of my free time enjoying the aircon and practising my Japanese with the gals at Nail Bee Roppongi, so it seemed the logical thing to do. Although describing what lash curve I wanted in Japanese not to mention explaining that one of the girls had glued my eye together was a bit of a challenge.

That first set worked out ok:

Unlike strips or bunches, real extensions sit 1:1 on your natural lashes, have no seams and last until the real lash grows out. I was hooked.

For the past year I've been getting mine done every 5-6 weeks at Lash Lab on Brick Lane and they fucking rule. It's £50 a pop and my eyes look like this without makeup:

A colleague of mine did some extensive market research on character designs for a fashion game last year, trying to find out what art style appealed most to girls and women and what type of aspirational images they identified with. She found that women reacted most favourably across the board to characters with thick black upper lash lines - we intuitively love that shit.

Nowadays I'll pop falsies on top of my extensions for a special do, inspired by HRH Nicki Minaj from who I learned you can wear multiple rows: 

Excessive? Perhaps. But I've got Gracie's fluttering genetic mutations to live up to.

Codess Stockholm

I was in Stockholm last week for a whirlwind 24-hours, to speak at Codess Engineering Forum for Women.

Not a hardship, since I'm kind of in love with Stockholm - it reminds me of Canada in a lot of ways. Friendly people with a casual, outdoorsy vibe. The city is surrounded by water. You don't have to put the word "ice" in front of "hockey" for people to know what you're talking about. 

But the Swedes have much better taste in fashion, interior design and sweet pastries than Canadians do. And I get to eat Kalles fish eggs on my eggs for breakfast whenever I'm in Stockholm - what is not to love?

The event was a huge success (check the video!) and I met some fascinating ladies in a room full of almost 100 female engineers. But I had a lot of trouble preparing my talk. It doesn't help that public speaking is like a small form of torture for me, and on top of that I was asked to speak about myself.

After much wringing of hands, I decided to go with a very personal talk about my career so far, and end it with 3 pieces of advice to share with women starting careers in tech.

Lesson 1: You're Probably Better Than You Think

More than just an excuse to use a quote from Winnie the Pooh, it's objectively true that women and minorities in the tech sector suffer from a myriad of cognitive biases. We are susceptible to everything from Imposter Syndrome to Stereotype Threat, and we're convinced that boys start out with a major advantage in maths and science.

That said, the Unlocking the Clubhouse research on Carnegie Mellon CS students indicates that despite these biases and feelings of inferiority, women tend to perform at the same level if not better than their male peers. It's mostly in our heads.

Lesson 2: Use Your Unique Perspective

I love the technique of gender swapping to reveal stereotypes. Anita Sarkeesian's "Tropes v. Women" video on the Woman in the Refrigerator trope calls out Wreck It Ralph's Sgt. Calhoun vowing revenge for her boyfriend's murder at the altar by a giant Cyberbug as a reversal so rare as to be comically absurd.  

Being a minority in a male-dominated industry affords women a unique outsider perspective. It's often tempting to try to be one of the boys. But by being ourselves, we can sometimes turn assumptions on their head and show things for what they really are.

It's also a common theme in the research that women have broader interests and a wider range of reasons for entering Computer Science than most men. That's not to say that women can't be hacker bros who love code for the sake of code, or that men can't be well-rounded. 

But the tendency of many women in Comp Sci NOT to be pure hacker bros presents an amazing opportunity - not just to integrate engineering with disparate fields like fashion, medicine and biochemistry, but also to explore different paths within engineering such as Product Management, Quality Engineering and User Experience.

Lesson 3: Help Your Friends

People tend to be friends with people who are similar to themselves - and they tend to want to work with people like them too. This is how Old Boys clubs are formed in the first place. It's also how I became so close with fellow female game devs Laura and Cici that we ended up together in Mexico on Laura's wedding day.

I think helping your friends is especially important when you (and likely your friends) are minorities within an industry/culture. This means making introductions, referring your friends for jobs, mentoring younger women and just generally being willing to give your time and knowledge to others.

I guess it also means standing up in front of a room of women to give a speech, even though you'd rather jump into the Baltic sea.

I strongly believe the more I can help out the people I know, the stronger the women in tech community will become and the better the industry will be for everyone, male and female alike.

Inbox Zero

Inbox Zero - it does exist!!

I'm on a Getting Things Done kick this week, attempting to organize my brain and my life so I don't feel so fucking overwhelmed and stressed out all the fucking time. Ahem.

Gracie and I spent two glorious days in the Brecon Beacons the weekend before last, without any data or mobile reception. As soon as we drove back toward civilization both our phones exploded with hundreds of new emails. Just what I wanted to deal with at a dirty Welsh truck stop with an epic wedding-guest hangover. I couldn't tell if it was the prospect of wading through my inbox or the impulse-bought Burger King mozzarella sticks that made me more nauseous.

I've been using Outlook Tasks and my inbox as a to-do list, and had primitive rules set up for inbox filtering - a system that was clearly not working as my Outlook Tasks contains pages of quasi-relevant emails from as far back as April.

Gracie has been using Mailbox for six months now and swears by it. I love the idea of triaging email once - do it now, delegate it or defer it. I often find myself reading the same email multiple times which is utter bollocks. Unfortunately Mailbox only supports Gmail accounts and I have to sync corporate mail across five devices.

I figured Outlook has to have solved this problem, even without the pretty UI interactions. And behold, it is good.

What I have done is basically this method of emptying my inbox using the Trusted Trio, but with a couple extra hacks:

1.  Rules. Mine weren't working. I filtered JIRA notifications and some other auto-spam folders but I still had 100+ messages a day from distribution lists clogging up my inbox.

For the past couple of days I've sent all my DL mail (except for my direct team's low-volume DL) to a single DLs folder, which I check a couple of times a day. It is ridiculous how much this decreases my inbox load and the time and headspace this has saved me already.

2. Follow Up - the first rule of inbox triage. I call this folder Tasks, not Follow Up, because whatever. A Task is anything I receive that needs an action but can't be completed in under two mins. Because otherwise just do it, right? GTD style.

Tasks is my To-Do list. And awesomely enough, I get close to zeroing it out most days. When a task is complete, of course it gets moved out of Tasks into another folder. Otherwise shit would be bananas!

3. Hold - this is the stuff that doesn't require action from me, but that I might need to keep track of. Maybe it's an ongoing thread with some key info, or an answer I'm waiting on from somebody. I plan to review this folder regularly so I can chase things or delete/archive them once they're no longer active.

4. Archive - everything that I read that doesn't require action gets moved out of the Inbox to this folder. I don't really delete anything except OOO mail so this is essentially trash/storage combined.

This is the biggest difference for me and what has allowed me to reach Inbox Zero for the first time EVER. If I read something and don't need to act on it, I move it so I don't have to look at it or think about it again. The commitment is not to leave read shit polluting your lovely inbox whitespace.

5. Category searches - I've added a few Outlook categories to make it easier to search for things. Of course this should all be stuff that requires no current action so it probably lives in Work Archive.

So far I only have reference tags and a tag for product ideas I may want to revisit somewhere down the line, but I can see the potential for other tags like "Learning", "Worth Reading" and project specific reference categories.


This is pretty basic lifehacking, but it's a step in managing the firehose that is my email. I'm excited to mess around with other GTD hax as I go, like calendar reminders and syncing to OneNote.

Have you ever seen an empty inbox before? What's your system like?

And how do you manage to sync it across different devices? I have an iPhone, a Windows phone and an Android tablet as well as a couple of Win8 and Mac laptops - hey! I'm a platform agnostic! - so it should be fun to see how this method scales cross-OS. Thank the lord (Ballmer?) for SkyDrive.

What I'm Into: Pinterest "Crap I Like To Eat"

So after that takeaway blip a while back we're back to cooking at home 4-5 nights a week. It's not easy. As a foodie, living in London, there are far too many temptations to eat out.

I say that like "oh you fancy, huh", but the number of new restaurants we try each month is tiny. The list of places I want to eat at grows much faster than I can knock items off it. Most of the time when we eat out or order in it's a case of sheer exhaustion or boredom.

The thing is, home-cooked meals are almost always way better tasting than takeaway (let alone cheaper). Yet somehow, when I'm feeling tired or apathetic it's hard to remember how awesome my own cooking is. Which is why I got inspired by this blog post and the idea of making a "Crap I Like To Eat" list - to reference in precisely such moments of weakness.

So I thought this was a perfect opportunity to finally use the Pinterest account I started 2 years ago and never pinned anything to.

Feel free to tell me I am doing it wrong. I get the feeling I'm totally doing it wrong. Pinterest seems to be a place to keep pics of sexy, aspirational food porn - more along the lines of "things I'd cook in my fantasy life where I'm an organic hipster Martha Stewart" rather than "things I have cooked loads of times for weeknight dinnerz". Speaking of things I've cooked loads of times for weeknight dinnerz, the above pic is one of our regular standbys - soba, eggs, asparagus and prosciutto, 5 minutes, easy.

I don't particularly care if I'm doing it wrong though. I've been misusing social media for my own needs ever since I started using Twitpic then Tumblr as an Instagram a few years before Instagram existed.

With that in mind here is our regular dinner food board - all tried and tested recipes in the Gracie Herst household. Though we do tend to put our own spin on them, as neither of us are into following recipes and we're both obsessed with adding chilis to everything.

It's not strictly dinner either as I've put a few of my favourite puddings in there. I have a mad sweet tooth, but I also take after my mum and often bake as a self-soothing project. Usually late at night. The jam tarts are a go-to.

I'm interested to see how this evolves and if I keep using it. This summer we are really into making South-Asian wraps and pancakes, from summer rolls to ssambap and banh xeo to pa jeon.

Do you have a "Crap I Like To Eat List"? What is on it? Are you a Pinterest food pornographer? Please share!