Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Author: Michael

  • The Curse of Knowledge

    Matthias Ott with a great story that starts with him trying to guess songs that his kid claps (spoiler: it’s a losing proposition).

    When you have an advance in knowledge over someone else, it can be difficult to recognize this gap and act accordingly. This phenomenon – that we falsely assume that others have the background to understand – is called the curse of knowledge.

    The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that can be observed whenever people want to convey information. The readers of your article, the students in your class, the participants of your workshop, the listeners of your podcast, the people at your next meetup, the clients in your conference call, the users of your interface – they all don’t know what you know and are therefore missing context. Always. And while you are confidently talking and explaining like a pro, people actually don’t understand you as well as you would hope.

    The Curse of Knowledge · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

    Even if you know your audience intimately, each conversation should start with setting context. This can take many forms, but it is necessary to establish a foundation from which you make your point. If you don’t start from a shared understanding everything else will be an unnecessarily hard attempt to be understood.

  • Software is eating conferences – Microsoft Build and the digital transformation of conferences

    Software is eating conferences – Microsoft Build and the digital transformation of conferences

    May is traditionally the month where the big tech companies host their developer conferences. Google, Facebook and Microsoft all have their gatherings with Apple quickly following in June. When COVID hit, many in the tech scene wondered what would happen to conferences. The traditional format brought thousands of people together in one space to mingle and exchange ideas in close proximity. That no longer works in a COVID world.

    All the big tech companies responded differently. Facebook and Google decided to wait this year out and canceled F8 and I/O respectively. Microsoft and Apple decided to go ahead and take Build and WWDC online this year.

    Impressions from Microsoft’s Build

    Microsoft was the first to come out of the gate last week. Their Build conference heavily leans towards developers. It’s typically held in Seattle with around 7,000 attendees, big rooms, expo floor and lots of space for the community to meet. Within the last eight weeks, this huge event was re-imagined for the virtual space. And it has been an innovative interpretation of an all-online conference: a 48-hour non-stop event with presenters from all four corners of the world. Yes, here and there minor seams were showing, but Microsoft was pushing the envelope and for a 1.0 this was very stable.

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  • Less is more … difficult – writing summaries

    Less is more … difficult – writing summaries

    Writing is hard and writing a summary is no exception. If you are working on proposals, general research or strategies, at some point you have to summarize your idea. As Pascal once said “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” A summary takes time to get right.

    The investment does pay off as it makes your work easier to digest, improves structure and highlights your very best insights. It’s not uncommon that only the summary gets read. That’s actually a good thing. But it raises the stakes to get the summary right and you still need to put in the work – your summary will only be as good as the underlying work. But there are a few tips and tricks that helped me in the past.

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  • In defense of email

    In defense of email

    Unpopular opinion: I like email.

    I remember distinctly when I got my very first email address. It was a mid-nineties summer in Germany and I finally got my hands on a modem. That was a big deal, as it required me sending a cashier’s check via mail to a business that I didn’t know, wait for seven or eight weeks with no status update to receive a no-name modem with at best spotty documentation. After dabbling in local BBSes and QWK readers, I signed up for a BBS that was connected to Fidonet which meant that my online community was no longer restricted to the local area code. Fidonet provided access to a global network of nodes that replicated messages with each other via dial up. Because of dial up messages were replicated between nodes only a few times per day. Therefore it could take days for messages to travel from sender to recipient, but this was a global network.

    Part of that deal was an email address. Admittedly, one that took days to deliver, but one that allowed me to communicate with people on the other side of the world without long distance calls. That left an immense impression on me and I remember going outside to tell the great news to my father who was working in the garden. After all it was summer. I told him about how it was all connected and that I could send emails to people in places like America. He just looked at me, baffled, and just commented that I didn’t know anybody in the US. He was right, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that my English was broken or that my email address was a lengthy and random assortment or letters and numbers. What mattered was the possibility.

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  • Timely advice from the Wu Tang Clan

    W – Wash hands

    U – Use masks properly

    T –Touch nothing

    A – Avoid crowds

    N – Never touch your face with unwashed hands

    G – Go to the hospital if you have severe symptoms

    Wu Tang Clan on Instagram

  • The case of the missing hit

    Such a great podcast episode about a song that seems to have vanished from the internet. Totally amazed by the lengths to which the team has gone to solve the mystery:

    A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case.

    Reply All #158 The Case of the Missing Hit

    Best quote:

    “The only way to cure an earworm is to listen to it. But what do you do when that song no longer seems to exist?”

  • How to get more out of OneNote

    OneNote is one of those underappreciated apps within Office 365. To be honest, I’ve only used it for the last two years despite my wife having praised it for her work as a teacher for a long time. But it really has grown on me and I enjoy taking notes, working on outlines and reviewing documents with OneNote. Its integration with Teams makes it a no-brainer to share notes among a project team.

    I recently saw an unanswered tweet asking for help about OneNote and thought this might be an opportunity to share some of the things that I’ve learned to appreciate about OneNote over the last two years.

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  • Dear Library, Thank You!

    Dear Library, Thank You!

    The end of the year is an opportunity to look back and be grateful. When we moved here, the local libraries of King County and Seattle welcomed us with open arms. No credit history or social security number required, not even a monthly fee. We’ve been continuously surprised by the local libraries and their commitment to excellence. Their dense network of locations for pick ups and drop offs, the amazing collection of books and their great electronic options to name a few.

    They have been particularly helpful for our daughter. Not only did story times and a generous limit on book loans help us nurture her interest in books, it even helped her deal with daily life challenges. When she became a big sister picture books prepared her for what was to happen. When she was afraid of going to the doctor “Leo gets a check up” showed her that it will be OK. When she showed interest in diggers and construction vehicles, there were lots of picture books about how all that heavy machinery works together.

    The adults in our household enjoy the electronic selection, in particular Kindle loans for eBooks and Libby for audio books. The latter blew me away. Searching, checking out and listening audio books all from within one app is a great user experience. The user interface is intuitive (better than Audible) making it easy to take notes and set bookmarks. I very much appreciated the option to search by “What’s available”, which helps me get through household chores. The collection of physical books is amazing as well. And if a book is not available right now, we can just place a hold and are pleasantly surprised once it turns up in the future – deferred gratification, a rare treat in today’s world.

    We recently also discovered their Kanopy and Hoopla services, where we’ve now watched a couple of movies. They don’t encourage binge viewing, but limit consumption to five movies a month. That’s a good amount. We like the selection of movies, ones that we often wouldn’t find on other streaming services. And it’s all included in the membership.

    And how much does all of this cost? It’s part of our tax dollars at work. Do they track my data to target advertising? Not that I know of. Libraries have been these shining oases nurturing our souls that we are very grateful for. If you are looking for a New Year’s resolution for 2020, making more use of your local library is a great one.

    Let me close with quotes from two articles from last year that put it so much better than I could. Khoi Vinh on his blog:

    Even more radically, your time at the library comes with absolutely no expectation that you buy anything. Or even that you transact at all. And there’s certainly no implication that your data or your rights are being surrendered in return for the services you partake in.


    This rare openness and neutrality imbues libraries with a distinct sense of community, of us, of everyone having come together to fund and build and participate in this collective sharing of knowledge and space. All of that seems exceedingly rare in this increasingly commercial, exposed world of ours. In a way it’s quite amazing that the concept continues to persist at all.

    Your Public Library Is Where It’s At

    And one quote from the New York Times:

    Libraries are an example of what I call “social infrastructure”: the physical spaces and organizations that shape the way people interact. Libraries don’t just provide free access to books and other cultural materials, they also offer things like companionship for older adults, de facto child care for busy parents, language instruction for immigrants and welcoming public spaces for the poor, the homeless and young people.

    To Restore Civil Society, Start With the Library

  • Kids

    Paul Graham wrote five years ago something that stuck in my head ever since:

    He finally followed up and wrote a great post about his experience of having kids. I much appreciated its honesty (“I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. “) and its pragmatic advice such as

    I have some hacks […]. For example, when I write essays, I think about what I’d want my kids to know. That drives me to get things right. 

    It reminded me of Jeff Atwood’s blog post on parenthood back in 2011. I wonder whether there is a hall of fame of parenthood essays written by hackers.

  • A Meditation on the Open Web

    This little video was published nearly a year ago by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. But it stuck with me and makes me want to contribute more to my little corner of the internet. It’s pretty remarkable for an ad to stick in your head for nearly a year with very little repetition.