Tag / technology

by Ricardo Sanchez

Use technology, don’t let it use you.

I am sitting in a lounge at an airport in Mexico City. My flight is in three hours, I am on my way back to Seattle, the city I call home. I visited my family in Guadalajara. I love seeing my parents, my siblings, their spouses, and the charismatic nephews and nieces.

My trip to Mexico was pleasant, and everything was organized using the internet. First, I spent a few days researching flights and my work schedule to ensure I’d maximize quality time with my family and be unobtrusive as possible with my work schedule. Then, when the day came, I got to the airport with the help of a ride-sharing app and used the airplane app to monitor my flight, the gate location, etc. Also, while I spent about an hour reading the book I brought to the trip, technology made it possible for me to watch a new movie while traversing 30,000 ft in the air.

Technology is beneficial. It can help with many things and make our lives easier and even more precise. I was introduced to technology a while ago after receiving a talking robot called 2-XL which wasn’t very technologically advanced, but it sparked my interest. I remember taking it apart one day. I wanted to know how it worked, and I did. Surprisingly, this robot was nothing more than a cassette player with a few automatic functions.

Robot 2 XL
Joe Haupt, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The robot 2 XL used a cassette containing the sounds and phrases it used in response to some buttons on the front. To use the robot, you’ll insert the cassette and turn it on via a knob which also functions as the volume control. It also had four buttons: Question, Yes, More Info, and No. After pressing the question button, 2 XL asked a question based on a theme from the cassette, and then you had the option to answer by pressing the button Yes, No, or More Info. It was a track player, but it had some educational value, and I loved it. Unfortunately, my 2 XL never worked again after taking it apart. But this action definitely sparked my interest in technology in general.

Many years later, I enrolled at a school in Mexico City to learn to code. I don’t think I learned how to program from that experience, but it definitely fed my curiosity. Some more years later, I enrolled in an Information Technology program at a community college. This time, the experience was better. In addition to programming, it helped me learn and improve my English skills, which were clumsy at the time.

Technology continued to be all around me, the commercial internet was born during this time, in the mid-nineties, and it surprised me how quick people were adopting this new medium of communication. At the time, the internet was simple, mainly text-based websites, but there were signs of potential for more. For example, search engines and directories started to appear, showing, even at this early stage, how these tools would replace phone directories and other paper-based tools.

After solidifying its potential to gather and organize information, it was a matter of time before online commerce started to show up. Also, other tools such as email, online maps, and better search engines were introduced. With this, new devices such as faster modems, better computers, and eventually a much faster internet and mobile devices were all around us.

Many of us use technology daily, and the internet is part of it, directly and indirectly. The internet is not only helpful but necessary in many areas. For example, it has helped me learn and gain skills to get better jobs. The internet has also made it possible for my family and me to have a comfortable life. With a few clicks, we can order food, clothes, and home goods, make restaurant reservations, purchase movie tickets, watch movies, and even book an entire trip from a phone or any other device connected to the internet.

Technology and the internet are also crucial ingredients in my professional life. All my work is done via a computer, writing code, designing applications, and communicating with team members and clients. Technology, and more precisely, the internet, are tools I use to make my life easier and more comfortable. Unfortunately, however, the same reason the technology and the internet are readily available and accessible to users is the same reason it makes it a target for misuse and abuse.

Technology itself is, for the most part, harmless. But many applications that use technology and the internet have created algorithms and layouts designed to make you, the user, a tool for it. Many devices, for example, have notifications enabled by default to keep you returning to them and to the applications hosted on them. Electronic notifications are addictive and disruptive, and yet, the sound, the frequency, and the visuals are all designed to make them addictive to them. As a result, most of us can’t stop looking at our phones, checking email, or browsing social media. It’s in part your fault, but the most significant percentage goes to the application and hardware designers, the technologists, which have created an ecosystem to stimulate our senses and curiosity.

I put my phone away when talking to someone, eat without any devices around me, and only check email and social media once or twice a day. I try many things, and yet, I often find myself spending too much time letting technology and the internet use me, instead of me using it.

I will keep trying to reduce the frequency and the time I spend looking at useless information, looking for endless stimulation and a false sense of doing something productive. Instead, I will continue to read more paper books, go for walks, talk to people in person or via the phone, and, if possible, continue to use technology and not let it use me.

Have a wonderful day.

Shot of a street corner in New York City
by Ricardo Sanchez

A note on boredom, anonymity, and declinism

It’s interesting to see how the amount of ennui in our society increases simultaneously as technology advances. We are doing something wrong. Technology and its rapid advancement can be not only distracting but dangerous. 

Is this contributing to the declinism of our society? I think it is, and my only advice is to be more empathetic and caring of others around you. 

The abundance of digital content, the accessibility of technology, the algorithms strictly designed to keep you connected and in rage, and the facility to consume more goods from our homes, digital and non-digital, it’s all part of it. 

We are becoming isolated creatures who are often policing others to see how they are behaving and ready to complain publicly if other people disagree with us.

Attacking and criticizing others is easier than ever; digital anonymity is at the root cause of this. Interestingly, those who identify themselves and dare to share their opinions publicly suffer from attacks of people who dislike what they say, destroying any opportunity of dialog and intelligent conversation.

It is boredom, online anonymity, misinformation, and many other things contributing to a civic and ethical decline. 

I’ve found myself lured into digital anger holes just by doom-scrolling on Twitter and other platforms. Even when I think I’m self-aware, it’s hard to push back and ignore the ignorant and the misinformation of pointless negativity, some of which comes from people who are just virtue signaling.

Slowing down is the best thing we can do, in my opinion. Before you reply to a critic, before responding to someone’s comment, take a minute and figure out if responding or commenting to something undeniably negative or ignorant is necessary. I think it is not.

Fighting misinformation, cynicism, and hate speech are necessary, but we can’t do it with more misinformation and cynicism of our own. We often fall under tribalism behavior, and it requires a large amount of patience and self-awareness to combat that. 

We don’t need to stop innovating to advance our technologies. However, we need to be wise and empathetic to those who are negatively affected by it. Hence, we should be aware of what’s happening and be willing to make changes, even when not in our favor, to ensure the technology and progress that comes with it benefit everyone equally.

At a personal level, I find it beneficial to be more present and empathetic to those around us, our family, our friends, the cashier at the store, the homeless around the corner, the people with who we disagree, etc. 

Just follow the Golden Rule:

One should never do something to others that one would regard as an injury to one’s own self

Mahābhārata 13.114.8

by Ricardo Sanchez

How to explain technical information to someone with no technical knowledge

Last week as I was asked to describe what a JavaScript callback is to someone without any technical background. I thought about it for a few seconds and couldn’t think of a non-technical way to explain that a callback is a function that gets executed after another function has finished its execution, so then I was asked to explain a 500 error instead.

Explaining what a 500 status code is to someone with zero technical knowledge sounded more interesting and fun to me so this is what I remember saying…

A 500 status code is what you’ll get when a something has gone wrong on the web application’s server but the server doesn’t have any specific details.

Imagine a home with many doors, in this example, each door is a “web application” and the home is the “web server”, the place where all these doors are.

Now imagine that you open a door, and while the door does exist, there is nothing behind it, at this point the home will tell you that nothing specific exists behind the door so in web server language, that would be similar to a 404 status code which means “Not Found”.

What about the 500 status code? Well, if you attempt to open any other door and nothing works inside of it, the home will tell you that there’s something wrong with it, but not sure what it is. For example, there might be no lights or no water, but the home won’t tell you that, it just tells you that there’s something wrong and in web server language that’s usually what a 500 error means. Something is wrong with the web server or the app but it doesn’t know what it is.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
~ Albert Einstein.

By now you’ll probably already pulling your hair, and I understand, this is painful. My explanation or attempt to explain this to someone with zero technical knowledge wasn’t good enough, at least not in my opinion. But that isn’t the point of this, the point that I am trying to make is that it is very hard to explain something technical that is well understood by us and people that we work with, but not by anyone that isn’t technical and has zero knowledge about programming or web servers in the above example.

In my experience, having the ability to translate a technical problem or solution to a non-technical audience is key, it is something that you as a software engineer, for example, will need to do many times when communicating with business partners, customers, or anyone that isn’t a software engineer or has any technical knowledge.

How do we get better at this? Well, this is something that the more you do, the easier it gets, but it never stops being difficult. You might memorize a couple of examples where you can explain a couple of things, but with technology changing so rapidly it will be hard to have a template or an example of how to translate something technical onto something that anyone can understand.

The ability to tell a story is key to accomplish this, and without at least trying to get good at storytelling, your chances of confusing people and not being able to communicate something technical clearly are very low.

Also, be empathetic and patient. If you are trying to explain a technical concept be aware of who your audience is and tune your technical speak to their level. There might be times where you’ll replace the technical talk with something that your audience will understand, remember that your ultimate goal is to communicate and to do it clearly.

In conclusion, I learned something about myself and this blog post is the first step to improve it, I don’t think too much about how to improve my communication skills when trying to explain a technical concept, idea, or problem, to someone who doesn’t have the technical knowledge or experience with technical terms.

Here are some resources that I am using to help me with this subject:

by Ricardo Sanchez

Innovation

Innovation is an overused word and very often, not recognized for what it is or what it means but instead, for what each one of us wants to believe it means.

Innovation is not something you teach or buy; innovation is not something a consultant will find for you or much less help you create it. You cannot capture it. You cannot force it.

Innovation is a way of life for some people; it is the way some people see the world and the way they think and do things, from picking up groceries to creating a company.

When real innovation shows, most of us don’t even know it, it just happens. Focused on your craft and improving what you do, and innovation will show up.

Innovation is often dismissed by some of us because we often reject change or things that are different. When we don’t understand something, we commonly describe it as a bad idea or even as something foolish.

Innovation is all around us and if you are lucky enough to notice it, do not turn your back to it, be curious, have an open mind, and embrace it.

Cheers!

Ricardo.