What Does This Button Do?
Making things, mostly for me, but hopefully for you, too
User Experience is Hard
I have often said that in the triumvirate of technology product development (possibly more on the hardware side initially, but now I think generally true), the opposing forces that can be easily split into Engineering, Sales, and Marketing cooperate to the the extent that something might ship some day, but is any happy with the impacts had by the other two on what they hoped to accomplish? Does the end user win or lose as a result? Look for discussion about Co-Creation in future issues here and elsewhere (the Workie project, CasaNunzia, and other things I have yet to mention). But for now…
The Business of Groceries
There is little doubt that Amazon has only become stronger during 2020, but Kroger most definitely remaining in the game and making the most of the chaos of dynamic conditions On The Ground, on the Front Lines from the very beginning of The Pandemic. Despite the ridiculous disappointment that is data reporting within Clark County, Nevada where I reside, I can say that about one year ago at least one case of covid-19 was diagnosed for at least one employee of the Smith’s Grocery Store at which I shop.
Along the way, there was a lot of urgent conversion of the in-person grocery store shopping experience to online ordering, workers assembling orders from the same shelves shopped by masked and un-masked patrons (exposure, almost certainly), parking lot pickup (even without a car) and Kroger was out in front across all of their various brands and properties. As I discovered very recently, Kroger actually has an API, which appears to offer a subset of what they make available in their mobile application(s) and via their website.
https://developer.kroger.com/documentation/public/getting-started/quick-start
Sad to say, though, making a MVP developed under duress cannot be deemed sufficient, which I fear Kroger may be doing. My recent interaction with Kroger Customer support have been frustrating and, ultimately, pointless, and these were questions about some very minimal, basic things that their Dev and Customer Support groups have seemingly left on the table. If there are two areas I could select where technology could make a really positive impact on life experience for people on the ground, groceries and money are they.
Fin Tech is not Fun Tech
My current bank is a credit union which locates one branch inside a Smith’s grocery story, a 10-minute walk from home. This would seem to be convenient, and it had been until our global pandemic really highlighted what we can, need, and sometimes must do remotely. Prior this particular credit union had shown itself to be somewhat behind the times in terms of Fin Tech, and they have made neither leaps nor bounds to change that. Thus, my question to modernize has commenced in earnest…
Plaid is a horrible idea, but it is the evil glue that binds for now. Several fin tech entities rely on Plaid to enable even basic inter-entity communications about accounts and balances and basic transactions, but the implementation is troubling. Rather than a centralized broker of account access, how about a standardized account access pattern than can be deployed similarly to the “Sidecar” pattern in microservice implementations? Keep account credentials with the account and enable external access in a standard way? Some day, perhaps.
Privacy.com is a great idea (virtual, per-merchant payment cards), as I re-discovered when the business card I use to cover AWS, Google Workspace, GitHub and other business services and their respective recurring charges… guess what happens when mysterious charges suddenly occur on at that card, that it was compromised is only the beginning of the headache, to re-attach a new default payment method to each account; an afternoon of effort, at least. But what happens when Plaid, on which Privacy.com depends, can’t talk to a particular banking institution, but there is no notification of such failure? Havoc can ensue, which makes Privacy.com not so great an implementation of a great idea.
Brex is my first toe into the waters of fully virtual modern “banking,” which is always a little bit of a concern even in the best of times. Virtual payment cards are built in, but it’s not really a bank so much as a brokerage that funds its free services with cash deposits… not really that drastic a difference between the checkable deposits and loans for the standard [American] banking model, but still there’s always something to be wary of. So far the upside to most modern online “banking” services (and there are many) is, they have formed a business on top of branch-less, online use, which means their adoption of technology (even something simple like U2F) is more likely an organic feature, not one that comes down the road, some day, if ever. So I’m hopeful that Brex will work for the payables side of the ledger.
Novo looks interesting for what we might call “standard” business banking services in the age of SaaS, with several current and potential future service integrations with, say, PayPal and Stripe for example. I have not commenced the sign-up process with Novo as I’m still investigating candidates for where money should flow into and stay for a few minutes… in other words, compartmentalizing fin tech services may have some advantages (Plaid isolation, fraud isolation, different services and features that align with payables versus receivables, etc) but at the same time it’s another thing to deal with.
I’m confident this will come up again. The intersection of User Experience and User Money is not one to take lightly.
To Be Continued…
How Funny
I have always enjoyed stand-up comedy (mostly as a consumer, though my very brief attempts to be a producer were educational, if not entertaining), and for better or worse, YouTube has brought loads of stand-up to an augmented audience that may never have taken a chance on a “work-out room” or an unknown feature. Hopefully this expanded exposure (to comedy and other creativity) is good over time, at the moment it’s good fun, at least IMHO.
Here are some great shows and/or great comedians, at least from where I sit:
Maria Bamford has a ton of great stuff out there, I just caught this last night and I think it’s a nice encapsulation of the more current Bamford commentary. Comedy Central’s This is Not Happening is rife with good and weird and interesting stuff, no difference here.
Liz Miele is a comedian I discovered literally via YouTube’s autoplay feature as it wandered from one stand-up set to the next. Really talented and once again, thanks to YouTube, we can look back in time and see “the old material” and the more current stuff and the evolutionary journey. I enjoy her delivery style and her material is great.
Sam Morill is another I found thanks to YouTube, proof perhaps that while The Algo isn’t necessarily a great idea, it does do good sometimes. Once again, delivery style is a part of the appeal for me (for future reference, I am a big Steven Wright fan) but some really great material of course. I’m linking to a set on Team Coco because Conan is a great part of the online path that comedy has taken…
Tommy Johnagin is a nice one to end on here, I’m including a link to the first set I saw, on Letterman, which lead eventually to my seeing Tommy live in Sunnyvale, California of all places (at Rooster T Feathers, of course). “You gotta really want to build that shed, man.”
Light Reading
A steady stream of books (especially audio books while getting outside for some fresh air and general movement) has kept the brain cells firing… I will go backward in time along the reading list, but today I can drop these two on you:
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr, is a good long read that I am about half-way through as I write this, well-narrated and fascinating during my daily wanderings around my neighborhood. History is one of those tricky things, written by the winners and so often concealing the bad parts. Definitely food for thought, especially if you’re hungry (you should be, always).
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, is up next on my reading list, once again an audio book (and from a Clark County Library, in fact) and another look back at different parts of our origin story. I’ve included a Wikipedia link here, not an affiliate link, and as I have not yet read this one I can only say that I’ve seen Harari in a discussion context and I find him interesting; I am hoping for the same or more from this book.
Work in Progress
This newsletter is young, and will gain footers and style and maybe some more support links… my goals initially are to experiment with old ways becoming new again, and moving away from the default Facebook post as The One True Way to reach out and stay in touch with people.
I will add this on here because if you don’t ask, you don’t get, but my hope is to make the items which appear within these newsletters even more interesting and worthwhile than this newsletter itself, an in some cases those interesting things will be my own projects, or projects that I benefit from in some way. Still, if you find you want to contribute to my coffee endeavors (seriously), who am I to deny you that possibility?
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DanHugo
Thanks for reading, sharing, and all of the other usual online things, regarding this newsletter, podcasts, projects, links, and whatever else comes up each week.
Be well!