Intridea - Leaders in Agile Software Development

The other day when Zoho People was announced I came to the realization that even though I had heard about Zoho in 20 different blog posts over the last year or so, I had never taken a moment to go check out what they were all about. With a full online office suite, it’s definitely something I’m interested in and could use. So why didn’t I take 5 minutes to explore further?

Their Logo. It had been attached to all of the posts about them, and when I see it I just instantly lose interest in the company and their products. This is not the logo of a company that wants to be taken seriously for a productivity suite, it’s the logo of some company that sells teddy bears online that you can customize…or something. It is such a stark disconnect from the target demographic that I really just can’t understand the thought process that went into it.

Now I may be shallow in writing off this company solely because I didn’t like the look of their logo (though I would argue that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do), but the point is that it doesn’t matter at all what features, awesome back-end programming, and next-generation online collaboration Zoho offers. I never found out more about them because the image I was presented was not one that appealed to me.

The design of a company’s logo, its products, its website, everything, are not throwaway concerns. In a split-second, a person might look at your corporate website and decide “This company doesn’t look professional enough.” There is a critical period in the very first moments a potential customer sees your product that may well inform the rest of your relationship with that customer. Without an appealing aesthetic front, you will never make it to the meat of your pitch, because they have already written it off mentally.

This, I feel, was the largest gap between my college Computer Science education and the real world. I’ve always been a designer as well as a developer, but when there was absolutely no emphasis placed on the user experience or the aesthetics of the software that we were building for classes, I got frustrated. Not everyone has an eye for design, and that’s not a problem. But if a product is to be taken seriously, someone along the line has to take it and make it look good, because behind-the-scenes magic will always be just that: behind the scenes.

Regular expressions are a very powerful, but very confusing tool. It takes a long time to figure out the grammar, and even today just looking at a regular expression makes my brain go numb for a moment (but writing them is much easier). However, they’re good for more than just validating e-mail addresses. They can be a powerful everyday tool if you happen to need to reformat some text.

For example, I recently needed some seed data for an application and wanted to get 50 girl and 50 boy names. I did a quick google to find popular names and came to the Top 100 baby names of 2006. Great! I copy and pasted the names into TextMate and I was left with something that looked like this:

1    Emma
2    Madison
3    Ava
4    Emily
5    Isabella
6    Kaitlyn
7    Sophia
8    Olivia
9    Abigail
...

Now, that’s pretty simple, but I wanted it in a form like this (Ruby array shorthand):

%w(Emma Madison Ava Emily Isabella Kaitlyn Sophia Olivia Abigail...)

Rather than either retype or manually delete the numbers and proceeding tabs, I just wrote the following find and replace in TextMate (make sure you check the Regular Expression option):

Find: ^[0-9]+\t([A-Za-z]+)\n
Replace: $1 

That is, find anything that has a line starting with a series of 0-9, followed by a tab, followed by some letters followed by a line break, and replace it with just the letters and a space. This leaves us with the following:

Emma Madison Ava Emily Isabella Kaitlyn Sophia Olivia Abigail...

Which is almost exactly what I wanted to begin with. Now I’ve saved myself a little bit of time and a lot of repetitive work. You’d be surprised how often using regular expressions to reformat some copy and pasted text comes in handy.