Simple Things

I was recently in New York to visit a friend. Flew into La Guardia and called him up to tell him I was taking public transportation into Manhattan. He sounded puzzled but I didn’t really feel like spending $60.00 getting to West Village. Plus, there’s something to be said for pulling out the machete and blazing through uncharted lands. And by machete, I mean iPhone; and by lands I mean tunnels.

After taking a few wrong turns, I made it over the bridge onto 125th street, but I was definitely lost, and decided, “you know what, it’s late – maybe a cab is the right move.” Nope – apparently New York has these “black” cabs competing against the trusty yellow ones. I think they’re just there to freak out tourists.

Back to public transportation – and this time I’m going underground.

Without the aid of my iPhone underground, I had to memorize some of the key stops for my journey. I got an MTA card from a touch screen kiosk (why those things are so complicated I have no idea – don’t even get me started on the ones in CA.) When I finally got on the platform and got my bearings I was blown away. The New York subway system is absolutely incredible.

Subway Map - Holy Crap!

When you decide below the streets, there’s not 1, or even two layers of trains, there’s sometimes 3. And each level contains up to 3 rails. May not seem like such a big deal, but then you remember that above you is one of the biggest cities in the world - behemoth towers of steel and concrete  growing above these arteries. I was really blown away.

Then I got lost… again. And here’s why:

Why I got lost:

• Why is the word “Exit” on a red background? Does following the arrow mean you’re going to the exit? The red divides the routes on the right from the arrow. I was unsure whether following the arrow meant the exit, those lines, or both.
• What does this mean: “Local to Bay Ridge-95 St. Late nights N to 36 St, Bklyn for R” ?
• I actually like the alphanumeric dots of color, but why mix them into the language. At a glance it should be obvious what trains are coming to the platform your standing at.
• Once you’re underground, which way is North? South? When you’re spun around, it can be very confusing. Don’t look to the signs; unless you know the city they won’t help you. I was amazed that even the transit maps (not pictured) while telling you “you’re here” failed to point out which way you were going. Unless you traced the route to the last stop – and even that wasn’t consistent.
• Pay-to-turn bidirectional revolving steel doors? I for one find those things scary as hell. They remind me of one of those elaborate cave traps Indian Jones gets stuck in in the Temple of Doom. To make matters worse, they turn both ways on some ratcheting system. Not enjoyable.

What I found comforting:

• The students playing a concerto in the walkways. Really good stuff.
• The electronic signage on some of the subways. They give a bright and clear indication of direction of travel, make it obvious which stop you’re at, and dynamically show only the pertinent information like what stops are coming, not those that have passed.

Lack of conventions, obscure abbreviations, and unclear signage made for a fairly confusing night ride. Might not seem bad reading it at your laptop, but three stories underground, with trains whizzing by and no access to the outside world makes it pretty daunting.

Compare that to Chicago, granted a much simpler subway system (I feel inadequate even linking to a picture of the subway map):

Lines have clear names, and the construction emphasizes the route (red line = red steal girders). While maybe redundant, the signs are explicit (”Board here”) bringing the commuting experience down to the lowest common denominator. Maybe that says something about a difference between East Coasters and Midwesterners.

But I think it says more about design: know your audience. A public transit system has to serve everyone from the battle hardened city warrior, to the foreign tourist. Just the dependence on full English sentences describing routes throughout the NY transit system seems like a huge design deficiency to me.

Compare their websites, too: Chicago vs. New York.

But one can’t be too harsh, just take a close up look at their subway map and you’ll see it’s really incredible.

Oh, and it’s profitable.

It’s always hard to find the line between buy vs. build – or as it’s known in the open-source world, buy vs. “borrow.” I find this to be more true in Rails than in any other application framework. You want authentication, you got it; you need paging, done. Before you know it you’ve got an application that does almost everything you need, almost everything you don’t and you’re stuck in the middle.

Now, it’s time to actually write code.

At GetFave.com, we had a problem on our hands. We needed to deliver ads from our own inventory – space on the site that our sales team sells to our clients. I immediately asked – how can we do this without writing anything. You can anticipate the complexity that comes from adding a feature like that: find ads contextually, figure out which one to show, show it, track that it was shown, all while not slowing down the page. We take performance very seriously at GetFave.com

So we tried on Google AdManager for size. It seemed to be the right fit. First off, it’s Google, so it’s gotta be good (debatable, I think). Secondly, it promised to do all the heavy lifting for us: tracking impressions, click-throughs, reporting, delivery, impression distribution, inventory management, and more. They even worked with us to open up an advanced custom attribute targeting system. The only known draw back was that it wasn’t going to work with other ad network APIs. Plus, it was a drop in replacement for AdSense – so we had nothing to loose.

A few weeks later, a day before one of our clients ads had been promised to be delivered, AdManager has yet to perform as we’ve expected. The interface is clunky and convoluted. I can’t blame them, they’ve built a behemoth catch-all advertising management system. But most importantly it wasn’t delivering the ads we needed to satisfy our customers (I later discovered that AdManager requires several weeks for custom targeting data to propagate and effectively deliver ads.)

With our lovely sales director popping her head in to make sure we on target for ads to be delivered, I found myself between a rock and a hard place. Then it occurred to me: “wait, I know how to write code!”

Queue Pandora. I started with a basic ActiveRecord model and stubbed out what I thought we’d need – borrowing heavily from my experience on the Google side of the wall. The biggest issue was performance and although I was reluctant to have ad delivery happen synchronously, I decided to go with it (we’d have some time to refactor before we had enough inventory to slow things down). I had already written a nifty tracking class to help me keep track of the context of the page such as keywords and geography. In an afternoon I had the whole thing done.

Pretty soon it was in production and getting feedback from sales people and customers. There were bugs, as was to be expected, but we’ve since worked them out in addition to adding several new features. Shameless plug: All you small business owners out there may be interested in our new geo-targeted ad product.

The moral of the story was that sometimes – I’ll say maybe even the majority of the time – it pays just to write it yourself. To borrow from my friend Michael Dwan, and then in turn DHH, “don’t use code you couldn’t write yourself.”

Next up, Google Analytics.