Protocol

Water fasting protocol is super simple. Drink water, don’t eat, for 3 days (72h). Additionally I had black coffee and electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium. Carefully avoided any food/suplement that could break the fast.

Just because we like to experiment, my wife and I started to do a 48h fasting (Mon-Wed). This is the first 72h to see how it goes.

What about the moon thing?

9 years ago I waited for the New Moon to start fasting. It’s an easy way to track when to do it, and there are a few other reasons from Hinduism…

Brahmins (and many other Hindus) observe a fast on the new moon day called Amavasya, for a mix of spiritual, ancestral, and practical reasons. Sometimes they do it on a Full Moon as well.

This time, I just started on a Monday and will break fast on the Full Moon. Will take a note for next time and compare the results.

Fasting, first 24h

Since we’ve been doing 48h fasting for 2 weeks, the first day is easy. Just keep yourself mentally busy, drink water, the day flies. Specially now that work has been intense.

Second day

Second day was ok, twice hunger waves if I remember correctly, some water with electrolytes and it goes away. Still busy, so that helps.

At the end of the day we went for a 5km walk, to the beach because it’s quite warm in Amsterdam this time of the year. Stayed there for like 1h, came back home around 9pm. On the way back, was a bit tough. Felt a bit like keto flu, a slight headache and pain behind the eyes, wasn’t talkative at all. I think it was ketosis kicking in hard.

Third day

Woke up feeling great, measured ketones (3.4mmol/L) and glucose (3.7mmol/L) with a Keto-Mojo meter and just confirmed that I’m in deep ketosis, so probably that’s what I felt yesterday. Had water with electrolytes and a black coffee, ready to rock and roll.

Feeling a bit of pain in joints, like knees. Also a bit dizzy when stand up suddenly, what I think is that in long fastings, you gotta lay low and do less… at least that’s my assumption. When I got in deep ketosis eating normally in the past, nothing like that, so I assume is the body redirecting energy and preserving as much as possible.

Breaking it

We’re about to break the fast now. 72h and a bit. Bone broth, chicken and egg. Basically a soup. In about 1h, meat.

Very different than the other two times where I ate veggies. Let’s see the effects. The first time, around 32 years ago, I tried to chug a bunch of carrots and was not good at all. Previous time started with cucumbers and avocado, was fine. Now, let’s see what happens when we focus in protein to go back.

Results

I lost around 4kg. 3 days is easy. Next week, I’ll try 3 and a half days (84h) to prepare for a 5 day fast (120h). I’m really curious to see what happens then.

Just thinking that on that week, I’ll have to take it slow, read, work less and gentle walks. But who knows, might be totally different than that!

This time I walked 10km on the first day and 5km on the third. Couldn’t think on doing more than that.

Next steps

✅ 3 days after 8 years. I’m thinking about doing a long water fast (5 days) but for that I’ll prepare a bit. Idea is to fast for a few days every week, walk those days, and the others run and lift weights. Just want to see what happens, and probably won’t do it for long because I don’t need to loose a lot of weight.

This experiment is closed.

Experiment: Water Fasting (again) was originally published in Wolff experiments on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s a Tuesday night, and you decide to relax with a movie. You find the movie on the big smart tv, accept the credit card charge to rent it for 48hrs, microwave some popcorn, and settle in to watch it from the comfort of your couch.

You really like the protagonist’s sunglasses and wonder what they are. A quick search reveals the brand and where to buy them. You head to the brand website and add them to the cart… but the cart process is slow and clunky; everything takes forever to load… there are lots of spinners, and the forms are SO complicated. You give up and return to your movie, and the sunglasses company loses a customer.

Cloud products have a massive influence on how we interact with the world today — with a few clicks, today’s connected consumers can have goods or services delivered to their doorstep.

Users are accustomed to having what they want, when they want, and they’re getting more impatient with apps or services that fail to deliver on our expectations.

Here at Atlassian, millions of users use our products — like Jira Cloud — to move fast, stay aligned, and build better together. We are constantly innovating to ensure the performance matches our users' expectations.

The real competition

Our users won’t compare Jira against our competitors but against the applications they use the most. This creates new expectations for performance that, if we miss, frustrates our users and can affect our products’ success.

Users become more demanding and unhappy with every second they wait, and according to Zendesk, 95% of them don’t hesitate to share that online.

Performance must be part of any new digital product. The problem is: performance is usually an afterthought and a technical issue that needs to be resolved by developers.

But better performance can also be a better design, and we can create more performant experiences for our users.

How can we use design to increase performance?

Design can add to the performance by increasing our products’ usability and understanding how users feel about the experience.

Usability focus on the effectiveness, efficiency, and overall satisfaction of using a system or product.

Two of the five UPPer (User Perceived Performance) principles bring usability to our design decisions.

When we minimize the interaction cost, provide accelerators, get customers out of errors, and ensure that we’re considering the whole end-to-end journey, we increase efficiency and lower errors.

When we use familiar patterns, present the most needed information right then and there, and make intelligent choices for customers, we’re increasing learnability, memorability, and efficiency.

Applying those principles allows us to make our users feel the product is faster and that they can accomplish much more with less, increasing their satisfaction.

How do we measure how users perceive our products’ performance?

Measuring perceived performance is complex, but we can use some proxies to understand the user experience.

For the web in general, Google created some metrics that we can use to measure the quality of the user’s experience. They’re classified in:

• Loading speed
• Responsiveness
• Visual stability

Load metrics measure how the user experiences the load of a page. Responsiveness is how snappy a page is when they interact with it, and visual stability is how stable the rendering of the page feels.

These metrics can be found in Lighthouse and are industry-standard for understanding web app performance (see them at the end of the article).

UPPer metrics

UPPer stands for User Perceived Performance, representing a shift in Atlassian’s way of measuring the quality of our user’s experience.

UPPer metrics are a way to measure performance in a user flow instead of a single page or experience.

User flows are a series of steps or actions a user needs to do to accomplish their goal, which can happen on page load or in a SPA (Single page application) transition.

For each step of the flow, we capture values for each metric, allowing us to infer the user’s experience.

UPPer design principles

Perceived performance is not only a set of metrics, though. Designers can use UPPer principles to take design decisions from the start, which increases the likelihood of the experience being perceived as fast by the user.

As you can see, most principles are related to usability and efficiency.

These principles are an extension of Atlassian Design Principles and can help designers to have performance in mind when creating new and exciting features.

When designers apply those principles and track the metrics here described, we're creating user experiences with a performance mindset.

How can you apply those to your work?

When creating new experiences, think about performance during the whole design process.

Performance-oriented design is a culture we create when interacting with different roles during a project.

• Work with PMs to minimize a feature’s initial footprint through thoughtful reductions.
• Work with Engineers to understand the cost of an operation and feature scalability.
• Work with Researchers to ensure we’re observing the correct performance metrics.
• Work with Analysts to define and measure the common customer path.

Extend and adapt the principles to your product

Extend UPPer principles to adapt them to your product’s needs, remix them, and make them your own.

Principles are not static, they evolve and adapt.

Have a performance mindset, and your designs will reflect that, having a massive influence on how your users interact with the world today and in the future.

UPPer Metrics in detail

There are the metrics we're using to measure the perceived performance of our products. They're based on Google's web performance metrics, with the addition of ICR, an Atlassian innovation (more on this soon).

• FCP (First contentful paint) [ Loading speed ]
• FMP (First Meaningful Paint) [ Loading speed ]
• TTFB (Time To First Byte) [ Loading speed ]
• FID (First Input Delay) [ Loading speed ]
• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) [ Loading speed, visual stability ]
• SI (Speed Index) [ Loading speed ]
• CLS (Cummulative Layout Shift) [ Visual stability ]
• TBT (Total Blocking Time) [ Responsiveness ]
• TTI (Time To Interactive) [ Responsiveness ]
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) [ Responsiveness ]
• ICR (Interaction to Complete Result — Atlassian) [ Responsiveness ]

Better performance = better design was originally published in Designing Atlassian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Confusing title, I know. But it just demonstrates the confusion people might have.

What is a Sprint?

According to Atlassian:

“A sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work.”

So when people hear about Design Sprints, the most common misconception is that a Design Sprint is a time-boxed period where Designers would complete design tasks. But that's not what a Design Sprint is.

So, what is a Design Sprint?

Design Sprint is a methodology invented in 2010 at Google Ventures, and the official definition is:

“The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers.”

Would you like to know my definition, which I believe is more straightforward and to the point? I’m the writer, so I’ll tell you anyway:

“Design Sprint is Design Thinking in action.”

Oh boy. Now I need to define what is Design Thinking. I’ll skip the quotes, though: Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that seeks to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. That’s the Interaction Foundation’s definition.

Design Thinking is a conceptual framework that doesn’t prescribe an application. What this generates is several possible practical approaches, usually called Design Thinking Workshops, that cover one or more of the following stages:

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

Knowing the Design value of these processes, Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz started to experiment on how to apply Design Thinking in a practical and repeatable way, to obtain the best result possible.

After trying out different techniques, they compiled their experience in a book called Sprint, that started this whole movement (and naming confusion).

The format

There are (at least) two ways you can havea Design Sprint. The traditional way, or the Design Sprint 2.0 way.

AJ&Smart, a Berlin based Design Agency specialised in Design Sprints, worked with the Sprint book author, Jake Knapp, and came up with Design Sprint 2.0, an evolution based on empirical data on hundreds of runs in companies of all sizes.

Here are the weekly schedule of both formats, so you can compare the differences and similarities:

As you can see, Design Sprint 2.0 focus the first 2 days on defining and framing the problem and shuffles some activities. This is made to ensure that the output of one activity is the right input for the next one. It’s also more streamlined and focused, taking one less day to produce the same results.

Which one is better, Design Sprints or Agile Sprints?

The comparison is not 🍎 to 🍎.

Design Sprints generate Agile Sprints, and the opposite is not valid. In graphical form:

Design Sprints → Agile Sprints

Design Sprint is a way to find solutions through a diverge/converge method, as a team, and validate it at the end of sprint with real users.

It’s practical Design Thinking. At the end of the Sprint you’ll have answers if there’s market fit, an idea of cognitive load, and more importantly, if users understood what your team came up with.

With the output of the Design Sprint you’ll have material to start your Agile Sprints, breaking down the findings into Epics and Tasks, and filling your backlog.

The best part is that after a Design Sprint the whole team will be engaged and committed for that path you’ve traced together.

In Design Sprints, you start with a big problem and end up with a clear direction. It generates user stories and tasks, that will feed the Agile Sprint.

Agile Sprints are an excellent solution to be able to predict productivity, quickly remove impediments, improve team communication. But for it to be productive, the user stories and tasks need to be in place, well defined and prioritized.

You can’t Design Sprint forever

Design Sprints are, by definition, short.

After you complete a Design Sprint, you can do something called an Iteration Sprint for another 4–5 days. And that’s it.

The outcome of the Iteration Sprint is an even more refined direction, tested with ten users (5+5) and high fidelity mock-ups, to create user stories and start Agile Sprints.

It’s not productive to keep iterating. After two rounds of qualitative tests, it’s time to develop the solution and put it in production. Otherwise, the time spent refining a theoretical solution might come short when put to real customers.

How to convert the output of the Design Sprint into Agile Sprints?

That’s usually the Project Manager’s job. Based on the storyboard and user testing insights, each step is broken down into epics, stories and tasks, and dragged to the backlog.

From the backlog, the tasks are estimated by the team. Then they’re put together into Agile Sprints that have their timing, rituals, and checkpoints.

For more reference on how to do Agile Sprints, consult Atlassian Agile Coach documentation.

Now, would you be able to tell the difference between a Design Sprint and a Sprint? I hope so. If you still have any questions or comments, though, feel free to contact me, and I can clarify it further.

Design Sprints are not actual sprints was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

3 years ago I did a diet experiment that meant I’d have to ditch sugar in coffee. It was then that I started my relationship with coffee.

From then to now, I’ve lived in 4 continents. I have tried local coffees, blends, single origins, and some innovations, like the Singaporean Kopi. And still, my favorite goes back to my roots in Brazil. The flavour is nutty, sort of naturally sweet and grounded.

When I joined Atlassian, I found out that there’s no coffee available in the office, so employees can leave their desks and go outside to have a break — a very good idea, by the way — And I thought this could also be also an excellent opportunity! As a problem solver, I tried to think outside the box on how to solve the challenge of having coffee at my desk, anytime.

First, some research

I looked into the cupboards, saw that some people have their own cups, and found out we have boiling water available on all taps. I also saw a couple of french presses and even a small espresso machine somewhere. Now, I had to use this information to come up with a practical yet tasty solution.

e-commerce, the paradise for the impulsive shopper

I was browsing online for some kitchen supplies, because I had recently moved. Then I saw something new to me: a Travel Coffee Maker that was both cup and french press, that looked interesting.

Impulsive, perhaps; in any case, I bought it and brought it to the office. Now the question is: does it work properly?

Putting it to the test

As a test, I bought some Single Origin from Guatemala (couldn’t find SO from Brazil at the supermarket). Nothing fancy, just everyday coffee for a field test.

Being methodical, and since I was at the supermarket, I bought some ziplock bags. That way, I could store the coffee after opening the bag in “vacuum-sealed” bags, individually packed for the daily kick. Yes, I prefer to work once and not having to measure spoons every time I want coffee.

Having no idea how strong was this coffee, I decided to binary search it. Experimented first with 5 spoons, and as expected, it was undrinkable (too strong). So I jumped to 2, thinking 3 would be the magic number. Surprise! two spoons was the ideal for this bean, which is considered intense (9 in a 12 points scale) — disclaimer: I have no idea where this scale comes from.

The tap with boiling water worked wonders, as well as the travel cup/french press. I believe I lose 50ml of the cup because of the french press sieve, so it's ~300ml. A decent-sized coffee, at a proper temperature, ready to drink in 4 minutes and 10 steps from my desk.

Repeatable, measurable, predictable. It works as a scientific experiment, and in my humble opinion, this experiment was a success!

Oh, did I mention the financial factor?

I don’t think so. A colleague calculated that if you take a $4 coffee a day, in a year the daily coffee it can cost you a round trip ticket to Japan ($1000).

With the solution above, buying a 250g coffee pack the cost is around $0.40 per cup. If I buy 1kg coffee bag instead, it decreases to $0.23 per cup, or $57.50 a year instead of $1000… that’s quite some coffee savings! :)

Coffee at the office was originally published in Wolff experiments on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That’s kind of what happened in the first Design Sprint I facilitated in Singapore.

Design as a Strategic Tool

There’s a trace that’s quite common in the startup world: design is a service. There’s much focus in the UI, and due to time constraints, development is the strategic driver.

Design as a service usually has a price: it’s not a user-centered process. And inevitably you come to a point where there’s a disconnect between the user and the product.

The good news is that it’s possible to fix that, moving design from a service perspective to a more strategic one. Design can be the light of the path, that reconnects the product with its users, delighting them with the best possible experience.

With that in mind, I took AJ&Smart and Jake Knaap’s Design Sprint Masterclass to be more productive, and we started our journey to our first Design Sprint in the Startup I work for here, in Singapore.

Hit the ground running

Due to time constraints, the Sprint had to happen in a specific time frame, which meant the first improvisation need. Instead of Monday, our Design Sprint would have to start on a Wednesday.

The plan was to end the week with a prototype and do user testing the following Monday or Tuesday. Being the first sprint, and having secured a budget of 5 days, I left Monday as a buffer for checking user test agenda and polish the prototype if we had to.

Adaptation, improvisation

During the next few days, there were occasions that more improvisations were needed.

Once we spent 20 minutes debating if we should merge different ideas instead of just choosing one and moving on (this was what we did in the end).

We also did the map twice, because the first one wasn’t what we came to solve with the Sprint (it’s a complex product). Taking a step back and doing it again was fast and the best decision. With that, I moved ideating solutions for the next day, because people were mentally drained.

Which means sketch, vote, and storyboard had all to move to the second day.

The good news is we were able to make it. 🎉

Knowing when you went too far

Prototyping was a chapter apart. We started with the standard eight screens from a 6 part user flow, and somehow that ended up in almost 20 screens.

The conclusion is that we went too broad in the solution, but because this was our first Sprint together, we were still learning how much we can cover. We consciously decided to go with the big package.

Counting the facilitator (me), we had three designers on the team; the strategy was divide and conquer.

That way we were able to finish a mid-fi prototype on Friday (using a generic UI library and not worrying with colors).

The plan was to refine and make the prototype realistic on Monday, while we were setting up the interviews’ agenda for Tuesday.

User Interviews: remote it is

We tried to recruit users during the sprint week. But here’s the catch with SaaS products: your users are your customers, it’s tough and time consuming to find people for a particular part of the journey outside our current customer base. And we’re doing onboarding.

It’s also extra hard to make them come to the office for a user test. So remote was the solution.

Tools and platforms

We used google meets and recorded our screens with QuickTime, capturing the audio from laptop speakers.

For the prototype, we used Sketch and Marvel. We used the 5 act user interview technique, and the team took notes to build the visual feedback board.

The timezone issue

During the first two interviews, the whole team couldn’t be together to take notes. So we again improvised and sent everyone the google drive links of the interview videos so that they could take their notes at some other time.

The next day, we got together in the Sprint room and transcribed the notes to post-its.

Everyone agreed that this biased the process and didn’t feel natural, so for the next ones we decided on not improvising and stay together taking notes at the same time the interview was happening.

We managed to have one user coming in person for the interview. So we sat in the other room, watched the user’s screen, their facial reactions (and comments) and took notes. It was a much better process and felt faster, as well. We did the same with the remote ones.

Notes compilation

After that, we had our visual feedback from the user interviews, a mass of colored post-its representing the journey we asked them to do and understand. Now what?

Group summarising

My first idea was to summarize all feedback myself. Then I thought:

What about if we use our collective brain to do that?

So I set the time timer to 30 minutes and asked everyone to write down three things, based on User Feedback, for each talking point on the feedback board:

• Main takeaways
• Areas of attention
• Recommendations

My idea was that it’d be easier to identify patterns from a handful of summaries instead of dozens of post its. And it was!

Sprint Results

We were able to answer all the sprint questions, confirm some of our assumptions, and negate some others, which is also good.

From the recommendations, it was possible to extract a clear, actionable plan, that generated a backlog of tasks with the whole journey attached to it, from beginning to end. We have enough work for a couple of months from that.

And most importantly, the whole team understands why we’re going in this direction, and that we’ll need quick validation with real users along the way.

This alone should shorten the loop between idea and validation, and will bring the user to the center of the whole development process.

If the Design Sprint can improve on the development culture to make it more user-centric, that is a giant leap for design as a strategic tool.

Improvements

Some things became clear to all, and showed in the Design Sprint Retrospective: working together alone and moving on works, it’s much better than spend hours debating a topic and end up with a compromise and not a real commitment.

User validation is fantastic, and everybody was impressed by how much it was possible to achieve in just five days.

For the next time, we’ll work a little more before the sprint, as well as train the sprint team, so they know what to expect from each step of the process.

I’ll also gather some examples for Long Term Goals or Sprint Questions on a similar industry, that can increase people’s confidence when coming up with their HMW and Sprint Questions.

We also thought that quantity sometimes should be limited. It would be good to have, for example, a limit of sprint questions per user, to speed up the process and pre-prioritise.

Is this the end?

As a final step, I generated documentation of each day of the sprint, not only to capture the result but also serve as a guide for other teams wanting to apply it in their areas.

This was only our first Design Sprint together. Based on the results, we’re confident that it is a useful tool to achieve in 5 days work that would be otherwise the result of weeks or months, and puts the whole team together towards the same objective because they were part of each step of the process.

Design Sprints are both a Sprint, and a Marathon.

Was it worth it? Definitely. Was it a bit chaotic? A little, and that required some improvisation skills.

But we’re all musicians in the jazz of life, and the good thing about Design Sprints is that we can iterate and improve, and the next one will be different.

Design sprint jazz was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first time I read the Sprint book I thought it was a panacea, something that could solve small improvements or create disruptive products… but that’s not quite the case.

Here I explain what are the cases on which Design Sprints are not the solution you’re looking for, and when they fit you like a glove.

Design Sprints are not for you if…

The problem is too small

If the problem is easily solved by one person, in a short period of time, a Design Sprint makes no sense.

A simple example would be color contrast. Your product uses font colors without enough contrast, and your customers are complaining it’s hard to read the app. Your product has a clear problem and a single obvious solution. Improve the contrast. You can check WCAG Color Contrast Checker and, most importantly, make an agreement with other designers that from now on there’s a minimum contrast standard for the App (tip: it’s 4.5:1).

The problem is unclear

How can you answer a question you don’t know? Yogi Berra said that

If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else

I’ve heard about failed Design Sprints, because people got together without the big question they want answered. If you’re looking to an empty backlog and thinking “I have no ideas, maybe what I need is a Design Sprint”, don’t do it.

First think about the problem you want to solve, the big question you want answered, and then use the Design Sprint as a pragmatic, effective way to get you your answers.

You want to replace Agile Sprints with Design Sprints

Homonyms are words that sound alike but have different meanings. Agile Sprint and Design Sprint sound the same, but are two completely different things.

In Agile Sprints, a team breaks a big problem into small chunks, and must complete those agreed tasks in a certain amount of time. Review what was done and continue until the product is complete. It’s a practical way to develop a product, and can have User Feedback as a validation method. But that’s not a Design Sprint.

Design Sprint is a way to find solutions through a diverge/converge method, as a team, and validate it at the end of sprint with real users. It’s Design Thinking in practice. At the end of the Sprint you’ll have answers if there’s market fit, an idea of cognitive load, and more importantly, if users understood what you came up with.

With the output of the Design Sprint you’ll have material to start your Agile Sprints, breaking down the findings into Epics and Tasks, and filling your backlog.

The best part is that after a Design Sprint the whole team will be engaged and committed for that path you’ve traced together.

You want to change the Design Sprint process completely

Well… Design Sprints were created in 2010 at Google Ventures, and applied to hundreds (if not thousands) of problems, what caused it to evolve with time.

AJ&Smart, a Berlin based Design Agency specialised in Design Sprints, worked with Jake Knapp and came up with Design Sprint 2.0, an evolution based on empirical data. Bottom line is: there are experienced people evolving it already, so chances are the modifications you’re thinking of, have already been tested.

Does that mean you can’t change or create activities? Not at all. In a recent Sprint I facilitated, we did both. Changed something that didn’t need to be changed, and added something new. The former wasn’t better than the original, so we rolled back, and the latter actually added value, so we kept it.

The advice is to do small reversible experiments and iterate. Give the Design Sprint method a chance and see the results before changing it.

You can’t do User Testing with 5 users

For instance, the problem you’re trying to solve can’t be user tested. Or you just want to use parts of the Design Sprint, like problem definition and solution sketching, but don’t want to do user testing at the end.

I’d say: if you can’t test with users, don’t do a Design Sprint. The whole point of Design Sprint is to collect feedback from real users with a realistic prototype, to capture what would be their reactions in real life.

This might be an opportunity for you to be creative on how you user test your case. If it’s a product too complex to prototype in 1 day, like a car, you can build the market brochure to test market fit. If it’s a book, you can produce different synopsis and AB test them with your 5 users.

You can, of course, use some activities of Design Sprint in a particular situation. Just realise this will not be a Design Sprint.

And why 5 users? Diminished returns. Jakob Nielsen found this number researching for the ideal cost/benefit for usability tests, and works well for all kind of user testing.

So, are Design Sprints for you?

If you’d like to answer big or complicated questions fast, and:

• The problem is big enough to involve a whole team for 4 days
• The problem is clear and evident (based on user pain points)
• You’re looking for a method to find a product/feature direction
• You’re looking for a way to solve a problem, not reshaping a problem solving tool
• You can find a way to test your solution with 5 real users

Then it looks like Design Sprints are for you.

Feel free to ask me questions about Design Sprint in practice and how they can be applied to your case. Here to help.

Design Sprints are not for everyone was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Há mais ou menos um ano desinstalei o aplicativo do FB do meu telefone, utilizando a plataforma somente a partir do Brave browser no celular ou no computador. É um navegador específico que bloqueia anúncios por padrão. O resultado deste experimento foi que a memória do meu telefone agradeceu e o tempo investido no Facebook foi reduzido a 5–10 minutos 2 ou 3 vezes por semana. Foi o suficiente por um tempo…

E então dois eventos aconteceram: A entrevista para Forbes do ex-CEO da WhatsApp e o Facebook data breach de Setembro de 2018. Isto gerou a seguinte reflexão:

Qual é o real objetivo do Facebook?

Qual é o objetivo do FB enquanto produto? Manter o usuário interagindo com o site/app pelo máximo de tempo possível.

Qual é a forma mais eficiente de manter o usuário pelo máximo de tempo? Criar bolhas de interesses (dissonance free environment) que reforçam a si mesmos, para que nós possamos crer que estamos sempre certos nas nossas crenças e afirmações.

Vi o seguinte experimento em um vídeo da Vox: Se a pessoa entra em alguns grupos a favor do presidente dos US, a timeline do facebook começa a mostrar trolls contra democratas e conspirações contra o governo por parte da imprensa. Em seguida procurando por “vacinas” no pinterest, apareceram anúncios anti-vacinas. E quanto mais extremos os likes ou visualizações, mais extremos os conteúdos oferecidos, reforçando a polarização.

Isto não significa que A ou B estão certos, mas sim que redes sociais em geral, Facebook especialmente (pela variedade de usuários e número de friends) reforçam polarizações, segmentando pessoas, criando uma falsa noção de comunidade.

A quem pertencem os meus dados?

Tudo o que compartilhamos no Facebook é nosso, correto? Well… sim e não. Os termos e condições dizem que o conteúdo pertence ao usuário, mas que para poder fornecer o serviço, o usuário cede direitos de uso, manipulação, distribuição, tradução, cópia, derivações ao Facebook e parceiros (sub-licensable).

Eu posso apagar o meu conteúdo a qualquer momento, mas uma vez colocado na plataforma, ele pode ser utilizado tanto para melhorar o meu “perfil de personalização“ (leia: publicidade) copiado, transferido, derivado, etc. Não somente enquanto estou navegando no Facebook, mas em qualquer app/site que tenha botões de like/comments/login pelo fb.

O que pode ser feito com os meus dados?

Para os 87 milhões de usuários que tiveram seus dados minerados — sem consentimento prévio — pela Cambridge Analytica em 2016 (com repercussões até março de 2018) o impacto foi manipulação emocional.

Facebook manipulando as emoções dos usuários?

Experimente ler a seguinte pesquisa: Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks publicado na National Academy of Science dos US.

In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed.

Tradução: “Em um experimento com pessoas que usam o Facebook, testamos se o contágio emocional ocorre fora de interações pessoais entre indivíduos através da redução de conteúdo emocional na timeline”

Esta pesquisa foi aplicada a 689 mil pessoas no Facebook.

These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.

Tradução: “Estes resultados indicam que emoções expressadas por outrem no Facebook influenciam as nossas próprias emoções, constituindo evidência experimental de contágio via redes sociais em larga escala”

Isto ficou conhecido como o Facebook Scandal, e nas palavras de Jacob Silverman, autor do livro Terms of Service: Social Media, Surveillance, and the Price of Constant Connection:

What’s disturbing about how Facebook went about this, though, is that they essentially manipulated the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of users without asking permission

Tradução: “O que é perturbador sobre o procedimento do Facebook nisso, é que eles essencialmente manipularam os sentimentos de centenas de milhares de usuários sem pedir permissão.”

Então é tudo uma conspiração?

Não, de forma alguma. É um business, com objetivos claros de negócio. Eu, enquanto usuário, é que acordei para alguns fatos óbvios que estavam em segundo plano. Mas não é somente este o motivo pelo qual decidi sair da plataforma…

WhatsApp CEO e Data Breach

Li a entrevista da Forbes com o ex-CEO da WhatsApp, Brian Acton, sobre o motivo dele ter aberto mão de $850 milhões em ações para sair antes do tempo do Facebook com um tweet misterioso: “It is time. #deletefacebook”. Boa leitura sobre as práticas de negócio do fb, recomendo.

E finalmente, o data breach que vazou dados pessoais de 30 milhões de usuários do Facebook. Não só dados como nome, email, data de nascimento, empregadores, histórico educacional, preferência religiosa, dispositivos utilizados, páginas curtidas e buscas recentes, mas também acesso à aplicações conectadas pelo facebook, como Spotify, Strava e outras, estão na posse de alguém cujas intenções são desconhecidas. Confira aqui para ver se você foi afetado.

Junte isso com as eleições de 2018 no Brasil

Nestas eleições, vi famílias se afastando por “diferenças políticas”; vi amigos de longa data discutindo opiniões abertamente em fórum público; pessoas acusando umas as outras ou exigindo manifestação do voto, cujo segredo é protegido por lei.

Isto somado com os algoritmos que fazem com que todos nós achemos que estamos certos (pois só vemos confirmações às nossas crenças na timeline) e a realização de que todos temos um tempo finito neste planeta, e que ele pode ser melhor utilizado de outras formas, é uma boa hora para virar a página e seguir em frente.

Para você que continua no Facebook

Seja feliz! Seja consciente de que os dados fornecidos (posts, likes, paginas, grupos, links, videos, fotos, mensagens, apps) serão utilizados para construir um perfil digital, para “personalizar” a sua experiência. Com consciência disso, cada um faz o que acha melhor.

Não me acho certo por sair do Facebook, ou que quem permanecer está errado. Cada um que cuide da sua vida. 😊

Compartilho estes dados para explicar de forma objetiva e sintática as minhas razões pessoais, mas cada um tem as suas, e procuro respeitar.

Como sair do Facebook?

Caso queira acompanhar, vá em https://www.facebook.com/dyi/ e selecione Download your information. Em algumas horas horas eu fui notificado que o fb havia preparado um arquivo zip de 1GB com a minha história na plataforma. Depois, https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account/

Os posts, comments, videos e fotos ainda ficam na plataforma por até 90 dias. Quero crer que eles apagam dos backups também, mas acho meio impraticável.

E agora? Como ficar em contato?

Caso você queira entrar em contato, esporadicamente consulto a minha timeline no twitter — @bitbonsai, vou procurar escrever mais aqui (ou em outra plataforma) e ser mais presente no momento presente.

Due to the nice number, in September 2017 I decided to repeat the experiment and see the effects.

Protocol

Water fasting protocol is super simple. Drink water, don’t eat, for 3 days (72h). Additionally I had black coffee and mint tea as well.

In preparation for that, I did a 40 hour water fasting, to have an idea of how difficult would be to not eat for longer. So in the new moon of August I stayed 40h only drinking water and plan to do a longer fasting in the next new moon.

I also took Magnesium and Potassium supplements, 2 capsules in the morning with coffee. Since I was going to drink water a lot more, didn’t want to loose minerals.

Why new moon?

The gravitational influence of the moon on earth is a fact (tides). I’ve heard interesting observations on what happens to plants on different moons, but haven’t researched to confirm that.

My real reason is that it’s easy to set time bound experiments to moon phases, and also has a nice ring to it.

Fasting, first 24h

The first 24h are easy, specially if you keep yourself mentally busy. Work helps, it’s easy to concentrate and you have more time to focus.

I started the day with a black coffee, just like any other day. We’ve been doing intermittent fasting for a while now, and not having breakfast is a routine.

Hunger coms in waves. The trick is to drink more water than the usual, specially when you feel hungry.

It’s interesting to observe the patterns… I felt hungry at specific times of the day, and in other times, not hungry at all. Of course I was going to the bathroom more frequently, more water in, more water out.

At night, a tea is specially good, due to its warmth, before bed.

Second day

Confirming my early memories, the second day is the hardest one. Slight headache, hunger is a bit more pronounced, slight pain around the eyes. Nothing as close as keto flu though, so it was easy to go through it. By the way, after experiencing keto adaptation, fasting seems to be much easier.

Third day

Woke up feeling great, based on my experience with keto, I believe I was into ketosis again. Too bad I didn’t have a way to measure it, but was feeling more energy, not hungry, could probably go for 5 days or more of water fasting. Still having black coffee in the morning and usually another one in the afternoon, and a tea every once in a while. Water the rest of the time.

I decided to stop the fasting because I could compare with my experience from 25 years ago, which was also 3 days, feeling good about doing a long water fast at least once a quarter.

Breaking it

I remember that when I was 17 and did the same fasting, breaking it was the hardest part. Then I went to a vegetarian restaurant and tried to eat, couldn’t went home and slept for 4h, then was able to eat a papaya and started from there.

Now was much easier, just started with few cucumbers, then I was able to eat an avocado, and after a few hours, was eating normally. No hardships whatsoever.

Results

I lost 3kg, now I was with the same weight as 10 years ago. Despite the fact that I was drinking lots more water, didn’t feel cramps or weak. Probably due to the Mg and K intake, and faster keto adaptation.

Water fasting seems to be an awesome way to get into ketosis, next time I do strict keto for a couple months will kickstart it with a water fasting, for sure.

Didn’t exercised or ran during the fasting, because I didn’t do that in the past, so I could compare better, and because I hadn’t done that in a while. Next time will try to run and see the effects.

The focus and ability to concentrate increases a lot when fasting, and will power and self control increase.

Can be psychological, but I felt I was back to ketosis after 2 days. Next time I’ll get some strips to confirm.

Next steps

3 days is easy. I’m thinking about doing a long water fast (3–5 days) once a quarter, and next time, after te fasting, another experiment with keto for a longer period to compare with the first one.

This experiment is closed.

Experiment 3: Water Fasting was originally published in Wolff experiments on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Then I stumbled on a blog called renegatehealth.com, from Frederic Patenaude. I liked that the guy doesn’t exactly believe in keto, so his articles are less biased than the most. Also, he goes after research, providing data for most of his claims.

Anyway, I found the post with the title Boosting brain power with classical and baroque music. This sounded interesting as I work in an environment that requires lots of data processing and connecting in creative ways.

The TLDR: according to a study from John Hopkins University, baroque music (1600~1750) with tempos between 50–80 bpms can

stabilize mental, physical and emotional rhythms to attain a state of deep concentration and focus in which large amounts of content information can be processed and learned.

Not only that, but I found out another study from Stanford where a group of scientists stuck people with noise cancelling headphones into fMRI machines and found that baroque is able to lock and sustain attention, due to the transitions of this kind of music and a brain process called segmentation. In the words of one of the professors, Vinod Menon:

I’m not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner

That seemed nice, so I decided to to an experiment out of it.

Current situation

My daily work environment is noisy, we work on an open floor structure, with lots of talking. It’s very convenient because if you have a question regarding a feature or code, the best way to get the answer is walk a few steps and ask the author (thanks to git blame).

So noise cancelling headphones is the way I found to be able to concentrate.

But what music would be more efficient? Usually when I’m coding I like to listen to Skrillex, Zomboy or Kill the Noise, because it’s fast, cyclic and speeds up my brain (apart from being good music). I usually listen a playlist or a song in loop mode, so it becomes a background sound. And it works for me… Would baroque music be more effective?

The experiment protocol

• Create a playlist based on Frederic’s blog post recommendations
• Listen ONLY that playlist while working
• Listen to music as often as possible while working
• Use this protocol for at least 1 month

I created a Spotify playlist called BrainBoost with 253 songs (13h), with pieces from Bach, Marais and Handel.

I’ve listened it from July 15th ‘till August 15th, while working (~4–5h a day, the rest is meetings) and with no exceptions. When biking to and from work, I’d usually have my daily dose of Skrillex (or other things).

During the experiment

I was able to identify which songs resonate more, usually the ones with lower bpm, and skip the ones with choir, because voices and words distract me. I’d probably be able to reduce the playlist, but kept it and skipped the songs I didn’t find useful.

On the other hand, found out that Bach is indeed a genius, as well as Handel, and got to know Marais, which I’m a fan now.

Since day one concentration and focus were easier, and I could feel an overall calmness that was higher than the usual. Stressful situations or meetings didn’t have the same effect as before.

I have to admit though that sometimes I’d like to listen to something else to have some variety, specially if I was a bit sleepy or tired, but stayed strong in the protocol to validate it after a month, which is kind of short time.

Conclusions

After one month only listening to baroque 50–80bpm music to work, I can affirm that — for me — it does work.

It facilitates concentration and keeps me in a calmer mood than with other music or without music. It also has the added effect of not being obtrusive, so it’s like it creates an atmosphere around you that allows deep calmer focus.

Right now I’m listening to Orchestral Suite №3 in D Major — Air in G from Bach (not on the playlist) to write this up. Some people might feel it melancholic, I advise. I feel it calm.

Next steps

To only listen to it I found it limiting, but if there’s a need to calm down, interpret large chunks of information and produce tangible output, this is the kind of music I’d choose to work with.

This experiment is closed.

Experiment 2: BrainBoost Playlist was originally published in Wolff experiments on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

28 anos da www + 23 desde que editei o primeiro HTML

Nota: este post começou a ser escrito em 2014, foi esquecido e concluído em 2017

Ontem no trabalho estávamos falando de browsers antigos, e achei interessante o fato dos meus colegas falarem que o primeiro browser que viram foi o IE6, ou mesmo Netscape 2. Por que? Porque eu me lembro do Mosaic…

Em meados de 1994 fui no escritório do pai e um amigo dele que era responsável pela TI me mostrou o Mosaic 2.0, e um protocolo que nem sei se ainda existe chamado Gopher.

Algum tempo depois, comprei uma MacWorld ou MacHelp, que tinha na capa algo como "Aprenda HTML". Aquilo me fisgou. Em seguida comprei outra revista que vinha com um disquete que tinha um browser, chamado WinWeb, e algumas páginas html da Conectiva.

Ainda não existia, que eu me lembre, provedores de internet. Alguns BBS ofereciam acesso à email, mas não me lembro de acesso à web. Então o que pude fazer foi abrir o disquete para entender como funcionava aquilo. Achei uns arquivos .html, arrastei eles para um notepad que tinha aberto. E foi aí que tudo começou… ainda lembro a surpresa de descobrir que era texto puro, e achei uma referência a um arquivo .gif. Em seguida peguei uma foto da esposa e salvei por cima do gif no disquete. Reload no browser e a foto dela estava no documento. Nota: aquela versão do WinWeb foi a primeira com suporte à tag img. Comecei a plantar a vida que tenho hoje hackeando o site da Conectiva num disquete.

Na época tinha um estúdio de design gráfico com um amigo. O trabalho mesmo era Photoshop 2.5 e CorelDRAW 3 (já havia o 4, mas as versões pares não funcionavam direito) mas rapidamente editar html se tornou um hobby. A referência mais antiga que achei na WayBack Machine foi um site que fiz para a Colcci, em dezembro de 1996. Mas ele é anterior a isso. Vi que foi um freela para a NutecNet, que depois virou zaz.com.br e depois terra.com.br, então já devia estar publicando algo para eles me acharem. O site foi otimizado para Netscape 2, e usava um recurso novo chamado tables para layout e background image.

No começo de 97 fiz junto com o Marlon da Morphy o que foi o primeiro site comercial do Brasil em Flash. Ainda começamos a fazer usando FutureSplash, quando a FutureWave foi comprada pela Macromedia e mudou o nome do produto para Flash. Foi nessa época que mudamos para Porto Alegre e comecei a fazer interface design para a Intermídia, e ainda lá fiz os primeiros sites da Grendene (quando derrubei vários servidores do terra com um script em Perl) e o primeiro site da Rider em 1998.

Depois disso muita água passou debaixo da ponte. Em 2004 trabalhei com o Juliano e Totoro, gente que admiro e muito aprendi. Hoje estou em Amsterdam, observando milhões de pessoas interagindo com um serviço pela web, que surgiu em 1996, o mesmo ano que publiquei o primeiro site comercial.

Hoje é 2017. Comecei a escrever este post 3 anos atrás e esqueci completamente de concluí-lo.

Mas a web continua cada vez mais relevante, agora mais em telefones do que computadores per se, e Internet of Things ainda está incipiente mas entrando na vida das pessoas, meio por baixo da porta, sem alarde, mas ainda deve amadurecer antes de ser onipresente.

E tudo isso aconteceu graças a um estudante de física do CERN, chamado Tim Berners-Lee. O primeiro documento da web foi restaurado pelo CERN ao seu endereço original (http://info.cern.ch), e o primeiro web browser também pode ser acessado (pela web).

O Mosaic, o primeiro contato que tive com essa tal de internet, nasceu em 1993, o mesmo ano que a Natya. E tudo começou porque vi um browser no escritório do meu pai, e arrastei alguns arquivos para o notepad. E isso me trouxe para a cidade que pretendo ficar… a vida é realmente um processo fascinante.