About

I am a prodigal student at Carleton University in Ottawa, where I’m following up on a successful undergrad in Computer Science with a Master’s degree. My focus is on building web tools for collaboration and decision-making. When I’m not coding I’m probably out walking the sweetest little whippet you ever did see.

What do I mean by “average bear”? The idea comes from the observation that we are very often confronted with secondary tasks, like keeping passwords (primary task: accessing a valuable resource), or remembering touchpad gestures (primary task: operating a MacBook), or documenting our work (primary task: doing the work), or securing a system (primary task: building one). We are hopefully smarter than your average bear at the primary challenges in our lives, but I wonder if we can say that about the secondary tasks that we face every day.

This collection of notes operates on the theory that we quite likely regress toward the mean on the performance of tasks that are misaligned with our central goals. Speaking only for myself of course, I find that such tasks can also bring out a distinctly ursine cast of mind. Is it your job is to build necessary things that your average bear would prefer they didn’t have to deal with? What design trade-offs might that imply?

The scrunched form of average bear is something of an appeal for developers to go easy on hurried users. The word is of course entirely made up. It’s derived from μ (read: ‘mu’) symbolizing the population mean, and ursi, which is the plural form of the latin word for bears. Mu of ursi, mu-ursi … μrsi. Read it quickly and it sounds like “mercy”.

Image credit: Unsplash on Flickr