Tag: Seth Dillingham

Sometimes the Developers (Pleasantly) Surprise Me

Seth Dillingham has a funny post here about users who ask him to configure Conversant in weird ways,

A Conversant user recently asked me to custom-configure one of his sites, because he wants to do something that isn’t available via the web-based configuration.

Why not? Because we never saw anybody wanting to do this. We’ve never done it, never tested it.

I set it up for him, but I’m still experiencing heart palpitations.

I know what he means, because I’m the one who requested the odd custom configuration. So far, its worked incredibly well. In a couple months I’ll be able to show off the cool things I’m doing thanks to this bit of wizardry.

But what it really does is speak to just how well Seth’s developed Conversant. A lot of software tends to produce very frustrating roadblocks. Its great if you want to do things the exact same way the developer does them, but start deviating from that plan or start asking “what if I mixed feature A and feature B” together, and most of the time you’re out of luck.

Conversant, on the other hand, does an excellent job of taking a wide variety of basic building blocks and then letting the user mix and match them in pretty much anyway he or she wants. There have been a handful of times where I’ve done something in Conversant and it worked even though Seth said he hadn’t thought of using the feature in that way. When you can do things with software that the developers never intended or thought of, you’ve got an extremely well-done piece of software.

And that’s a great way to describe Conversant.

Sponsor Seth in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life

Seth Dillingham is looking for sponsors for the American Cancer Society’s upcoming Relay for Life. Seth’s been doing this for a few years, and he’s getting close to his goal of $400 this year.

Cancer is one of those diseases that we’ve spent a lot of money researching which still persists, largely because we now know that preventing and curing cancer is a vastly more difficult prospect that was imagined when Nixon launched his war on cancer in 1971. But we are getting closer to having a better handle on cancer, and the multitude of different approaches that are being investigated are mind boggling. But, of course, someone needs to foot the bill for that research and treatment.

Most people know somebody who has died of cancer. Two people I know died of cancer in the last few years, and the really horrifying part was that a) they died relatively young, and b) they died relatively quickly. An acquaintance who discovered he had throat cancer died just a few months later. A coworker lasted just 6 months after being diagnosed (and undergoing experimental treatments for her cancer).

Even with my aunt’s Huntington’s at least she and her family got several years to prepare for and come to terms with the disease. But to wake up one morning and be told that some random mutation is going to kill you in a few months and there’s nothing anyone can do about it is downright obscene.