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    <title>cmdln.net_2007-06-06</title>
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    <outline text="Intro" Offset="00:17">
      <outline text="2nd anniversary show, June 20th"/>
      <outline text="Quick review of The Jennifer Morgue, by Charles Stross"/>
    </outline>
    <outline text="Word of the Week: Classic C" Offset="03:45">
      <outline text="http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/Classic-C.html"/>
    </outline>
    <outline text="Inner Chapter: Empathy" Offset="04:51">
      <outline text="What is it?">
        <outline text="Empathy - the ability to understand and share the feelings of another"/>
        <outline text="Connotes understanding without necessarily having exactly the same experience"/>
        <outline text="Sympathy - understanding between people; common feeling"/>
        <outline text="Connotes a shared frame of reference or overlapping experience"/>
        <outline text="Empathy is harder since it requires getting out of one's own head"/>
        <outline text="It is more useful as it is more generally applicable"/>
      </outline>
      <outline text="Why is it important?">
        <outline text="Personally">
          <outline text="While hackers often share a common core of experience, there are often substantial differences"/>
          <outline text="The academic versus the self taught"/>
          <outline text="The monomaniacally obsessed versus the more casual hobbyist"/>
          <outline text="Both experience and skills are often very broad">
            <outline text="Cannot always rely on common experience, past or present"/>
            <outline text="Some empathy can help when your weaknesses are different from someone else's"/>
            <outline text="Can especially help when your strength is someone else's weakness"/>
          </outline>
          <outline text="Despite common social skill problems, hackers are people, too"/>
          <outline text="Empathy with a challenge, technical or otherwise, promotes positive feeling"/>
          <outline text="Estrangement can magnify the anxiety problems induce"/>
        </outline>
        <outline text="Professionally">
          <outline text="Especially in interface design"/>
          <outline text="Both for users and other hackers"/>
          <outline text="Having a reasonable model of someone else's expectations reduces surprises in the interface"/>
          <outline text="APIs are used by people, too, so are governed just as much by intention and expectation"/>
          <outline text="Lack of empathy can lead to unclear, hard to understand APIs"/>
          <outline text="&quot;It was obvious to me&quot; vs. &quot;It is obvious to the average hacker&quot;"/>
        </outline>
        <outline text="In a business">
          <outline text="Helps with requirements analysis"/>
          <outline text="Similar to interface design"/>
          <outline text="Understand the pain, problem felt by the stakeholder"/>
          <outline text="Maybe understand competitors, why they took different approaches"/>
          <outline text="Mentoring, professional development"/>
          <outline text="Like the personal aspect, but more so"/>
        </outline>
      </outline>
      <outline text="How to cultivate it?">
        <outline text="Listen"/>
        <outline text="Consciously stop thinking about yourself, how everything relates to your own concerns"/>
        <outline text="Otherwise, not really sure"/>
      </outline>
    </outline>
    <outline text="Outro" Offset="16:17">
      <outline text="Contact me">
        <outline text="Email to feedback@thecommandline.net"/>
        <outline text="Web site at http://thecommandline.net/"/>
        <outline text="IM to command.line@skype"/>
        <outline text="Listener comment line is 360-252-7284"/>
        <outline text="del.icio.us tag is &quot;for:cmdln&quot;"/>
        <outline text="http://twitter.com/cmdln"/>
      </outline>
      <outline text="I'd like to thank libsyn.com for AAC hosting and Wouter de Bie for MP3 hosting"/>
      <outline text="These notes and the show audio and music are covered by a Creative Commons license">
        <outline text="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/"/>
        <outline text="Attribution, non-commercial, share alike"/>
      </outline>
    </outline>
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