I finally got my Simple invite. Simple is an online banking startup that wants to make the experience of using banks much, much better. As far as I can tell they are delivering on that experience - their site and iPhone app are a joy to use. They also focus on the whole experience - the ATM card that came in the mail was delivered in a beautiful package, and the signup process, which requires gathering a ton of private information about you, was painless.

That said, I realized shortly after signing up that I'm going to be sticking with Ally Bank for one simple reason: they refund ATM fees. I used to hate ATM's. The option I had with ATM's was either a) look up the nearest in-network ATM online, then walk three blocks, all the while wondering why I are doing this to save a measly $3; or b) go to the liquor store ATM and hate myself for spending money to get at my money.

ATM fee refunds turned an experience I hated into something I can brag about ("It doesn't matter, I get the money back at the end of the month"). I get about $120 in ATM refunds every year, as well as the time and stress savings trying to find an in-network ATM saved, easily worth two or three percentage points of interest. I don't know how it makes business sense for Ally to pay for my ATM fees, but it's their killer feature.

I appreciate what Simple is doing and wish them the best. If you are still saddled with a card from a bank with physical branches, switching to Simple is one of the best things you could do. However at the moment Ally's ATM fee refunds (a better ATM user experience) over Simple's awesome website and iPhone app (a better web experience).

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On Saturday my post on how not to ask questions at a conference was the number one post on the site for a solid six hours, between four and ten PM. Here are some raw stats from the last day.

• Since the post was submitted, I've gotten 31,787 pageviews to my site; 14,478 in the nine hours between post submission and midnight, and another 15k on Sunday. One post can bring in amazing amounts of traffic, and justify all of the effort you've put into creating quality blog content.

• In just the last two days I've gotten 50% as much traffic as I did in the whole previous year.

• Of those pageviews, 30,807 were for the article itself. 414 people visited my homepage (1 in 72 people) and 253 people visited my about page (1 in every 130).

• 8,142 visits (roughly 27%) came from mobile devices. I am really glad I added a mobile/responsive view for smaller screens earlier this year, as this makes the content much more consumable on a small screen.

• 69% of mobile visits (18% of the total) came from an iOS device.

• Roughly 10,000 clicks came from Hacker News and 8,700 came from the Programming subreddit, where my post is still on the frontpage a day and a half later. If your post is doing well on HN, it probably makes sense to submit it to Proggit as well, as there's a large contingent of people that use Proggit exclusively.

• 1,479 people have clicked on the aggregate Bit.ly link and 97 people have Tweeted the post (roughly 1 in 300).

• I added 18 Twitter followers (about 1 in every 1800 visitors), bumping my total to 418. I added one new Bitbucket follower and zero new newsletter subscribers.

• 23 people left comments on the post (about 1 in every 1300). 156 people left comments on Hacker News, off about 10k clicks, and ~160 people left comments on Reddit, off of 9k clicks.

I've posted my "conversion rate" in all cases because I don't feel like it's amazingly high. This is probably the nature of this sort of traffic though; there to read an article and learn something and then move on to the next thing. I suppose if I can reach the frontpage a few times in short succession, people may start to recognize my name and there would be a snowball effect, in terms of the number of people signing up to follow me or posting comments.

I don't have the tools in place at the moment to be able to test my "conversion rates" and see whether they can be improved. All in all though, the low rates at which people are clicking through to other material on my site suggests that I should put any information you'd like readers to know about yourself on the post view page, or in the footer of the post itself.

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Via Tyler Cowen, an author from the Wall Street Journal interviewed the head of admissions at the Harvard Business School. The whole article is good, but this particular line stood out:

The best recommendations have a lot of verbs. They say, "She did this," versus adjectives that simply describe you.

I remember in 5th grade that we had to write Show Not Tell stories. The idea was to get out of the habit of writing "Kyle is in 3rd grade and he is really kind" - style stories and instead writing "When Joey's mom couldn't pick him up, Kyle walked him all the way home, even though it was two miles in the wrong direction."

I don't know why later teachers dropped the Show Not Tell agenda from the curriculum, but apparently people still write in this style. Maybe recommenders are lazy and it's easier to write "Shannon is a hard worker" than it is to come up with a concrete example. Maybe the recommender doesn't know the student very well, which is discussed in the article, and a problem.

The other possibility is that the person being recommended hasn't done anything interesting. It's easy to tell, because if you have done things, people tend to mention them when they're introducing you to someone, like "This is Jeff. Jeff wrote the entire billing system." You can also tell because the bullet points on your resume will have really bland verbs in them that don't really say anything, like "Developed marketing skills" or "Monitored social analytics tools for Company X".

One day you are going to have to wake up and decide to be Someone that Does Things. The World of Doing can be scary at first because there are lots of things that need to be done and no one is there to tell you how to do them.

So: what verbs to people use to describe you? Which of the versions below would you rather someone used to describe you?

• "He's really good at finding tips and tricks to save time."

• "He built a replacement for the school's calendar system and got 550 people to sign up."

• "She is a really fierce competitor."
• "She won the regional finals for her team by making free throws and getting a key steal in the final minutes."

• "She's a hard worker."
• "She rewrote the website to make it 100% faster, which boosted signups by 50%."

• "His code is always reliable."
• "While he was in charge, the API was down for a total of three minutes in two years."

Related: See Be Specific at Less Wrong.

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I went to Pycon last month (my first conference ever!) The conference was totally awesome and I met a lot of cool people. But I was also pretty appalled at the question asking at the end of each talk. Here's some stuff you should keep in mind before you ask a question at a conference.

• Ask questions that you believe would be relevant to at least a third of the people in the room. Otherwise, avoid the temptation to show off your specialized knowledge to the room and just ask the speaker afterwards. Most of them are approachable on Twitter, email, or just in the hallways.

• Ask only one question. If you have more than one question, pick the best and ask the other one in private later. Or ask your first question and then go to the back of the line. Other people have questions to ask as well and may not get to ask one.

• Avoid buzzword bingo. It feels like lots of people walk up to the microphone just so the room can hear them mention some buzzword that indicates they know something about the topic. If I am running a Scrum team should I use Soak testing? How does Node.js influence the development of the PyPy project? If you wouldn't ask the question without a room full of people present, then don't ask.

• Ask a question, don't make a comment. Talk time is for the speaker to be the expert, not you. Write up your comment as a blog post and post it for everyone to read later.

• Be brief. After a talk, time is precious and many people may have questions for the speaker, so don't ramble about how nice it is to finally see the speaker in person, or how enlightening the talk is, even if those things are true. It's a matter of courtesy to everyone else in the room.

There is an easy solution to bad questions that no one has bothered to implement yet. Have people submit questions anonymously and have the speaker or a moderator choose which ones to answer, or have the room vote using a tool like Google Moderator. This will solve the problem of the question asker-bragger asking a trivial question.

The other solution is to charge money to ask a question, which could go to whatever cause you want. If enough people in the room have the same question they can contribute to the fee to ask the question and have it asked.

Update: There's some good discussion on Hacker News. "If the question you're asking makes you look smart, there's a good chance you're being a douchebag."

Also my friend Alan Shreve wants to know if it's appropriate to push back if the speaker dodges your question.

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