Posts Tagged “BibleTech”
The tempestuous 2010s: Illusory spiritual growth
In the early 2010s, I’m sure my fellow Christadelphians saw in me growing knowledge and ability and a continued commitment to God. They must have thought that I was set for life, and was becoming the spiritual leader I was always meant to be.
And yet, this was the decade I outgrew my faith. My path was only leading in one direction, and that direction was away from religion.
Where did this disconnect come from? How could so many people be so wrong?
The tempestuous 2010s: The decade I outgrew my faith
As I look back on the 2010s, I get a better perspective on how my deconversion worked and how much changed. Where my 2019 review will probably end up “2019 was a lot like 2018, but still different”, the difference for me between January 2010 and December 2019 is night and day.
At the start of the decade, I was preparing to speak at a Bible software development conference, and my commitment to my childhood religion was unquestioned by all, including me. By the end of the decade I had spent more than a third of it as a self-identified atheist, had started a blog where I wrote critically and at length about religion, was involved in several strongly anti-theistic communities, and was about as certain as I could be that I was never going back.
Topic management in BPBible
In the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about my experience speaking at BibleTech in 2010. One of the biggest problems I had was trying to cover too much. In my talk I spoke about Bible software and usability: Why we should care about personal notes and why Bible software couldn’t just replace paper.
What I want to discuss in this post is my own personal vision: What I had already implemented in BPBible, and what my future plans were. Though it was meant to be an important part of my talk, none of it ended up covered at BibleTech.
User editable content in Bible software
Recently, I reflected on my experience speaking at BibleTech in 2010. The key starting point for my talk was that lots of people were doing Bible study using paper Bibles, word processors, and other general tools. Why weren’t they using our specially designed Bible software? Was there something wrong in the way we designed software? Or were our users wrong for not realising how much better our software was?
I think this mind-set illustrates a key problem with technology-led solutions. It’s very tempting as a software developer to think that if we take an existing process and replicate it exactly in software it will end up better. But what we actually find is that we were unable to replicate it exactly. Sometimes this leads to complaints, other times the system we build is just ignored.
While both Bible software and technology have changed a lot since 2010, I think the key usability principles I talked about then still apply.
The importance of personal Bible notes
In my last post, I mentioned that I spoke at BibleTech:2010 about user annotations in Bible software. In this post, I want to talk about why I felt support for personal notes was important, and why it wasn’t enough to just use someone else’s notes.
BibleTech:2010, seven years on
Anniversaries have helped me reflect on what my religion meant to me, and today marks a significant anniversary. Seven years ago I spoke at BibleTech:2010 on “Improving User Annotations in Bible Software”. Let me tell you a little about it.