nirak.net

Drawing Back the Curtains on CSS Implementation

Panelists:
- David Baron, Mozilla (@davidbaron)
- Elika Etemad, Invited Expert (@fantasai)
- Molly Holzschlag, Opera Software (@mollydotcom)
- Sylvain Galineau, Microsoft Internet Explorer (@sgalineau)
- Tab Atkins, Google Chrome (@tabatkins)

They all love feedback! Message them on twitter with ideas, suggestions, concerns. If you blog about CSS, they probably won’t see it, so send them the link. The majority of people want to be involved in the standards, take the time to participate.

You can also follow @csswg for minutes and drafts.

When asked how many in the audience preferred Internet Explorer’s incorrect implementation of the CSS box model, many raised hands. I was one of them.

Question: What would they change about the CSS spec?
Answer: Galineau said that there should be other methods for laying out pages than float:left and right. Floats are delicate and easy to break. Also insane we don’t have variables. CSS sheets are giant and unwieldy.

Why Would We Think Social Media Is Revolutionary? – Clay Shirky

Social media tools are not just a utilitarian way of getting the word out, they are also a divide between generations. They provide a narrative for the current generation to produce change.

The revolutions which are happening now are the end of a long process, not a new process. The Kefaya movement started in 2004, using blogs to coordinate efforts. But what happens when the long game is not there? People don’t know who to trust.

What people really want is a more responsive government. (Karin’s note: I have heard this repeated again and again – the cry isn’t for “democracy” per se, but a government who will listen to the people. Sometimes democracies don’t even seem to have that.) Feminism correlates strongly with attempts to make government more responsive.

Totalitarian governments are running into a problem – in order for economies to be competitive, people need to be informed. Everyone with a cell phone. But that gives people a way to organize. They can synchronize, coordinate, and document, as well as share.

What can we do?

Pay attention! Pick an area you care about and learn about it. Bloggers, tweeters, etc who can make informed decisions about what to repeat are valuable. They can add context and explain.

Help out. Example: Egyptian linux users group shared information with other linux user’s groups. Share expertise, experience.

Finally, Clay showed a picture of the Christian Egyptians holding hands to protest the muslims praying. We can do that. Join hands around the muslims in this country, stop hateful political grandstanding.

Matt Mullenweg Interview: The Future of WordPress – Interviewed by: John Battelle

(note: these notes are pretty disjointed, was busy taking it all in!)

12% of sites are powered by WordPress.

Blogging isn’t dead, it’s just changing

Mullenweg about tumblr – (paraphrased) some will say it’s all porn, but it’s artistic.

Tumblr is a different product, with a different focus. It integrates the reading/writing process in a beautiful way. WordPress should do more of that.

WordPress.com is made to be a consumer service – for people who don’t want to deal with the plugins, etc.

Interviewer – “You do seem to make money with advertising, but you seem to hate it.”

Originally how the ads worked is they would only be served to people who were coming from google, had never been to WordPress.com before, and were not on Firefox.

Question: Any ideas how to change the monetization of WordPress? Promoted posts like Twitter? Promoted accounts like Tumblr?

Answer: WordPress is very sensitive to putting things on people’s blogs. There is a little more room on pages that feature collected posts on a theme, because you are not messing with people’s personal style or infringing on their space.

They do monetize by providing value for the users – with things like premium themes, etc.

Jetpack launch!

Jetpack is a new plugin which aggregates some features which were available previously in seperate plugins, and brings features from the WordPress.com site to the .org site, like analytics and a math markup language. The goal is to have 100% feature parity between WordPress.com and self hosting users.

Guided transfer lanch!

Guided Transfer is a service which costs $99 and will help the user leave WordPress.com to their own guided host.

Business model: “We make a good thing, tell people about it, people give us money.”

Mullenweg was born and raised in Houston. Was in a linux user’s group and a palm users group there.

How the WordPress business works:

There are 80 people around the globe, the most people in any one place it 5. They use very little email, but use IRC for chat, and the P2 theme (for WordPress, duh) to keep track of projects. It has sort of a twitter/friendfeed feel. They have more P2 installs than they have employees. Superior to email because it is archivable and searchable. Great for catching new people up on the projects.

Question: Are there enterprise solutions? Pay for a certain level of uptime?
Answer: They already do this. WordPress.com powers some of the largest sites in the world – CNN, lolcats, time magazine

Question: What separates the entrepreneurs who make it?
Answer: Are you willing to outwork everyone else?

Question: What would Matt like to see in WordPress?
Answer: Handle media better. There is already a full screen writing mode for the visual editor (see pic below) , but Matt would like to improve even more.
Wants to continue to put authors first.

Question: Are there any plans to make podcasting better?
Answer: This will continue to be handled by plugins, and WordPress will continue to provide the hooks to make it work.

Question: Will you make it easier to livestream?
Answer: Matt recommends picking up a WordPress theming book and get skinning. You can use categories to distinguish livestreaming entries. “Scripting is a new literacy.”

Question: When will you make the iPhone app better?
Answer: It will continually get better, along with the blackberry, android, etc. apps. These are like nothing WordPress has worked on before, there are 5 different codebases. Also, people don’t like to contribute to closed platforms, so they are not getting the open source community help they do with other stuff.

Question: Is there any plan for plugin consistency?
Answer: This is hard because the plugin makers have leeway. But there is a UI group where plugin makers can ask about the best place to put things.

Updates are still not as easy as Matt would like. Working to make it better.

“Programming and Minimalism: Lessons from Orwell & The Clash” by Jonathan Dahl

Programming is defining processes. Be a code craftsman – build good code, that can’t be commoditized. Develop habits and use tools that allow a craftsman do his or her job well. Work with good teams and develop good habits and practices. A good programmer can describe complex processes in a precise way.

Programming and similarities to music

Both work in an abstract way – the musician records the music in a notation that is an abstraction of the actual music, a representation (dots on a page). The coder also works in abstraction.

How music is created:

• Make something simple and interesting (like the hook of a song)
  • {build on it (loop)}
• End up with something enormous, stale and boring
• Trim the fat
• Repeat as necessary

The Dahl went into a musical history, which I don’t think would be as useful without the clips he played. But the gist was, music goes in cycles from simple to complex to simple again.

Simple -> Complex -> Simple -> Complex -> Simple -> Complex

It is operating well between the simple and the complex that leads to beauty.

Minimalism is a positive aesthetic.

Programming and similarities to writing

An essayist writes and rewrites, as a programmer codes and then refactors code to make it better.

Is language ambiguous? Is that the problem? Or is the problem that we don’t realize that language is imprecise, so we don’t take it into account?

There is not a 1:1 correlation between what we want and how it can be expressed in code, this is why coders are needed in the first place.

George Orwell the essayist

Read George Orwell’s “The politics of the English Language” – it connects poor writing to poor thinking.

Example: the US Patriot act. The name does not tell you anything, it co-opts your ability to think intelligently about whether it is a good idea. It should have had a title like “The expanded surveillance act.” The sloppy title inserts the idea beyond rationality into someone’s brain, and demonstrates sloppy, unclear thinking.

Bad writing is more prone to bugs. The presenter gave an example of terribly unclear writing that had a quadruple negative, one of which didn’t need to be there. Clear, direct writing makes it easier to follow the thinking and detect bugs.

Orwell’s rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Application to programming

• Minimalism
• Clear direct writing
• Take simplest approach to coding
• Clever code is bad code
• Any code not doing something is harming your product. If your users don’t need it, get rid of it.
• Accept constraints – work witht he language and framework when possible
• If something isn’t local business logic, it belongs in a library. (In MVC, model should not be huge)
• If it is not local, consider using open source
• Don’t over or under abstract
• Always actively clean up your code – otherwise your code is degrading
• Code tracker – always document what needs to be done
• Apply these rules wisely
• Simple code is beautiful
• Break hard problems down

Consume

• pair programming, hold code critiques, view other people’s code
• read good prose
• listen to good music
• study and learn

Produce

Good programming is:

minimal – direct – beautiful

Questions

Question: How to justify to stakeholders time spent on cleaning up code?
Answer: Don’t tell them. They hired you to do the best job you can, and the best is not broken spaghetti code.

Question: How do you deal with an organization love of complexity?
Answer: I didn’t record an answer for this one. If anyone thinks of something, let me know!