Category: Technology

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I skimmed through Steve Yegge’s “Good Agile, Bad Agile” piece and was thinking of responding, but luckily Dare Obasanjo responded first and said all I’d say and more–especially as regards to the ‘star’ treatment accorded to developers at companies like Google, and the employees gratitude back for being ‘so well taken care of’.

Dare writes:

I remember interning at Microsoft five years ago and hearing someone say how grateful he was for “the things Microsoft has done for me” and thinking how creepy and cult-like that sounded. A company pays you at worst ‘what they think they can get away with’ and at best ‘what they think you are worth’, neither of these should inspire gratitude. Never forget that or else you’ll be on the road to heartbreak.

We should respect the companies where we work or, at a minimum, respect our responsibilities as employees; but gratitude and loyalty, both, will eventually lead to heartbreak.

PPK, writer of QuirksMode, has a panel proposal in at SxSW I wanted to point out to those of you attending. PPK is well known in the JavaScript circles and someone I respect for his good, commonsense approach to web page development–particularly with JavaScript. Yes, I am pointing you to a competitor, because he’s worth being pointed to and his sessions sounds to be one of the more interesting at SxSW.

My panel will not be technical. Instead, I’d like to address some of the social issues that face JavaScript nowadays, issues I also touched on in my JavaScript and “serious” programmers entry. Not entirely coincidentally, this entry has about the highest overall comment quality on the QuirksBlog, which means (I suppose) that people are truly interested in the subject. In turn, that means the panel could prove to be quite interesting.

It’s not easy finding the proposal when using Firefox on the Mac, because something in the panel picker causes the browser to crash if you try to expand the list. Unfortunately, there’s also no title search (which I guess demonstrates that maybe the SxSW people should consider going to this session.) Frankly, it’s not easy finding it with any browser–the interface really sucks. But I persevered and found the following:

Now that JavaScript is in fashion again, we’re facing a few non-technical issues that may be more important than the technical ones. There are two ways of writing JavaScript: the client side and the server side way. They focus on different things: application development vs. CSS/accessibility, respectively. Is one of the two clearly “right”, or is there place for both? What’s going to happen once the Ajax hype folds?

PPK lists out a set of issues related to today’s use of JavaScript/Ajax, in particular the approach the application developer takes as compared to the web developer. Among some of the issues:

The web developers’ strong points are good knowledge of accessibility, HTML and CSS, as well as immersion in the ideas of the CSS revolution. Their weak points are sloppy spaghetti-coding and a general lack of knowledge about application design.

The application developers’ strong points are strict coding practices and lots of knowledge about application design. Their weak points are a total disinterest in accessibility and sloppy HTML coding practices.

This is a discussion I’ve indulged in at my site, in particular, this new breed of JavaScript developer who is completely indifferent to standards and accessibility. I’d like to think two decades of development and a comp sci degree doesn’t mean I’m on the other spaghetti coding side, but there are people who have come to JS through the web page design who aren’t familiar with good coding practices. Chances are they’ll never become aware, because the application developers tend to be cryptic, as well as being a tad over-engineering.

This promises to be an interesting panel. If you’re going, find it and click the “Pick Me” associated with the proposal.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Perhaps at SxSW, PPK can convince the new horde of Ajax developers to stop acting as if that they’ve invented the technology, all squeaky new. Via link from Ajaxian, the concept of ‘transparent’ messages from Humanized.

Issues of accessibility and usability aside–been there, done that, wrote the book (page 240 to be exact).

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

From the new Pew Survey on future of the internet:

A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.

Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.

Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.

Tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.

People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy.

This is a bizarre hodge podge of scenarios.

The last item already exists, but the idea of terrorists going around bombing out routers to prevent change is too Unibomber for words. As for the key item: maintaining control of technology that’s advancing in such leaps and bounds, we must remember that the hot new thing now, Ajax, is based on ten year old technologies.

Reading the report, most of the ad-hoc responses were the same flowery, empty phrases we’ve had for years now. The so-called ‘experts’ were ones the report says …have been online since 1993. Wow, that long? Half were online before, half after 1993.

This survey is based on packaged scenarios built on pre-defined assumptions and validated by hand-picked respondents. It’s flawed, almost beyond belief.