One of my biggest bugbears with education, learning and teaching – especially online – is the focus we have on testing people by giving them multiple choice questions or having them fill out a very specific and rigidly defined test. This is a remnant from school education, where it is important to compare pupils and to also make it easy to measure the success rate and effectiveness of the teacher. Overly simplified, our school systems are designed to create new professors, not people who use the knowledge elsewhere. Ken Robinson covered this nicely in his TED talk How schools kill creativity and Salman Khan (founder of Khan Academy) ran with it in his TED talk as well.

The problem with rigid tests is that they can be gamed. I knew quite a few students and interviewees who learned information by heart, aced tests and came out not remembering a single thing let alone being able to apply the knowledge in a different scenario. The learned the what, but not the why.

Job interviewers make the mistake of having a fixed set of questions and then compare different applicants by how they fared. This is not only boring for the interviewer, it also doesn’t tell you much about how the person you interview ticks. And in the end you want to work with that person, see them grow and apply their problem solving skills in various different scenarios. At Yahoo we had a great way of doing this – we gave people a code exercise that encompassed creating a small web site from a photoshop comp. We told them what the thing should do and then let them decide how to approach it. We looked at the result they sent us and if it worked nicely, we invited them to an interview where the first half hour or hour was them explaining to us why they approached solving the problem in a certain way, what their frustrations were, and how they cut corners and why. We learned a lot about the people that way, because programmers who can explain what they did are people who can code.

This is why I am very happy to see that some people are creative enough to approach teaching to code differently than others. There are quite a few new resources out there that teach coding by describing problems and asking the learner to write code that then gets validated in a worker thread (in the case of JavaScript). Code Combat for example is a beautiful product using that approach.

Yesterday I was super happy to see that Mozillian Brian Bondy who took in onto himself to create a series of videos explaining how to contribute to Firefox at codefirefox.com added a series of small coding exercises to this endeavour.

Instead of telling you to “create variable a and assign the value foo to it as a string” the exercises on codefirefox.com are task descriptions like

Create a new variable declaration and initialize it with a literal value in one statement.

This teaches you the lingo (you might have to look it up to understand the question but you now what a declaration is afterwards) and allows you to choose what you want to do. You creatively code instead of answering a question. There is a text editor embedded in the page that analyses what you do and if you manage to get a task done, ticks it off for you. All you do is code instead of following yet another “next lesson” button navigation.

Even better is that Brian released the framework that allows you to create tests like that. Under the hood it uses Acorn by Marijn Haverbeke in a web worker to analyse the code and test it against assertions you defined in a simple API.

var c = new Codec();
c.addAssertion("x = 3;");
c.addAssertion("x++", { blacklist: true, otherProps: "hi" });
c.parseSample("if (x) { x = 3; }", function(err) {
  console.log('whitelist hit? ' + c.assertions[0].hit);
  console.log('blacklist hit? ' + c.assertions[1].hit);
});

The codefirefox exercise module code is available on GitHub.

I am very excited about this and hope that some people will take this on. Brian is doing a great job with this and more is to come.

Earlier today my colleague Anton Kovalyov who works on the Firefox JavaScript Profiler ran across an interesting problem: if you have a table in the page and you want to colour every odd row differently to make it easier to read (christened as “Zebra Tables” by David F. Miller on Alistapart in 2004) the great thing is that we have support for :nth-child in browsers these days. Without having to resort to JavaScript, you can stripe a table like this.

Now, if you add a class of “hidden” to a row (or set its CSS property of display to none), you visually hide the element, but you don’t remove it from the document. Thus, the striping is broken. Try it out by clicking the “remove row 3” button:

The solution Anton found other people to use is a repeating gradient background instead:

This works to a degree but seems just odd with the fixed size of line-height (what if one table row spans more than one line?).

Jens Grochtdreis offered a pure CSS solution that on the first glance seems to do the job using a mixture of nth-of-type, nth-child and the tilde selector.

This works, until you remove more than one row. Try it by clicking the button again. :(

In essence, the issue we are facing here is that hiding something doesn’t remove it from the DOM which can mess with many things – assistive technology, search engines and, yes, CSS counters.

The solution to the problem is not to hide the parts you want to get rid of but really, physically remove them from the document, thus forcing the browser to re-stripe the table. Stuart Langridge offered a clever solution to simply move the table rows you want to hide to the end of the table using appendChild() and hide them by storing their index (for later retrieval) in an expando:

[…]rows[i].dataset.idx=i;table.appendChild(rows[i]) and [data-idx] { display:none }

That way the original even/odd pairs will get reshuffled. My solution is similar, except I remove the rows completely and store them in a cache object instead:

This solution also takes advantage of the fact that the result of querySelectorAll is not a live list and thus can be used as a copy of the original table.

As with everything on the web, there are many solutions to the same problem and it is fun to try out different ways. I am sure there is a pure CSS solution. It would also be interesting to see how the different ways perform differently. With a huge dataset like the JS Profiler I’d be tempted to guess that using a full table instead of a table scrolling in a viewport with recycling of table rows might actually be a bottleneck. Time will tell.

People who have seen me speak at one of the dozens of conferences I covered in the last year know that I am passionate about presenting and that I love covering topic from a different angle instead of doing a sales pitch or go through the motions of delivering a packaged talk over and over again.

For a few months now I have been pondering a quite different talk than the topics I normally cover – the open web, JavaScript and development – and I’d love to pitch this talk to the unknown here to find a conference it might fit. If you are organising a conference around digital distribution, tech journalism or publishing, I’d love to come around to deliver it. Probably a perfect setting would be a TEDx or Wired-like event. Without further ado, here is the pitch:

Accidental arrchivism

The subject of media and software piracy is covered in mainstream media with a lot of talk about greedy, unpleasant people who use their knowledge to steal information and make money with it. The image of the arrogant computer nerd as perfectly displayed in Jurassic Park. There is also no shortage of poster children that fit this bill and it is easy to bring up numbers that show how piracy is hurting a whole industry.

This kind of piracy, however, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the whole subject matter. If you dig deeper you will find a complex structure of hierarchies, rules, quality control mechanisms and distribution formats in the piracy scene. These are in many cases superior to those of legal distributors and much more technologically and socially advanced.

In this talk Chris Heilmann will show the results of his research into the matter and show a more faceted view of piracy – one that publishers and distributors could learn from. He will also show positive – if accidental – results of piracy and explain which needs yet unfilled by legal release channels are covered and result in the success of the pirates – not all of them being about things becoming “free”. You can not kill piracy by making it illegal and applying scare tactics – its decentralised structure and its very nature of already being illegal makes that impossible. A lot of piracy happens based on convenience of access. If legal channels embraced and understood some of the ways pirates work and the history of piracy and offered a similar service, a lot of it would be rendered unnecessary.

If you are a conference organiser who’d be interested, my normal presentation rules apply:

• I want this to be a keynote, or closing keynote, not a talk in a side track in front of 20 people
• I want a good quality recording to be published after the event. So far I was most impressed with what Baconconf delivered on that front with the recording of my “Helping or Hurting” presentation.
• I’d like to get my travel expenses back. If your event is in London, Stockholm or the valley, this could be zero as I keep staying in these places

Get in contact either via Twitter (@codepo8), Facebook (thechrisheilmann), LinkedIn, Google+ (+ChristianHeilmann) or email (catch-all email, the answer will come from another one).

If you are a fan of what I do right now and you’d be interested in seeing this talk, spread this pitch far and wide and give it to conference organisers. Thanks.

A few years ago now, I spent two afternoons to write down all I knew back then about Developer Evangelism/Advocacy and created the Developer Evangelism Handbook. It has been a massive success in terms of readers and what I hear from people has helped a lot of them find a new role in their current company or a new job in others. I know for a fact that the handbook is used in a few companies as training material and I am very happy about that. I also got thanked by a lot of people not in a role like this learning something from the handbook. This made me even happier.

With the role of developer evangelist/advocat being rampant now and not a fringe part of what we do in IT I think it is time to give the handbook some love and brush it up to a larger “Guide to Developer Evangelism/Advocacy” by re-writing parts of it and adding new, more interactive features.

For this, I am considering starting a Kickstarter project as I will have to do that in my free-time and I see people making money with things they learned. Ads on the page do not cut it – at all (a common issue when you write content for people who use ad-blockers). That’s why I want to sound the waters now to see what you’d want this guide to be like to make it worth you supporting me.

In order to learn, I put together a small survey about the Guide and I’d very much appreciate literally 5 minutes of your time to fill it out. No, you can’t win an iPad or a holiday in the Carribean, this is a legit survey.

Let’s get this started, I’d love to hear what you think.

Got comments? Please tell me on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter.

The video series “Everything wrong with $movie in $length minutes or less” by Cinema Sins is a big YouTube success and for a movie buff like me a lot of fun to watch.

The team behind it take a lot of time to meticulously analyse goofs and issues in movies and mercilessly point them out in short movies. Frankly, I am amazed they can show that much footage of current movies without take-downs and that they have such a quick turnaround time. It is funny, it is parody and satire and it shows that even the most polished and expensive products of the entertainment history aren’t safe from slip-ups. What I like most about them though is that they are also pointing out how they themselves are not without fault: “We are not reviewers – we’re assholes”.

I see a lot of parallels in how people criticise products on the web – we don’t really look at the why and how something was built but from the get-go try to find the simple to prove fault and talk about that instead. The fault that probably only us web developers will ever see or even remotely care about.

This, in itself is not a bad thing as it shows that we care about our craft and look at what other people do. This can be gratifying which is why we leave code comments and easter eggs – a secret handshake from one professional to another. We want people to look at what we do. We do not, however need people to nit-pick at one small detail and disregard the rest of our work as that is hurtful and makes the person reporting the issue (and only this issue) appear as intentionally hurting or trying to find a flaw at all cost.

Things go wrong, and in many cases we don’t know the reason. It could be that the place the content is published has limited access to the writer, thus forcing us to use an image where a text with CSS would have been better. Zeldman put that eloquently in his Get off my lawn! essay where he explained that it is not ironic if an article about a certain best practice gets published on a platform that doesn’t follow that practice.

It could be that the product had to be shipped at a certain date no matter what and corners had to be cut – a fault of the project manager, not the developer/designer. Many things are impacting the release of a web product (and that includes apps in my book); it is unfair to blame the executing party.

Maybe it is a good idea to reconsider publishing that one fault publicly and instead do a two minute research finding the makers of the product and report the fault there. Instead of public naming and shaming and – let’s face it – gloating we could thus either report an unknown fault to those who can fix it or learn why something happened. In either case, this means you are a constructive critic and don’t come across as a know-it-all. It is very simple to point out a flaw, harder to fix it and hardest to prevent them. To the outside, our constant nit-picking doesn’t make us look an inviting bunch, and is the small moment of fame finding the obvious bug worth that?