I am currently in Bucharest, Romania and yesterday talked about current issues with HTML5 and how Mozilla found solutions for them during the creation of Firefox OS.
photo by Ștefania Ioana Chiorean
The slides with notes are on Slideshare
There’s also an audio recording available on Soundcloud
It was good fun and I got some interesting questions from the audience.
Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, these are my views, yadda yadda.
Today Google released the Google Web Designer (beta), a WYSIWYG editor to create HTML5 ads for Google AdSense.
The designer is an installable app for Mac or PC but seems to be an HTML app under the hood. The interface is very familiar to people who use Adobe’s tools to create ads in the past (yeah, the F(lash) word) and seems to be a directly catered to AdSense alternative to Adobe’s Edge suite.
Of course, when there is a new editor out, shenanigans are afoot really quickly and David Matthams scored the Twitter goal with his Google Web Designer creation of outstanding beauty (yes, this was sarcasm, yes, David’s creation is a joke).
Here’s the thing though: I do applaud Google for what they’ve done here. First of all, the tool creates CSS animated ads – not JavaScript driven ones and despite a few hitches (div class=”gwd-div-s33n editable editable editable editable editable editable gwd-gen-8p5fgwdanimation gwd-div-ydjn gwd-gen-8p5fgwdanimation-gen-animation0keyframe” being an interesting one) the code is clean, supports all the browser prefixes and a non-prefixed fallback and is editable by a machine and readable by a human.
The latter is a very important bit: getting on our high horse and trying to quarrel with the semantics of generated code like this is futile. These are ads. They are clickable videos, and their main task is to look pretty and get people to buy stuff whilst working in all environments. And this code achieves that goal quite well.
HTML5 needs tools, there is no question about it. And whoever had to work with ad providers knows that a lot of ads cause havoc with your memory consumption and page performance. This tool, at least, does not do that and uses Google’s fixation on performance.
So before we snigger at “the return of Dreamweaver or Flash’s fallback output”, let’s take a moment and remember that a lot of content out there on the web that pays our wages and bills is built by people who have no clue about HTML. And we are arrogant enough not to ever touch the projects they get paid to create.
So, I for one, am happy about more tools that are having a good start and hope they’ll go far. In this instance especially, I wouldn’t be surprised if that will be a part of the AdSense site sooner or later and I am extremely happy that it is not a Chrome App that does not work with other browsers, but a tool that people can use.
One thing that bugs me a lot is that in the publishing world about the web we have a fetish for the “how” whereas we should strive for the “why” instead.
What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, I count everything that is published as important. This could be a comment, a tweet, a blog post, a presentation, a screencast – doesn’t matter. If it ends up on the web it will be linked to, it will be quoted, it will be taken as “best practice” or “common usage” and people will start arguing over it and adding it to what we call “common knowledge” (spoiler: there is no such thing).
That is why publications that answer the “how” without also explaining the “why” are dangerous. We explain how something is done and we pride ourselves when this is as short and simple as possible. We do live coding on stage showing how complex things can be done with one small command and five different build systems. We show how simple things are when people use this editor or that development tool or this browser and everything is just a click away and we get amazing insight into the things we do.
We expect people who learn the “how” to be sharp and interested enough to get to the “why” themselves. Sadly enough this is hardly ever the case. Instead, the quick “how” also known as the “here is how you do it” becomes an excuse not to even question practices and solutions any longer. “Awesome technology expert $person said and showed on stage that this is how it is done. Don’t waste your time on doing it differently” is becoming a mantra for a lot of new developers.
The issue with this is that “best practices” are getting more and more short-lived and in many cases very dependent on the environment they are applied in. What fixed performance issues in a Web View on iPhone 3 might be a terrible idea on Chrome on a Desktop, what was a real issue in JavaScript 10 years ago might not even make a minimal difference in today’s engines (string concatenation anyone?).
The “why” can be a few different things:
Explaining the “why” is much, much harder than the “how”. Telling someone to do something in a certain way is giving orders, explaining a procedure. Explaining why it should be done this way means you teach the other person, and it also means you need to deeply understand what you do. The “how” can be repeated by someone who doesn’t know really how something works – and in many cases is – the “why” means you have to put much more effort into understanding what you advocate. The “how” is what lead to boring school books and terrible training folders. The “why” leads to interactive and memorable training experiences.
Getting rid of the fetish of the how is an incredibly frustrating uphill battle. The biggest manifestation of the “how” is W3Schools.com. This site shows you how to do something – even interactively – and thus has become a force majeur in the web development world. It gives you a fast, quick answer to copy and paste without the pesky having to “understand what you are doing” part. This leads to people defending it tooth and nail every time some righteous people set out to kill it. All of these efforts are doomed to fail if they mean setting up yet another resource that will “do things better than w3schools”. The reason sites like W3Schools work are:
In other words, they are a useful reminder and lookup resource for people who already know the “why” and simply forgot the “how”. Thus, they look like a power tool the experts use and are very tempting for beginners to use as well. Much like buying the same shoes as Usain Bolt should make you an amazing runner…
The only way to “kill W3Schools” is to support resources that explain the how and the why, like MDN or WebPlatform.org – not to create more resources that have the right heart but are doomed to fail as maintaining a documentation resource is an amazing amount of work. Instead of sending new developers to w3schools or a Stackoverflow post that explains how something is done quickly, send them to a deep link on those. We can not expect people we point to solutions to care about how they happened. We have to show them the way, not the destination. By sending them to the destination via a shortcut, we deprive them of their own, personal learning experience and we cheapen our job to something anyone can look up on demand.
The “how” gets outdated, and – in many cases – dangerous practice very, very quickly. The “why” remains as it lights up the way to a solution, a solution that can change over time.
That’s why I’d love people to stop spouting quick answers and let new developers ponder the solution for themselves before telling them a way to do it quickly. We need to learn in order to understand and be empowered to create on our own. You only learn by asking why – let’s be supportive of that instead of feeling smug about pointing out an already existing solution. Web development got to where it is by continuously questioning how we do things and find ways to make it work. If we stop doing that, we stagnate.
Disclaimer: this is the script, well, the notes, for a presentation I am giving at Spotify in Sweden this weekend as part of the Studenttechfest. I was asked to give an inspirational keynote telling students what working in IT is like. The slides and recording will be available afterwards.
Update: there is now a (bad quality) audio recording of the talk on Soundcloud:
In I.T. there is what I call a “fetish of the how”. We are obsessed with finding and showing quick and intelligent solutions for problems that abstract away the original issues in order to make us more effective and use less time to achieve our goals. I remember a Dilbert cartoon in around 1996 that hit the nail on the head. Dilbert explained when asked why he uses computers all the time that they make him much more effective and save time. When asked what he does with the time he said he does more computer stuff and his friend went “wow, so you can save even more time”.
This culture of giving you a “how to do things” instead of “why they work” starts perpetuating a false belief that what we do is easy and can be learned quickly by doing an online course or looking things up in Google. Many of the threads on sites like Stackoverflow are just repeated answers stating that “you just do this and everything works”. Sites like W3Schools are very successful as they show how to do something and give you the promise that you can achieve anything by just copying and pasting an answer. Why bother with understanding what you do when you could already deliver?
The issue is that a lot of quick solutions start breaking really soon and then you are stuck as you don’t know what you did. You used magic, and not even yours and you aren’t even a wizard. There is nothing wrong with using free resources and abstractions and be more effective. In order to be professional, however, you also need to understand how they work and be able to create working solutions without them. This is when you start becoming someone who can be hired and offered a career. Otherwise you can get a job as a deliverer or maintainer but no company in their right mind would invest in you as your attitude is that of those who try to dazzle and really don’t not know what they are doing.
I.T. is probably, with the exception of acting and journalism, the most versatile job market out there. Things are constantly in flux and there is not much boredom if you are excited about building things from zeros and ones.
You will encounter a lot of products, frameworks, software packages and practices along the way. Take them in and deliver with them. Stay agnostic though as things are continuously changing. In every job there is something new to be learned and whilst your task is to deliver it you can also learn from the mistakes made and the results of shortcuts taken. Try everything and you will find patterns over time that help you make better decisions later on in your career.
Working in a constantly changing environment also means a lot of drama, a lot of problems and egos clashing. Be aware of that and prepare for it. Even when you disagree with people strongly – if they are your manager and tell you something needs to be done the best way is to ask why and you might learn about outside pressures you weren’t aware of before.
The I.T. world seems large, but it is actually pretty small. When leaving a job, don’t leave in anger. Don’t burn bridges as you will come across people later on you are very much sick of right now. You might even realise that in another environment these people will be brilliant to work with. You make a career by forging personal relationships. Collect great people to work with and keep up to date with what they are doing. Most great jobs come from word of mouth. Not via LinkedIn.
Once you are done with university, you have your degree and many jobs require a degree as a right of passage. This means you can and will easily get a job. However, lots of other people also have degrees and as someone who hires I am looking for other, additional features. You are about to embark on a great journey, one of privilege, really. No other market is booming like I.T. and the things companies do for us make other people gape in astonishment.
Therefore, as a prospective employee, I am looking for passion in you. One of the main complaints by hiring managers is that people come into the job interview not knowing anything about the company they apply for. This is a bad first impression, as if you don’t care about the company why should the company care about you? Talk about your passions, give me an indicator that you want to get better and you are ready to learn more. Then I am ready to take you on and do a lot more for you than just pay you.
There is no better way to get hired than to be known as someone who cares about sharing, giving feedback and showing technical and social aptitude. The good news is that this is amazingly simple these days.
The main issue is that becoming known and being visible can be easily seen as showing off and in many cases actually is. In the US, this is part of a career; you have to sell yourself. As a European this can be daunting and feel wrong, but sometimes we need to jump over our shadow.
A great way to be visible is to go out there and speak about things you do. This is scary, but it is also a great way to get into the business. The simplest way to do that is to attend meetups and unconferences.
However, you don’t have to put yourself out there immediately, participation and visibility can be achieved much easier.
GitHub managed to make the impossible possible: it is a social network for engineers, people not generally known for being too social. On GitHub you can not only get lots and lots of great, free software but you can also become part of it. You can contribute code, you can file issues and help with testing, you can comment and help work around people’s differences. All of this brings you brownie points when it comes to applying for a job and looks much better on a CV than hypothetical achievements.
It is important to remember that your bad behaviour online is also noted by prospective employers. It might be fun to start a flame war and to troll people, but it can also mean the end of your career before it started. Playing nice is a good idea.
One ironic thing about I.T. is that whilst we are all connected world-wide, a lot of times traveling to other places to work with people face to face is necessary. Therefore it is important to be flexible about this. Many of my career jumps happened because I was OK to work from a different location for a short while. This also gave me a lot of interesting experiences I took with me.
Taking on an opportunity to work with a remote team is a great move in your career. The problem of making distributed teams work efficiently is still a big one for a lot of companies. If you already manage to have a fruitful collaboration with people from other timezones and cultural backgrounds you become a very interesting asset to companies out there.
Lastly, I want to point out that I don’t see any way that you could not end up with a good job right now. The question you have to ask yourself is what you want to do. My advice is to find a place you feel great, you can be part of a team you respect and you see opportunities to learn new things. That is much more important than being paid a lot. Burnout is a big problem, and you should consider planning for a longer career rather than being a rockstar for a season and then feel like you already need a break at 22.
Disclaimer: this is not a technical post, it is a cultural and personal one. It is also very long, but I talked to a few people and they wanted me to write it to understand some of my actions and reactions.
If you have comments, there are threads happening on Facebook and also on Google+
I just spent a week in India training Evangelism Reps, giving a keynote and a three hour training at a conference, answering dozens of personal requests and posing with people on photos.
People who see me as a rock star, people who are timid around me and whose eyes light up when they see me and talk to me. People who came far and wide to a conference to meet me. People who both make me feel uncomfortable – as I don’t see myself as an unapproachable rockstar, but at the same time make me feel amazing when I see how much it means for them to meet a guy they learned things from. I am right now in the airport and I am dead tired. I slept about 3-4 hours each day in an incredible luxurious hotel I did not use enough. I didn’t eat regularly the way I normally would and a few times I literally passed out for a quick nap to recover. I did all this voluntarily, because I know I don’t come here often and I see how much it means to people when I do.
Here I will explain why coming to India is tough on me and why I put a lot of effort into training locals to go and speak about technical bits instead of me. Here is the good, the bad, the ugly and my takeaways.
As someone who likes to share information and teach people, India is heaven. The thirst for knowledge is immense and people are very adamant to get to ask questions and understand what you tell them rather than just “being inspired by it”. The “how” is very appreciated but people also strive for the “why” when it comes to learning.
You can feel that people want to use the knowledge they acquired and that knowing more here means getting a better life and having better chances to move ahead in your career. There is no sense at all of fatigue or boredom; people are incredibly hungry. Every single Q&A session following the talks at the conference was full of great questions, people were sticking to one topic and it showed that they had listened to all you had to say. There was no grandstanding or time wasting with bait questions comparing your product to competitors or spouting truisms to show off that you are cleverer than the presenter. It was all about getting the most out of being at the conference. Talking to people I sensed that they really knew a lot already and had amazing insights but utterly failed and even were uninterested in flashing their knowledge in public. This humbleness is commendable but also dangerous, as it means that it is very easy to underestimate our Indian colleagues. It is not the person who shouts the loudest that has the best insights, but it is easy to think that way.
One thing I find fascinating in India is that there is always a way. It might not be the most comfortable or obvious one but there is no stagnation. Whether it is a whole family, their pets and their shopping sharing a motorbike that was meant for two or logistics needing sorting out – there is no large period of complaining: things just move on and solutions are found. This is something the Western world can learn from. We tend to linger on complaining about things being wrong rather than doing something about them as we are used to delegating work.
Feedback amongst Indian people appears to be brutally honest and immediate. This could come across as shocking for people coming from cultures where you have to wrap criticism in nice words (AKA the shit sandwich – start with appreciation, give the criticism and end with a compliment) and cultures where any critique is seen as a personal attack. Personally I prefer the honesty and to the point criticism. As someone in my course put it:
“I don’t mind that the other person hates me right now for pointing out what was obviously wrong in their work. I just know that they will think about it later and turn that hate towards their own mistakes and remedy them. I just want them to get better.”
I hope that really is the result and I wished more people had the same courage and honesty.
Another good thing about India is that people are genuinely excited about little things and incredibly good hosts. You really feel welcomed as a visitor by the people who invited you. You see them bending backwards to sort problems out for you and make your visit as convenient as possible. In many cases this can be seen as not enough effort as the country is just so different to what we are used to. Yes, the car that picks you up might be smelling of cigarettes and the seats are threadbare and not the cleanest. But it was on time and it gets you were you need to go without delay and that is a very uncommon thing here.
This helpfulness is very much ingrained in the culture in India which brings me to the bad part.
The bad things about India for me are first of all the obvious ones: getting there (visa fun, time difference, distance), the heat, the rain, the crowds, the “air”, not being 100% sure about food and water, the bureaucracy, things hardly ever happening on time and following the original plan. A lot of those can’t be helped and you just have to grit your teeth and bear with it.
The big issues for me are those that culturally rub me the wrong way because of my upbringing. My mother was a housewife, my father a coal miner and then a factory worker. I have two siblings, one a former factory worker and now fireman and another who works in the unemployment office trying to give people work who want to. You can see that helping other people and having to work for good things happening to you is very much ingrained in us. We never were rich, but we never were poor. We just learned to make the best out with what we had. My dad being a big union man he was firm in his belief that everyone “up there in management” is a corrupt bastard.
I grew up not to admire anyone by their cultural standing or by how rich they are. On the contrary, the common view was that people who are rich are never that way because of what they put into it. Instead, they were either born that way or achieved it by immoral means. Of course I rectified that world-view of my dad a bit – as is the task of the next generation – but deep down it is still there. I feel like a fraud when people see me as a rich person who has a better standing and deserves being served because of that.
My personal view is that people are equal and deserve the same chances. The only way to lose my respect is being close-minded, genuinely mean or deliberately unwilling to learn or improve, and that is independent of how rich you are, where you come from or how impressive your background is.
That’s why I feel uncomfortable with being continuously served and seeing the obvious class differences you still feel in India. I guess the latter is to a degree necessary to make a country this big and overcrowded work (and to maintain its “delivery” role in the world market). The former, however, drives me crazy.
I am not used to people opening me doors, I feel very odd being in a gym and having two trainers hover about asking me if I need anything every two minutes (which actually makes me wonder if I do things wrong and feel bad for not letting them help me). I want to go into a place and look and discover things on my own account rather than being immediately given my personal helper who beelines towards me as soon as I cross the doorstep. I much more prefer being left alone and having to do things myself until I get stuck and get quick help when that happens.
I am OK with asking for assistance, but I am bad at refusing it when I don’t need it but get it offered to me. It is a very strange feeling being pampered all the time and being asked the same questions over and over again, especially when they are of the “how are you sir?” kind. It feels like an inflation of helpfulness. Service, to me, should be on demand and not continuously in your face. I should be happy about this, but it really is disturbing to not be able to look at anything without someone dedicated only to me hovering about. I feel continuously bad for wasting that person’s time although I probably do not at all.
Which leads me to the really horrible bit: as someone like me, who very obviously is not local, many times in India to be able to get something done or to just have your peace you need to be a horrible person.
I love people. I love to talk with them, I love to recognise body language and see people being happy. Someone approaching me and greeting me is a thing I enjoy and love. Were I a puppy, I’d be wagging my tail all the time.
I know you are interesting, I know you have a story I’d love to hear, I know you have an idea that could be the spark for my next impressive published insight. I am a sponge for human interaction.
That is why it pains me that I can not go down the road without having to repeatedly shout “no” at people or avoid eye contact at all cost or just be rude and push people out of the way. Or having to stay safe in artificial, protected environments like hotels and malls. I want to explore, I want to see and I want to learn. In order to go where I want to go and not take the services of “my dedicated driver” or having to ask people who brought me here to accompany me (whilst they might have better things to do) I need to deliberately treat people as if they don’t exist. This hurts me deeply. Beggars coming to you asking for food and money. Very young kids in horrible physical states (in some cases inflicted on them to appear more pitiful and thus more effective as beggars) – it breaks my heart having to shout at them or move on as if they are not there. But the worst, to me, is when this is used against me in a manipulative way.
Getting around the city used to be simple when I went to India in the past: you got a Rickshaw and paid five times as much for the ride as local people would. That I totally don’t mind. It is still dirt cheap and once you came to terms that the imminent violent death you’ll suffer the way the guy drives never happens you just lean back and submit to the inevitable. Sooner or later you will be dropped where you needed to be. However, lately some drivers are resorting to emotional blackmail. It goes like this:
You walk down the street and someone will approach you and ask how you are. When you explain that you are feeling excellent, without a single care in the world and all that stops you from feeling ecstatic is to be able to walk to where you want to go on your own terms and power, creativity kicks in. The person approaching you introduces themselves a cab driver who can easily get you where you want to go with much less hassle. If that doesn’t work it gets more aggressive: the driver will tell you that there is no way you can reach your destiny on your own account as there is “a riot and the police blocked off some streets”. The driver then offers a ridiculously small price (actually the price locals would get) and you start considering it. When you cave in and get to their car or Rikshaw the driver is very chatty, very knowledgeable about everything and tells you about their wife and children. They also tell you that to kill the time until the roads are free again you can take a look at a great shop that has amazing prices – only today, no less.
And thus you end up in some store that obviously has a deal with the driver. These shops are full of confused westerners looking at things they don’t want and don’t need but feeling guilty as the very helpful driver was so nice. The products in these shops are – to keep it simple – shit. You get shown jewelry that is “amazing high quality stones in silver plated with white gold” with the glue sticking out in the back where the plastic stone was shoddily put in. You get stoles and other things that start at 6000 Rupees and can easily – if you care to put the effort in – be haggled down to 1000. You feel the scam, it oozes out of every moment, and yet you feel kind of obliged to the driver to do something. It is lies after lies on top of hyperboles and false appreciation and chumminess (“I can see that you have an honest face, my friend, so I can do you a special price” – it sickens me).
This can repeat itself. I had a driver that dropped me at three places until I lost my temper and told him to go back to my hotel immediately or I will stop the next policeman and tell him I am being held against my will. “OK, sir, if that’s what you want, sorry sir, I just wanted to help use the time until the riot is over” is the answer. Also, you will hear that it is the driver’s wedding day and he works to get some extra money and will have an argument with the wife. Whatever you pay when you finally get to your hotel will be greeted with a disappointed face and a very quick depart by the driver without another word.
This scam makes you end up probably having something you didn’t want and feeling like a terrible person at the same time. And it is not uncommon. And it really is the worst to me. The fact that I feel ripped off is OK, that happens, but the dishonesty of it all is just shattering to me.
You can only get out of it by leaving the driver behind and taking another one once he stops at the shop. Or answering anyone obviously local with a key in their hands in the street in languages they don’t understand. I resorted to German and French and pretended not to understand any of their attempts and just moved on pretending to be scared.
These are the things that make traveling for work in India very daunting to me. Maybe I overreact but I am very happy being in control of my life without being in command. I enjoy my independence, and it is very, very hard to have it when you are in between people offering you services you feel menial for anyone to do for you and having to spend a lot of energy fighting off people who single you out to take advantage of you financially. Of course you can afford the latter but it also feels very wrong that these scams succeed seeing that vast amount of immensely poor, honest people around. You can not really hate the scammers as they just found a very effective way to get more money that probably to us is still a ridiculously low amount. All in all, you can not win either way unless you shutter yourself emotionally. And to me being emotional is being alive, being human.
That’s where I am lucky that I meet people who work with me, or invited me over, who shield me from the ugly and the bad and make me feel very hopeful for India. People whose warmth is written on their faces, their gestures and their actions. People who commit to what they do 100%. And those are the ones that make me come back and burn myself out during the short time I am here and make me try to share as much as I can to ensure they get what they deserve from me during the time we have. It is worth it, because of that, but it really takes a lot out of me.
I tried my best to thank anyone who helped me, I invited my friends for a nice fancy dinner and I answered all the emails and followed all the connections I got. I will be busy tomorrow with other stuff and will be unable to answer new questions and contact requests. I am sorry about this, but I am burning my candle on both ends as it is.
I am right now writing this in the first class cabin of my flight back to London. The lushness of this seems surreal and I got here by recycling and doing a nice thing. The hotel gave me a lovely bouquet of flowers as a thank you for staying with them. Something beautiful on the way. Now, taking flowers on a 13 hour trip home is kind of tough and I actually am allergic to flowers. Of course there was no way for me to tell them that without feeling like an ungrateful ass-hat. So I took the flowers with me to the airport (sniffling in the cab) and gave them to the lady who checked me into my flight as a surprise present. She was speechless and I am quite sure my current state of travel (and the 7 hours of deep sleep I just had because I could lie down) is the result of finding a way to spread the joy I was supposed to get exclusively.
I will be in my flat in London soon. I will be excited about taking public transport home, I will be amazed to remember just how lucky I am being able to pour myself a glass of water from my tap and go on my balcony and see a busy but clean street with no continuous sound of horns and people zig-zagging within hairline distance from another. I will enjoy having personal space. I will now have a few weeks of utter humbleness and a wonderful feeling of not giving a hoot about the internet and media drama we create for ourselves in the West. I will be thankful and grateful for what I have. I will take stuff I don’t need but have and share it with those who need it. I am reminded of how privileged I am having gotten to where I am by being fierce in wanting to learn and taking in all I can get and share it. And I am appreciating the little things we consider a given but so not are everywhere in this world. I went once again through the emotional washing machine with a high spin cycle that is India, but – as always – I feel coming out a bit cleaner.
If you have comments, there are threads happening on Facebook and also on Google+