Here’s something that put a smile on my face this morning that needs to be jackhammered off: Tweenbots. Kacie Kinzer wondered if people are ready to help a friendly, but dumb robot and build a small robot with a smile and a little flag saying where it needs to go. All the robot can do is move forwards.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

The results are shown in this wonderful video:

The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

Now all we need to do is deal the same way with other human beings! The other thing it proves is that cute beats smart.

Other things that made me happy this morning:

• Sticking with the robot theme, here’s an awesome Wall-E case mod
• The BackTweets API is terribly useful to see who tweeted your links, it even knows all the shorturl redirects
• Disney shows that all those people who say templates are bad and will not allow you to be successful are wrong. Apparently Disney made one movie and then traced a lot
• Here’s an interesting design concept of a watch in braille
• The Guardian content API is apparently great to track the use of swearwords over time

I am right now teaching a four day class of DOM and Ajax in Sunnyvale, California and also do some tech editing for Scriptin with JavaScript and Ajax by Charles Wyke-Smith and I find one thing that is pretty worrying: easy examples of web development practices are dangerous to show these days.

I’m talking about practices that make it easy to get quick results and give readers and attendees “I am getting this – this is easy” fuzzy warm feelings.

One very obvious example is form validation and re-rendering of a form using PHP_SELF and displaying user data using $_GET or $_POST. Unfiltered they are a free invitation for any XSS attack and will turn your server into a spam-hub or bot-net drone. Explaining countermeasures of XSS normally is out of scope for an example that only shows how a form would work that you enhance progressively.

The same applies to simply outdated ideas like onevent handlers. It is easy to show an example that uses a few onclick handlers, but explaining event handling really well takes a bit of time. Again, this is something that really does not fit in the scope of a DOM course.

I do however think that it is important to get it in there, as there is no such thing as knowing one technology in the web development stack and being able to use it. There’s a lot of overlap with other areas and in order to be a good developer and play well with others you need to be aware of your effects and areas of overlap with your colleagues’ skill-sets.

The other extreme I find myself doing is being too over-cautious. I went through the tough times of the first browser wars and got a deep-rooted mistrust towards anything some browser tells me is OK to do and use. However, I get the feeling that it doesn’t really matter any more if Internet Explorer has a problem with name vs. ID or whatever other shenanigans we have to be aware of when we build things from scratch.

I do get the distinct feeling that not building on top of a good client-side library is simply a waste of time these days. Libraries allow us to write code, not to work around bugs and wonder what other safety measure we have to put in.

That’s why I started asking people in my courses to use Firefox with Firebug and use a good text editor to code along. Today I managed to breeze through how to write HTML that is ready for internationalisation and works with assistive technology, over simple DOM access to the document and at the end writing a validation script for a form using generated DOM content. By concentrating on how things are meant to work instead of debugging random issues I managed to get the students to reach far into the matter in a day – even those who never touched JavaScript before.

Maybe it is time to get beginners accustomed to a market that builds on working solutions and benefits from browser abstraction via libraries than teaching developing from total scratch – bad browsers and bad people taking advantage of any technology to gain access or spam us seem to have made this way of working redundant.

• How to make a lot more money with Google AdSense the easy way
• A good example of car customisation going very wrong
• Amazing exhibition of balloon sculptures – some of them looking like rude bits
• The German Elektrischer Reporter explains Nerds (in German of course)
• A good article on communication skills being a something that sets you apart as an excellent developer: Coder your days are numbered
• The Bible, re-enacted with Playmobile
• A great Arduino solution for a bakery that will twitter when there is new fresh bread
• If your URLs are just not big enough, use Huge URL – also notice their contact email
• There’s a new format for JPG that allows for packing it – zipping up JPG images is more or less pointless in terms of saving bytes.
• A clever trick to analyze your browser history to determine your gender – I am 100% male.
• Awesome things people put on their resume – my faves are “Married, eight children. Prefer frequent travel.” and “Never been fired, although it could happen anytime now.”

I’ve just finished watching Nate Koechley’s talk on professional Front-End Engineering on the YDN Theater:

You can download the m4v for your ipod and read the transcription on Eric Miraglia’s blog.

I’ve seen Nate give this talk before in a shorter version at @media in London, but this version has the whole story from what frontend engineering is, over technologies and methodologies to use and avoid up to a very compelling argument why it all matters.

So if you can spare an hour and a half (or chunk it over two workout sessions in the gym like I did) go and watch this video before you start flaming on mailing lists, forums or flat out tell people that it doesn’t matter when something is incomprehensible or works by magic – as long as it works.

Thanks Nate for a great encapsulation of the whole frontend matter in one video.

Here’s an idea to help those people in your office move away from IE6 to realmore modern browsers.

1. Install FireFox or Opera on their machine
2. Remove the Internet Explorer icon
3. Replace the Opera or Firefox icon with the appropriate following ones
4. Tell them when there’s any confusion that “Microsoft updated their browser, it looks different now!”

Who’s with me?