Ben Collins-Sussman, Subversion godfather and one of the men behind Google Code wrote an interesting article about Programmer insecurity in which he realizes that the whole concept about “Release early, release often” is not as common as we think it is.

And yet over and over, I’m gathering stories that point to the fact that programmers do not want to write code out in the open. Programmers don’t want their peers to see mistakes or failures. They want to work privately, in a cave, then spring “perfect” code on their community, as if no mistakes had ever been made. I don’t think it’s hubris so much as fear of embarrassment. Rather than think of programming as an inherently social activity, most coders seem to treat it as an arena for personal heroics, and will do anything to protect that myth. They’re fine with sharing code, as long as they present themselves as infallible, it seems. Maybe it’s just human nature.

Yes it is, and overcoming the barrier to allow people to point out your mistakes to you for fixing is quite a hard step for a lot of people.

One main reason is that the job market doesn’t necessarily help us in getting there: bad managers still promote developers in terms of what they can produce in a certain amount of time or how much they know themselves. Clever managers encourage knowledge sharing and make sustainability of your code a necessity for promotion. If you can deliver good code and you can make yourself replaceable by people reporting to you, that is good for the company and the product. It also means that you can have a holiday once in a while. However, far too often this way of progressing is seen as weakness or “losing touch” or “becoming a manager and not a coder” by your programming peers. Coalfaces we ain’t, so let’s stop with this.

Back to opening up your code early and often and invite feedback all the time. I do appreciate that some people don’t want to do that. It is not about releasing “perfect code” but it actually is about protecting your idea or principles.

Say you wanted to create a JavaScript library that only does one thing right: patching browser bugs in DOM and CSS support and allowing developers to really use the W3C recommended methods instead of branching for browsers. Releasing this library would more than likely result in a flood of requests to “add animation – everybody needs that!”, “make it like jQuery – just smaller” and similar requests. Developers are amazingly gifted in listening to the “feature creature” (think of Jabba’s little evil cackling mate in Star Wars) on their shoulder instead of keeping what they deliver down to the bare necessities. Feedback like that early in the process is very distracting and also disheartening. It is not about how much you pack in – it is about fulfilling the task you set out to fulfil.

It is pretty cool to see what is happening right now in the UK when it comes to mashups and data. Show us a better way is a web site and competition that asks ethical hackers to come up with ideas to use a wide range of public data for the good of the public. Straight from the horse’s mouth this sounds like this:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a 20,000 pound prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here. 

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.  Rest assured, this competition does not include personal information about people.

We’re confident that you’ll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don’t have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.

There is a vast amount of APIs available to play with so what stops you from giving it a whirl? My own idea, cabsharing is something I was actually planning to do for quite a time, maybe even as a start-up, but why not here?

Dees Chinniah just emailed me with details about Barcamp London 5 on the 27th and 28th of September in the ebay offices in Richmond.
It is quite a trip to get there from Central London, but if the weather will be nice the location is the bomb – and there is enough space to park if needed.

More information on the BarCamp Site and of course on Upcoming

Let’s give Dees and of course Jonathan from ebay our support and make this a great unconference.

Adobe just announced the new searchability features of Flash complete with a specifications document of the SWF format. Google already announced that they are indexing SWF as of now to a full extend and according to Adobe Yahoo! are soon to follow.

This is splendid news, as it will allow people to write APIs to get text information out of SWF movies in a much easier way. Sure there were several Flash Decompilers already available, but this will make this much more mainstream and people will take adding text information to their Flash movies much more seriously.

On the other hand, this will also lead to more security exploits, but that is to be expected from any disclosure of file format specifications.

Thanks Adobe!

I am very happy to announce that I am organizing my first big event. After years of fighting the good fight and getting people to embrace accessibility I was ready to give up on it. Instead I took a new angle on it and used APIs to create alternative interfaces to systems that just will not get more accessible any time soon.

Readers of this blog will have seen the outcome of these, and last weekend at mashed08 I showed another hack and explained the idea of it. I also gauged if there was any interest by the assembled hackers in an event like this and got some good response.

Even better was that I won a prize – some financial support to get an “accessibility hack day” on the road.

So here goes, check out Scripting Enabled

Scripting Enabled is a conference and hack day in London, England in September 2008.

The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time – let’s not wait, let’s make it happen.

Right now I am still looking for, well, everything. I have some money, I need a location and other speakers. I got a lot of ideas, though.

Check out the site, the calls for participation and if you want to help, please contact me!