Oh yeah, the Open Hackday London is over and it was a blast. I will spare you the bad puns about the lightning strikes (bad enough that I did the graphics for Simon Willison’s shenanigans on the topic) and instead say that I had a lot of fun and it was great to see all the hacks and meet people.

As part of the organizing companies I wasn’t allowed to come up with an own hack but I was happy to do my share by finding the right people to talk to each other, and helping one of the winning teams battle the tag-soup that is called BBC news (I never thought innerHTML on all FONT elements would be the only way to scrape a news item, but I was wrong).

Nate’s and my presentation on the YUI seemed to have gone down rather well, although I must say that I didn’t hear what I said, but instead what the speaker next to me had to say, which can be a bit distracting. I hope the audience got all and random probes later on validate that assumption.

The hack spirit was omnipresent, as my wiki on business reasons for web standards was promoted seamlessly from quick internal repository to official hack schedule during the presentations. This was a bit of a surprise, but it held up and people are using it now to put up details on their hacks and also help me battle the spam and abuse of the repository. Cheers for that lads.

I went through the whole list of hacks for internal presentations and I am still amazed at the quality of them. Not necessarily in terms of perfect presentation (I am wary of perfectly designed interfaces that are allegedly done in two days – although I saw one of them happening) but in terms of ideas. The ever so present “we put some data on a map – wahey mashup!” was not present at all but people came up with really interesting concepts and attacked old issues in new ways. Some highlights are pixeldiva’s Yahoo Buzz RSS to knitting pattern hack, a community steered blimp (I still think this one needs a camera and you should be able to control it with a mobile), the three stage rocket propelled by water pressure, mentos and pepsi light, a fully unit tested social network content aggregator by James Aylett, an AI eliza bot for myspace and and and…

It was also interesting to see how many different companies sent people there. Moo.com were present, one of my favourite small new media companies, MTV sent some people and even the New York Times Research Department was there and won a Wii to take home (guys, the outlet won’t fit, just leave it with me!).

My proudest moment was seeing the organizers of the US Hack Day and senior people inside my company being not only pleasantly surprised by the amount of people showing up and the quality of the hack but being thoroughly speechless. We’ve surely put the UK on the map for events like these even if it isn’t a good idea to put up a tent on the lawn and I hope we can do a lot more of this throughout the UK in the nearer future.

The only differences I’d have liked to see:

• Real coffee – instant coffe brings out the evil in people
• Band on Saturday night – a lot more people would have seen them as most had to leave to catch trains home
• Steadier wireless – but then again, maybe that made people hack more and surf/blog less

Time to wrap up and write some more internal stuff about this.

• Flickr Photos of Hackday
• The official winner list

[tags]hackday,eurohackday,hackdaylondon,bbc,yahoo,mashups,developers,yui[/tags]

Finally getting the wireless at the open hack day to work, here are the slides of Nate Koechley’s and my presentation from this morning. For some reason slideshare has the fail when it comes to showing the PDF right, so I needed to upload the powerpoint.

[tags]hackdaylondon,YUI,JavaScript,CSS,pragmatism,Yahoo!,collapboration,christian heilmann,nate koechley[/tags]

I am sitting here sipping a coffee before leaving for Alexandra Palace to attend the first European Open Hack Day organized by Yahoo! and the BBC. My presentation is ready, I am listed for 11 o’clock (I think) and it is going to be amazing! I went to the preliminary drinks yesterday and the venue is gigantic, especially its 20ies style in the outside are is just beautiful to behold. Thanks to the organizers for pulling this off. More life-blogging (maybe) later.

[tags]hackday,hackdaylondon,eurohackday,london,alexandrapalace,yahoo!,bbc[/tags]

Coming back from @media, I am sure the world is full of amazing developers. Almost every speaker said something along the lines of “you know all this already” (effectively intimidating the ones in the audience who don’t, but that is another story). So now I want to see if you can bring on what is allegedly there.

I need a counterpart of mine in the U.S., specifically in the Silicon Valley. This is an amazing opportunity as it means:

• working on one of the biggest products Yahoo! currently has (11m registered users and counting)
• working with a brand new, enthusiastic team re-architecting the system from scratch using best practices in development, ensuring web standards compliance, unobtrusive scripting, accessibility and the adding of extra semantic layers
• working with one of the main engineers of a MVC framework to create the frontend layer and help it scale to the necessary dimensions
• ensuring i18n readiness for currently 20 languages, but growing weekly
• ensuring that both the teams follow the same agreed standards and work effectively together.

If you pull this off, it is going to be the biggest chocolate star in your career you can have. The team is an absolute joy to work with but it is tricky to cover both the UK and the US parts as 8 hours time difference is tricky to juggle.

So, what you need to bring:

• Excellent knowledge of web semantics, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Excellent knowledge of browser quirks – what breaks how and how to fix it
• Solid knowledge of running a small team
• Good knowledge of templating, using APIs and debugging PHP
• Good knowledge of accessibility issues and workarounds
• Knowledge/Acceptance of the YUI as the library to work with
• Being on-site (don’t bother with proposing telecommuting, you know it does not work)

I hear all over the place that the war for web standards is won and that we can do all these things, but finding people who really come through in interviews is another issue.

Send your proposals and CVs to me, I will treat them with all confidence. I am really not kidding when I am saying that this is a massive opportunity both to show the world that what we preach works but also get the satisfaction to have fixed a massive chunk of the web.

[tags]jobs,lead webdev,lead frontend engineer,yahoo,silicon valley,california,webstandards,yui[/tags]

Back in 2004, Brian Alvey wrote in A List Apart about Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz, detailing that some parts of prison life can be translated to becoming a good web designer (avoiding solitarity, playing to your strength, giving things out for free and so on).

Lately I get the feeling that the bad habits necessary to survive jail also become part of our life as web developers, namely making sure to beat up the biggest guy in your way to establish your place in the pecking order.

A lot of presentations lately take the mickey at larger corporations and their web sites and during panel talks like last week’s @media in London there seems to be no better fun than constantly picking on the W3C, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Apple or whoever is big and corporate and seems to be much slower in bringing us towards the brave new world of standardization, microformats goodness, semantics and a very cool, available and usable world wide web.

Well, looking back several years, I distinctly remember that we wondered why large corporations don’t follow web standards and what can be done to change that. We had the problem that every small client would come to us and ask why they should have CSS layout and valid HTML when none of the big companies do. Corporations seemed too far away to reach and talk to and we reveled in being hard-core and grass-roots celebrating our independence.

Well, times changed and many of the large corporations do take web standards serious, have a thorough understanding of them as a part of the interview process of new developers and give out information as to what obstacles were in their way when shifting from easily maintainable tag-soup (remember, this is what enterprise level frameworks create out-of-the-box) to CSS driven layouts with cleaner, semantically valuable markup. Some even offer frameworks, widgets and code for anyone to use that is built upon their findings.

Instead of welcoming this, we rather ridicule these efforts and pick out bad examples to show how much cooler we can be as smaller, fast-moving individuals and companies.

Maybe it is time to remember that working with grass-roots means getting your hands dirty and we should concentrate more on really producing some larger products, actively help improving framework output and allow for tools to make things easier for people who are bound to software to maintain their sites that is sub-par in terms of quality of generated code.

Maybe we should also remember that the way of working as a web standards evangelist or famous blogger is not the norm, but far from it. For example it is really easy to claim you can add microformats to any document by adding some spans and classes to an HTML document, but in reality a lot – and I mean a massive amount – of content of the web is developed by people who never touch the HTML or know about it. This is why we invented CMS - to separate content from structure and allow maintenance without needing to code HTML.

I do realize that a lot of these panel talks and presentations are tongue-in-cheek, but let’s not forget that this can hurt a lot when someone slaps you on the back of the head while you do it.

Just for the record: I do work for a large corporation, but I was not asked to write about this. I would have written this in any case as I welcome the change web development has done and I don’t want our efforts of the last few years to be in vain because of arrogance.

[tags]webdevelopment,web standards,communication,professionalism,corporations[/tags]