Adventures in India

Posted April 1, 2008 at 3:11 AM | Tagged as: Photography, Travel, Work | Just 1 Comment

Back in February, I traveled to India in order to do some Web development training for PayPal. In addition to having a wonderful time meeting and interacting with all of my coworkers, I got the opportunity to see some of the sights, including Mahabalipuram and DakshinaChitra in Tamil Nadu and the Taj Mahal in Agra. I did my best to document my experience in photos, and while it took some time, I’ve finally uploaded and tagged all of them. Go check them out!

Prior to leaving for India, I made plans to visit Delhi and Agra with two of my co-workers, Jeremy Gillick and Reena Bansal. Reena lived in Delhi for some time and she made a great tour guide. Thanks to accidentally perfect timing, we saw the new Bollywood epic Jodhaa Akbar just prior to visiting North India, and this gave us history on the sites we were seeing and really helped to bring them alive.

As great as that trip was, I really loved spending time in South India. The culture was simultaneously alien and completely familiar. There were more people and there was more activity than I think I’ve ever seen before, foods were completely unfamiliar, the language was completely unknown to me — yet I felt completely at home with the chaos and the people. For my free time in and around Chennai, the role of tour guide was filled by fellow team-member Guru Prasath. He did a great job of ensuring that I gained a greater understanding of the cultural, spiritual, and linguistic history and traditions of the region. And, with the help of Anitha, another co-worker, I gained some lovely Indian fashions, too.

I’ll admit that I didn’t know much about India — but one of the few things I knew, I learned back elementary school. For nearly 25 years an image has been stuck in my brain: that of a woman drawing an intricate pattern on the ground outside a home. The accompanying description explained that women in South India would wake each morning to draw kolams, or “painted prayers”, in order to bring prosperity to the home and family. Never did I think that I’d see one in real life! Now that I have, I’ve been inspired to learn more about the designs and to draw some myself (just on paper, so far).

Drawing a kolam is a wonderful meditative practice that I would suggest to anyone who needs to quiet one’s thoughts or develop greater concentration and attention to detail. It’s also a practice in generating mathematical patterns. In my further reading about kolams, I’ve seen them referred to as “spiritual mathematical patterns”, the practice of drawing them as “geometrical acts of kindness”, and the women that create them as “great female mathematicians who solve complicated line patterns every morning”. Kolams are so intriguing, in fact, that computer scientists are studying them. How’s that for ancient traditions mixing with technological advancements?

I guess that’s what appeals to me about India — the blending of old traditions with new technologies and outside influences to create something that is still uniquely Indian. As I see it, the people of India have one foot moving toward the future with the other rooted in the past, and I respect how they’re working to reconcile the two. I can’t wait until I return again, to learn more about what’s been and where they’re going. And next time I’ll be sure to rise early to witness the kolam ritual, and maybe even try some of my own.

The Annoying IE8 Loophole

Posted March 4, 2008 at 2:22 AM | Tagged as: Web Standards, Work | 3 Comments

Right now, the Web Standards community is celebrating. After weeks of telling us otherwise, Microsoft has announced that IE8 will enable standards mode by default.

Like others, I’m very happy about this change and I applaud Microsoft for reversing their decision. However there’s something bothering me about their latest statement…

Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

You see, originally Microsoft wanted us to add an HTTP header or META tag in order to indicate that a page was compliant with the latest-and-greatest standards mode; now that we get that mode by default, we don’t need the header/tag — except to explicitly indicate that we want the older, IE7-like standards mode.

Don’t see the loophole yet? If you work for a big company that’s not quite so Web Standards savvy, you might. The loophole is that there’s nothing in IE8 that’s going to force anyone to upgrade their code! While you, dear Standards-abiding designer/developer, want this opportunity to clean up your site and trash the old code, The Man is going to tell you that there’s no point investing in this change and they’re going to point you to the HTTP header/META tag solution.

So, now is the time to begin strategizing — how are you going to convince your boss(es) that an IE8 code refresh is necessary? Also, how do you plan to support IE8 and IE7, and possibly even IE6 and IE5.5?

Go ahead and start the party without me… I need to work this one out first.

Already kicking ass in 2008

Posted January 8, 2008 at 5:32 PM | Tagged as: Career, Meeeeeeee, Web Standards, Work | Comments Off

I’m very honored to be featured as Christopher Schmitt’s first interview of the year. Christoper is a stand-up guy, a great designer, and prolific author. We had a good chat about work and non-work stuff, and you can read the whole thing here!

And just in case you didn’t notice, the line-ups for the 2008 An Event Apart conferences have been posted. Eric and Jeffrey asked me to speak to the Boston crown on June 23-24, and how could I say no? I had such a good time last year in San Francisco and it seems about time to take my message to the East Coast.

Wow, we’re only eight days into the year… how am I ever going to keep up this level of ass-kicking for the remaining 358 days? Whewh!

A Book and A Contest

Posted December 19, 2007 at 12:26 PM | Tagged as: Books, Web Standards, Work | Comments Off

Not having mentioned it here before, you may not be aware of the fact that I contributed a chapter to the new book Adapting to Web Standards. But I did, along with Rob Cherny, Meryl K. Evans, Kevin Lawver, and Mark Trammell — all coordinated and organized by lead author Christopher Schmitt.

My chapter (chapter 5) relates to the five years I’ve spent as a standards evangelist and standards consultant in the enterprise. I write about the Circle of Standards: the process I invented to make standards adoption and ongoing practice an easier task. There aren’t too many “professional” standards evangelists, so I hope this chapter encourages more people to step up to such a role. Of course, I hope that it helps all standards enthusiasts through the process of establishing standards in the work environment.

If you’re interested in checking out the book, you can try to win a copy in this contest! Of course, you can also buy a copy.

Web Development as a Craft… and Career

Posted August 10, 2007 at 7:46 AM | Tagged as: Business, Career, Web Standards, Work | 4 Comments

Karl Dubost’s recent post on the craft of HTML coincided with the launch of the first round of Web coding standards at work. Why did we need coding standards? Karl answers that for me in his first paragraph:

HTML is a practical art. In a professional context, it requires precise and extensive skills. As with many popular crafts, the vast majority of people do it on their own, but only a few do it for a living. The quality of products varies a lot.

When you have a team of developers working on a product, you need to set quality requirements… but to meet those requirements you also need to set the expectation that the developers will work in a consistent manner. Sometimes this can be achieved by having the team lead set the direction for the code by crafting templates and doing code reviews. But what happens as team members rotate on and off the project — how do you retain the knowledge about the coding direction without taking time to bring each person up to speed? What happens as your development team grows to 10, 40, 100 people? This stuff doesn’t scale without spelling out the rules and setting expectations… thus the need for coding standards.

But standards alone won’t create consistency, of course. When Karl says that “HTML is a craft”, he implies that there are techniques that one can only learn through study and practice. When practicing a craft, there are skill levels that reach into the realms of mastery that only few will ever meet. Out of that team of 10, 40, or 100 developers, how many will truly become those masters?

My experience over the past 8 years of working in industry has led me to find that only a few will ever commit themselves to the craft of Web development, and that worries me as a developer and as a manager. We all want job security, and dedicating oneself to excellence in a field implies we’re in that field for the long haul. But what career path can a Web developer expect to have today? What opportunities will be available 5 years from know? There are many unknowns and I think that this may be one big reason I don’t see more talented developers taking the plunge and committing themselves more fully to Web development as a craft and career.

Karl points to another problem: the “majority of people do it on their own, but only a few do it for a living”, which to me implies that most people think anyone can be a Web developer (how many times have you heard someone state that their kid could build a better site?) and therefore they don’t take the craft of Web development seriously. I’ve found that most Web developers who didn’t emerge from computer programming backgrounds have serious complexes over whether or not they’re “real” developers… and a lot of this is due to snarky computer programmers who put Web developers down because they make the same, stupid assumption that “anyone can do Web development”. How is that encouraging to anyone looking at committing themselves to this work as their career? (Nevermind how irrational it is for a computer programmer to dismiss part of their larger discipline.) How is that encouraging to anyone who has hopes of using Web development as a basis for a career that could include programming in other languages?

So what’s a developer to do? And what’s a manager to do? I’ll post my ideas at another time… right now, tell me yours.