Firefox Followup: Parakey

Firefox

Details have finally emerged about Blake Ross’ secret new project, Parakey. It gets to the meat on the third page.

“Although it looks like a Web site–down to the Firefox-style tabs that run across the top of the page, which each family member uses to display his or her own section–it is, in fact, something much more ambitious: a universal interface. Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera.”

It uses a new language called JUL. I haven’t found anything about Parakey online, besides Parakey.com registered about a month ago. Most disappointing quote from the article?

“If it were up to us, we’d open source all of it,” he says, “but it depends on how the investors want to do this.”

I’m guessing this might be a misquote. Investors are for money, advice, and connections, not product leadership. There are good examples now of scalable businesses being built on top of open source — don’t let anyone take you down a path you can’t believe in 100%. Think long term. I don’t know who Parakey’s investors are, but I’m sure Blake hooked up with (or could demand) folks smart enough to understand this.

Update: Blake says in the comments, “That is, indeed, a misquote. Parakey will be open source, as I repeatedly told the magazine while the article was being edited.”

Double Standards

Asides

A lot of the same people who rant and rave every time Internet Explorer has another security snafu are being strangely silent about Firefox’s recent flaws. I wonder how many of the web technorati are willing to give Firefox a pass every now and then because of its superior standards support? The Firefox team is also to be commended for their rapid response to the issue on the only site that’s vulnerable by default.

Jay Z + Me

Gallery, Personal

I think it was Dustin Curtis who said something along the lines of “you can learn a lot about someone by their bucket list,” and he had posted his publicly recently. (Posting it is a great idea by the way, people will help you with it.) I began to think about mine, which was a little strange because I’ve been trying to move away from desiring things or experiences and just be more grateful in the present, but immediately a few music ones came to mind: have WordPress name-checked in a major hip-hop song, be in a rap video, and perform with one of my favorite artists (somehow).

It was less than a week later I got an email from a friend who was helping organize a hush-hush event where Jay-Z would sing his song Picasso Baby over and over 6 hours while interacting with various artists and an audience as a performance piece, and there might even be an opportunity to be one of the people he interacted with. My jaw dropped.

Continue reading Jay Z + Me →

Six Apart and Live Journal

Asides,

I’m a little late to this, but the word is that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. Congrats to the 6A and LJ teams! Big news, however you cut it. However, the question is: what exactly are they buying? LiveJournal has about 5.6 million accounts, but only about 2.4 million of these are active. That’s still pretty nice though, considering I imagine it’s about 24x what Typepad/Movable Type have now. Is it the technology? That’s already open source so they would have access to that anyway, and it’s Perl (which is 6A’s core competency) so I’m sure they could find they way around. (I wonder what will happen to the Open Source project after the dust has settled though?) That leads me to think it must be the people and engineers at LJ that 6A is after. Is this enough to position them against Microsoft and Google, as many have been suggesting?

98.6% of LiveJournal users don’t pay a thing, but that still gives 6A ~93,000 accounts paying $25/year. That revenue will be nice, especially since 6A has so many employees, but I don’t think it’s the coup most people are expecting. Remember the people who invested $10M in Six Apart are expecting it to be a quarter of a billion dollar business. It’ll be interesting to hear what the official word is on this, if and when an official word comes out. I’m probably missing something obvious. (And where is Yahoo in all of this? They better hurry up and buy someone too.)

WordPress and Dreamhost

WordPress

As has been reported many places, and sent to me in a dozen emails, Dreamhost have integrated support for installing and upgrading WordPress through their administration interface. For many this is not new, some systems like Fantastico have had support for auto-installing WP for a while now, but the interface was cluttered and WordPress was just one of several dozen miscellaneous scripts. What’s really interesting about this decision is their thought process, quoted from their newsletter:

Why didn’t we make it so you could just install Movable Type itself with one click instead? Somewhat because Movable Type is a commercial product, and they would require us to do some sort of weird registration for all our users with them in order to even install the free version. Also, WordPress doesn’t require “rebuilding” your blog every time you publish. Mostly though, installing WordPress was eleven times easier for us.

Tyler Brekko sent me screenshots from the entire installation process, including emails from the “Happy DreamHost WordPress Robot” and it’s kinda neat. They take advantage of a few structural decisions in WordPress and on wordpress.org to make the process very smooth. You can read a bit in their knowledge base. What surprised me the most was the sheer number of people who emailed me about this, DreamHost must have a ton of users. Here are some other posts around the web about this:

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this!

WordPress Party Tonight

Events, Yahoo

Tonight (Monday March 30) at 7 PM we’re opening up the new Automattic space at Pier 38 for the first time because so many of our friends will be in town for Web 2.0 Expo and all their fun events. Come by our spot (on Embarcadero in between Brannan and Townsend) starting at 7 PM and enjoy good music, free booze, and geeky friends. We’re on the left corner and there’s a bunch of circles in the window and an Automattic sign over the door. (Sorry for the late announcement, if you could help us get the word out I’d appreciate it.) You can RSVP on Facebook here.

29 Books in 2019

Books

As a follow-on to my lists in 2017 and 2018, here are the books I completed this year. I’ve linked all to the Kindle edition except the Great Mental Models, which is so gorgeous in hardcover you should get that one, and the The World is Sound isn’t available as an ebook. Bold are ones I particularly enjoyed or found myself discussing with others a lot.

  1. The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coehlo
  2. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
  3. No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
  4. Imagine it Forward by Beth Comstock
  5. The Great Mental Models Vol. 1 by Shane Parrish
  6. Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
  7. There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald
  8. Less by Andrew Sean Greer
  9. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
  10. nejma by Nayyirah Waheed
  11. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (also on Obama’s book list, and based on the high school I went to, HSPVA)
  12. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
  13. The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello
  14. The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz, Don Jose Ruiz, and Janet Mills
  15. Empty Planet by Darrell Bricker
  16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  17. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elian Mazlish
  18. Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison
  19. A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
  20. Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris
  21. The World Is Sound: Nada Brahma: Music and the Landscape of Consciousness by Joachim-Ernst Berendt
  22. The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman
  23. Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
  24. Four Soldiers by Hubert Mingarelli
  25. Working by Robert Caro
  26. Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
  27. Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  28. The Devil’s Financial Dictionary by Jason Zweig
  29. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (also on Obama’s book list)

What’s interesting is that if you were to purchase every single one of those books, it would be about $349. You could get them all for nothing from your local library, even on a Kindle. The money I spend on books is by far and away the best investment I make every year — books expand my mind and enrich my life in a way that nothing else does.

T-Shirt Plea

Asides

Open letter to free schwag people: Not all geeks are XXL! There is a reason the small and medium shirts are the first to go. Please keep the smaller geeks in mind when purchasing your merch. Conference organizers: make t-shirt size part of the registration so you can give your vendors a heads-up to the size makeup of the conference. (Other than that, Gnomedex is going great.)

Getting a Job After Coding Bootcamp

Asides

The past 6-8 months I’ve been seeing a new type of person applying for Automattic’s engineering positions that I hadn’t seen before, and I think it’s very interesting and promising but missing one key component.

These applications usually have great cover letters and well-put-together resumes, which is a good sign that people put some thought into it and had someone spot-check it before sending it in. But where most people list prior jobs, these applications (and LinkedIn profiles) list projects. When you dig into prior jobs listed, if there are any, they’re typically in a completely unrelated field like medicine or finance, and under education they list one of these new bootcamps, like Hack Reactor or App Acedemy.

Here I’m going to offer a key 🔑piece of advice to these folks to help their applications stand out, and can 100% compensate for their lack of professional experience: contribute to open source. “Projects” done in a coding bootcamp, even when they’re spelled out in great bullet-point technical detail, don’t really tell me anything about your engineering ability. Open source contributions show me a passion for a given area, ability to work with others to have a contribution reviewed and accepted, and most importantly show actual code. Even better than one-off contributions, if you can grow into a recognized position in an open source project, that puts you ten steps ahead of applications even from folks with 20 years experience in the field, at least to an Open Source-biased company like Automattic.

Though I don’t know any of these boot camps well enough to suggest them, I love the idea in general. Even before the more formal bootcamps I’ve seen hundreds of examples of people who used free information and technology to rise to a very high level of technical contribution. In fact that’s very much my own story from the early days of WordPress. So in summary: it’s okay to learn to code through class projects, but show your value by getting involved in something bigger.

Twitter API

Web Standards

I think the opportunity has passed for the Twitter API to become a lingua franca for the real-time web. WordPress.com, Tumblr, Typepad, SocialCast, and Status.net all added support for the API in a way to make it as easy as possible for Twitter client developers — all they had to do was change the endpoint. The clients would then become a hub for users across different services, and had the ability to flourish regardless of the direction of the service they originally built on.

However because of perceived lack of market or a rush trying to keep up with each other and new features in Twitter’s API, like geo-location, we’re now close to half a year later and support for alternative endpoints in the major clients is haphazard at best. One of examples we all used to point to, Tweetie, is now owned by Twitter Inc. and doesn’t have much motivation to support other services in the future. Neither do the other official clients they’re rolling out. (Twitter.com/downloads is now a 404 page.)

For the record I completely support Twitter creating or buying official clients for every platform, including desktops. It’s what I would do in their position. However the third-party client developers that contributed immeasurably to Twitter’s success thus far are now in the awkward position of no longer being useful to their parent. It makes no sense for Twitter to have its user or signup experience mediated by a third party. None of the third-party clients have innovated enough in the user experience (for the most part they do not look or work significantly different from when they launched) or in cross-service support and flow.

If any of the clients had added seamless third-party API support when the opportunity first arose we’d all be pointing to them and promoting them. Now we’re more in a situation where, like Twitter, it makes more sense to build and promote our own because our users are demanding a multi-modal experience.