“We thought we were gonna change the world”

From Mike Monteiro’s One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end:

Their goal was giving everyone a voice. They were so obsessed with giving everyone a voice that they never stopped to wonder what would happen when everyone got one. And they never asked themselves what everyone meant. That’s Twitter’s original sin. Like Oppenheimer, Twitter was so obsessed with splitting the atom they never stopped to think what we’d do with it.

Related: more Twitter-related news from the Civicist.

Link

ftrain at twenty

Paul Ford continues to be an inspiration, even if ftrain.com isn’t as active as it once was. You really should go read the archives if somehow you haven’t explored them before.

20 years is arbitrary nonsense. A blip. Our software is bullshit, our literary essays are too long, the good editors all quit or got fired, hardly anyone is experimenting with form in a way that wakes me up, the IDEs haven’t caught up with the 1970s, the R&D budgets are weak, the little zines are badly edited, the tweets are poor, the short stories make no sense, people still care too much about magazines, the Facebook posts are nightmares, LinkedIn has ruined capitalism, and the big tech companies that have arisen are exhausting, lumbering gold-thirsty kraken that swim around with sour looks on their face wondering why we won’t just give them all our gold and save the time … In the spirit of this thing I won’t be editing this paragraph.

Thanks for sharing what you know!

Link

Goodbye Uncanny Valley

“The easier it becomes to counterfeit an image, as political propaganda for instance, the more difficult it is to convince someone an image is real. In other words as computer graphics get better, we believe all images less.”

Goodbye Uncanny Valley by Alan Warburton (via).

Escape from distractionland

I recently added some scripts to my work laptop designed to help me break out of my reflexive “cmd-T, T, enter” keyboard habit. That keyboard sequence loads up my Twitter timeline in a new tab before I’ve even realized what’s happening. I’m untraining myself out of habitual social media grazing by enforcing a rigid schedule.

Based on Mike Rugnetta’s excellent write-up, I basically hijack my Mac laptop’s /etc/hosts file on a daily interval from 10am to 6pm, with a one hour lunch break at noon.

Read more →

Kyoto side trip

Detroit Techno-Lectures

I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!

On September 5, 2016 I won the Listserve lottery. In case you haven’t heard of it, the Listserve is a one-message-per-day email newsletter. Each day a single person from the 21,000+ subscriber list gets to send a message out to the entire list.

Read more →

The world is weird and wonderful!

A tile mural at the 36th Street subway station in Sunset Park.

I wrote a post over on the Mapzen blog that I think came out nicely.

The territory means different things to different people. Depending on your perspective, the kinds of data that are captured about places may be missing, insufficient, or downright hostile. Who’s On First is opinionated_—like all datasets, no collection is truly unbiased—but we hope to be aware of when we’re asserting our own opinions about places and create a framework where a polyglot of _place-feels will be welcome.

The multifaceted maps we make simply reflect the weird and wonderful territory they represent.

I’m going to be adapting this as a talk at csv,conf. If you’ll be in Portland May 3, come out and say hello. (Bring your CSVs!)

Email to a former student

Last night I got an email from a former student, and figured I’d publish my reply. Maybe it could be helpful to you!

Hey Professor Phiffer,

I hope all is well with you. Its A— from CCNY. I took a JS course with you a few years ago. I hope that this is not a bad time to reach out to you. I’m reaching out to you in regards to programming and becoming a fully fledged software engineer. I see that now JS is one of the most important languages that are being used today, and I would love to master it and programming concepts in general.

However, I’m realizing that there are a lot of flaws to the way that I approach programming, such as how to solve a simple problem. I realized it during a technical interview that I’ve had a few months back.

I know that this is out of the blue, but I’m wondering if there is any way to accurately learn how to properly program? I believe that all of these years I’ve been doing something wrong despite building out lots of websites. I was heavy on declarative languages such as HTML and CSS but never fully understood imperative programming languages such as JS and other real programming languages. Would you have any advice as to how to properly go about this?

I also truly don’t know what I’m missing as a programmer because I would love to get a frontend engineering job. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to your response Professor.

Sincerely,
A—

Hey A—,

I can totally relate to this! I think landing your first junior developer gig is among the hardest things to pull off working in tech. I crashed and burned in 3 or 4 of my first interviews, just completely red-faced and speechless, unable answer some “basic” tech question (especially the trivia kind).

The thing to realize is that you probably don’t want those jobs anyway! I bet they’re awful places to be a junior dev, they’d work you raw and not give you professional development or space to grow. So don’t get too discouraged if it doesn’t work out at first.

If you want it to happen, it will happen with time, the job market is in your favor here. It’s just a matter of finding your way to the right people. This is a largely a networking thing, and that’s probably one of the reasons grad school is still a good investment despite the crushing debt that’s often involved.

And by all means learn JavaScript, it is a super relevant tool, but it is just one tool in the toolbox. HTML and CSS are 100% real programming languages, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I find that mastery of CSS and the DOM is way more valuable than being a hotshot with a flavor-of-the-month JS framework.

Taking programming seriously is helpful for improving your software, but it’s also a great way to gain the confidence to interview well. Some of that just comes from doing it repeatedly, and learning from other people’s code (read the jQuery source, read the annotated underscore.js). There are also a lot of soft skills that have helped me along the way: send emails to people (you are already doing this!), buy the O’Reilly books, subscribe to blogs, listen to podcasts, get familiar with the “lore” (see: The Rise of Worse Is Better, The Jargon File, Macintosh Folklore).

Realize that some of all that (and my advice) will be somewhat outdated. You are going to have to invent a lot of the shit yourself that doesn’t exist yet, because our profession is still in the dark ages. Architecture and urban planning are decades more advanced than where we are, you are by no means arriving too late to the party.

Write your own blog posts, embrace the beginner’s mind, start going to BrooklynJS (or ManhattanJS, JerseyScript etc.) meetups—apply to be a speaker, don’t be intimidated that your talk ideas might be too basic.

And hopefully all of that doesn’t sound too overwhelming!

Dan

A big Twitter day

Today I tweeted a snarky thing about Google’s featured snippets and then a bunch of people faved/retweeted it. I’m pretty sure this is the closest I’ve gotten to something “going viral.”

Link