Coder for the People

http://picasa.google.com/mac/

Congratulations, everybody!

I like people. I like meeting new folks, and talking to them, and meeting their friends, and walking up to strangers in public places and striking up conversations. I actually hand out a lot of business cards, just because it seems like the polite thing to do after somebody has done me the courtesy of getting to know me.

At work you can pick your own title for your business cards. Well, you can’t put “CEO” or “Vice President” unless you really are one, but the internal designations are pretty useless outside Google.

I thought for a while about what I do, and why I do it. What I do, ultimately, is try to make peoples’ lives more pleasurable, especially when they touch technology. That’s one of the reasons I like movies, and user interface, and open source, and the web. I’m here for the people.

Coder for the People

Silicon Valley 2004

A friend’s startup started layoffs this week. He was working on the servers until 3:00am the day before his Last Big Meeting. It got me thinking.

We worry a lot when things crash. When I took this picture, my thought was “Whew! I’m out of that dangerous dotcom phase of my career.” In retrospect, this would have been the perfect time to start a scrappy Web 2.0 business with a couple of my buddies.

We’re in one of those between-times now. In a few years, I suspect we’ll either be doing the new-new thing that’s germinating right now, or wishing that we had. There’s at least 1500 web-savvy folks about to come on the job market this year. Who knows what they’ll cook up?

The last time I drove by this building, the sign had been replaced, but the www and .com remained. There was something new going on between them, though.

A lot of wise people are blogging about the political conventions, who said what about what when and why, how this person or another is lying and distorting the truths that should be self-evident and so on.

A friend just sent me a link to the film below. I LOVE a good crazy conspiracy theory. But… pay attention. Watch it through the closing credits.

Watch it here: Dark Side of the Moon

And remember to do your own thinking in the months ahead.

“OK, everybody back from vacation?”

“Hit the button! Hit the button now!”

I’ve been working on the JS UI for the facial recognition and tagging system in Picasaweb since early this year. Hope you like it!

Slides and examples for my second OSCON 2008 talk “CSS for High Performance Javascript UI” are now available.

Just finishing my talk with Andrew Hyde on Startup Weekends. Links to the slides and some resources here: oscon2008.html

I’ve created a minimal Google AppEngine example project for an upcoming workshop. Here it is:

http://code.google.com/p/aeshell/

Today, Picasa posted about its “>“Teddy Bear” Easter Egg.

The Picasa 1.0 Easter Egg was a pink pig, this one, in fact, as an homage to Invader Zim, which we watched riotously during late-night debugging sessions.

Eugene and I worked together on the original dojo.gfx project, and he’s gone and written a significant post on functional programming which Javascript developers must read and understand thoroughly if they want to move ahead in their technical abilities.