This year I’m starting to understand what it is to be middle aged. I think I became middle aged in 2011, but this year maybe I know what that is.
When I was young I viewed middle age through the lens of a young person. I would think: to …
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Professional Transitions (or: the shutting down of Mozilla Labs)
Since my last post about leaving Python, my career has shifted further.
Earlier this year Mozilla shut down its Labs group. It’s a little hard to tell – I guess we didn’t actually shutter anything, and though it was announced internally it is entirely unclear externally. But Mozilla Labs …
How We Use GitHub Issues To Organize a Project
Towards a Next Level of Collaboration
With TogetherJS we’ve been trying to make a usable tool for the web we have, and the browsers we have, and the web apps we have. But we’re also accepting a lot of limitations.
For a particular scope the limitations in TogetherJS are reasonable, but my own goals …
Collaboration as a Skeuomorphism for Agents
In concept videos and imaginings about the Future Of Computing we often see Intelligent Agents: smart computer programs that work on your behalf.
But to be more specific, I’m interested in agents that don’t work through formal rules. An SMTP daemon acts on your behalf routing messages to …
Defaulting To Together
I’ve been working on an experiment, Hotdish, for several weeks now with Aaron Druck and Gregg Lind. I’m really excited about what we’re doing, and in particular I’m excited about some of the principles we are bringing to the design. Hotdish is an experiment in sharing …
Hubot, Chat, The Web, and Working in the Open
I was listening to a podcast with some people from GitHub and I was struck by Hubot.
My understanding of what they are doing: Hubot is a chat bot — in this case it hangs out in Campfire chat rooms, but it could equally be an IRC bot. It started out …
Saying Goodbye To Python
This post is long overdue; this isn’t a declaration of intent (any intent was long ago made real), just my reflection about my own path. I left the Python world a long time ago but I never took a chance to say goodbye.
While I had moved on from …
Live Programming, Walkabout.js
There’s a number of “live programming” environments used for education. Khan Academy is one example. In it, you write code on the left hand side, and you immediately see the result on the right hand side. You don’t hit “save” or “run” — it’s just always running.
There …
Nouning the Verb of Browsing
I was talking for a while with Gregg Lind about TogetherJS and about all the ways it could and should be cool, if we keep building out this idea. Both to build out TogetherJS, but also the general area of cobrowsing (cobrowsing is where two or more people can browse …