I just spent a couple of days playing around with ideas, words to describe those ideas, and code to make those ideas come to life. It had been quite a few months since I’d spent the time to sharpen my tools, and while the challenges to the web are greater than ever, it’s also a more impressive toolkit than ever.
I’d like to call out a few heroes whose generous work as open source and easily accessible services have made the last couple of days particularly fun:
The folks at Heroku
The amazing perseverance of @automattic and the WordPress team, whose recent moves to both redo the front-end and open-source the .com site are one of a long string of bold and ambitious moves.
The energy and diligence of the Ghost team
The JS module hackers who make github and npm useful as opposed to just necessary
Brock and the rest of the Surge.sh team for a product that “just works”
The Firebase team, for not shutting down one of the tools I think has managed to bridge the ergonomics of a Heroku with the developer power that AWS-style services provide
AWS, for paving the way (and because even S3 is still remarkable)
The React team at Facebook & beyond, who are boldly moving the client side forward
The Material Design team at Google, for taking design seriously and then implementing it in an accessible way.
The LetsEncrypt team, one of the projects I’m proud to say Mozilla had a big hand in.
A couple of years ago, I was part of a panel with the remarkable Evgeny Morozov, at an event hosted by the Museum of Vancouver. The event wasn’t remarkable, except that I ended up in a somewhat high-energy debate with Mr. Morozov, without particularly understanding why. He ascribed to me beliefs I didn’t hold, which made a rigorous intellectual argument (which I generally enjoy) quite elusive and baffling.
It took a follow-up discussion with my political theorist brother to elucidate it. In particular, he helped me realize that while for decades I’ve described myself as a technologist, depending on your definition of that word, I was misrepresenting myself. Starting with my first job in my mid teens, my career (modulo an academic side-trip) has essentially been to bring technological skills to bear on a situation. Using the word technologist to describe myself felt right, without much analysis. As my brother pointed out, using an academic lexicon, the word technologist can be used to mean “someone who thinks technology is the answer”. Using that definition, capital is to capitalist as technology is to technologist. Once I understood that, I realized why Mr. Morozov was arguing with me. He thought I believed in technologism, much like the way the New Yorker describes Marc Andreesen (I’m no Andreesen in many ways, but I do think he’d have been a better foil for Morozov). It also made me realize that he either didn’t understand what Mozilla is trying to do, or didn’t believe me/us.
Using that definition, I am not a technologist any more than I am a capitalist or a regulator[ist?]. I resist absolutes, as it seems to me blatantly obvious (and probably boring) that except for rhetorical/marketing purposes (such as Morozov’s), the choices which one should make when building or changing a system, at every scale from the individual to the society, must be thoughtfully balanced. This balance is hard to articulate and even harder to maintain, in a political environment which blurs subtlety and a network environment which amplifies differences.
It is in this balance that lies evolutionary progress. I have been re-re-watching The Wire, thinking about Baltimore. In season 3, one of the district commanders, sick of the status quo, tries to create a “free zone” for unimpeded drug dealing, an Amsterdam-in-Baltimore, in order to draw many of the associated social ills away from the rest of the district. In doing this, he uses his authority (and fearlessness, thanks to his impending retirement), and combines management techniques, marketing, and positive and negative incentives, to try fix a systemic social problem. I want more stories like that (especially less fictional ones).
I don’t believe that technology is “the answer,” just like police vans aren’t the answer. That said, ignoring the impact that technology can have on societal (or business!) challenges is just as silly as saying that technology holds the answer. Yes, technology choices are often political, and that’s just fine, especially if we invite non-techies to help make those political decisions. When it comes to driving behavioral change, tech is a tool like many others, from empathy and consumer marketing to capital and incentives. Let’s understand and use all of these tools.
Human psychology explains why marketing works, and marketing has definitely been used for silly reasons in the past. Still, if part of your goal involves getting people to do something, refusing to use human psychology to further your well-intentioned outcome is cutting your nose to spite your face. Similarly, it’s unarguable that those who wield gigantic capital have had outsize influence in our society, and some of them are sociopaths. Still, refusing to consider how one could use capital and incentives to drive behavior is an equally flawed limit. Lastly, obviously, technology can be dehumanizing. But technology can also, if wielded thoughtfully, be liberating. Each has power, and power isn’t intrinsically evil.
1+1+1 = magic
Tech companies of the last decade have shown the outsize impact that these three disciplines, when wielded in coordinated fashion, can have on the world. Uber’s success isn’t due to smart deployment of tech, psychology or capital. Uber’s success is due to a brilliant combination of all three (and more). I’ll leave it history to figure out whether Uber’s impact will be net positive or negative based on metrics that I care about, but the magical quality that combination unleashed is awe inspiring.
This effective combination of disciplines is a critical step which I think eludes many people and organizations, due to specialization without coordination. It is relatively clear how to become a better technologist or marketer. The ladder of capitalist success is equally straightforward. But figuring out how to blend those disciplines and unlock magic is elusive, both within a career path and within organizations.
I wonder if it’s possible to label this pursuit, in a gang-signal sort of way. Venture capitalists, marketers, and technologists all gain a lot by simply affiliating with these fields. I find any one of these dimensions deeply boring, and the combinations so much more provocative. Who’s with me and what do you call yourselves? Combinatorists? Alchemists?
I have a new job! Still with Mozilla, still doing a lot of what I’ve done in the past, just hopefully more/better/faster. The group I’m joining has a great culture of active blogging, so I’m hoping the peer pressure there will help me blog more often.
What’s the gig you ask? My new focus is to help the Mozilla Foundation make our products as adoptable as possible.
MoFo (as we affectionately call that part of the Mozilla organization) has a few main ways in which we’re hoping to change the world — some of those are programs, like Open News and the Science Lab, some are products. In a program, the change we’re hoping to effect happens by connecting brains together, either through fellowship programs, events, conferences, things like that. That work is the stuff of movement-building, and it’s fascinating to watch my very skilled colleagues at work — there is a distinctive talent required to attract autonomous humans to a project, get them excited about both what you’re doing and what they could do, and empowering them to help themselves and others.
Alongside these programmatic approaches, MoFo has for a while been building software whose use is itselfimpactful. Just like getting people to use Firefox was critical to opening up the web, we believe that using products like the Webmaker tools or BadgeKit will have direct impact and help create the internet the world needs.
And that’s where I come in! Over the last few years, various smart people have kept labeling me a “product person”, and I’ve only recently started to understand what they meant, and that indeed, they are right — “product” (although the word is loaded with problematic connotations) is central for me.
I’ll write a lot more about that over the coming months, but the short version is that I am particularly fascinated by the process that converts an idea or a pile of code into something that intelligent humans choose to use and love to use. That translation to me is attractive because it requires a variety of types of thinking: business modeling, design, consumer psychology, and creative application of technology. It is also compelling to me in three other aspects: it is subversive, it is humane, and it is required for impact.
It is subversive because I think if we do things right, we use the insights from billions of dollars worth of work by “greedy, evil, capitalist corporations” who have figured out how to get “eyeballs” to drive profit and repurpose those techniques for public benefit — to make it easy for people to learn what they want to learn, to allow people to connect with each other, to amplify the positive that emerges when people create. It is humane because I have never seen a great product emerge from teams that treat people as hyper-specialized workers, without recognizing the power of complex brains who are allowed to work creatively together. And it is required for impact because software in a repo or an idea in a notebook can be beautiful, but is inert. To get code or an idea to change the world, we need multitudes to use it; and the best way I know to get people to use software is to apply product thinking, and make something people love.
I am thrilled to say that I have as much to learn as I have to teach, and I hope to do much of both in public. I know I’ll learn a lot from my colleagues, but I’m hoping I’ll also get to learn on this blog.
I’m looking forward to this new phase, it fits my brain.
In grad school, I remember a conversation across the campus green with an visiting psychologist from Harvard. I don’t remember much about the conversation except that he introduced me to Isaiah Berlin’s notion of the Hedgehog and the Fox, and correctly pegged me as a Fox. I think I was a bit offended at the simplification, but time has proven him right. I’m certainly no hedgehog.
I got into a silly argument on twitter last night, about whether my looking to hire someone who I labeled (as job descriptions make us do) a “Coding Designer” was not just foolish (I’d seen the Unicorn references in my tweetstream already) but apparently a bad idea, because, so the ultra-simplified argument goes, you somehow can’t be both. And so I’ll use the energy to rant a bit about what seem to be prevailing attitudes around titleism and narrow definitions of “professionalism”.
We all need to define ourselves to others. It helps us be understood, and hopefully valued. Labels can be useful for that. We also, even more, like to label others. It helps us simplify our approach to them. If I can find a label for you, then I can rely on a prioris about how people with that label tend to think and behave, and I don’t need to actually get to know you too much. The more people we interact with, the more important these shortcuts are. Some roles are particularly subject to that (Recruiters, VCs, politicians, etc. — people who routinely talk to dozens if not hundreds of people a day). And the best at these roles are those who use a different labeling system than their peers. Recruiters who see the latent ambition or genius in a shy candidate; VCs who see the determination behind a stutter, or, conversely, the lack of self-confidence behind the bravado, etc.
Labels are useful and practical in the short term. And I don’t know how one could run a large HR department without them. But we should be careful to not take them too seriously, as in the long term, they can hurt. They hurt because people, especially interesting, worth-getting-to-know people, are much more subtle, complicated, confusing and hard to categorize creatures. Whether you take the label too seriously when thinking about others (e.g., refuse to see the valid opinion about a design expressed by a non-Designer) or about yourself (and limit your impact on the world because “oh, that’s not something that a mere ____ like me could say/do”), you’re not getting the most out of anyone involved.
As I write this, I realize that I feel quite strongly about this topic. Part of it is probably because I grew up in an educational system, which at least then believed way too much in labeling people and determining their fate based on that label. Much waste ensued. Part of it is probably because I can’t for the life of me figure out what my label should be, and if I can’t, then that must be bad. I’ve had a range of professional labels, from scientist to engineer, architect, team lead, vice president, CTO, CEO, blah blah blah. I’ve been called a designer, strategist, entrepreneur, boss, blah blah blah. None of those words will, I hope, be in my epitaph. And so I get cranky on twitter at night, because if there are people who strive to be both excellent at design and at coding, then by golly we should encourage them.
Titles are a poor approximation of a professional ideal, and a profession is a poor approximation of a human’s breadth, contributions, and talents. Embrace your inner fox, and if you happen to have both design and coding skills, can see a problem, conjure up a solution, prototype it, welcome challenges to your idea from peers, data, and users, apply.
I’ve been having a really stimulating few weeks, which is making me feel oddly optimistic, so I figured I’d spread the cheer.
It’s been somewhat quieter than usual in my little corner of Mozilla, as many of my colleagues were busy preparing for on our big announcements and demos at Mobile World Congress. This lull has allowed me to spend more time indulging in longer term thinking.
In that thinking period, I’ve had the privilege and distinct pleasure of spending a few hours of quality videochat with none other than Ward Cunningham, inventor extraordinaire. We’ve been talking a lot about his new baby, which he calls Federated Wiki (the name is misleading I think, but as with many new ideas, awkward names are better than long descriptions. The shortest analogy I can come up with is a space for personal writing that borrows the forking attitude from github, within a smalltalk-like conceptual model. — Confused yet?). Regardless of the name, it’s both refreshing and stimulating to talk to someone like Ward about topics we both see as important and interesting, with a shared commitment to improve the status quo. If you’re intellectually curious, willing to do some mental backflips and deal with fairly raw and unconventional ideas, I encourage you to watch the videos and play around with federated wiki. It’s a worthwhile exploration.
One of the surprising ways in which that exploration is changing my brain is that I’m finally starting to care about hardware. Until recently, I’ve been quite uninterested in hardware talk, both of the standard computer geek variety, as well as the internet-of-things variety. The former has felt no different to me than talking about fashion, and the latter always struck me as an industrial problem, not a human one. It’s made sense to me that companies like GE were keen on the Internet of Things — i just didn’t really care, and the odds of billions of networked computers being a net win for the world seemed pretty slim — I’ll admit to a bit of an head-in-the-sand reaction there.
What’s changed my thinking (and let me to acquire handfuls of raspberry pis and pcDuinos for the office) is a growing belief that the economics of hardware manufacturing, the maturation of the open source stack and standards, and the mainstream adoption of “the cloud” are, in concert, going to provide interesting opportunities for networked computation “by the people for the people”.
The default path
It’s fairly easy to see that the big players in computing (Apple, Google, et al) are deepening their stack and broadening their scope — from software or services to software and services to hardware to phones to tablets to TVs and other consumer devices, to cars, eyewear, physical networks, wireless carriers. The path ahead for them is clear. And I’d say that the consumer experiences that will follow promise to be stunning. But if nothing is done about it, it’s also clear that this will happen through market concentration. That concentration of power, economic influence and wealth is particularly problematic because it also implies a concentration in modes of thought, in cultural outlooks, in possible futures. As I’ve written before, I think the world would be poorer if that happened.
All conventional indicators (especially those concerned with things like “eyeballs”) are in that direction, of course — large amounts of money make it possible to make shiny attractive things, as well as to identify attention-grabbing things in a sea of uneven quality. Popular culture naturally gravitates towards superstars, be they pop stars, or youtube clips. We seem to be wired as people, societies, and markets to head that way.
Another architecture, and the economics that can power it
And yet I mentioned above that I was optimistic. That’s because while there are natural economic incentives for markets to create large companies, and for those large companies to concentrate attention on a few things which are safe, non-threatening, and profitable, the centralization forces are not the only ones at play, and not everything behaves in market-expected ways. Clay Shirky has written and talked about this eloquently — sometimes we don’t need to do what economists tells us we should want to do.
You can now buy $35 full-featured computers which, within seconds of being plugged in, are fully capable internet nodes. Within years at most the price will keep dropping and the capabilities will keep expanding. In addition, the open source software stack which powers them is the same which millions of web developers already know, and hopefully soon millions of amateurs as well. In other words, the means of production are being commoditized and democratized, and the network is ready to serve as a coordination layer for these devices. I am not predicting a utopian world of DIY hardware running bespoke software written by each user. Instead, I want to point out that the entire value chain for using the internet to do new things (from hardware to services) is now ripe for new, good ideas, even coming from single brains. The substrate for deeply personal web experiences is here. I should also acknowledge Allen Wirfs-Brock’s recent writings on the need for a bigger picture plan here as helping me to process the need to actively shape the architecture of the connected things around us.
Much has been written about the impact of Big Data for business, but internet-available Personal Data could be just as transformative for individuals and small groups. I’d wager that a Raspberry Pi and a cheap drive can store all of the words I will write and read in a lifetime, do meaningful computation on that corpus, and be available to all of my internet-connected devices. That feels significant. When people routinely have that kind of agency over their stuff, and if their digital agents are well coordinated through a well-decentralized network, it’s easy to imagine just as futuristic and impactful but less commercially driven outcomes.
When compelling experiences that work thanks to a decentralized architecture emerge, I’m confident that many kinds of business models will follow, including consumer devices, services, and others. Some of those devices will run FirefoxOS. All will have the web stack built-in. As important, these things (or virtual things) will be cheap enough that cost and profitability won’t be the primary consideration. Instead, you’ll think about what you, your family, your neighborhood, your community need. I could easily subsidize a fairly powerful computing service for all the children in my kids’ school. Larger foundations could subsidize the same on the scale of countries. Combining Shirky’s cognitive surplus and insanely cheap delivery systems means we can be freer from the stranglehold of short term economic thinking. Bring in network-enabled funding models like Kickstarter, and we can keep baffling economists and conventional investors for a long while.
The Product Challenge
The conundrum, then, is to find those compelling experiences which thrive on a decentralized architecture, and not just try to force decentralization on experiences which work well in a centralized model. As a “product person”, I’ll admit that it’s not easy to wean oneself from the dominant world view, which favors neatly bounded and hard, polished exteriors (metaphorical and otherwise), where control is critical to quality, and where complexity is managed through barriers. That’s why I’m so impressed with Ward’s thinking — he’s been starting with a decentralized architecture, and seeking to identify and facilitate outcomes that are easier, more natural in that world. We need more such thinking.
When I start thinking that way, my mind wanders towards deeply personal systems and deeply meaningful relationships. Private diaries. Family-centric stuff (family recipes, private calendars, snapshots, secrets). It is worth noting that Ward has seen his ideas resonate in tightly knit communities who need deep connections over ideas and data, but who aren’t seeking mass audiences. More generally, I suspect that this kind of architecture will naturally complement offerings from giant players by gravitating towards parts of our psychology which the giants aren’t built to serve. Our need for quiet; play space; safe space. Our need for a small number of deeply meaningful relationships. As the giants define what the “mall” style of interaction with the net is, I’m (finally) optimistic that we’ll see structures emerge that mirror many other social structures, from the self to the couple, family, school, workplace, church, interest club, support group, etc.
This future feels more humane. That’s worth working on.
What computing will she need, and who will build it?
For a non-investor, I end up hearing a lot of pitches. I even make pitches of my own (not for companies, but for product ideas — same basic idea). Around Mozilla, we tend to say that things are “like the web” or “very Mozilla”. Those are equally fuzzy analogies, which assume a shared conceptual map — a dangerous assumption. What if your audience thinks of the web as a scary, confusing, complicated place? or have a Mozilla concept that is anchored by a dinosaur?
In the startup world, a quick glance at Angel List shows how prevalent that phrase is among budding entrepreneurs. It’s clearly both trendy and attractive to rely on other successes to explain your concept. I’m here to warn you about what may be an attractive nuisance, but suggest a simple way to do it better.
Whenever you say something like “It’s like YouTube for _____”, or “like Pinterest but for ____,” you hope you’re concisely communicating a key part of your business or product idea but you could easily miss the mark, and not know it. Analogies work to the extent that the analog is a concise description of a key concept, which you’re applying to a different market. The problem is that products, and especially successful products, are not that simple. If I say “like YouTube”, my interlocutor will have a very different set of words pop into their minds depending on whether they’re an Italian judge, my kid, a devops, or a music industry executive. The people you pitch to likely think differently than you do (after all, that’s likely why you want their attention, time, money, patches, whatever). It’s therefore much too easy to confuse rather than elucidate.
My advice is to refrain from saying “like ____ for ___”, even though it feels nice to glow in the reflected glory from these successful precursors.
You can do better, and you should: there’s usually something in that appealing analogy which is the concept you’re trying to convey, so focus on that aspect of the inspiring product. “It’s got the same instant gratification of Instagram, but with ___”. “It’s as disruptive to an enterprise market as MySQL was, but targeting the ___ market”. By making the analogy precise, you bring your audience along where you want them, and you show that you understand one of the many reasons why these products were successful.
I’ve been poking around firebase & meteor, and sparkleshare+github and dropbox+site44. I’m a bit disturbed (in a good way) by what feels to me like a sea change that’s happening there, and it seems to me that almost anyone thinking about web developers writ large needs to think hard about what this means for their roadmap.
In particular, a few brief thoughts:
I’ve been, for a while now, using sparkleshare + github pages with CNAME support as a way of making trivial static sites that are real. Sparkleshare is an open source git-syncing-to-filesystem client (with nice ergonomics and design, OMG!). With github-pages and CNAME support, this means that I save in my favorite text editor, and within _seconds_ the thing is live on the web. That’s a disruptive flow.
I’ve been coaching the harp.io team through WebFWD, and they have a service which does similar things on top of Dropbox, including coffeescript/haml processing, CDN, load balancing, push-button deploy, screenshotting for multiple user agents, rollback, etc. In other words, you author your webapp locally on a dropbox folder, and they take care of high-quality, high performance hosting. There is no app-specific server-side logic (which means you need to either have static sites or integrate with hosted services for said features).
I recently ran into site44.com, which does a ‘cheap & cheerful’ version of what harp.io does, with no push-button deploy/rollback, and much more like sparkleshare — instant deploy, with little management capabilities (but instant gratification).
Both harp.io and site44 use Dropbox for syncing, which is a Big Idea in my opinion because setting up Dropbox is so much easier than setting up git credentials (what with SSH keys, etc.). Both assume that the user has write access to local files (which may be a problem in some retrograde environments like enterprises and schools, but which could be solved with web-based editors).
I finally bit the bullet and dig in again into Firebase. Firebase is effectively a key-value store, with Pubsub messaging of data changes. They’ve made some interesting progress in their security and auth models (they include persona support, which is cool). Firebase feels like it makes it trivial to add state and real-time behaviors to previously static sites. The API surface area is quite small, so it should be fairly easy to adopt.
I’m also looking again at Meteor. Since they first launched w/ both fanfare and a bit of ridicule due to overhype, they’ve cleaned up their act significantly: the license is now MIT, they’ve announced $11M in financing from tier-1 VCs, announced an enterprise business plan to complement their open source offering, and build a bunch of APIs. Meteor feels like a steeper learning curve, and another “at-bat” for reactive programming (a topic I’ve been interested in for a decade).
Meteor feels like a solid foundation for a potential full-stack offering, and I like the open source option; Firebase feels like a really compelling basis for demoware and hacks. Regardless, syncing from filesystem to websites without thinking too hard about deployment is a huge benefit of front-end-driven sites.
Single-page apps feels to me like the conceptual next hurdle. Figuring out how to manage history and state management so that the app feels as dynamic as the best webapps, but has good URL support, etc., is an engineering challenge (see e.g. history.js). And it certainly challenges the old mental model of one URL -> one file which pulls down other resources. The newer model (especially on mobile, low-latency devices) needs to be one app -> many URLs, with one core application logic which pulls data-as-JSON and builds most state clientside (with serverside rendering as an optimization for high traffic or slow-CPU environments, as per airbnb’s post).
I’m not sure what this means for advanced webmaker skills. At the very least explaining some of the above to a broader audience is something we could do.
