Chris Coyier is no slouch, but he was just on fire when he posted this one, "So, you're going to start a new, huge web project."
“Thank you.”
Walking around the Media Temple party after the first day of An Event Apart last night, something that Sarah Parmenter said in the second session of the day finally bounced into the correctly shaped hole in my brain for it to get through to me. She praised the web community for being just that: a community. She talked about how she found it to be a friendly, non-competitive place that encouraged sharing and co-learning almost inherently (due, in part, to “view source” itself).
What occurred to me last night as I walked around Frank with a cold beer and a delicious cookie in hand, is… I didn’t go to school for this. I learned my trade—developing for the web—on the web, from these people.
I’ve made a living for the past 12 years as a programmer. I feed and clothe my family and put a roof over their head because of people like Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer, who not only championed web standards before most of us knew what that meant, but documented their journeys, wrote books, blog posts, blog templates, and so, so much more, but didn’t even stop there. Not only is there An Event Apart, there’s the free web site: A List Apart, the free podcast The Big Web Show (hosted by Mr. Zeldman himself, and among a network half populated by people in his current or former employ), and the publisher A Book Apart.
To Jeffrey, Eric, Sarah, Jason Santa Maria, Luke Wroblewski, Kristina Halvorson, Ethan Marcotte, Jeremy Keith, Andy Clarke, and Jared Spool, I am indebted to you, minus royalties from the many of your books I have purchased, and, maybe a wee little bit of the conference pass price.
So, you know, 12 years of income minus $17.53 or so.
Other speakers this week, I’m only omitting you because you’re a new discovery for me. I may be writing another thank you letter to you in a few weeks/months/years.
UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot Jared Spool in my initial post. For shame.
Happy Cog’s Siteweek — A case study for teamwork, web work, design work and more
Internal projects. If you work at an agency, those two words, in such proximity, send shivers down your spine. You’re an agency. You get your paycheck because you and your cohorts do work for other people, who pay you for your time and talents. Who pays for an “internal project?” And, therefore, who has time to work on one?
If you’ve ever been sentenced to an internal project, you know the pitfalls. People get yanked off the project at will because a real client needs them, if you can even get someone officially assigned to the project in the first place. People are often asked to work in their “spare time.”
Most established firms know better than to try them. Newer groups will try them, once.
But, if the need is great enough, eventually the cobbler’s barefooted children will barre the front door and get him to cobblin’.
Happy Cog, web everything firm of Jeffrey Zeldman (defender of web standards, other-dad of the Internet, podcaster), recently decided it was time to refresh their own face on the web. And it seems they did it right. They…
- Spoke with clients to say, “We need a week off from you in order to do some housework.”
- [Thereby] freed up key talent to work on this internal project.
- Committed to keeping those people free for the week, while being available in emergencies.
- Did lots of prep work.
- Got everyone together in a war room for a week.
- Came in with a process, but
- Iterated on that process when they found flaws.
- And, best of all (for us), they live-blogged and post-mortem’ed the whole thing.
If you are interested in team dynamics, design process, web development/design/strategy or watching craftsmen at work, you owe it to yourself to read up on this case study.
Read Happy Cog’s announcements, “Redesign Week” and “Happy Cog Rebrands” and live-blogging at tumblr and storify.
And don’t miss debriefings by Kevin Hoffman, Happy Cog experience director (more links within) and Brett Harned
[Added on 2-17-12] And now Greg Storey chimes in with a reflective piece. HUGE thing I didn’t know until this piece: Happy Cog even spun up a new, from-scratch CMS during Site Week. Nuts!! There was an official, organized post-mortem Wednesday night, so there will likely be a few more pieces like this hitting the web in the near future.
Layer Styles - edit CSS with a Photoshop interface
Via Veerle Pieters. As @tripleman points out, you can even hold the shift key to change the direction angle by 5º increments. Wow.
“The Web is really just HTTP over TCP/IP. What gets transported over HTTP does not define the Web.”
Samsung releases code of WebCL implementation for WebKit
Oh my. Watch this:
With advancements like this, the walls between “native” applications and “web” applications just keep eroding.
Right now there’s a lot of excitement around cross-compilers: things that take an application originally written for one platform (say, a desktop operating system) and let you “port” them to another platform (say, iOS or the Web). Simultaneously, the mobile platforms (and now some of the next-generation desktop platforms) are elevating HTML to an almost native language.
Pretty soon it won’t matter. When you can render 3D like they are in that video, access the local disks as you can with modern browsers/HTML 5, the Web might just make all of that a headache of the past.
People have been predicting this for years. I have thought they were all mad. They’re starting to sound more like visionaries.
