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.

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?

Thanks to Havi Hoffman for her editorial help.

“It’s like YouTube for ___”

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.

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.

• stripe doing payments
• disqus doing commenting
• firebase, pusher doing lightweight data & realtime updates
• newrelic is doing deep resource tracking
• geckoboard is doing dashboards
• heroku is doing processs/service hosting, relying on a bevy of partners including many of the above for slices of value
• …

There are lots and lots (and lots!) of new entrants that are following this paradigm, and from a developer’s point of view it’s both exciting and daunting.

Exciting because in the right combination, these services can be combined to deliver incredible scale and agility even to very, very small teams. (I have a fantasy of someday figuring out how large a 10-person project can be. It’s pretty large).

Daunting as well, because while when they can work well together in an app, they really should be thought of as independently moving (and failing) parts. And you’re likely not going to understand them as well as you should, or as you would had you built them yourself.

Which leads me to a friday-afternoon prediction: that there will be, over the next few years, a few companies who become experts at solving the coordination problems that arise from assembling so many disparate slices of value into an offering (whether for developers, or clients, or internally). And I expect that this expertise may not be purely technological.

I’ve seen how deep one has to go to get a real understanding of the security and privacy implications of relying on a third party for handling user data; I’ve seen the horrendous chain of dependencies that emerge out of security vulnerabilities; I’ve gotten a glimpse at the regulatory issues which some (soon more) folks will have to face. Dealing with high availability, geo-distribution, etc. all result in systems whose complexity scales in scary ways.

This leads to two thoughts:

• If I were a wise investor, I’d look for those folks who look like they’ll find ways to integrate value in coherent larger slices, or mitigate the pain.
• As a “product person”, I probably want to work on problems that require only a few slices, done well.

Said like that, I do get a “nothing new under the sun” feeling. Oh well, it’s Friday. MFBT.

Sometimes I wonder whether I’m the only one getting value out of our conversations, but this blog post reassured me that at least sometimes I have an interesting impact: Do you really need a server? Build your minimum viable product entirely client-side.

I’m particularly interested by the fact that I wasn’t really trying to force them to think about the privacy advantages of client-centric development (I realize it’s hard for budding entrepreneurs to make that a priority), simply going for the pragmatics of it all. I’m so glad it’s working out for them.

“Mozillians are people who make things. Moving people from consumption to creation is Mozilla’s goal.”

Now, Mitchell’s words often inspire me (she’s probably the biggest reason I joined Mozilla full time), but this phrase in particular has been bouncing around in my head for weeks.  It’s also one that resonates deeply with many people I talk to, regardless of their degree of familiarity with the web, technology, Mozilla, open source, etc.

Now, the premise of the Webmaking software offering is both incredibly exciting and so ambitious as to be scary.  We want to reach large but diverse populations and find ways to make creating on the web both compelling for them, and fun/productive.  That means that we need both specialized tools, specialized content, and deep connections with whole new populations of Mozillians who can join Mozilla to build these offerings, bringing their passion, skills, knowledge, connections, etc.  We’ve already got great start in a few beacheads: kids/tweens, filmmakers, newsrooms to name a few.  There are many more on the roadmap.

Each of these slices of webmakers will require specific content, and likely tooling, which we think of as a “product.”  As an example, Thimble is a combination of a code editor (a tool) and learning projects (content) developed in partnership with a bunch of great organizations, aimed at giving people who don’t know anything about the web the first bit of a clue, and the first bit of a sense of agency over the web. It’s an early effort, that we built really quickly, but it’s showing a lot of promise.

Initial approach

We built Thimble v1 “the easy way” — a dedicated designer, a dedicated product manager, and a dedicated engineering team, working full-time over a few weeks, coordinating with professionals who themselves had well-defined roles and responsibilities.  It wasn’t really easy, but it was familiar territory for most of us.  We knew what to expect of each other, we could rely on the traditions of both open source projects for the “code”, and product development for the integration of the code into an overall “consumer experience” (although the word consumer is particularly ironic in this context). 

I don’t think we can expect to keep this approach and scale the way the Webmaking project deserves to. (Michelle Levesque thinks so too!).

Now, one might think that that’s what Open Source projects do, but I think in fact very few open source projects are run as products.  In particular, in my experience, a good product team has learned that code is only part of the equation — design, project management, writing, engagement, etc. are equally important, for which there is no equivalent to the code open source culture.  As an example, good designers, as a result of decades of abuse by clients, typically refuse volunteer work. There is no global culture around any of the non-coding skills (with a few notable exceptions, such as QA and localization, and most interestingly, the legal profession, who has incorporated pro bono work into its professional culture).  Now, Mozilla as a whole has been tackling all of these issues for years to support the main products (Firefox in particular), but even then we have not yet figured out how to gather volunteer contributions in many parts of the workflow.

I’m hoping that within the Webmaking effort, which I think is so compelling to so many non-engineers, we have another opportunity to refine our approach.  I used the title “volunteer-powered” rather than “open source” in the title because I think that while open source has a lot of lessons to bring in, it also has a bunch of antipatterns.  Forcing non-developers to think or act like developers isn’t the answer.

Question!

Here’s my question for the day: are there collaborative models of work in non-engineering disciplines where people have developed ways of working that I should be reading about or talking to people about? 

To make it more precise and hopefully a bit controversial: I fear that a lot of the tradition of “collective action” has its roots in cultural norms around equality, fairness, and making people feel good about their contributions ahead of all other values.  And as a result, in my experience at least, a lot of volunteer groups for example end up very pleasant and “nice” but lacking the urgency, the drive, the decisiveness, the ambition to kick ass in the market that turns ideas into shipping code that users love.

How can we combine the rapid pace, deliberate action, role assignments of a product team, and the openness to volunteer and part-time contributions of open source?

At this point, they’ve done a bunch of thinking, blackboard sketches, paper prototypes, and more, and they’re making good progress, but they need your help!  In particular, they’ve got a hypothesis that by preparing a few templates and story-telling concepts, they can define a design framework that everyone could use to make something compelling.

If you’re interested, it’d be great if you could check out their questionnaire and do a “pretend story-telling” — think of a place you want to document, and fill in the form — it will only take a few minutes, and be very helpful to the team!

But, this is Vancouver, British Columbia, in North America, a continent where lawyers and fear have way too much sway on policy and clearly no firm grasp of reality.  In this particular case, the problem is that the venue — the swank Vancouver International Film Festival’s VanCity Theater has the audacity to serve wine and the like to its patrons.  As a wine and movie enthusiast, that seems like a delightful plan.  But apparently, this very civilized offering is seen by regulators as implying that the location is evidently such a den of iniquity that my kid would obviously be irretrievably harmed by the sight of some adults having a glass of wine. Of all the things that I worry about as a parent, this doesn’t make the top 1000.

This was mildly embarrassing for all concerned, and led to my son and I going home early and having a conversation about the puritanical roots of the Canadian legal system rather than the much more interesting discussion that I expect would have ensued after the movie.

Such a waste.

Somebody let me know how the show went?