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Tech

Yup, this is my goodbye post. My last day is tomorrow, Friday the 14th. How did I get here?

Eleven years ago, when I first got to USC, I sidled up to a gadget-lugging fellow headed in the same direction I was, and asked if he was also going to the honors engineering retreat. That’s how I met Leonard Lin, who still amazes me with flights of technological fancy that i’m sure to hear about two years from whenever he finds something interesting.

Then, about four years ago, Leonard Lin introduced me to Andy Baio. Andy was looking for a “perl programmer” to come to work for him at a mutual fund company in Santa Monica. Not just any perl programmer — one who would be able to wear a suit daily. Although I had another option that was seemed far more lucrative (talk about finding a local maxima!), Andy seemed to be growing a really groundbreaking and nerdy team, especially for a mutual fund company. Since one of my great priorities in young life was to get to know the financial world better, and also because I liked the looks of Andy’s team, I accepted that position. As it turns out, that’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever had the chance to make.

After getting called out by Jon Udell when he was at infoworld, Andy was insistent that he’d have Jon’s suggested changes incorporated into Upcoming (then Upcoming.org), his pet people-powered events calendar project, within a week. At that point, I had been practicing development of quick web apps and open source libraries for over a year, and we’d built a great working relationship. I offered to help integrate Freetag into Upcoming, and assist with the rest of the work as well. That’s how I got started working on Upcoming, and ever since then, i’ve had the fortune of working for one of the greatest online communities on the web.

So it’s with a tinge of sadness that I decided to leave Yahoo! a few weeks ago. It’s been a great run, and I can’t begin to enumerate the ways in which I’ve become a better developer, leader, and person through this experience. It’s just the right time for me to move on.

What about Upcoming?

If you actually know that I work on Upcoming (a small crowd indeed), you’ll also know that i’m the kind of person who likes to be responsible in my work. I’m happy to say that I’ve been passing on as much of my knowledge as possible, and that the new generation of Upcoming is looking strong. I have faith that they’ll continue to make decisions with respect for the existing community, and most likely will push out features faster than we had a chance to in the past year or so.

What about BravoNation?

This is a trickier one. It’s certainly an experimental project that I’m thrilled to have been able to take from Hack Day to private beta within the context of Brickhouse. It’s also an experiment whose future has not yet been completely decided. I leave a well-documented and fairly mature platform in Brickhouse’s hands, and I hope that those who have used it were intrigued by the idea of combining peer-to-peer recognition with an open network award platform for integration. The possibilities behind the core BravoNation idea are really nothing original; it’s simply the combination of concepts from the video gaming world and the social media web that arose from my experiences investigating the gaming side of SXSW 2007.

I’ve been working on something internal lately which should help see my work on BravoNation live on in a very helpful way. With a little luck, it will be a great legacy. If it sees the light of day, i’ll see if I can score an interview about it.

What’s next?

Well, first, I think I need a little break. I think i’ve never had a serious break – the last time I was out of work for a serious bit of time, I spent it building a collaboration tool for designers, whose needs I got to know intimately in a previous job. Actually, that whole tool was the entire reason why Andy decided to hire me in the first place.

So, it’s safe to say that i’ll be working on personal projects like that old one once again. I just need some time to refresh myself, and get out of my current mindset and get used to being on my own. In actuality, the freedom to work on new things is what I’m most excited about. I’ll probably be developing some toys, some tools, some more artistic abilities, and maybe even a few waffles. Maybe I will even blog more. In any case, if you’re ever in the Los Angeles area, look me up and i’ll be happy to show you around town.

I’d like to thank all the Yahoos who made my time at the big Y! enjoyable, productive, and fruitful. Stewart and Caterina, for introducing us to Y! Local. Paul Levine, for believing in us and giving us the freedom we needed. Vince Maniago, Neil Kandalgaonkar, Kelsey Parker, and Shawn Shen, for being a powerful but small team that helped us get stuff done. The new Upcoming generation, for carrying on the torch! Kevin Cheng, Ernie Hsiung, Nikhil Bobb, Ray McClure, Jeffery Bennett, Salim Ismail, and the rest of the Brickhouse team, for putting up with my neurotics that got BravoNation out the door. Edward Ho, for all the Mario Kart, car talk, and inspiration. Kevin Krawez, for being my navigator in the scary world of ops. Bradley Horowitz, for creating the environment inside Yahoo! that made us feel comfortable in the first place. Anand, Ronny, Van, Peng, Eric, Don, Ganesh, and all the Local folks for not killing us over noise problems. Chad Dickerson, for creating the Hack program, often imitated, never recreated. Tara Kirchner, for changing my mind about PR people. Eric Wu, for caring so much about Y!, and welcoming me to the valley. Legal and the paranoids, for saving us from ourselves. Daniel Raffel, for seeding knowledge I used to build BN. Jay Janssen, for all the crazy MySQL knowledge. A certain team inside Y! for powering so much of Upcoming and being my favorite technology. And, of course, Andy and Leonard, for being two of the most unique and interesting personalities i’ve had the fortune to know so well. Apologies if i’ve forgotten anyone, it’s just that the full list runs a mile long, and I fear that it’ll turn into the entire content of this blog post. Be certain that I won’t forget the way you helped make my experience at Yahoo! better.

Tech

Peter Bright at ArsTechnica posted a story this morning about Microsoft’s about-face to make standards-compliant rendering the “default” mode of the new Internet Explorer 8. This is in contrast to its earlier position of attempting to render in a IE7-compliant mode by default, switching to “standards” mode only if the website opts-in.

While I don’t have anything really interesting to say about the technical decision, other than “hooray,” I did find that the latter half of the article tried to explain the change as a hive mind reacting protectively to an external political influence. My experience at a large company leads me to believe that this was not the case.

Microsoft is citing its new interoperability initiative as the impetus behind the change. This move, designed primarily to stave off further EU intervention, emphasizes support and promotion of open standards in a way that the company hasn’t previously done. This move should also help to fend off Opera’s antitrust complaint, which argues that the EU should force IE into better standards compliance.[...]

If the company honestly believed that its approach was, from a technical perspective, the best one—and the software giant certainly put quite some effort into designing and defending it—then it should be of some concern that politics should have caused it to switch. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad that they’re going to make “standards” mode standard. I just wish they were doing so for the right reasons.

To me, this is a prejudice rooted in the way that the outside world prefers to think of large companies — giant, monolithic entities of a single mind. This occurs time and time again in journalism. The preference to characterize corporate behavior as if the organization were a single, albeit giant, individual is almost always inaccurate. It also does the reader a disservice, as people who follow tech then follow the journalist’s lead, and this becomes the common way to think about and understand what large companies do.

First of all, all large companies are comprised of individual actors. Each of them has their own goals, preferences, and opinions about the company’s decisions. Within Microsoft, undoubtedly there are proponents of interoperability and web standards. There are certainly prominent ones in the public eye, but I’d bet that there are many pockets of culture that live, breathe, and prefer open standards. For example: the engineering staff building IE8. These people must make their case for use of open standards to their management, and must consider the company and team’s objectives and stated goals when constructing arguments for spending dev time on open standards.

Here’s my guess as to what happened at Microsoft.

Imagine that you are an influential lead in a team of developers working on the world’s incumbent majority web browser, and you know that the work that you do impacts an enormous amount of people. However, the company that you work for has a history of prioritizing backwards compatibility, especially with prior work that involves the company’s own products and closed standards. In this environment, it is difficult to make the case for prioritizing the adherence to open standards over compliance with earlier products (in this case, IE7-style rendering). You understand that, and so you consent, perhaps against your better judgement or personal feelings, to go with backwards compatibility.

Suddenly, there’s a cultural shift that comes down from the top, stating that the company is now prioritizing interoperability and open standards. Undoubtedly, this is a strategic shift, and one can imagine that it developed as a result of some parts politics, some parts market environment, and some parts executive staff composition. Since you’re on the IE8 team, and you’ve always bought into making open standards the default mode for your browser for the good of the Internet, now’s your chance to really push your case.

You can suddenly frame your argument in the context of new, important, shiny corporate objectives. Your powerpoint decks make their way up the chain, as managers above consider how they might use the opportunity to prove their “leadership” in following new corporate objectives. This is how the management chain can now evaluate the decision in a completely different internal political light. All of them agree that the decision makes sense. The go-ahead is given.

The GM can then post a blog announcement on the IE8 blog that explains the technical details without a modicum of hype or fuss — but it is likely that many people within that team feel very validated at the moment.

So that’s my theory of what might have caused this. As you can see, I do think that there were most likely politics involved in the decision, but only partially in the way that Peter supposed. Most corporate decisions or changes have their start as external market forces bearing down on the executive staff, which then cause a shift in stated objectives or behavior. Whether these things are communicated to the employees internally (memos) or externally (through PR), the message is sent. Especially in a tech company, the individual workers and engineers now tend to rethink and reframe their decisions in light of the new information. So, although the chain of events frequently may have their basis in external political events and relationships, decisions eventually get made through internal politics and relationships.

That’s my understanding, and if you don’t believe me, feel free to go work at a large company for a couple years, and see how things really happen for yourself.

Tech