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Get involved in blogs and forums. Tech people can be assholes but don’t let that bring you down. Some people feel like they have to belittle you to justify their place in the world. They do this to everybody and not just you. If you ignore the belittling remarks and just extract the information you will succeed. We have all been there

Employers don’t know what to look for in Front-End development. We are still a frontier discipline. Just stay in the game and keep learning. The best way to market yourself is with a portfolio. Resumés and classes are not as important and good old fashioned experience. Go to github.com and forums and get involved in open-source projects. Learn from your mistakes because the true rules are yet to be written (and most likely never will be).

It’s 5:51 pm (PST) and I am in the PHX Airport waiting for my connecting flight home. The last 6 days have taken a lot out of me and I am frankly tired of not being in Los Angeles right now. Odd though, I can’t wait to hop on a plane and head to SXSW next year. I had a heavy set of expectations and I think the SXSW Interactive Festival delivered beyond my expectations.

It all started a year ago while I was in a period of high-stress and low-inspiration. In a desperate effort to be inspired, I was listening to a harrowing amount of web related podcasts, favoring The Rissington podcast and Boagworld. This was in addition to my eye-numbing list of RSS feeds in Google Reader. Over a weekend I followed the progress of some of the most influential bloggers and podcasters through SXSW 2008, and wished I was there in the panels and parties. The conversations that came out of that week in Austin seemed to generate a year of inspiration for me and I vowed that I would not be a spectator in 2009.

In the following months I convinced myself that this was something that I needed to sell to my employer. I knew the company would benefit as much as I would; but I was just not sure I could sell a 6 day conference in a time when we were, as a company, considering layoffs for the first time in many years. I am glad that I was willing to, and did, pay my own way. I then proceeded to convince my girlfriend (a fellow geek), that since we would be traveling together we would be saving a fortune. In fact, we can’t afford NOT to go. I am assuming by the easy sell that she really wanted to go herself but I sort of like to let myself think that she was fooled by my clever sales tactic. So it was decided; in the summer of 2008, we made arrangements to go.

Before arriving in Austin, I had decided that the price of the ticket would be justified if I could meet and make contact with some clever and cool people in the industry and feel inspired to pick up at least one skill that I did not have when I arrived. We set out from Burbank last Thursday, and embarked on one of the most irritating Southwest Airlines experiences of my life. The trip to Austin could be a post in itself so I will just wait to embellish on that here in the future or over a drink (you’re buying).

On my first day, I missed most of the sessions and wandered into a book reading that really didn’t hit home. At about 6:00 pm, I figured I should at least salvage the party part of the day and get a head start into the line for the Tap Room party. On arrival in the line I immediately made friends. The people there were excited to engage in conversations about things I rarely get to talk about in a party atmosphere. In most cases, you can hang with geeks or you can go out to a club and have some fun. SXSW is a rare place where the two merge and it was a lot of fun.

We drank and talked shop as well as a few almost religious debates about the cloud and Agile before we decided to leave and get some Pizza. That is where I ran into Andy Budd and Remy Sharp. These are indeed well known people to me though there was an silly moment where I asked Andy if he would be attending the Great British Booze up, not yet recognizing who he was. He responded with “I am the Great British Booze up” which I think was the best possible answer to be honest.

Later in the week, I attended a panel where ARIA was explained with detail and passion by Becky Gibson from IBM and Dojo. Before this I had not completely understood what ARIA was, though Becky really brought it to life. I did some more reading and realized that ARIA can be described as CSS for the visually impaired. This perspective on the subject of ARIA really made the subject interesting to me. You will continue to write semantic markup in the same way. ARIA is simply a layer that will be added to your markup, much like your CSS style-sheet. This is a simple way to enable everybody to use your site to its fullest. I am positive that I will bring this back to my team and challenge them to work this into our framework.

Over the next few days I attended some amazing interviews, panels, parties, and learned the right way to give a presentation. I also met Paul Boag, John Resig, and had an conversation with Daniel Burka about Agile. As our conversation progressed, he challenged a lot of career limitations that I did not even know that I had. Yes I am completely exhausted and eager to go home but it is with a year of inspiration and new friends that I go. See you next year SXSW!

Last week I traveled up north to the location where most of the customers of my group work. We put together 2 days of training mostly focused on new code but including some best practice stuff like rapid iteration and test driven development. The over-all response was good. People thought that the information was useful and they were eager to hear when our next event would be.

The highlight for me was a roundtable session where we suggested topics and allowed the group to have an open discussion. Some of this became a Q&A for our team and other parts were an open debate about best practice. I am happy to say that this entire roundtable session was captured on video and we will soon take note of every good idea shared in the room.

This feel this session may have done something that in all of the time I have been on this project, I am yet to see: it sparked a community. I hoped that after this event, we would all leave with a better understanding of who our team-mates are, and how we can work together to innovate. It turns out a lot of people want to innovate, I just think that they feel they are the minority. They let their urge to innovate give way to their need to just get the job done; since it seems the fight would be pointless otherwise. I hope out hour of open discussion was enough to tear down this misconception once and for all and let the ideas flow free.

We made a point to ask for feedback with some success. As we all know however, people are much more willing to share their true feelings when they are anonymous. I used SurveyMonkey.com to create a truly anonymous survey on a third party site. It turns out that we did get a lot more candid feedback but it was still all very gracious. I suppose we can count this first event as a success.

PHOTO CREDIT: Uploaded to Flickr by Shashank

The recession has hit the tech sector and companies are cutting jobs. Fewer people are buying and that is making shareholders a little uneasy. As a result some of us are losing our job. It is easy to feel hopeless about things. I know it feels a little discouraging for those who started in this industry when I did; mostly because we got into this industry at a time when we were deep within the tech boom of the 1990s and we all enjoyed limitless job security.

Just as we so quickly moved from boom times to recession, we will turn this around. In the mean time there are some opportunities to seize. One that immediately comes to mind is the opportunity to build your network. One of the few upsides to the recent spike in layoffs, and there are not many, is that you and/or your former colleagues will be moving on to a new job. Make sure that you keep in touch with the people that you respect the most. Smart people will find other smart people and place themselves well. 

Last year, when I left my last employer of ten years, I kept a good number of connections. A lot of these people continue to be in my Twitter list, FriendFeed, Facebook, and RSS Reader. I attend user groups with them and meet on occasion for drinks. Some of them have moved to a couple of other companies in the past year. I have met some of their colleagues and learned a lot. It seems every time there is a layoff announcement, I have a few more friends and contacts that let me know that I have a place to go if a pink-slip finds its way to me.

PHOTO CREDIT: Uploaded to Flickr on May 26, 2006 by dt10111

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What is the difference between people who enjoy developing software for the Internet and those who don’t? The ones who constantly come up with good ideas and those just go with the flow? There is clearly a difference between the people who love what they do and the ones who just go to work. At the rate that things change around us, keeping up with the industry seems impossible, though there are some people are doing it. If you are not one of these people, I bet that you know somebody that is always talking about some new gadget or service before David Pogue even had a chance to write a silly review about it. How do they do it? I bet that they also seem a little more enthusiastic about their job. That person is not strange, a genius, or a witch; they are just living the Connected Lifestyle.

Internet Services are not just a new industry. Internet Services that run in your browser or connect devices are a breakthrough in how we connect as people. They enable people to communicate with a massive audience the way that we could only communicate with an intimate few in the past. Wether this is your thing or not, it will keep catching on and the world will never look back. Each generation will build on top of the foundation that is being laid today.

This new way of communicating is so effective that its own remarkable growth can be counted as its own greatest success. Rather then relying on a few computer scientists to design everything, now people of all educational backgrounds are invited to connect and include their ideas and experience. This took the Internet from a collection of research documents to what we have today. It’s an art gallery, a library, a news room, etc…

We have always had a desire to get what we know about our work and interests out there. Historically, the average person would spend years perfecting their skills in what ever job they had. So much knowledge and experience just stayed in their head or was let go as an anecdote during dinner. With the advent of blogs this information that is tedious and boring to your poor family at the table, can delight somebody across the world who is also passionate about what you do. This collective knowledge could eventually accumulate and reshape how we see educate ourselves by letting people design a curriculum for themselves that would make the best possible use of their talents and interests. As you can see, blogging, Twitter, and name your favorite web service; are not gimmicks or kids toys. These services are the first bricks in the foundation of a connected lifestyle that everybody will need to be a part of to survive in the future.

Looking back at what led to the polarization of American culture in the past 8 years. The media is supposed to be our voice but it seems to have become the voice of advertisers, lead by ratings dollars. We have to subscribe to one that sounds better to us but not much encouragement to hear out the other. This morning I wanted to see how some well known news organizations were covering this election. Here are some samples:

Lets start over-seas:

Now lets get started with the moderate domestic source:

and now the allegedly liberal:

And finally the conservative:

There is no doubt that the economy needs to be fixed but our culture needs some work too. I hope the new administration will be the unifying force that we need.

I see a lot of potential around me. I always want to take apart or tinker with some thing or process to improve it. All of these ideas create a growing inventory of things to do. All of that Getting Things Done (GTD) talk that I started to notice couple years ago, was an eye opener. Suddenly everybody had great ideas to help me organize and plan. Now in 2008, armed with A note pad, an Inbox with 0 items in it, and a Remember the Milk account, I am finally starting to get things done.

In the first few iterations of my GTD approach, I would just keep adding and adding things to my ToDo list. When something was added, I would give it a priority and never look back. Inevitably, I would just start ignoring things and move on to the one that I really needed to do when I would look at my task list. Turns out one important thing about getting things done, is coming to terms with the fact that an idea you had last week may not really make sense this week or a priority from last week may not be the same. Now I have modified my process of adding to my list to also include a quick audit of the items on the list. I always end up removing one or two things.

This lesson should not be lost on those of us that develop software when we are at work. There are a lot of ideas that you can come up with that can be added to the idea inventory for your project. What makes this harder is that you have other groups that are hired to add to your inventory as well. QA will keep your inventory full of bugs to fix, Designers will keep it full of crazy new patentable interfaces, and Product Management will keep coming up with more features that MUST be there. Every time something is added to the mix a full audit and re-prioritization needs to be done to keep the inventory manageable.

PHOTO CREDIT: Uploaded to Flickr on May 26, 2006 by kogakure.

I am one week into a new iTunes rating campaign. The idea is that I want every song in my library to have a rating which will add another dimension to my smart play lists. The last time I did this was about 3 gb of purchases ago, so I have a long road ahead. The only way this can be successful is if I work the process of rating into my daily routine. This is both because there is no way I am going to convince myself to just sit down and spend hours rating and I don’t want my ratings to be rushed. Luckily with the iPhone at my side, I can easily integrate this process into my commute. The next step is to commit to a flexible and meaningful definition for the each of the 5 stars provided by iTunes. Sometimes I wish there were just 2 options like in the Last-fm interface (love and ban) because it really makes things simple. Most of the time I will use this system:
• 1 Star – Hate
• 2 Star – Palin ( don’t like )
• 3 Star – Meh
• 4 Star – Digg
• 5 Star – Epic

The best part of this is going through some of the lost hits from the past year.

Heading into San Jose on an early flight along with Dave and Kelly from my team to start the first of the weeks workshops on time. We will be starting on a two day track about site integrity with a focus on client side code. Honestly, I have passed on this class the last few times it came out to my area. I just never thought of Site Integrity being a subject that would be huge concern to GUI types, like me. I expect I will see the error of my ways by lunch time today. Remarkably bad flight aside, I am looking forward to the next few days…