Loving the Web Again
An interesting thing has happened in the past few weeks. I’ve fallen in love with the web again. For the past two years I’ve worked exclusively on Windows client applications. First in Windows Forms and then in WPF. Recently, however, I moved my website to a new domain and on to a new platform, WordPress. Learning WordPress has plunged me back in to the minutiae of the web with all it’s challenges, frustrations and rewards.
There is a school of thought that says that creativity comes from constraints. The constraints of working on the web are opportunities to find creative solutions. In the past few weeks I’ve explored the 960.gs CSS grid system, Cufon and @font-face font embedding and been introduced to the latest in platform specific CSS hinting. All of these are workarounds for constraints and they all produce amazing results.
Another happy consequence of diving back into working on the web is a new fascination with design. I’ve been reading tons of design blogs and articles. For some reason, I’ve always drawn a clear distinction between development and design. because I self-define as a developer I assumed that design was for other “creative” types. Since I don’t use or have an interest in Photoshop, I assumed that I was not a designer. But the truth is that I have always been a designer. I’ve been designing user interfaces for years. Usability, I realize now, is the primary design motivation with prettiness coming in a distant second or third. By copying other user interfaces such as Outlook and gradually modifying them according to feedback from users I was absolutely doing design.
This realization lead me to think of myself more as a designer. I’ve always been most interested in helping users solve problems. The debates about how the application talks to the database in the software development community are tiresome and tedious. I know all the technical details and have my own opinions about how best to implement that detail, but it is just an operational detail in a much bigger story. Delighting users is the only thing that truly matters. Why do I do this thing called software development? Because it is creative and therefore personally satisfying, but also because it is useful and ultimately satisfying to others.
I am more firmly convinced than ever before that HTML is the lingua-franca of user interfaces. The advances coming in HTML 5 and CSS 3 are game changing. I think platforms such as iOS and WPF offer amazing possibilities for designers and developers, but like MP3 was to audio accuracy, HTML 5 will be more than good enough for the majority of users. I don’t think that HTML interfaces will ever replace platform native user interfaces, but I expect to see toolkits where the majority of the UI is built in HTML with hooks for platform specific features much the way we include -moz and -webkit in our CSS today.
Moving my website onto WordPress has re-invigorated my passion for software development in a way that I never could have predicted. I have ordered three books on user experience and web design and am constantly consuming new information via RSS feeds. There is much to learn and as always whatever I learn, I’ll be sharing it via talks and blog posts and rants on Twitter, so stay tuned for more!
Coding In Public Slides and Video
The Ohio user group tour last week was a success from my perspective. I had a blast sharing some ideas and talking to friends. The feedback that I received was very positive as well.
I put the slides on SlideShare here.
I am especially pleased that Scott Walker took the time to record video of my talk in Columbus,OH. The video is embedded below. Enjoy!
Alan Stevens – Coding In Public from Scott Walker on Vimeo.
Cheers,
++Alan
Southern Ohio User Group Tour
This week, I’ll be traveling around Southern/Central Ohio giving talks at User Groups and at least one corporate office. The schedule is:
- Tuesday, March 24th 6:00 pm Cincinnati .NET Users Group location
- Wednesday, March 25th 6:00 pm Dayton .NET Developers Group location
- Thursday, March 26th 6:00 pm Central Ohio .NET Developers Group location
Here’s the abstract to my talk. I’ll elaborate on the content more below:
Come learn about the idea of deliberate practice as applied to the craft of software development. Alan Stevens will perform (less than) amazing feats of coding and he will do it for your enjoyment in real time.
OK, I admit, that’s a pretty lame abstract. The explanation of the lameness is that I didn’t really know what my talk was about until a few days ago. I’ve had a lot of ideas in my head that I’ve been trying to put together into a consistent theme. It was only after explaining to my wife recently what I wanted to talk about, that I saw the unifying theme.
And so, dear readers, I present you with the unifying theme of my talk this week:
In order to get better, you must be willing get worse.
This means that if you want to constantly get better, you have to be willing to suck, at least for a while.
So, come to my talk if you want to learn how to suck with gusto, and as a result become a better developer. If enough of us take this approach, we might just improve the industry, at least a little.
See ya’ in the Buckeye State,
++Alan
