Mike West
is a web developer working for Sueddeutsche.de in Munich, where he works on websites that (at their best) inform and delight. He writes occasionally, codes, and takes pictures.
Recent Writing
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Instapaper is Amazing
I think I've read more articles with Instapaper in the last two days than I have in the last two weeks with NNW alone. It’s an absolutely brilliant tool, and I'm excited about how much simpler it’s made my internet-related reading life.
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Opera Web Standards Curriculum: The JavaScript Bits
Last year, I jumped on the opportunity to sit down and write some articles for Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum. I bit off a bit more than I could chew, and Chris Mills exhibited the patience of a saint as I finished the first quickly, the second slowly, the third very slowly, and then completely failed to deal with the rest. Regardless, those were released along with the rest of the JavaScript bits to complete the curriculum.
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Centralized Bug Tracking
I liked many things about working at Yahoo. I'm coming to realize that what I (in hindsight) like most is probably the piece of software I thought about the least positively, namely Yahoo’s mostly centralized and completely open bug tracking system: Bugzilla. We abused it more than a bit, attempting to layer task and project management on top of a system that wasn’t really designed to support it, but all told, Bugzilla made my work life better.
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Some Thoughts Regarding Caja
Yesterday, Yahoo! made some announcements regarding The Future™ of many of their high profile properties. Specifically, they’re (slowly) opening up, enabling third-party developers to build applications that can be seen on and interact with your My Yahoo! page, or your mailbox. I think this is a great step, and one I wish they'd made before they laid me off.
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My job’s value
Recently, I wrote a short article on the effect a team’s sense of ownership in it’s projects can have on the finished product. The surprising twist in my professional life last week has led me back onto the same train of thought, but I'm coming to it from a slightly different angle.
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Has Mike been laid off? Yes. Yes he has.
Yahoo! decided to stop doing development work in it’s German offices, which leaves me in a bit of a bind. I'm suddenly incredibly motivated to look for new work. If you've got leads for me, please drop an email (mike@mikewest.org)
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I ♥ GitHub
Over the last two or three weeks, a substantial subset of my friends and colleagues have started using GitHub to host some of their personal projects. I'm really enjoying this influx, and it’s inspiring in a way I didn’t really expect. GitHub has done nothing less than to make my friend’s coding activity visible to me, and mine visible to them. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s simply transformative; If this is how “normal” people feel about Facebook, then I can start to understand how it’s captured so much mindshare.
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An Admonition Regarding Details
Details are everything, but worrying about details at the expense of progress puts the cart before the horse, misses the forest for the trees, makes perfect the enemy of the good, and can be described by many other metaphors with similar meaning.
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The Inspiration of Ownership
On the bus home from work, I was listening to this week’s On the Media. In particular, I was struck by a great interview with the man who designed the field-organizer and volunteer training programs for Barack Obama’s campaign: Marshall Ganz. If you’re at all interested in the political angle, I'd suggest you listen. If you’re at all interested in how I'm planning to apply this seemingly unrelated topic to the technical field of web development (et al), keep reading.
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Flickr’s API is driving me nuts
I'm trying to do something with the Flickr API that I consider to be relatively trivial. I have the impression that the API is fighting me every step of the way. Why, oh why, can’t the wonderful people who designed Del.icio.us’s new API hop over to Flickr and slap together something that makes sense from the perspective of the end user?
Links from del.icio.us
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YouTube: ‘Failure: The Secret to Success’
A brilliant video from Honda, framing failure as a productive part of the creative process insofar as you use your failure as an opportunity to learn. In the background, I get a very strong sense of my father’s favourite ad campaign from this; “Just do it” writ large… Via Assaf Arkin’s Labnotes.
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Daily Vim
I've been using Vim extensively at work for almost three years now, but I'm really just scratching the surface of it’s capabilities. I've never really taken the time to learn the tips and tricks that would make it a more effective tool; cheat sheets aside, I don’t exploit it’s power at all. Daily Vim looks like a nice way of easing myself into the program, with short tips that I can see the value of. Nice work!
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Elizabeth Gilbert: “A Different Way to Think About Creative Genius”
I haven’t read “Eat, Pray, Love”, but I think I'm going to after watching Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk. She’s inspirational, and an excellent speaker, and I like her ideas about creativity. The notion of externalizing your “creative spirt” to save your sanity isn’t something I would rationally accept, but of course that’s not the point… it’s a nice way of psyching yourself into doing your work. It’s a nice way of thinking about the process of creating something.
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Heroku: Instant Rails Platform
The model of application deployment the web is moving towards looks very much like Heroku. Pushing changes to an application out to your “cloud” with
git push, and dealing with common bits of configuration via Rake tasks looks quite appealing indeed. I’ll be interested to see pricing, and more interested to see if they start supporting things other than Rails (since I still haven’t bothered to dive into the framework yet…). -
Ben Terrett: ‘All the ephemera that’s fit to print *’
Here, Ben Terrett walks us through a project that’s really quite beautiful. He’s taken a “best of the web” compilation of favourite content from 2008, and transformed it into something resembling a traditional newspaper (albeit one with incredible attention to detail and design). The pictures are brilliant, I wish I'd known about this earlier to have a chance at picking one up.
Photosets from flickr
Twits from Twitter
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@NeilCrosby: That sounds dangerous.
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Heading home to spend some time with Elisabeth's mother and sister, who are in town to help Elisabeth find a wedding dress. Fun!
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@SeanW: It would indeed be a more interesting proposition. But I like my eyes. :)
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@dannyamey: US keyboard layout FTW. It's the best!
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@uhduh: Visor (so far as I recall) doesn't play well with Spaces. :(