Raible Designs

Writing Off Home Office Space

Before writing yesterday's post on How To Setup Your Own Software Development Company, I sent my Accountant the following e-mail.

I'm writing up a blog post on how to setup a Software Development Company for consultants. I remember talking to you a few years ago about writing off my home office space. At that time, you recommended I didn't because it'd end up on my personal taxes (or something like that). Do you remember that conversation and reasoning? I'd like to post a 2-3 sentence explanation of why this is not a good idea to readers of my blog.

Below is her response:

It's not that it is a bad idea, it just doesn't always result in a big tax savings. There are a lot of factors to consider, but I would not post something that says it's a bad idea. There are types of entities and situations where it is beneficial. Everyone's circumstances are different, so I would not suggest that you make a blanket statement stating that it is not a good idea.

In your particular case, you are an S Corp, which is a pass thru entity...meaning the S Corp does not pay taxes. So, if you want to take a home office deduction you would have your business pay rent to you. In return you would have to claim rental income on that money. So, you could take the deduction on the business side but have to claim it on the personal side...making it a wash. However, where you would get the tax savings, is that you can write off a portion of your utilities against the rental income of the office. It is usually small, like around 10% or so, but it is something.

The only issue is that when you sell your house, you are supposed to treat the sale as two different things...a personal sale and a business sale (for the office). You can often exclude the gain on the personal sale, but can not exclude the gain on the office. So, if the house goes up significantly in value, you could find yourself paying tax on a large gain.

Do you have your own company and write-off your home office space? If so, what kind of company do you have and does it save you a lot of money?

How To Setup Your Own Software Development Company

This post was originally titled "FTE vs. Contract in this Economy", but it didn't seem to capture the essence of this entry. I wanted to write about why I think contracting is better in this down economy, but I also wanted to write about how you you might go about setting up your own company. Starting a company is relatively easy from a legal standpoint, and hopefully I can provide some resources that'll make it even easier.

First of all, I believe that contracting is better in this economy for a very simple reason:

When you're a contractor, you're prepared to be let go.

There's really nothing like being laid off. It sucks. It often shocks you and makes you depressed. The good part is you usually get a good afternoon's worth of drinking out of it, but that's about it. Severance is cool, but let's face it - you'd much rather be employed.

As a contractor, you're always looking for your next gig. You're prepared for the worst. You're more motivated to learn marketable skills. You're constantly thinking about how you can market yourself better. Writing (blogging, articles, books) is an excellent way to do this and I believe it's rare that FTE are as motivated to do these kinds of things.

Being a contractor forces you to better yourself so you're more marketable.

People's biggest fear of contracting is that they'll have a hard time finding their next gig. In my career, I've rarely had an issue with this. There's always contracts available, it's just a matter of how much you're going to get paid. Yes, I've had to suck-it-up and make $55/hour instead of $125/hour, but that was back in 2003 and $55/hour is still more than I would have made as a FTE.

The other thing that makes me believe contracting is better in this economy is I believe companies are hiring more short-term contractors than employees. I don't know if this is because they consider employees liabilities and contractors expenses, but something about it seems to make the books look better.

So you've decided to take my advice and try your hand at contracting. Should you setup your own Corporation or LLC?

Starting a Company
Yes, you should absolutely start your own company. As a Software Developer, chances are you're going to make enough to put you in the highest tax bracket. If you're a Sole Proprietor (no company), you will pay something like 35% of your income to taxes and you can be sued for everything you own by your clients.

Should you create an LLC or Corporation? I started Raible Designs in May 1998. I started out as an LLC and later converted to an S Corp. For the first few years, I made $30-$55/hour and this seemed to work pretty well. I believe this was similar to having a Sole Proprietorship (because I was the only employee), except that I was protected from lawsuits.

In 2001, I got my first high-paying gig at $90/hour and my Accountant suggested I change to an S Corp to save 10K+ on self-employment tax. I'm certainly not an expert on the different types of business entities, but this path seemed to work well for me. It was $50 to convert from an LLC to an S Corp. I'm not sure if you can go from an S Corp to an LLC. The beauty of an S Corp is the corporation typically gets taxed at 15%, so you can run a lot of things through your business and pay less taxes. Date nights can be business meetings, vacations can be Shareholders Meetings, seasons tickets can be client entertainment and you can write off your car and fuel costs.

There's lots of good resources on the web that describe the different business entity options. My favorite is A List Apart's This Web Business IV: Business Entity Options. Another good resource is How to form an LLC.

The hardest part of starting a new business is coming up with a good name. My advice is to make sure the domain name is available and pick something you like. I chose Raible Designs because I designed web sites at the time. Raible is a pretty unique name, so that's worked well having it as part of my business name. Googlability is important - don't choose a generic name that will make you difficult to find. Potential clients should be able to google your business name and find you easily.

Once you've picked a name, the business establishment part is pretty easy. In Colorado, you can File a Document with the Secretary of State. Their site also allows you to reserve a name if you're not quite ready to make the leap.

You'll also need to get a Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN) from the IRS. The IRS has a good Starting a Business article and also allows you to Apply for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) Online.

Once you've got all the documents setup, you'll want to create a bank account for your business. I'm currently using Wells Fargo and really like how software-friendly they are. Their online banking is clean and easy to use. They also support QuickBooks for the Mac. They have Payroll Services to allow you to pay your quarterly taxes online as well as setup direct deposit, but I'm not using them.

For payroll, I use PayCycle and have nothing but good things to say about them (see update below). I have the Small Business Package at $42.99 per month. This package allows me to pay myself and employees + up to 5 sub-contractors with direct deposit. It also allows me to pay both Federal and State quarterly taxes online. Of course, if you can also get an Accountant to do this for you.

Having a good Accountant and Financial Advisor (for your retirement plan) will likely be an essential part of your business.. LinkedIn's Service Providers is a good way to find recommended professionals in your area. For example, click here to search for Accountants and then click the change location link in the top right corner to specify your zip code.

Finally, you'll need insurance. The Hartford has a good Small Business package that costs around $500/year. It's liability limits have worked for all of my clients and I'm covered if my laptop ever gets stolen. For Health Insurance, I recommend using eHealthInsurance.com to find a good provider for you. I don't get sick or hurt much, so I typically get a disaster prevention plan with a $5K deductible. For dental insurance, brush your teeth. Vision insurance typically sucks, so I wouldn't buy it. Yes, our health care system in the US needs work and I believe if everyone had a small business, it might get more affordable a lot quicker.

Over the next few days, I'll post some additional advice I've received on retirement plans, deducting a home office, drawing up contracts and how to come up with a good rate. If you're an Independent Software Developer and have any additional advice, I'd love to hear it.

Update: I take back what I said about PayCycle. After having a couple of insufficient funds when re-activating my account in January (they were pulling from the wrong account), they've changed my direct deposit lead-time to 5 days for the next 6 months. This means I forget to create checks on time since their reminder gets sent 2 days before. Time to try Wells Fargo.

Update October 2009: I never left PayCycle and I continue to use them to this day. I'm a satisfied customer, but do believe it still takes too long to make changes to your electronic services setup.

Testing GWT Applications

Last week, I did some research on GWT, how to test it and code coverage options for tests that extend GWTTestCase. The reason I did this is because I've found that most of the GWT tests I write have to extend GWTTestCase and I'd like to have code coverage reports. Read below for more information on my findings for testing GWT classes.

There are quite a few articles about testing GWT applications. Here are a few samples:

• Test-First GWT
• Test driven development for GWT UI code
• Test driven development for GWT UI code with asynchronous RPC
• Enabling Test Driven Development in GWT client code
• JUnit tests for widgets - thread about which components to test.

The main gist of these articles is that you should structure your code to make the core functionality of your application testable without having to depend on GWTTestCase.

All of them also advocate using an MVC or MVP (Model View Presenter) pattern. Currently, I'm using GXT and its MVC Framework. Unfortunately, GXT's MVC doesn't have much documentation. The good news is there is a good article that explained enough that I was able to refactor my project to use it.

The unfortunate side of this refactoring was I discovered that classes that extend GXT's MVC Framework have to be tested with GWTTestCase. The downside to extending GWTTestCase is there is it's difficult to create code coverage reports.

GWT's issue 799 has some patches that should make code coverage possible. I tried to implement code coverage with Eclipse and EclEmma using this README, but failed. In the process, I discovered an issue with Eclipse 3.4 and JUnit on OS X. Reverting to Eclipse 3.3 solved this problem, but I was still unable to make EclEmma work with GWT.

After failing with Eclipse, I tried to use the emma-maven-plugin. I was also unable to get this to work, with my findings documented in this thread.

Finally, I did have some luck with getting IDEA's built-in code coverage feature working. However, after getting it to work once, it failed to work for the rest of the day and I haven't had success since.

Code Coverage and GWT
Because of these issues with GWT 1.5 and code coverage, I think I'll wait until GWT 1.6 to worry about it. The good news is 1.6 M1 was released last Friday. If continuing to use GWTTestCase becomes an issue, I may write my own MVC Framework that doesn't use classes that call native JavaScript. Hopefully GXT MVC's framework will provide a good example.

In addition to trying to get code coverage working, I used the internets to figure out how run GWT tests inside of Eclipse and IDEA. I don't remember the resources I used, but hopefully this up-to-date documentation will help others. The nice thing about using an IDE to run these tests is they typically execute much faster.

Running GWT Tests in Eclipse
You should be able to run most of your GWT tests from within Eclipse using the following steps.

1. Right-click on a test that extends GWTTestCase and go to Run As > JUnit Test. It's likely you will see the error message below.

   Invalid launch configuration: -XstartOnFirstThread not specified.
   
   On Mac OS X, GWT requires that the Java virtual machine be invoked with the
   -XstartOnFirstThread VM argument.
   
   Example:
     java -XstartOnFirstThread -cp gwt-dev-mac.jar com.google.gwt.dev.GWTShell
   

2. To fix this error, go to Run > Open Run Dialog. Click on the Arguments tab and add the following values. The 2nd value is to increase the amount of memory available to the test and avoid an OOM error.

   -XstartOnFirstThread -Xmx512M

3. When you re-run the test, you will probably see the following error:

   com.google.gwt.junit.JUnitFatalLaunchException: The test class 'org.richresume.client.home.HomeControllerGwtTest' 
   was not found in module 'org.richresume.client.Application'; no compilation unit for that type was seen
     at com.google.gwt.junit.JUnitShell.checkTestClassInCurrentModule(JUnitShell.java:193)
     at com.google.gwt.junit.JUnitShell.runTestImpl(JUnitShell.java:628)
     at com.google.gwt.junit.JUnitShell.runTest(JUnitShell.java:150)
     at com.google.gwt.junit.client.GWTTestCase.runTest(GWTTestCase.java:219)
   

4. To fix this, open the Run Dialog again, click on the Classpath tab and click on User Entries. Click on the Advanced button and select Add Folders. In the Folder Selection dialog, select your source and test directories (e.g. src/main/java and src/test/java).
5. Run the test again and you should see a green bar in your JUnit tab.
6. To create a JUnit configuration that runs all tests, duplicate the previously mentioned run configuration. Then change the name to "All Tests" and select the 2nd radio button to run all tests in the project.
7. Click Run to execute all the tests in the project.

Running GWT Tests in IDEA
You should be able to run your GWT tests from within IDEA using the following steps.

1. Right-click on a test that extends GWTTestCase and go to Run "TestNameGwtTes...". It's likely you will see the error message below.

   Invalid launch configuration: -XstartOnFirstThread not specified.
   
   On Mac OS X, GWT requires that the Java virtual machine be invoked with the
   -XstartOnFirstThread VM argument.
   
   Example:
     java -XstartOnFirstThread -cp gwt-dev-mac.jar com.google.gwt.dev.GWTShell
   

2. If you get a compiler error instead, you may need to add the GWT Facet to your project. To do this, right-click on your project's top-most folder in the left pane. Select Module Settings > Facets and enable GWT for your module.
3. To fix the -XstartOnFirstThread issue, go to Run > Edit Configurations. Add the following values to the VM Arguments field. The 2nd value is to increase the amount of memory available to the test and avoid an OOM error.

   -XstartOnFirstThread -Xmx512M

   NOTE: If you still get a compiler error, see this page for a possible solution.
4. Run the test again and you should see a green bar in your Run tab.
5. To create a JUnit configuration that runs all tests, duplicate the previously mentioned run configuration. Then change the name to "All Tests" and change the Test configuration to search for tests in the whole project.
6. Run the new configuration to execute all the tests in the project.

Testing GWT applications isn't as straightforward as writing JUnit tests, but I do believe it's getting better. If you have any additional tips and tricks, please let me know.

What's the best Java Hosting Solution?

A friend recently asked me who I'd recommend for a Java hosting provider. Since I get asked this question every-so-often, it seemed appropriate to post my answer here.

1. KGB Internet - I use KGB for this site. I have my own JVM and have full control over what I want to install. I can control Tomcat versions and upgrade as needed. I don't know if I'd recommend him for a business site as he can take up to 12 hours to respond to requests.
2. Kattare - These guys will give you your own Tomcat instance and seem to have reasonable prices. They do seem to take quite some time to respond to requests (24-48 hours). I have a free instance that I use for a non-profit, so that could be the reason.
3. Contegix - These guys are far-and-away the best company for Java-based hosting. They're not cheap though. However, they have the best customer service in the business - often responding to e-mails in less than a minute.

Do you agree with these recommendations? If not, who do you recommend for Java hosting and why?

Ajax: The State of the Art with Dion and Ben

This morning, I added Dion and Ben's talk titled Ajax: The State of the Art. Below are my notes from the event.

Ajax started out as a bunch of hacks. It showed that we could take our web interfaces and do a lot more with them. A hack isn't necessarily a bad thing. Often, they turn into something much more elegant over time. The new browsers have many amazing capabilities that we haven't taken advantage of yet. We've seen discussions on Ajax go from how to do XHR to frameworks and how rich and mature they are. Dojo is great for Enterprise Development (packing system, namespaces). jQuery is well-suited for lightweight developers (PHP). Prototype is fantastic for people who do a lot of JavaScript development and take it very seriously.

Today's Ajax landscape is mature, really rich, and really exciting. Today, Dion and Ben are going to talk about technologies they're really excited about for the future.

Canvas
The building blocks of the web are text, boxes and images. With canvas, it really makes a lot more things possible. You can do bitmap rendering and image manipulation. They're showing a slide with Doom and Mario Kart running. Canvas 3D does true 3D rendering. Firefox and Opera have done prototypes of this. Can you do canvas-type things today in a browser? Yes, if you use Flash or Curl. Dion and Ben are excited about canvas over plugins for the following reasons:

• No start-up delay
• Available on mobile devices today
• Rendering fidelity with browser (especially important for typography)
• No bridges necessary (no marshalling/unmarshalling)
• Not a plug-in

The <canvas> tag originally came from Apple's Dashboard. Dashboard's programming model was in HTML and JavaScript. Dashboard is using WebKit under the covers. Today, canvas support exists in every major browser except for IE. The good news is there are Flash and Silverlight bridges to add support to IE. There's also an ActiveX component that wraps the Firefox implementation and allows it to run in IE.

SVG
Dion and Ben aren't that excited about SVG because it's such a huge spec. We've been struggling with the HTML standard for the last 10 years and the thought of another huge spec for the next 10 years isn't that appealing.

Fast JavaScript
Almost all major browsers have a Fast JavaScript implementation. Chrome has V8, Safari has SquirrelFish Extreme, Firefox has TraceMonkey and Opera has Carakan. This is exciting because of industry trends and how companies are trying to reduce computation cycles in data centers. The more computing that can be put on the client, the better. IE doesn't have anything, but Dion and Ben believe they are working on something.

Web Workers
Interface latency is awful for applications. Jakob Nielsen once said:

0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously. 1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay.

Anything that takes longer than a tenth of a second should be pushed to a background thread. Unfortunately, there are no threads in the web. Maybe we can add threads to JavaScript? Brendan Eich has said that "Threads suck" and there's very little chance for threads getting into JavaScript. Gears brought Worker Pools and this is going into HTML 5 as Web Workers. You could also use Java applets to do this. With the latest Java Plugin, many of applets' long-standing issues have been solved.

Desktop Integration
The ability to build desktop apps as web apps is very exciting. There's a few technologies that demonstrate this: Fluid, Mozilla Prism, Adobe AIR, Appcelerator Titanium and Gears. The Palm Pre demonstrates the logical extension of this. The Palm Pre uses the web stack as its developer SDK. It's very cool that web developers don't have to learn anything new to become a Palm developer. Desktop integration is exciting especially if we can access desktop applications like email and address book.

The Ajax frameworks that are out there have done a lot to make web development simpler. However, there's still a lot of pain with CSS and cross-browser issues. What if you took canvas and combined it with a sophisticated grid-based layout in JavaScript?

There's a lot of platforms out there: Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash, Apple Cocoa and Sun's JavaFX. The web often isn't considered a platform. Dion and Ben believe there should be an Open Web Platform. The problem right now is there is no central location to find out how to get stuff done. You have to search and find resources from many different locations. Mozilla is putting it's resources into creating an Open Web Platform. This site will consist of 4 different areas:

• Home
• Documentation (for different frameworks, browsers, quirks)
• Dashboard (state of the open web)
• Roadmap (what's going on)

This is not just Mozilla, it's very much a community effort. This is something that Ben and Dion have been working on. But there's something else they've been working on too. They've been talking about all these cool things, but what about an interesting application to test all these technologies?

Bespin
As they looked at code editors, most of them provide awful user experiences. Bespin is the Editor of Your Dreams and contains the following features:

• Accessible from anywhere - any device in any location
• Simple to use, like Textmate (not heavyweight like Eclipse) - an editor, not an IDE
• Wicked Fast - performance, performance, performance
• Rock-solid real-time collaboration, like SubEthaEdit - it just works
• Integrated command-line, like vi - Fun like Quicksilver, social like Ubiquity
• "Self-hosted" environment, like Emacs - For extreme extensibility, but with JavaScript!

For viewing files, they couldn't bring themselves to use a tree. Instead, they developed a file-browsing interface that looks very much like Apple's Finder. Personally, I like Finder, but wish it had Windows Explorer's path bar that allows you to simply type in the path without mouse clicks. Back to the command line. They've done a lot to make things more discoverable so users can easily find the power of the editor.

Bespin could be used to engage developers more with open source projects. Checking out projects, modifying code and creating patches can be a real pain. Bespin could be used to interface with open source projects in the cloud. You could login, modify code and easily patch/build with the click of a button. One other thing they want to do is to have the server do code-analysis as you're developing.

Is it OK to love a software tool? You must love your software tools. What we do as Software Developers is one of the most difficult jobs on the planet. Programmers, like poets, start with a blank slate and create something from nothing. If you don't love your tools, you'll start resenting what you do. If you don't love your tools, it shows in your work. -- Dave Thomas at RubyConf08

Thunderhead
A GUI Toolkit written with canvas and JavaScript. Allows you to do layouts with very little thought. It's a lab experiment that's in progress, stay tuned for more information.

All users care about is the user interface. Dion and Ben believe there's a key to creating compelling user experiences. It all has to do with managing expectations. It's not that different from how you manage relationships in your life. Expectations for movies and games have changes drastically over the years. What used to be the web (animated gifs and awful web pages) has also changed drastically (video of Apple's online store). What was cool with MapQuest got changed drastically with Google Maps. What we have today isn't the end of the game - expectations will continue to change. However, users have different expectations for software.

Alan Cooper has done some interesting work in this area. The software designer needs to focus in on a user's goals. There are basic things you can apply to all users, for instance "sex sells". An example of this is Delicious Library. This application allows you to keep track of things in your home such as books, movies, music and games. They made $500K in 3 months and made $54K the first day, with no advertising.

The quality of any software is determined by the interaction. If the interaction isn't good, it will poison the entire experience. Donald Norman has a good quote: "Attractive things work better". In society, this is often called "Dress for Success".

The Open Web is hear to stay because it has:

• An Easy Programming Model
• Easy Remoting
• Extensive Customization Vectors (e.g. GreaseMonkey)
• Easy Deployment
• Great Widgets
• Great Visual Effects
• Great Mobile Story
• Desktop Integration
• State-of-the-Art Plug-ins

Bespin is a tech preview that they hope to release next week. Thunderhead will be released at the same time.

Conclusion
This was a great talk and easily the most inspiring of the conference. Dion and Ben always do a great job and the sexiness of their presentation made it all the more appealing.

The State of the Web 2009

This afternoon, I attended The State of the Web 2009 at Web Directions North. Below are my notes from this session.

This panel has quite the list of superstars:

• Chris Wilson (Microsoft)
• Dan Connolly (W3C HTML Working Group)
• Mike (TM) Smith (W3C HTML Working Group)
• Lars Erik Bolstad (Opera)
• Scott Fegette (Adobe)
• John Allsopp (Organizer and Style Master Developer)

John is moderating this session and is starting by asking each panelist to speak about what they believe the state of the web is.

Chris Wilson
The future of the web may be as ubiquitous as electricity. Chris has a desktop, two laptops (one 10" NetBook, one is a 13" MacBook) and an iPhone. There's a lot of difference between these devices, especially when it comes to screen size. Chris uses a number of different browsers throughout the day. The web isn't just one browser, it isn't just one platform. He's showing a slide with a browser market share graph from http://www.netapplications.com.

Many different browsers are a reality. Many different devices are a reality. Web builders need to learn to write scalable applications that run across multiple browsers, devices and environments. They need to use progressive functionality and learn the tools they have in CSS and HTML. Semantic structuring helps.

Developers need to learn to live with multiple browsers. Cross-browser interoperability will get better, but it's likely to be an issue forever. Test suites with new specifications are helping. Developers should build for browsers of today and tomorrow.

You should build the applications you want to build and then figure out how how to make them degrade gracefully on the web.

Lars Erik Bolstad
Opera Software has 600 employees in 10 countries. They've been developing Opera and other browsers since 1995. The bulk of what Opera does is based on commercial browser deliveries to OEMs around the world.

Devices, platforms and networks: they come in all shapes and sizes. Only one thing unifies them: The Web. The browser is becoming more and more important on these devices. Users are not satisfied with WAP-based content anymore, they want the same content no matter which device they're using.

Opera Mini does its processing on the server-side. This allows Opera to gather statistics. These stats show that users around the world hit the same top sites on their mobile devices as they do on their desktops. It's a one-to-one match. Opera is seeing tremendous growth in the usage of Opera Mini, both in developed countries and emerging markets.

The point: don't just develop for desktop browsers. The mobile market seems to be growing much faster. The problem is actually more in the hands of browser developers since they have to satisfy the user's desire to see the same content on mobile vs. desktop.

Opera is focusing on advancing core browser technology in three areas:

• Web standards: CSS (webfonts, backgrounds/borders, transitions, transforms), HTML 5 (video/audio, persistent storage, drag and drop) and W3C Geolocation API and "Mobile DOM" API (access to camera, address book, calendars).
• Performance: VEGA (vector graphics-based rendering, hardware acceleration) and CARAKAN (new JavaScript engine, native compilation). For more details, see http://my.opera.com/core.
• Web applications: Standalone web apps, RIAs, Widgets. Gears support and Developer Tools.

Dan Connolly
The web is kinda important these days. It's a big deal. Make a mistake and 300 million dollars go away (see end of last entry about United news). One of the beauties of the web is you can easily participate as an individual. You can report bugs, write articles and be a part of many web standards groups. Most of the other systems in the world don't provide this kind of access.

Dan has been under a rock for the last 5 years working on Semantic Web stuff. Now that he's back in the game, it's incredible how much stuff is going on. He's glad there's JavaScript frameworks so he doesn't have to learn everything. The default security policies in browsers are a little rickety at this point. They allow you to download and run JavaScript from virtually any site. Caja might help to solve this. Dan believes that security will become more important and stricter to protect web users.

Scott Fegette
Scott is a Product Manager in the Web Group of Adobe. At the beginning of each year, they do heavy user research. Adobe wants people that develop content for the web to be as expressive as possible. Scott is going to give us a peak into the conversations he's had with the web community.

One of the biggest topics on people's minds is The Economy, but it's not negative as you might think. Small web designers are actually getting more business in the downturn, likely because companies are polishing their presence on the web. People are working much more distributed these days. There's a few areas that Adobe generally asks about: CSS, JavaScript, HTML (both statically and dynamically).

Frameworks are becoming more important to developers, as well as with clients. They've even seen some clients demand certain frameworks. Two years ago, when Adobe talked to small design shops and agencies, most web sites were built statically. Now they're developing with frameworks like WordPress. Out of 60 folks they talked to, only 2 were using static systems and not CMSes.

In the JavaScript frameworks arena, jQuery is the dominant leader. Shops are starting to use CSS frameworks as well. The only one Scott mentioned was Reset. Design is becoming a technical discipline and Adobe is calling this Stateful Design. WYSIWIG is definitely dying and designers aren't developing with visual tools.

The kind of projects that people are working on has changed a lot. Many shops are being asked to do work on mobile development. The iPhone has done wonders for the industry in raising the awareness of what a mobile device can do.

The other big investments for Adobe is RIAs and AIR. Ajax has matured enough that it can now compete with proprietary plugins like Flash. The reason for AIR is to allow web developers to use their skills to develop desktop applications. Flash and Flex are often overkill for browser-based applications, but they do often handle video and audio better than Ajax applications.

Mike (TM) Smith
Mike is also known as the "W3C HTML jackass". Mike thinks the state of the web is that it's a mess in a lot of ways. If you don't believe him, ask Doug Crockford. Most of this stuff is going to remain a mess for the next 20 years, unless another genius like Tim Berners-Lee comes along and invents something new. However, the good part about it being a mess is that we all have jobs.

One of the biggest things they're trying to do with HTML 5 is not breaking backward compatibility. Other working groups at the W3C don't share this philosophy, hence the reason they don't have browser vendors participating. Many of the ideas for HTML 5 game from Gears and Ajax Framework developers like John Resig. All this will make things less messy, especially with the help of browser vendors.

Developers like the ubiquitous web and are pushing the mobile web. Mike thinks everyone just needs to get a life (big applause). For mobile, SVG has already been a big success. You will see significant great things with SVN happen in major browsers by next fall. If you're a web developer, you should spend some time experiment with SVG. It will payoff for you. If it doesn't pay off for you and you see Mike next year at Web Directions North, you can punch him in the face.

Location-aware applications will be big as well. Browser vendors are implementing the Geo Location API. It's implemented in Opera, Firefox, WebKit and Gears. Video on the web will be significant as well. The SVG working group pioneered video support into standards, before HTML 5. Many of the problems they face are related to video codecs. The only way to solve the problems with video on the web is with money and lawyers. Very specifically, there's no royalty-free codec for video. This is nothing that standards bodies can solve. The most promising is that Sun Microsystems is developing an open codec and spending money to make sure they're not infringing on patents.

Not only is the HTML Working Group improving markup in HTML, they're also working on coming up with new APIs that give you access to features. If you have ideas that aren't included in HTML 5, the group is definitely interested in hearing about them.

After each panelist talked, John asked them questions about what's the biggest thing they'd like to see implemented by everyone (open video codec, geo location api were the winners). Mike also did some complaining about XML and how broken it is because there's no failure mechanism. There was some audience banter with Chris about SVG in IE.

Conclusion
This was a very interesting session, especially to hear from the people who are building/supporting the future of the web. I liked Scott's talk on what Adobe's hearing from their users. I also liked hearing Mike (TM)'s opinionated thoughts on XML and his non-marketing approach to most everything related to the web. Lars from Opera had a marketing-ish presentation, but it was nevertheless interesting to hear what Opera's working on. Good stuff.

Changes in the Languages of the Web with Dan Connolly

Web Directions is held in Australia and Japan and now the US. A few months ago, they were a bit hesitant about doing it in Denver in the middle of winter. However, they've discovered our best-kept secret: it's beautiful and sunny all week. People are attending this conference from all around the world.

Dan Connolly is the keynote speaker. He's played some very important roles, such as Chairmain of the HTML Working Group during HTML 4. He's also a research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and a member of the technical staff at the W3C.

Dan's talk is titled Changes in the Languages of the Web and you can view it online at http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/02wdn/slides.

Web Languages are like languages of the world. Like programming languages, web languages are artificial. Web-native languages are PHP and JavaScript. A Web Language is influenced by natural languages but are artificial. Learning languages is like reading music. With music, most learn from good ol' fashion sheet music. Nowadays, many are learning to read music from Rock Band (the game).

Is there a web language for music? It's not mp3/ogg and it's not Apple's GarageBand. ABC music notation is close and fake-book style cords mostly works. The problem is often these sites and specifications disappear because copyright holders come and scare them away.

Technology deployment rides on the practice of sharing media and culture. Open standards preserve freedom to tinker and supports cultural heritage. Lawrence Lessig at OSCON 2002:

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
• Our is less and less a free society.

Lastly, Lawrence asked what have you done about it?

In 1991, some places would fire you for looking at code from the Net. At the time, Dan worked at Convex, who encouraged participation in Free Software. Convex did business with HP; HP used SGML; HTML was SGML (almost). When Dan read about the World Wide Web from Tim Berners-Lee, he had an excuse to look at HTML as part of his day job.

Computer Science students and hackers learn BNF and parse trees. SGML is a little funny looking, but works mostly like BNF. Feedback loop:

1. Draft a DTD
2. Run some tests, ask the computer if it matches the test cases
3. Discover an issue; repeat

While Dan was at Hal in Austin in 1994, and adding HTML support in products, he:

• Asked other HTML Working Group members to try James Clark's sgmls parser
• Not many of them were in the habit of building software from source
• Mark Gaither and Dan installed sgmls as a CGI service
• Feedback loops works over the Web!

Dan was first the editor and then the chair of the standardization of HTML 4. HTML's standardization timeline:

• November 1995: HTML 2.0
• January 1997: HTML 3.2
• December 1997: HTML 4.0
• December 199: HTML 4.0.1

Browser marketplace explodes and then stagnates. Early 1990's - lots of little projects. In 1995, Netscape Navigator IPO rewrites the business books. In the late 90's IE takes over Netscape. After HTML, Dan started working on other stuff: Feb 98 (XML 1.0), Jan 99 (Namespaces in XML), Jan 00 (XHTML 1.0), Feb 04 (RDF and OWL), Apr 06 (SPARQL) and Sep 2007 (GRDDL).

W3C fostered many of the technologies of Ajax and Web 2.0:

• HTML, CSS, DOM, XML from W3C circa 2000
• JavaScript from Netscape, ECMA in 1995
• XMLHttpRequest from Microsoft in 1999

W3C's efforts since then lacked clear deployment paths.

XHTML is not the solution to a problem that concerns anybody except the guys who have to write parsers that convert markup into DOM trees. It turns out that XHTML put the validation on the wrong end of the network. It turned out that the market didn't put much value in a document delivery system that could decide to not display the document because there was an unrecognized attribute on an invisible meta tag.
-- Doug Crockford Jan 2008

The web isn't just for computer geeks anymore. From The Future of Information by Ted Nelson in 1997:

The software world currently corresponds to the Pre-Director stage in movie-making (1893-1904). During those years, when short films were already being shown in theaters, the job of making the movie was given to the cameraman - because he knew how to work the equipment.

That is how it is with software today. Today's software designers are those who only understand the technicalities, and not - with rare exceptions - those who understand how to integrate the presentation of ideas to the mind and heart.

The Web facilitates a shift from mass media to participatory culture. Worth watching: An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube by Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography Working Group.

The W3C HTML Working Group charted in March 2007 and ended up with hundreds of participants (most prior working groups had 20-30 people). In November 2007, there was an HTML WG meeting at W3C Technical Plenary and was very much an unconference. The HTML 5 Working draft was published in January 2008. Goals for HTML 5:

• Off-the-shelf parsers and tools for reading web pages like browsers do, including tag soup
• Modern test materials
• Standardize successful experiments in the Web Applications platform to balance the attraction of proprietary approaches:
  • <video>, <audio>
  • scripting details, security policies
  • offline storage

HTML 5 co-chairs: Chris Wilson (Microsoft) and Sam Ruby (IBM) with W3C staff support from Mike Smith and Dan Connolly.

Some ideas from the CSS validator roadmap:

• JavaScript CSS parser
• Support for CSS 2.1 forward-compatible grammar
• Integrate test-result data showing browser support

The browser marketplace is moving again.

• 2003: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera.
• April 2006: Mobile Phones Poised To Overtake The PC As The Dominate Internet Platform In Some Markets
• August 2007: iPhone
• Sep 2008: Google Chrome
• Jan 2009: Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate

How about authors? How do they feel about HTML 5? Two days ago, Dan received support from Adobe to work on HTML 5 materials for authors.

Design Principles Last Through Change. From Zeldman on Twitter: Client who saves $5K buying cut-rate non-semantic HTML will later spend $25K on SEO consultant to compensate.

There's still something to the nothing behind XHTML+CSS Web Design. Kudos to whoever designed the Kansas Tax web site (Dan is from Kansas City).

Sharing data in documents is one of the original goals of the WWW. Dan has been investing some of his own time into microformats.

Tantek Çelik in June 2006: "XML formats in the long run are not better than propriety binary formats."

• XML, both in technology (namespaces...) and as a "technical culture" is too biased towards Tower of Babel outcomes.
• A few XML formats may survive and converge (RSS, maybe Atom).
• But for now, XHTML is the only longterm reliable XML format that has more to do with it being based on HTML than it being XML.

And if longevity is not a goal, try JSON - it's yummy.

Microformats are not just technical ideas, but it's something that you can actually use in your life. XSPF - what if media players had used an XHTML dialect a la hMedia. RSS and hAtom - will feed readers grow native support for hAtom? Will calendar subscription clients grow native support for hCalendar? The process and the technology of microformats provide an 80% solution for global scale problems.

The Personal Information Disaster: The bane of my existence is doing things I know the computer could do for me. -- The XML Revolution, Nature Web Matters Oct 1998.

Let's find ways to make it cost-effective record and share knowledge formally, i.e. so that computers can manipulate it. How great would it be if your kid's soccer coach could distribute a schedule that would feed into everyone's calendaring system?

Flickr, Facebook and Twitter demonstrate the attraction of hosted services. Identi.ca supports federation (OpenMicroBlogging). Instant Messaging is much like e-mail used to be, where you couldn't e-mail folks that used a different provider.

Be careful not to delegate too much to machines!

• A United Airlines near-bankruptcy item from 2002 appeared as 2008 news via Google News
• Syndication continued up to a Bloomberg news flash.
• UAL stock cratered from $12 to $3 ($1.14 billion in market cap).
• The stock recovered within the day to $10 (down $300M in market cap)

Something to keep an eye on - SEC Interactive DATA and XBRL. Three dozen companies, representing more than $1 trillion of market value, have joined the SEC's test group. Have been working on this since 2005.

Conclusion
The balance between proprietary risk/reward and open standards is delicate. Media independence is more important than ever as mobile emerges. When content doesn't match specs, changing browsers is cheap compared to changing all the content, authors. Web technology is deeply intertwingled with social, economic context.

I enjoyed Dan's talk. He's obviously a smart guy and has been involved with the web since before it even existed. More than anything, I like the conference location. It's 1/2 block from my office and has excellent views. I hope to return for The State of the Web 2009 later this afternoon.

Epic Weekend at Silverton Mountain

This past weekend, I joined some of my best friends for a weekend of skiing at Silverton Mountain and Wolf Creek in south central Colorado. Most of the guys went last year and I knew I had to go this year after hearing about their thigh-deep powder experience.

The trip started out kinda rocky when we left on Friday afternoon. There were 3 different cars that drove and we were the last ones to leave Denver. We took my car, but I had a friend drive since I'd had a late night on Thursday night. About 2 hours into the trip, one of our friends called us to warn us about the speeding tickets the other cars had gotten. In fact, one of the guys had gotten two! I handed the phone to the driver so he could find out where, but he had to cut the conversation short as the police car's lights started flashing in the rear-view mirror. If only they'd called us 5 minutes earlier!

After the speeding ticket delay, we pulled into Pagosa Hot Springs around 11. With 18 soaking pools, this turned out to be the perfect place to stay.

On Saturday morning, we woke up at 5 and drove 2 hours to Silverton Mountain. I didn't know what to expect at first. I had it in my mind that we'd be hiking for 5 hours and get one run in the entire day. I was pleasantly surprised to find you 1) ride the lift up and 2) hike to your run. We had a guide named "Ronbo" and our first hike took 1.5 hours. It was very steep and steep like a ladder in some sections. The White Wave run was awesome in the middle, but somewhat skied off at the top. The powder was around boot-deep and the weather was beautiful.

After a 2nd run and a much shorter hike, 5 of us decided we had to take the leap and do a heli-drop. We rode to the top of the lift, got picked up by the chopper and rode for about 2 minutes to a neighboring peak. This was by far the best run of the day and one of my favorite ski experiences of my life.

We figured we couldn't top heli-skiing, so 3 of us called it a day around 3 o'clock. We did 3 runs all day and we were exhausted. A couple guys took a 4th run and the guys that didn't do heli-skiing got 5 runs in. A 2-hour drive back, some fireworks in Durango and a night of soaking at Pagosa Springs made us all very happy campers.

On Sunday, we woke up and headed to Wolf Creek for a few hours. It was Local Appreciation Day and tickets were a mere $31! We did some hiking, found some powder and enjoyed some of the best skiing weather of the year. We hopped in the car around 2, kept the cruise control on 5-over-the-speed-limit and made it home in time to catch the Super Bowl (thanks to my DVR).

If you're in shape and are an expert skier, I highly recommend you take a trip to Silverton Mountain. It's truly epic.

For more pictures from this trip, see my Silverton 2009 set on Flickr.

Bye Bye Dream Machine

This evening, I'm shipping back one of my favorite machines of all time. I received a fully-loaded Mac Pro as part of my employment with LinkedIn last June. It was necessary to run the LinkedIn application locally and I thoroughly enjoyed using it for the last 6 months. With 12GB of RAM and two 23" monitors, it was a great employee perk.

When I became a contractor again, they let me take my dream machine home. I promptly plugged in my 30" monitor and I've been loving my home work environment ever since. I could have bought the machine from LinkedIn, but I discovered I can buy a brand new machine with similar specs for less than their asking price.

The good news is I'm now able to answer the question I asked a couple years ago: One 30" monitor or two 23" monitors? IMO, one 30" monitor is definitely better and two 30" monitors would be awesome.

In addition to the Mac Pro, I'll also be shipping back the 15" MacBook Pro they gave me. This leaves me with my 17" MacBook Pro and an old HP Pavilion with Windows XP. I was hoping to plug my 30" into the HP, but I discovered I don't have a DVI card that will handle it. Over the next few months, I do plan on buying a new MacBook Pro (for work) and a Mac Pro (for home). With my running commute, I need to leave one machine downtown and I like to have one at home for the kids + late night hacking.

I'm currently having a hard time deciding if I should buy a MacBook Pro now or make do with what I have and just buy a new DVI card for my Windows box. I'm leaning towards a new 15" MacBook Pro (17" is too big to travel with). If I could get one with a 256GB SSD, I'd definitely be sold.

What would you do?

Running to Work

A little over two weeks ago, my commuter bike was stolen. At the end of that entry, I wrote:

Rather than buying a new one, I think it's a good opportunity to take things up a notch and start running to work instead. It's 6 miles and surely doable with some practice. There's also a good chance it's the worst idea I've had in a long time.

The next day, I ran my first commute and discovered it was 5.1 miles instead of 6. It also took me just under an hour (with a 10 minute cool down at the end), indicating an average of 11 minute miles. Yeah, that's slow. Since then, I've run most of the time I've been in town. Currently, I'm only running 3 times per week because I've found back-to-back days make me ridiculously tired.

I do hope to make it up to 4-days per week and possibly even do a couple round trips. Why am I doing this? Part of me wants to get in better shape, and the other part is too stubborn to buy a new bike. Yes, I will buy a new commuter bike eventually. My current goal is to run until April 1st or until I lose 20 pounds, whichever comes first.

The downside of running is it's easily the worst part of my day. It's the part I dread the most, especially on nights like tonight. When I left the office, it was dark and 6°F (-10°F with wind chill). Amazingly, I didn't get cold thanks to good layering. My face did end up with a lot of ice on it as evidenced by the photo on the right. I know the next couple months aren't going to be easy, but I always like a good challenge.

How have you challenged yourself lately?